Sibylline Sisters: Virgil's Presence in Contemporary Women's Writing (Classical Presences)

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick

James I. Porter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Sibylline Sisters Virgil’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing

FIONA COX

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Fiona Cox 2011 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–958296–9 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Dick, Peter, and Paul

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Contents Acknowledgements 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Introduction Virgil in Contemporary Women’s Poetry Ruth Fainlight Eavan Boland Miche`le Roberts Margaret Drabble A. S. Byatt Christa Wolf Monique Wittig Joyce Carol Oates Janet Lembke Ursula Le Guin Conclusion

Bibliography Index

ix 1 19 47 69 97 115 135 153 181 209 231 247 265 271 281

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Acknowledgements Many debts of gratitude have been incurred during the writing of this book. I should like to thank the Sabbatical Leave Committee of University College, Cork, for granting a period of leave. I should particularly like to thank Lorna Hardwick for her generous and constructive guidance. I am extremely grateful to two anonymous readers for OUP, who made several incisive comments and offered helpful leads. My thanks go also to Hilary O’Shea at OUP for steering the work through its various stages, to Taryn Campbell and Tessa Eaton for support and advice, and to Hilary Walford for her fine copy-editing skills. Thanks are also due to Isobel Hurst and Rowena Fowler for allowing me to read their fine and suggestive work prior to its publication. Susanna Morton Braund also kindly offered helpful suggestions and advice. I have immensely enjoyed teaching several of the texts discussed within the volume, and should like to thank the various groups of students with whom I have studied the works. In particular, I have never failed to learn from the rich insights offered by Catherine Burke and Kathleen Hamel. I was extremely fortunate to benefit at the Alice Ottley School from the generosity and keen intelligence of several teachers who showed us how to see connections between subjects long before interdisciplinarity became a trend in universities. Special thanks are due to Janine Cowton, Wendy Edwards, Ann Garrood, the late Eileene Millest, and Sue Ridgway. I am enormously grateful to Elena Theodorakopoulos, whose observations have been unfailingly enriching; conversations with her about the writers studied in this book have been among the great pleasures in writing this book. My greatest thanks are to my family. I am hugely grateful to my parents, who continue to provide constant support and encouragement. Especial thanks to my husband, Dick Collins, for his endless patience and encouragement, and for the abundance of new insights and suggestions he made. This book is dedicated to him, and to Peter and Paul.

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Acknowledgements PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements of permission to use copyright material are due as follows. In Chapter 2 I am most grateful to Rosie Bailey for permission to cite U. A. Fanthorpe, Collected Poems, to Josephine Balmer and Bloodaxe for permission to quote from Josephine Balmer, Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions, and to Peter Filkins for permission to quote from his translation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Darkness Spoken’. In Chapter 3 I am grateful to Bloodaxe for permission to quote from Ruth Fainlight, New and Collected Poems, 2010. In Chapter 4 I am most grateful to Eavan Boland, through Carcanet, for permission to quote from her New and Collected Poems. In Chapter 5 I am grateful to Virago, an imprint of the Little Brown Book group, for permission to quote from Miche`le Roberts’s Paper Houses and the following poems: ‘After My Grandmother’s Death’, ‘Lament for my Grandmother on the Day of the Winter Solstice’, ‘Mayday Mayday’, ‘Persephone pays a Visit to Demeter’, ‘Lacrimae Rerum’, and ‘Penelope Awaits the Return of Ulysses’ from Miche`le Roberts’s All the Selves I Was. I have also quoted from Miche`le Roberts’s The Book of Mrs Noah and poems from The Mirror of the Mother, copyright by Miche`le Roberts, reprinted by permission of the author care of Aitken Alexander Associates. In Chapter 6 I have used extracts reproduced from The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble (copyright Margaret Drabble 2002) by permission of United Agents Ltd on behalf of Dame Margaret Drabble, and I am grateful to them for their generosity. I am also grateful to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their permission to quote Margaret Drabble, The Seven Sisters, and to McClelland and Stewart for their permission to quote from Margaret Drabble, The Peppered Moth, The Seven Sisters, and The Sea Lady. In Chapter 7 I am grateful to The Random House Group Ltd for permission to quote from ‘The Pink Ribbon’ in The Little Black Book of Stories by A. S. Byatt copyright # by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto and Windus and used by permission of A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. In Chapter 8 I am grateful to Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to quote from Christa Wolf, Kassandra, and to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for permission to quote from Christa Wolf, Cassandra, trans. Jan van Heurk. In Chapter 9 I am grateful to E´ditions de

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Minuit for permission to quote from Monique Wittig’s Virgile, Non. In Chapter 10 The Tatooed Girl is reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd # 2004 Joyce Carol Oates. In Chapter 11 I am grateful to Janet Lembke for permission to quote from her Skinny Dipping and Other Immersions in Water, Myth and Being Human. I am also grateful to Yale Representation Ltd for permission to quote from Virgil, Georgics, trans. Janet Lembke. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of works cited in this book. The author is happy to attend to any outstanding issues at the earliest opportunity. When offering translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, I have relied on Ahl’s translation (Oxford University Press, 2007), except where otherwise indicated.

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1 Introduction ‘We do not live in Virgilian times,’ observes Ziolkowski towards the end of his seminal book Virgil and the Moderns.1 In the early 1990s, when Ziolkowski was writing, this claim held true. While he could cite isolated instances of contemporary writers engaging with Virgil (for example, the poet Ruth Fainlight), there was no identifiable pattern of Virgilian reception characterizing this period, making of it an aetas Vergiliana, such as had been experienced in the entre-deuxguerres period in France or in 1945 in Britain. But in recent years Virgil has been summoned to life again, has been called into being by a host of contemporary women writers across Europe and the United States. Recent works such as Margaret Drabble’s The Seven Sisters (2002), Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), or Joyce Carol Oates’s The Tattooed Girl (2004) enable us to look back to the authors beginning to engage with Virgil in the 1980s, such as Ruth Fainlight (Sibyls (1980)), Monique Wittig (Virgile, Non (1985)), or Miche`le Roberts in her poetry and her novel The Book of Mrs Noah (1985) and to see them, not as isolated examples of a quaintly idiosyncratic interest in Virgil, but rather as the forerunners of a new and significant era in Virgilian reception. We have moved once more into Virgilian times, and for the first time in literary history it is women writers who are creating and defining this new aetas Vergiliana. This book will examine the Virgils of the individual writers, as well as analysing the educational and cultural forces shaping the Virgils who emerge from different nations, before establishing whether the common echoes

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Ziolkowski (1993: 285).

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and the themes transcending nation will enable us to discern a Virgil who is specifically female. The innate paradox of this notion cannot be overstated. For thousands of years Virgil has been the quintessentially male poet singing of ‘arms and the man’ and hailed as ‘Father of the West’.2 And even his significance to male writers appeared to be under threat in a world where classical education is declining, and access to his works in the original has become the exception rather than the norm. As early as the 1950s C. Day-Lewis was commenting of his landmark Virgilian translation that he was no longer able to take familiarity with Latin among the general public for granted. The stage seemed set for the end of the twentieth century to represent the dwindling twilight of Virgilian reception. Against all the apparent odds, however, there is a burgeoning engagement with him by contemporary women writers that is due to a very specific confluence of various historical and cultural factors, which we shall now consider. One of the most significant changes in twentieth-century society facilitating Virgil’s presence in the works of contemporary women writers was girls’ improved access to educational opportunities. While Virgil is certainly not making his first appearance within the work of women writers (for example, Virgilian allusion forms much of the tension within Mme de Stae¨l’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1805) and the Georgics famously underpin Willa Cather’s rich evocations of the American landscape), the phenomenon we are currently witnessing occupies a unique standing within studies of the Classical Tradition. All the women writers we shall be studying in this volume studied Latin either at school or at university and so have direct access to Virgil in the original. This situation is all the more remarkable if we consider how study of the Classics for so long symbolized women’s exclusion from the education and careers available to men. A. S. Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book (2009) begins with an evocation of the last years of the nineteenth century, where two young girls still identify with Maggie Tulliver’s resentment at being forbidden to share her brother’s classical education: ‘Griselda had been reading The Mill on the Floss and had persuaded Dorothy to 2 The name was coined by Theodore Haecker (1934) as the title of his book, Vergil, Vater des Abendlandes.

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read it too. They sat in Griselda’s bedroom, indignant Maggie Tullivers, for whom maths and Latin and literature were not considered’ (p. 167).3 A few pages later she shows their brothers sharing a tutorial on Aeneid 6, where the imagery of substanceless shadows offers to one boy’s mind a way of articulating the rather sinister dreamworld of childhood that was his experience of England at that time: They were still working on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, where the hero, having broken off the golden bough, descends to the Underworld to interrogate his dead father. They had reached the passage where the Sibyl and Aeneas come to the vast elm, where false dreams hang from the branches like bats and shadows of imagined monsters hiss and gnash their teeth. The Sibyl prevents Aeneas from turning his sword on the bodiless, flitting lives, their forms only transitory and vanishing. Tartarinov chanted the Latin in a lusty Russian accent. Et ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas Admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae, Inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras . . . Tom saw in his mind’s eye gradations of shadowy matter, thicker and thinner irreality, coiling like steam from a train or smoke from a chimney, but in the dark, under dark branches, cava sub imagine formae. [ . . ] How do we get out of dreamland? Hic labor, hoc opus est, he said.4

In 1925 Virginia Woolf was still gazing ‘longingly at the secret world of the university, dominated by men and symbolized by mastery of Greek’.5 She recalls her exclusion from the lawns and library of Kings College, Cambridge, in an essay entitled ‘On Not Knowing Greek’.6 In Britain the changes in the policies governing the education of women in the twentieth century enabled girls to attend grammar schools or independent schools to study the Classics on the same basis as their brothers. While this system still maintained Virgil as the preserve of the affluent or the intellectual elite, his widespread currency among twentieth-century schoolgirls is indicated by casual and untranslated references to the Aeneid in schoolgirl fiction whose readers could be expected to understand the Latin for themselves. One such example is offered by the most prolific writer of girls’ 3 5

Byatt (2009: 167). Stray (1998: 163).

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Byatt (2009: 174, 176). Woolf (1925: 39–59).

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school stories, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, in her Chalet School series. In The Chalet School in Exile (1940) the central character, Joey Bettany, thinks wistfully of her school in Austria, which had become her home and which she had been forced to leave as a result of the Anschluss: Joey’s heart and mind were too full for speaking, for through this travelstained relic she seemed to see the Sonnalpe with its magic carpet of flowers, snow-clad mountains pink and purple in the glow of the evening sun, and the Tiern See alive with dancing shadows. Her thoughts became audible: ‘Olim meminisse iuvabit,’ she quoted.7

The same passage from Aeneid 1, depicting the Trojans’ complex blend of joyful pride and aching grief as they happen upon the wallpainting depicting their tribulations and lost family and friends in the Trojan War, is evoked nearly thirty years later by Antonia Forest in her own series for girls. Unlike Brent-Dyer, Forest does not use the allusion to illuminate the ongoing suffering entailed by war; instead she uses Virgil to articulate the wrench of more ordinary miseries. Yet Forest, like Brent-Dyer, depicts girls whose exposure to Virgil in class enables them to turn to the Aeneid as a vehicle for explaining to themselves events that occur in both their imaginary and their everyday lives. One example of this offers, to my mind, among the most powerfully moving glosses on the line ‘sunt lacrimae rerum’ (Aen. 1. 462) that we have. In The Ready-Made Family (1967), the 13-year-old Nicola Marlow has been searching for a 10-year-old missing child, her sister Karen’s newly acquired stepdaughter, Rose. Rose has run away to Oxford to search for her dead mother in their old home. Nicola eventually finds her and they are collected by Rose’s father, Edwin: ‘Why did you run off, Rosie?’ ‘I wanted to go home,’ said Rosie, half-whispering. ‘But you knew there’d be no one there.’ ‘I thought, p’raps—’. There was a long pause. Then Rose turned her face against Edwin’s coat and said ‘I do miss Mummy so.’ Almost absently Edwin put his arm around her. Presently, in a voice as low as her own, he said ‘So do I, Rosie.’

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Brent-Dyer (2003: 245).

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There are times, as Nicola discovered at that moment, when it is more tactful to stay put than go discreetly away. So she stayed where she was, gazing fixedly out of the window and clenching her hands till they throbbed to prevent the enormous tiredness and sadness which had overwhelmed her from turning into the most embarrassing flood of tears— for Rose, for Edwin—most of all, perhaps, for Karen. At the time she could have found no words to describe this engulfing melancholy; but a year later, when her friend Miranda was called on during a Latin lesson to translate the time-smoothed phrase sunt lacrimae rerum, which she did doubtfully as ‘there are tears of things’ only to be asked by Miss Cartwright what that was supposed to mean, Nicola, though she could have offered no better translation, thought of that train journey and knew exactly what it meant.8

Such appearances by Virgil in girls’ fiction of the mid-twentieth century speak eloquently of the role played by Latin classes at school in shaping the Virgils adopted by the women writers I shall be discussing in this book. These women were being educated just as Latin was declining in school and, in Britain, while it was still a requirement for entrance to Oxford and Cambridge. It is highly likely that they will be the last group of writers generating a significant phase of Virgilian reception to have had access to the original text from a young age. The formative impact of this is indicated by the way in which so many of them evoke their memories of their past selves as schoolgirls or students, poring over the Virgilian lines that awaited their translations. The works to which they invoke Virgil are haunted by both personal and collective pasts. While the most striking example of this is the Irish poet Eavan Boland, who draws upon memories of her 17-year-old self studying Aeneid 6 and finding the image that most cogently captured her struggles to give birth to herself as a woman poet, it is so frequent a manuvre as almost to function as a trope. Rowena Fowler offers a vivid reading of Fleur Adcock’s poem ‘Purple Shining Lilies’, where the rich palette of colours ignited within the young girl’s imagination by the Latin offers a stark contrast to the dull and stodgy tome in which it is presented:

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Forest (2004: 236).

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Sibylline Sisters The events of the Aeneid were not enacted on a porridge-coloured plain; although my greyish pencilled-over Oxford text is monochrome, tends to deny the flaming pyre, that fearful tawny light, the daily colour-productions in the sky9

For Fowler the vivid misreading ‘purple shining lilies’ produced by the clash of Adcock’s visual imagination with the Latin of Virgil’s texts functions as ‘a motto for a mode of classical reception in which the poet brings the past into some creative contiguity with the present while drawing attention to his or her own motives and processes’.10 U. A. Fanthorpe (1929–2009) also looks back to the Latin taught to her in England during the Second World War. Her œuvre, underpinned by Virgilian allusions, will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2, where we shall see how a Virgil refracted through Tennyson and T. S. Eliot helps to mould Fanthorpe’s quintessentially English world view. In ‘A Wartime Education’ her schoolgirl recognition of the impossible personal conflict faced by Aeneas spoke to her ambivalent feelings towards the Germans, whose humanity she acknowledged, even as she was being taught to hate them: it was hard To sustain pure hatred for the Hun, Known only as nightly whines, searchlights, thuds, bomb-sites, Might he not, like Aeneas, have reasons (Insufficient, but understandable) for what he did? I found it hard to remember which side I was on, argued endlessly at home, Once, rashly, in a bus, and had to be defended By mother from a war-widow. Careless talk Costs lives warned the posters.11

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Adcock (2000: 39). See Fowler (2009). I am extremely grateful to Rowena Fowler for her generosity in allowing me to see this chapter prior to publication. 10 Fowler (2009: 239). 11 Fanthorpe (2005: 208–9).

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While neither of the Virgilian works of the British writers A. S. Byatt (b. 1936) or Margaret Drabble (b. 1939) are autobiographical, the schooling they evoke is contemporaneous with their own schooldays. A. S. Byatt’s elderly married couple look back to their younger selves in the London of the Second World War when James, the husband, had been a Classics teacher before leaving England to fight. Elsewhere Byatt remembers studying Aeneid 6 as an A level text and recognizing its terrible potency, which eventually became a part of her so that its words were ‘singing in my own blood’.12 ‘When I was at the end of my schooling, I was beginning to see that the gods were more real and dangerous than I had supposed as a small girl, reading my story books. When I read Aeneid VI, where the golden bough shines on the shores of the underworld, and the Sibyl writhes in her cave, I felt a shiver down my spine which was recognition of power.’13 The protagonist of Margaret Drabble’s The Seven Sisters,14 Candida Wilton, looks back to comparable A and S level lessons in Latin, remembering that even in the early 1950s there were only three of them in the class. Drabble strikes a plangent tone as Candida remembers ‘an excellent teacher. Maybe all Classics teachers are excellent. They sing in the dark and shore up the ruins.’15 If I have focused in particular on the way in which their classical education shaped the British writers of this volume, it is because it is an education shared, at least in part, by half of the writers we shall be discussing. Though Ruth Fainlight is of American parentage and Eavan Boland is Irish, they both spent many of their school years in London. We shall examine in detail the impact on Boland of the Latin classes in her Irish convent in Chapter 4. The pattern of both a privilege and an awareness of witnessing the end of a tradition can be seen also in the educations of the women writers from the United States and in Christa Wolf ’s experience in Germany. Interestingly it is only the American writer Joyce Carol Oates who addresses directly the fact that the exclusivity of Virgil to children enjoying a privileged education creates its own categories of disadvantaged. The Tattooed Girl (2004) explores the relationship between Alma, an almost illiterate working-class girl and her employer, an affluent writer and 12 14

Byatt (2000: 138). Drabble (2003).

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Byatt (2000: 137). Drabble (2003: 83).

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translator. For Alma, Virgil represents everything that bars her from the world of education and beauty that she must hate because she recognizes that she can never become a part of it: ‘He’s at the dining room table reciting poetry I guess it is “Vir-gil” rocking forward and back in his chair his eyes shut not knowing anyone else exists [ . . . ] A jolt to the heart. That was what Seigl needed not boring old mildew books books fucking books.’16 It is, perhaps, the French writer Monique Wittig (b. 1935) whose educational experience is the exception, in so far as she benefited from Latin classes at her colle`ge and lyce´e, which would have been available to all French children. Christa Wolf, however, would have been only one of a small percentage of students to achieve the Abitur that would enable her to study German literature at the universities of Jena and Leipzig, and such a university course would have demanded Classics as part of her chosen subjects within the Abitur. In America, also, the study of Latin in high school was declining even in the 1950s, but the scholastic achievements of Janet Lembke (herself a professional classicist), Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938), who won a scholarship to Syracuse University, and Ursula Le Guin (b. 1929), who studied at Radcliffe College, mark them out as girls who would have had to study Latin at school. Indeed, Le Guin, whose research for Lavinia (2008) included reading the Aeneid ‘Very, very slowly. Ten lines a day’,17 observed that she found Latin as difficult in her seventies as she had at the age of 12. It is also Le Guin whose comments on the decline of Latin within the education system suggest that Lavinia was born in part as a last-ditch attempt to keep Virgil’s presence alive. In 2008 she wrote: ‘During the last century, the teaching and learning of Latin began to wither away into a scholarly speciality. So, with the true death of his language, Vergil’s voice will be silenced at last.’18 While Le Guin’s concerns over Virgil’s future in the education system are understandable, she does not take into account his presence within Western culture, which has deepened and expanded over two millennia. Virgil’s voice cannot be silenced, because he is at the very heart of the literary and artistic tradition that has shaped our world. His transmission via a plethora of texts in different media is

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Oates (2004: 156).

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Grossen (2008: 5).

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Le Guin (2008: 273).

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indicated by the way in which each of the women writers to be discussed in this book has inherited a Virgil that can be identified with her native country. Dante’s influence can be discerned in almost all the works we shall examine; but his response to Virgil established so firmly Virgil’s importance to both the reception of antiquity and the Christian tradition in Western culture that it is not possible to bypass the Commedia when invoking Virgil. Writers such as Fainlight, Boland, and Wittig, who each depict a female version of the descent into hell, colour their depictions with reminiscences of the Inferno as well as of Aeneid 6. Dante also underpins Byatt’s description of the hell of caring for an Alzheimer’s patient, of the helpless suffering and writhing of the damned. More chillingly, his association with portrayals of the concentration camps means that the Inferno is a key intertext of the episodes in the work of both Wittig and Oates, when the Virgilian shades are resurrected in the ghosts of concentration-camp victims. Apart from Dante, however, the dominant influences colouring each woman’s response to Virgil belong very clearly to the national tradition within which she is working. The British writers bring to life Virgils who are accompanied by their earlier presences in the works of Tennyson, Turner, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Auden. Margaret Drabble cleverly offers a glimpse of the importance of canonical translations to a national tradition as her seven sisters discuss the relative merits of the translations of Jackson-Knight, Day-Lewis, and Dryden. But it is above all T. S. Eliot, with his imagery of the ruined city inhabited by ghosts and exiles, who haunts their responses to Virgil. The London of Margaret Drabble’s The Seven Sisters is a contemporary version of The Waste Land, which also stands behind the Londons of Miche`le Roberts and A. S. Byatt. Byatt’s London is the London of the Blitz, and it is striking how often the women we shall be discussing locate at least some of their work within the Second World War. For the British writers this is not simply because the war offers a wealth of images connected to burning cities, the loss of loved ones and exile, but also because the Second World War was one of the richest periods of Virgilian reception within British literary history.19

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Ziolkowski (1993: 129–34).

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Eavan Boland, who spent much of her childhood in London, also presents a Virgil influenced by Eliot, especially when she too evokes the Second World War, but we shall see that her Virgil is the Virgil currently being invoked by many of the male writers of Ireland also— Seamus Heaney, Peter Fallon, Brian Friel, who are all expressing disease at their distance and exclusion from a dominant culture and calling upon Virgil to help them reconfigure the centres of civilization. But Virgil offers Boland imagery that she can employ, to examine her status as an outsider not just through her nationality, but also through her gender. Monique Wittig, too, invokes Virgil as a way of dismantling and reshaping those tenets of Western civilization that have excluded her voice. But the imagery of Wittig’s lesbian odyssey owes much to the work of Jean Cocteau, in particular the script and film of Orphe´e (1949). At the beginning of the twentieth century Virgil’s significance to France lay chiefly in the fact that his Eclogues offered a model to both Gide and Proust to analyse homosexual feelings. It is entirely fitting, therefore, that towards the end of the century he should feature so strongly within the work of France’s most prominent lesbian writer. Christa Wolf links her novel Kassandra to the Greek models of the myth offered by Aeschylus and Homer, yet we shall see that her evocation of Troy from the perspective of the vanquished is haunted by Aeneid 2 and offers fascinating insights into Virgil’s ability to speak for a world on the brink of collapse, not only the fallen city of Troy, but also Europe threatened by the Star Wars ambitions of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s regime. That Wolf does not herself mention Virgil as a model is entirely in keeping with a German view of Virgil, which has never quite shaken off the disdain of Goethe and Lessing, and which relentlessly persists in presenting the Aeneid as a pale, substanceless copy of the Homeric epics. In contrast, Virgil maintains a distinctive significance within the American psyche. He is bound to the construction of the modern United States, as exemplified by the fact that the three mottoes of the Great Seal of the Republic were adopted from Virgil’s poems in

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1782.20 Virgil is integral to the American ambition to transport the authority and glory of Rome into a new continent, while he also offers images of the ideal pastoral landscape into which to retreat from the pressures and corruption of civilization. One of the most potent ways of translating the cultural authority of Europe into the American landscape was through the transposition of European place names. It is precisely this strategy that contributes to the tension of Oates’s Virgilian vision at the beginning of the twenty-first century, while Virgil’s significance to the way in which America views its own landscape is a central theme in both Le Guin and Lembke, whose rural evocations evoke the Virgilian works of Willa Cather, especially My Antonia, whose epigraph is taken from the Georgics. To a large extent the richness of allusions that attests to these various national traditions also represents the weight of a tradition that needs to be reshaped so that it can accommodate those who had previously been excluded from it. One of the most effective ways of inserting oneself into such a tradition is, of course, to reshape its dominant texts and especially those that come near its beginning. More and more writers coming from places that have traditionally been outside the Western canon have turned to classical works as a way of connecting their experiences and backgrounds to a dominant literary culture.21 It is, paradoxically, one of the effects of the decline in formal classical education that we are witnessing an enormous literary engagement with classical texts.22 Women, especially, are reshaping classical texts so that the voices of their female characters might be heard.23 Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad forbids us to con20 Ziolkowski (1993: 147). Ziolkowski also notes that, when George Washington retired from military service, he ordered for his mantelpiece a bronze sculpture of Aeneas carrying his father from a burning Troy, and the six bronze busts that John Quincy Adams displayed in his study at Quincy, as his ‘Household Gods’, featured one of Virgil. 21 Recent volumes examining this phenomenon include Leonard and Zajko (2006) and Hardwick and Gillespie (2007). 22 For example, Ovid has received new form in the translation of Ted Hughes and the novels of Ali Smith, Julia Kristeva, and Jane Alison; Catullus in the translations of Anne Carson and the novels of Michele Lowric and Helen Dunmore. 23 Lilian Doherty (2001: 21) comments briefly on this: ‘In the late twentieth century, women writers have self-consciously sought to remedy this gap in the classical tradition by retelling the myths from the points of view of the female characters.’

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tinue overlooking the hanged serving girls of the Odyssey; Carol Ann Duffy’s anthology The World’s Wife offers new readings of fairy tales, biblical legends, and classical myths, which she presents from a female perspective. Ali Smith’s exuberant retelling of the myth of Iphis in Girl Meets Boy probes the self-awareness and emotional development of two young Glaswegian lesbians. The landscape of classical reception is now full of women’s voices conversing with the male poets from antiquity in a bid ‘not to pass on a tradition, but to break its hold over us’.24 Though the strategy of adopting female mythological characters as exemplars of strong, creative women is not a new one,25 the scale of rewriting from the 1980s onwards is unprecedented and corresponds to a parallel trend of women’s reworking of fairy tales, as in the work of Angela Carter, Carol Ann Duffy, Miche`le Roberts, and Marina Warner.26 In the rewriting of fairy tales, also, the emphasis of the trend has been not just on emulating the qualities of courage and wisdom associated with the positive female figures, but equally on subverting the original tales, so that the voices of formerly silent female figures can now be heard and so that the female characters can be seen to be assuming the heroic guises and emotions that were once exclusive to men. Christa Wolf articulates this drive to resituate women at the centre of the Western tradition as a way of showing that what we may once have been prepared to accept as ‘realism’ was, in fact, wildly distorted; it was a realism founded upon the exclusion of great swathes of the human race: Sollte man nicht einmal versuchen, was herauska¨me, setzte man in die grossen Muster der Weltliterature Frauen an die Stelle der Ma¨nner? Achill, ¨ dipus, Agamemnon, Jesus, Ko¨nig Lear, Faust, Julien Herakles, Odysseus, O Sorel, Wilhelm Meister. Frauen als Handelnde, Gewaltta¨tige, Erkennende? Sie fallen durch den Raster der Literatur. Dies heisst »Realismus«. Die ganze bisherige Existenz der Frau war unrealistisch.27 24

Rich (1972: 18–19). Sandra M. Gilbert points out that ‘a mythological way of structuring female experience . . . has been useful to many women writers since the nineteenth century’ (Gilbert and Gubar (1979b: 248), cited in Hurst (2009: 275). I am grateful to Isobel Hurst for her generosity in allowing me to read her essay prior to publication. 26 See Sellers (2001). 27 Wolf (1983b: 115). 25

Introduction

13

(Shouldn’t an experiment be made to see what would happen if the great male heroes of world literature were replaced by women? Achilles, Hercules, Odysseus, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Jesus, King Lear, Faust, Julien Sorel, Wilhelm Meister. Women as active, violent, as knowers? They drop through the lens of literature. People call that ‘realism’. The entire past history of women has been unrealistic.)28

These bids to shift the axes of Western culture stem from international recognition by women of their absence from the dominant literary tradition. This has resulted, not only in landmark works of theory and criticism such as Cle´ment and Cixous’s La Jeune ne´e (1975), Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977), or Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979), but also in the rise of women’s publishing houses such as the E´ditions des Femmes (1968),29 Virago Press (1973), and the Women’s Press (1978). It is against this background that the surge of female receptions of classical texts is taking place. There is, of course, a paradox inherent in the fact that Virgil is both hailed as the Father of a literary tradition that has been so set upon silencing and excluding the voices of women and invoked in order to help women articulate their consequent sense of exclusion and exile. In 1975, in a book exploring the birth of women’s self-awareness, He´le`ne Cixous offered a compelling account of how a patriarchal epic celebrating ‘arma virumque’ should have metamorphosed into a repository of images for women writers to explore the various positions of the outsider. Her essay ‘Sorties’ published as part of La Jeune Ne´e (The Newly Born Woman) appears almost to have been written as a response to Vera Brittain’s complaint in 1957 about the absence of a work that recognized the contributions made by women to the war: I began to ask: ‘Why should the young men have the war all to themselves? Didn’t women have their war as well? . . . Does no one remember the women who began their war work with such high ideals, or how grimly they carried on when that flaming faith had crumbled into the grey ashes of disillusion? Who will write the epic of the women who went to the war?30 28

Wolf (1984: 260). Sandra Gilbert (1996) notes the irony of the location of the publishing house E´dition des Femmes, which is situated on the rue des Saints Pe`res. 30 Brittain (1980: 77). For further discussion, see Hurst (2006: 218). 29

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Cixous’s essay acknowledges women’s experiences during the war, but extends the frame of reference as a way of searching for her own voice out of the patriarchal literature that has formed her, while at the same time excluding her. The Aeneid becomes one of the sources from which she forges her own weapons, challenging all the assumptions made by epic as a genre about male authority, patriarchal power, and female submission.31 From the very beginning, learning epic was associated with formative education and for centuries the curriculum promoted the superiority of men over women by exposure to epic. Cixous vividly evokes the way in which the ground is shifting under our feet, as marginalized groups step forward to share centre stage in an attempt to redress the balance: S’il e´clatait a` un nouveau jour que le projet logocentrique avait toujours e´te´, inavouablement, de fonder le phallocentrisme, d’assurer a` l’ordre masculin une raison e´gale a` l’histoire elle-meˆme? Alors toutes les histoires seraient a` raconter autrement, l’avenir serait incalculable, les forces historiques changeraient, changeront, de mains, de corps, une autre pense´e encore non pensable, transformera le fonctionnement de toute socie´te´. Or nous vivons justement cette e´poque ou` l’assise conceptuelle d’une culture mille´naire est en train d’eˆtre sape´e par des millions d’une espe`ce de taupe encore jamais reconnue. (p. 119)32 (If some fine day it suddenly came out that the logocentric plan had always, inadmissibly, been to create a foundation for (to found and fund) phallocentrism, to guarantee the masculine order a rationale equal to history itself. So all the history, all the stories would be there to retell differently; the future would be incalculable; the historic forces would and will change hands and change body—another thought which is yet unthinkable—will transform the functioning of all society. We are living in an age where the conceptual foundation of an ancient culture is in the process of being undermined by millions of species of mole (Topoi, ground mines) never known before.) (p. 65)33 31 See Oliensis (1997: 310): ‘In the Eclogues, women enable but do not perform pastoral song; in the Georgics their ideal place is the deep background of the fruitful landscape and household. This relegation is dramatised by the Aeneid which kills off its most visible and powerful women (Dido, Amata, Camilla) while preserving Lavinia as an instrument of dynastic reproduction.’ 32 Cixous and Cle´ment (1975). References in French are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text. 33 Cixous and Cle´ment (1996). References to translations are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

Introduction

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For women, such a transformation is possible only through an absolute refusal of the traditionally female qualities of passivity and submission. It is for this reason that Cixous rejects the role of Dido, the most memorable female of the Aeneid: Mais je ne suis pas Didon. Je ne peux pas habiter une victime, si noble soitelle. Je re´siste: une certaine passivite´ m’est odieuse, elle me promet la mort. [ . . . ] A elle pourtant toujours ma sympathie, ma tendresse, ma tristesse. Mais pas moi, pas ma vie. Je ne peux jamais de´poser mes armes. (p. 142) (But I am not Dido. I cannot inhabit a victim, no matter how noble. I resist: detest a certain passivity, it promises death for me. [ . . . ] My sympathy, my tenderness, my sorrow, however, are all hers. But not me, not my life. I can never lay down my arms.) (p. 77)

‘Arms and the man’ is here transformed into ‘Arms and the woman’. These ‘armes’ are now the resources from which Cixous will draw, precisely in order to avoid Dido’s fate. Here, too, Cixous is employing a comparable approach to the other women writers we will be discussing, most of whom do not mention Dido at all. The two who give her more than a fleeting glance, Fanthorpe and Byatt, subvert the legend by focusing exclusively on her intelligence and resourcefulness. For the most part, however, Dido as victim casts so threatening a shadow over the imaginations of contemporary women writers that they avoid mentioning her at all.34 This is not the only point at which Cixous’s relationship with Virgil bears striking parallels to the ways in which he will be adopted at the end of the century, and the reasons why women are turning to him at all. The title Cixous gives to her essay, ‘Sorties’, is already suggestive of night-time forays into the enemy camp. She forges an identity from this very realm of literature and myth, which she visits almost by stealth: ‘Et moi, insurrection, cole`res, ou` me mettre? Si je suis une femme, quelle est ma place? Je me cherche a` travers les sie`cles et je ne me vois nulle part’ (p. 138).35 (‘I, revolt, rages, where am I to 34 Dido has become less popular in general in the twentieth century. It is notable that in a recent edition of essays examining the Dido myth, the twentieth century is barely mentioned at all. See Burden (1998). 35 Cixous here anticipates Boland’s lament at the lack of any model of female experience in literature as she scours the history books to find her name that was not there: ‘Was there really no name for my life in poetry?’ she asks (Boland 1995: 23).

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stand? What is my place if I am a woman? I look for myself throughout the centuries and don’t see myself anywhere’) (p. 75). One of the literary sites from which Cixous garners the strength to wage her own wars against exclusion is the Trojan War, as depicted by both Homer and Virgil: Et je me porte naturellement vers tous les textes ou` on se bat. Textes guerriers; et textes re´volte´s. Longtemps j’ai lu, j’ai ve´cu, dans un territoire fait d’espaces pris a` tous les pays auxquels j’avais acce`s par la fiction, une antiterre (le mot ‘patrie’ meˆme nanti d’un ‘anti’ je ne peux jamais le dire) ou` n’avaient pas cours les distinctions de races, de classes, d’origines, sans que quelqu’un s’insurge. (p. 132) J’ai fait la guerre de Troie a` ma manie`re: ni d’un coˆte´ ni de l’autre. [ . . . ] Et dans tous les temps mythiques et historiques, j’avanc¸ais. (p. 134) (And naturally I focused on all the texts in which there is struggle. Warlike texts; rebellious texts. For a long time I read, I lived, in a territory made of spaces from all the countries to which I had access through fiction, an antiland (I can never say the word ‘patrie’ ‘fatherland’, even if it is provided with an ‘anti’) where distinctions of races, classes, and origins would not be put to use without someone’s rebelling.) (p. 72) (I fought the Trojan war my own way; on neither one side nor the other. [ . . . ] And I pushed ahead into all the mythical and historical times.) (p. 73)

In her refusal to use the word patrie Cixous not only suggests the late-twentieth-century suspicion of empire, but also touches on her own position as one of the colonized through having been brought up in Algeria. And, though she may not have realized it, it is this very position of being on the edge, of being an outsider from the dominant cultural centres, that predisposes her to turn to Virgil.36 Once again she shares this position of being on the threshold of a dominant tradition, or being straddled between two traditions, with a striking number of the women we shall be discussing. Christa Wolf ’s Germany was cut off from West Germany (and, in fact, now forms part

36 See Burrow (1997: 23–4): ‘Virgil tends to be adopted into English by poets who need the consolation of his authority or the sustaining dream of his imperial vision. [ . . . ] The act of translating Virgil gives [English] writers the sense of writing an empire even if they could not participate in one [ . . . ] writers on the margins of England have turned to Virgil to persuade themselves that they are at the nation’s centre.’

Introduction

17

of Poland); Miche`le Roberts is half-French, half-English, and so is caught between two languages, two cultural traditions; Monique Wittig emigrated to the United States, where her sexuality was more acceptable; Ruth Fainlight has made a home for herself in London, while acknowledging that the only place where she really feels at home is New York; Eavan Boland writes of the strain of being Irish in post-war England, where she was repeatedly reminded of her status as outsider. As Cixous assumes the roles of the heroes from antiquity, her war becomes one waged on behalf of all the voiceless, all the excluded: plus que jamais la lutte e´tait ne´cessaire. Car, dans le re´el, c’est aussi maintenant en tant que femme que je suis offense´e, et l’ennemi se ge´ne´ralise: contre moi, il n’y a pas seulement les adversaires de classe, les colonialistes, les racistes, les bourgeois, les antise´mites. S’y ajoutent les hommes. (p. 137) (struggle is more necessary than ever. For, in reality, the offense is also against me, as a woman, and the enemy is all over the place: not only are there class enemies, colonialists, racists, bourgeois and antisemites against me—‘men’ are added to them.) (p. 74)

Cixous is particularly well equipped to lead this war by virtue of her own personal identity, which skirts the no-man’s-land of identity on so many levels: Mais je suis ne´e en Alge´rie, et mes anceˆtres ont ve´cu en Espagne, au Maroc, en Autriche, Hongrie, Tche´coslovaquie, Allemagne, mes fre`res de naissance sont arabes; alors, dans l’histoire, ou` sommes-nous? Je suis du parti des offense´s, des colonise´s. Je (ne) suis (pas) arabe. Qui suis-je? [ . . . ] Ou` est ma place? Je cherche. Je fouille partout. Je lis, j’interroge. Je commence a` parler, quelle langue est la mienne? le franc¸ais? l’allemand? l’arabe? Qui a parle´ pour moi a` travers les ge´ne´rations? J’ai ma chance. Quel accident! Etre ne´e en Alge´rie, non en France, non en Allemagne; un peu plus et comme tels membres de ma famille je n’e´crirais pas aujourd’hui, je m’anonymiserais comme pour l’e´ternite´ du coˆte´ d’Auschwitz. [ . . . ] Ou` sont mes batailles? mes compagnons d’armes? Que dis-je mes compagnes d’armes. (p. 131) (But I was born in Algeria, and my ancestors lived in Spain, Morocco, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany; my brothers by birth are Arab. So where are we in history? I side with those who are injured, trespassed upon, colonized. I am (not) Arab. Who am I? [ . . . ] Where is my place? I am looking. I search everywhere. I read. I ask. I begin to speak. Which language

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is mine? French? German? Arabic? Who spoke for me throughout the generations? It’s my luck. What an accident! being born in Algeria, not in France, not in Germany; a little earlier and, like some members of my family, I would not be writing today. I would anonymiserate eternally from Auschwitz. [ . . . ] Where are my battles? my fellow soldiers? What am I saying . . . the comrades, women, my companions in arms?) (p. 71)

If the women writers we will be discussing appear to have heeded Cixous’s rallying cry, to have joined her as ‘compagnes d’armes’, it is precisely because her essay shapes her vision of Virgil to her exposition of the issues confronting contemporary women. We shall see that the reasons given for the invocation of Virgil are several and various—from his depiction of the horrors of being unable to make your voice heard, to the female wisdom of the centuries-old Sibyl, hidden in her impenetrable utterances; from the need to rewrite the cultural tradition by starting with the Father of the West, to a recognition of the potency lent to contemporary suffering by a voice from antiquity speaking of comparable horrors. Above all, these women have found recognition within Virgil of the exile they experience, the sense of homelessness they each seem unable quite to shake off. It is time now to examine the contemporary guises he assumes within the works of these ‘compagnes d’armes’, these sibylline sisters.

2 Virgil in Contemporary Women’s Poetry On a summer’s day in 2006 a young Austrian girl escaped from captivity and ran back into the world from which she had been abducted eight years earlier. The story of Natasha Kampusch is the most potent instance we have in modern times of the revenant, one who has made the journey back from the Underworld into the land of the living. She returned to the world as a ghost: not only had she been given up for dead, but, as she appealed to passers-by for help, they had difficulty understanding her. Her appearance was disorienting—she was apparently as white as cheese—and, after eight years of communicating solely with her captor, her voice had lost its fluency and natural cadences. This collision of the world of the living with the world of the dead is a theme to which classical myth reverts over and over again, perhaps most vividly in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find Hilary Mantel meditating upon Natasha Kampusch’s return in an article written for the Guardian about the powerful hold still exerted by the myth of Orpheus on the contemporary imagination.1 The myth of Orpheus has always been with us. One of our main sources for it from the ancient world is Virgil’s Georgics 4 (453–527), where its treatment foreshadows Aeneas’ loss of Creusa in the Aeneid 2 (766–95) and the depiction of the shades of the Underworld visited by Aeneas (Aen. 6. 305–14). Mantel describes the distinctive shapes given to the myth by a contemporary society haunted by the horror stories in the press of young girls who vanish from one moment to the next and of the torments that they may be forced to undergo. In a film version of the myth, commissioned by Opera North and shown 1

Mantel (2007). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

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at Leeds Art Gallery (October 2007), the ghosts in the Underworld fastened Eurydice to the wall with duct tape. Mantel writes of how the scene resonated with memories of crimes that have recently horrified the public, of how the figure of Eurydice came to embody also the shades of the newly dead: There was a scene in which the inhabitants of the underworld pinned Eurydice to the wall and fastened her there with duct tape, length upon snarling length of it, at first making nothing worse than a sinister ensnaring web. But as the ripping sound went on, minute after minute, into a theatre totally silent, I remembered the killer Fred West embalming the heads of young girls, wrapping them until they could barely breathe, and the sound of the tape tearing became the essence of cruelty; and I thought, the dead girl is made a parcel, she is consigned, she is consigned to oblivion. (p. 4)2

The world of ancient myth and the world of the twentieth-century serial killer blend in this theatre of violence and loss. By moving straight from this description into an account of Natasha Kampusch’s plight, Mantel reminds us again both of how we need ancient myths that help us give shape to contemporary experience, of how myths allow us to approach an expression of the unbearable, and of how such myths stay alive by doing so. ‘This is the year of Orpheus’, declares Mantel of 2007, a statement that highlights how mentalities have changed since Ziolkowski’s 1993 assertion that ‘We do not live in Virgilian times’.3 Through Mantel’s depiction, Hades comes to life once more on the streets of Austria. Her telling of the story of Natasha Kampusch is steeped in Virgilian imagery. One of the most poignant qualities of Virgil’s Underworld is the difficulty of communication. At the very entrance of hell, Aeneas hears the indecipherable whimpering of the children placed there: continuo auditae voces vagitus et ingens infantumque animae flentes, in limine primo quos dulcis vitae exsortis et ab ubere raptosabstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo. (Aen. 6. 426–9)

2

That this production should choose to suffocate Eurydice is highly charged, since, as Alison Keith (2000: 85) points out: ‘suffocation itself is a form of death reserved for the female in the classical imagination’. 3 Ziolkowski (1993: 285).

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(Instantly voices are heard: massed wailing, the weeping of children: Souls never able to speak, just over the boundary’s threshold, Stolen by death’s dark day.)

More chillingly still, as he advances further, he encounters the shades of the Greek generals, his former foes, who try but fail to address him: ‘pars tollere vocem j exiguam: inceptus clamor frustratur hiantis’ (Others, trying to raise a thin war-cry, j Find that the shouts don’t emerge from their mouths, though they open them widely) (Aen. 6. 492–3). Echoes of these passages hover around Mantel’s description of Kampusch’s desperate please for help: ‘She ran down the street and appealed for help to the first woman she met; but the woman didn’t understand her: how would the dead speak?’ (p. 4). The child was transformed into a ghost over and over again. First of all her abductor dragged her out of her life. Much later she attempted to communicate her plight, but those whom she addressed failed to decipher her utterances. In the meantime there were the neighbours who saw, but failed to register the implications of, a young girl living with the middle-aged man. They saw her, but looked past her. Mantel observes that: It may take her years to come back fully to life, and the story of how she does that will be as interesting as the story of her burial. If she spoke from her heart, what would she say to her neighbours? Perhaps that they made the most basic error of all: they misidentified the living as the dead. She walked among them, solid and breathing, but they were unable to see her. (p. 4)

That this article meditating on the relevance of the myth of Orpheus to the contemporary world should have been written by a woman is further evidence that the aetas Virgiliana we are currently witnessing is, for the first time, being shaped predominantly by women writers. Although Virgil’s Georgics are not the only model of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, it is nevertheless his treatment, along with that of Ovid in the Metamorphoses, to which later writers have predominantly turned. A survey of the way in which contemporary women writers have engaged with the myth will establish some of the central themes that emerge also from women’s engagement with the Aeneid at the turn of the millennium. In Chapter 1 I argued that it is possible to discern the ‘national’ Virgils standing

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behind each woman’s invocation of his work; further evidence of Virgil’s absorption into the general culture is his strong presence within the work of contemporary women poets. He enters women’s poetry through female rewritings of the Orpheus myth, but also through female responses to the figure of the Sibyl, the descent into the Underworld, and exile within a ruined city. As Virgil underpins the œuvre of Ruth Fainlight, Eavan Boland, and Miche`le Roberts, I have analysed the significance of his presence for them in individual chapters. This chapter will examine female responses to the myth of Orpheus before analysing the various references to the Aeneid made by the British poets U. A. Fanthorpe and Josephine Balmer. For the Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood (b. 1939), Orpheus’ unending song becomes an act of resistance in a world governed by tyranny and oppression where the individual is silenced and blighted. The imagery she employs to depict Orpheus’ walk through the contemporary world reverses the landscape of the original myth, so that it is the real world that is crowded with the maimed shapes of the dead. And this stunted, bleak world that she depicts is a chilling prefiguring of the poisoned, lifeless planet that is the habitat of her novel Oryx and Crake (2003). The first line of her poem ‘Orpheus (2)’4 emphasizes that it is the ‘horror of this world’ that she is describing. And the deformities that she evokes are suggestive of those that result from a world on which radioactive waste has snowed down, while her reference to those ‘whose names are forbidden’, ‘Those with silence’, serves as a reminder that one of the functions of the archetypal poet, Orpheus, is precisely to sing for those who have no voice. Her imagery suggests the legions of silenced women pushed to the outskirts of history, as they will appear in Boland’s poetry, and yet for Atwood, as indeed for Boland herself, and for Wittig, Oates, and Wolf, the oppression of women goes hand in hand with any form of tyranny, any form of suppression. Orpheus, the poet, shares in the bloodiness of recent history, still symbolized by the poppy—one of the ‘red flowers’ that splatter open against the walls. The dangers of eloquence in the mouths of those who might be able to give voice to

4

Margaret Atwood, ‘Orpheus 2’, cited in Kossman (2001: 119).

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the suffering of the silenced is suggested by the violence with which his head is ripped off his body: They have cut off both his hands and soon they will tear his head from his body in one burst of furious refusal. He foresees this. Yet he will go on singing, and in praise.

Atwood’s invocation of Virgil in her depiction of the poet who is in revolt, who is expressing unto death the evils of contemporary history and its silenced victims, parallels Christa Wolf ’s imaginative resurrection of the ancient prophetess Cassandra. In Wolf ’s hands Cassandra sings of male domination and female exclusion, but the themes of silencing and suppression are directly coloured by her anxieties about the future of a Europe threatened by the cold war. Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73), who spent much of her life in Rome, claiming to feel more at home there than in her native Austria, also chooses to use the myth of Orpheus specifically to evoke deaths that have been caused by the currents of history. Her poem ‘Dunkles zu sagen’5 (Darkness Spoken)6 recognizes the aching need to reach the dead, and the urge to use poetry to communicate with them, even as we know beforehand of the doomed futility of any such enterprise: Like Orpheus I play death on the strings of life, and to the loveliness of the Earth and your eyes, which govern heaven, I only know how to speak of darkness.

The imagery that Bachmann employs in the second and third verses is suggestive of the Holocaust; once again this strengthens a pattern to be seen later in this book, especially in the works of Monique Wittig and Joyce Carol Oates, where the Virgilian shades come to life as the ghosts of Holocaust victims. Bachmann depicts the moment of waking to death in the camps, and the disintegration of humans into ash:

5 6

Bachmann (1978: 32). Translation by Peter Filkins. Bachmann (2001: 110–11).

24

Sibylline Sisters Your curls were turned into the shadow hair of night, black flakes of darkness buried your face.

Here the curls of Orpheus blend with the ashen hair depicted by Paul Celan in one of the most famous and graphic poems depicting the Holocaust, ‘Death Fugue’. Bachmann’s last verse universalizes the grief once more. Both the dead and the grieving are lonely, are irrevocably separated, as Virgil also portrayed through his depiction in the Aeneid of the living and the dead reaching out helplessly to each other from separate banks: ‘And I don’t belong to you. j Both of us mourn now.’ And yet, despite poetry’s inability to bring the dead home, in her closing lines Bachmann, like Celan, nevertheless affirms its power to preserve the memory of the dead, to allow them a voice through its lines: But like Orpheus I know life on the strings of death, deepening the blue of your forever closed eye.

It is above all the British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955) who gives an overtly feminist twist to the myth. ‘Eurydice’ features in The World’s Wife, which retells a variety of classical myths, biblical legends, and fairy tales from the viewpoint of the woman (pp. 58– 60).7 Her approach to the canonical texts of the Western tradition is akin to that of Roberts and Wittig, humorously subversive, elegiac, barbed with real anger. Not only does her work bring the women of the Western canon to the fore, but it is also addressed explicitly to women. ‘Eurydice’ establishes female solidarity by beginning her account with a comradely ‘Girls’. Duffy draws upon the Virgilian ‘umbra’ not only to evoke death but also to suggest that Eurydice’s years of living with the high-maintenance Orpheus have exacted a heavy toll and worn her down. The domain of death is acknowledged as a place out of time by Duffy’s replacement of the expected ‘nowhere’ with the word ‘nowhen’; but ‘nowhen’ also allows her to 7 Carol Ann Duffy (1999). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

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accommodate the experiences of women throughout history. Death is the place where language stops, which even the most accomplished poet is unable to reach, but for Eurydice the silence, the freedom from her husband’s poetry, represents a blessed peace and quiet: Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop (p. 58)

Duffy vividly evokes the blood-chilling horror of Eurydice’s recognition of Orpheus’ distinctive knock at the door: Just picture my face when I heard— Ye Gods— a familiar knock-knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. (p. 59)

Lest any of Eurydice’s female companions should imagine that Orpheus has won the right to recover his dead wife through the beauty of his song, Eurydice is swift to establish the mediocre quality of Orpheus’ verse and make it clear that his career was fostered by his male publishers. Duffy’s equation of foolish publishers with Gods is reminiscent of Miche`le Roberts’s presentation of the Christian God as the Gaffer who is angered to be excluded from the female view of storytelling and history when he finds himself on board the Ark with Mrs Noah and the Sibyls, as we shall see in the discussion of The Book of Mrs Noah in Chapter 5. That Duffy intends her Orpheus to represent any of the archetypal poets of the Western tradition is indicated by Eurydice’s acid dismissal of his work—not only does he forbid her to speak for herself, but he uses paltry verse to attempt to bring her to life: Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess, etc. etc. In fact, girls, I’d rather be dead. (p. 59)

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The irony, of course, is that she is as good as dead, imprisoned as she is within his lines of tawdry verse, her only identity on earth being his wife and scribe. Through her physical death and access to the Underworld Eurydice is simply achieving an authentic version of the living death to which she has been subjected on earth. And, when the male gods permit Orpheus to break the laws of nature and return with her to earth, it is precisely this fate that she resists: to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths . . . (p. 60)

Eurydice prefers the quietness of death to the prospect of a return to this shared life in which her own identity is as an adjunct to him and provider of material for his poetry. The woman’s identity being shrouded in all these lines of male-authored poetry echoes Boland’s futile search for her own name in all the lines of poetry in the Western culture available to her. Though Duffy’s tone is richly humorous, there is a chilling element to the way in which she wraps the verse around with the names of different poetic forms. The lines of poetry that trap her are presented here as being like threads, like chains. The imagery is all the more sinister if we remember Mantel’s account of the theatrical version of Orpheus in which Eurydice’s mouth is silenced with layers and layers of tape. Duffy’s poem has darkened from a satirical account of a wife who longs to be spared from listening to her husband’s poetic gems to an expose´ of the myth as a tale of abuse, and an abuse that has been repeated and deepened and expanded until the present day. Eurydice pleads to be spared the torment of living through it all again: ‘Please let me stay. | But already the light had saddened from purple to grey’ (p. 61). The will of the gods and the ambition of Orpheus are implacable; she has nearly run out of ways of forcing him to look at her and thus to lose her irrevocably. In desperation she thinks of the one strategy that will definitely trick him into turning to her—she dupes him with flattery: ‘Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. j I’d love to hear it again . . . ’ (p. 61). Duffy’s emphasis on breaking the silence of these women who are trapped within the lines of male-authored writing aligns her to the tradition of women’s writing that has become particularly pro-

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nounced since the 1980s and that is to present well-known myths, fairy tales, or biblical legends from the perspective of the female characters. It is a strategy she shares with the British poet U. A. Fanthorpe, who introduces a sequence of four poems with precisely this aim: I wrote these four poems because I was interested to see how the masculine world of Shakespeare’s tragedies would look from the woman’s angle. In fact, women exist in this world only to be killed as sacrificial victims. So I imagined Gertrude (mother-in-law), Regan (King’s daughter), Emilia (Army wife) and the unnamed waiting gentlewoman in Macbeth having a chat with some usual female confidante like a hairdresser or a telephone. (p. 94)8

The worlds U. A. Fanthorpe has inhabited have been both intensely female and quintessentially English. We saw in Chapter 1 how the Second World War shaped her understanding of the Virgil she was studying in her girl’s boarding school in Surrey. After leaving school she studied English at Oxford, before a sixteen-year stretch of teaching English at Cheltenham Ladies College, where she was Head of English for the last eight. Wishing to give herself more time and creative energy for writing, she resigned from teaching and worked as a receptionist in a Neurology Department, an experience that would offer rich material for her poetry. She left the hospital in 1989 to become a full-time poet. In 1994 she was the first woman in 315 years to be nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Until her death at the end of April 2009 she lived in an Elizabethan cottage in Gloucestershire with her partner, Rosie Bailey. Fanthorpe’s poetic world is an English landscape, one that she shares most closely with John Betjeman, but one seen from her perspective, so that in many instances it is a specifically gendered universe. The toast and trains of Betjeman’s England are transposed into the trappings of an English girls’ school in her poem ‘Half-Term’: Always autumn, in my memory. Butter ringing the drilled teashop crumpets; Handmade chocolates, rich enough to choke you Brought in special smooth paper from Town. 8

text.

Fanthorpe (2005). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the

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She experiences her England through the literature that has shaped both it and her, so that her poetry echoes Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Tennyson, and the Authorized Version of the Bible. Given her background and education, it would not be possible for her to inhabit an England that was not filled with their voices, yet she is constantly aware of the need to carve her own woman-shaped niche in this world, as in the poem ‘Kinch and Lack [Boys’ Outfitters]’, where Virgil assumes the guise of a boy’s outfitter, preparing his charge for the robust universe of an English boy’s public school: He’s rehearsed for a special future By a man with pins in his mouth; Seven-year Dante, whose Vergil Salutes his inches with respectful craft. Mother stands restlessly by. The cheque-book in her bag (And I know, without being told There’s a world enlisting him That hasn’t a place for me. O.K. I’ll make my own.) (pp. 365–6)

This need to recast the world so that she can find a place within it entails further revisiting of the myths that have shaped the Western tradition.9 9 For example, her poem ‘Unauthorised Version’ modifies the biblical legend of Jesus chiding Martha for her household anxieties and supporting Mary’s choice to sit at his feet and listen. In Fanthorpe’s version, Mary rewrites history and establishes solidarity with her sister:

Still, Josh himself, as I said—well, he is only The Son of God, not the Daughter; so how could he know? And when it comes to the truth, I’m Marty’s sister. I was there; I heard what was said, and I knew what was meant. The men will write it up later From their angle, of course. But this is me, Mary, Setting the record straight. (p. 238)

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In ‘Carthage: An Historical Guide’, Fanthorpe presents a Dido whose suicide was not the act of a desperate woman, unable to survive her abandonment by her lover, but rather an altruistic act of sacrifice by a female leader wishing to ensure the welfare of her people. Fanthorpe quotes Virgil as the epigraph to the poem: ‘dux femina facti’ (Aen. 1. 264), reminding us that the first presentation that Virgil himself gives of Dido is as an unusually strong female leader, and offers C. Day-Lewis’s translation (‘A woman led the exploit’), a touch that roots her work still further within a British Virgilian tradition. Fanthorpe commemorates her Dido for her intelligence and political acumen. She describes the presentation of Dido by a guide leading tourists around the site of Carthage, an image that anticipates Margaret Drabble’s evocation of precisely the same scene in The Seven Sisters, where the characters also return to the ancient world via Flaubert’s Salammboˆ: Story of Dido and the bullhide. She was intelligent! (meaning—almost French). . . . . . We are to read Salammboˆ, distinguished work Of Flaubert, celebrated novelist (Who was, of course, French). Now at La Goulette we must notice flamingos Men trading snails, the Turkish fort where Christians Scorched until sold. And finally, Dido’s headland, where she flared Into legend. Not, we are glad to learn, For frail Aeneas’ sake, But prudently, as a true Frenchwoman would, For the Commerce, so that the people might be briefly sure Of olives, freedom, bread. (p. 232)

This twist to the accepted legend of Dido is important, not simply because it recognizes the unusual gifts and capabilities of this female leader, but also because it facilitates a kinship between Dido and contemporary women readers. Fanthorpe’s world is rich with presences from the classical tradition that she is able to recognize and expose, yet she is acutely aware that she is working in a world where this is likely to cease to be true and where our connections with the past will be severed. In her poem ‘In Memory’ she reworks the

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classical epic trope of autumn leaves10 figuring the souls of the dead, pointing out that such literary images outlive individual human lives: Dead, passed away in your sleep in your chaste bedSitter with the charming rural views. Tomorrow you will be incinerated, Like the October leaves. Only leaves return In a secure succession, and you Leave just a few embarrassing ashes. (p. 451)

It is, above all, Autumn that is her season. The autumnal evenings that she repeatedly evokes blend into the twilight of a civilization where the classical tradition is valued. This is especially true of her poem ‘Autumn Offer’, where the wistfulness is off-set by her ironic allusions to Keats: Already We have axed from our course the modules that clearly Have long passed their sell-by date: Art, music, history, literature, religion. Currently we are phasing out language, But retaining Japanese and German, For obvious reasons. (Season of timetables, and uniform . . . ) . . . . . (Season of texts and learning what to think . . . ) (pp. 398–9)

Her anticipated sense of loss at the disappearance of Latin and Greek allows her to establish fellow-feeling with Boethius, who was beset by similar anxieties in his own day. She tells of him in ‘The Gaoler’s Story’, where she describes his affection for (Two Greek geezers. He’d translated them before. He thought the world of them. He put them in Latin, In case Greek didn’t last. Languages don’t, he said.) (p. 420)

In the ‘Notes’ that she appends to the poem Fanthorpe observes: ‘Knowledge of the Greek language was dying out in the West, hence

10 The image first appears in the Iliad and comes down to us via Virgil, Dante, Milton, Gerald Manley Hopkins, etc.

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Boethius’ hurry to translate Greek thought into Latin. He correctly anticipated centuries of ignorance in the future, and wanted to make sure the best things lasted’ (p. 422). Fanthorpe’s own intimations of a civilization that will have become severed from its classical roots underpin her poem ‘The Silence’. At the beginning the silence evoked is that of Dido’s palace once Aeneas has started to tell the story of fallen Troy and his subsequent wanderings; by the end of the poem the silence represents the gap created by a lack of cultural knowledge, which will result in a world that has come adrift from its moorings. The poem itself was inspired by a tile excavated in Hampshire that had words from the Aeneid scratched upon it.11 The implication of Fanthorpe’s poem is that the day is at hand when such graffiti will be left untranslated and therefore silenced: A slave told me the yarn: some man, on his way From losing a kingdom to finding another, gave A friendly queen his story, And her people stopped talking, and listened. Conticuere omnes. Something like that. Stuck in my mind, somehow. They all fell silent. . . . . . Here we stand, Between Caes. Div. Aug. and the next lot, expert only At unspeakable things, Stranded between history and history, vague in-between people What we know will not be handed on. Conticuere omnes. (p. 293)

Fanthorpe’s figuring of the late twentieth century as a version of limbo, an era that is hurtling into a cultural wasteland, owes much to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a text that is vital to the transmission of Virgil in the twentieth century, especially in Britain. Eliot’s London is crowded with the ghosts of the First World War dead, streaming over London Bridge (‘So many, I had not thought Death had undone so many’), indistinguishable from the living spectres whom they elbow. 11

‘Conticuere omnes (Aeneid 2). Aeneas tells the story of the fall of Troy and his escape to Queen Dido and her court at Carthage. These words describe the response of his listeners. They were found scratched on a tile by excavators at Silchester in north Hampshire’ (p. 293).

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In ‘Rising Damp’ Fanthorpe follows Eliot in troping London as a version of the Underworld, by naming Acheron, Lethe, and Styx in an epic list as among the rivers that flow beneath its streets.12 Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy. Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet. It is the other rivers that lie Lower, that touch us only in dreams That never surface. We feel their tug as a dowser’s rod bends to their source below Phlegethon, Acheron, Lethe, Styx. (p. 72)

In ‘A Brief Resume´ at Fifty’ she offers a later version of this spectral landscape: Born in the pinched post-war, when cold and discouraged, We had too much to remember, too many uncounted deaths, You came, a wordless message, bringing the future with you, Into a past-haunted world. (p. 449)

She develops the image further in ‘Seven Types of Shadow’, a title that both echoes William Empson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ (1930) and highlights the importance of ‘shades’ and ‘shadows’, which are an essential feature of Virgil’s aesthetic vision.13 We carry our human ghosts around with us. . . . . . We are photofits of the past, And the future eyes us sideways as we eye ourselves. We are the ghosts of great-aunts and grand-nephews. We are ghosts of what is dead and not yet born. Ghosts of past, present, future. But the ones the living would like to meet are the echoes Of small dead joys still quick in the streets. (pp. 378–9)

The lines both ache with the loneliness of separation from those who matter to us, of our inability to feel complete and at home within the 12

See Fowler (2009: 245), where she comments that Fanthorpe’s epigraph to this poem: ‘A river can sometimes be diverted, but it is a very hard thing to lose it altogether’, offers an insight into the afterlife of classical texts also. 13 For an excellent exposition of this, see Theodorakopoulos (1997).

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present, and at the same time are alive to the unexpectedly persistent survival of the past. This sense of participating in enduring human grief is also explored in ‘The Passing of Alfred’. Here, the cruel gulf between Virgil’s banks of the living and the dead from the Aeneid (6. 313–14) conflates with the lines from Georgics 4 that depict Eurydice sinking back into the darkness under Orpheus’ gaze: Like us, they ran from habit to tell the good news To dead ears; like us they dreamed Of childhood, and being forgiven; And the dead followed them, as they do us, Tenderly through darkness, But fade when we turn to look in the upper air. (p. 77)

It is entirely appropriate that a poem commemorating Tennyson should invoke Virgil if we remember the importance to Tennyson himself of Virgil, culminating in the poem ‘To Virgil’, where he, too, depicts England as a land of ghosts when he describes Virgil as a Light among the vanish’d ages; star that gildest yet this phantom shore; Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise no more.

The Virgilian imagery in Fanthorpe’s poem, reminding us of the inexorable breakdown in communication with the dead so that we can never be forgiven, never redeemed, blends with Tennyson’s own imagery on this theme. Virgil lives within Fanthorpe, so that the people and scenes that are part of her everyday life are refracted through his lines. Her sequence ‘Four Dogs’ begins with a depiction of ‘the first dog’, Cerberus, and the importance to her of her classical understanding is indicated by her acerbic observation: ‘Later writers can seldom be trusted. j Primary sources are more reliable.’ In her version Cerberus is all the more sinister in that he does not appear threatening at all—he endearingly lures visitors into the hell from which, famously, it is so difficult to emerge: This dog guarded his master’s gate, Wagged his ears and tail at visitors, Admitted them all, and saw to it That none of them ever got out. (p. 68)

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More darkly, still, Fanthorpe detects traces of Cerberus (together with Anubis and Goya’s ‘El Perro’) within her own dog, Shandy: The fourth dog lives in my house with me Like a sister, loves me doggedly, Guiltily, abstractedly; disobeys me When I am not looking. I love her Abstractedly, guiltily; feed her; try Not to let her know she reminds me Of the other dogs. (p. 69)

The human figures from Virgil’s Underworld depicted in Aeneid 6 also find reincarnation within those living in Fanthorpe’s world, and the living can include physical locations as well as human beings. In ‘For OS759934’ she addresses words of love to Wotton-under-Edge, where she lived for thirty-five years. Through her imagery the place assumes a sibylline guise: She is my Corinna, my Lucasta, Whose name, for courtesy, I will not say. Like a tomboy, she sprawls among sharp small hills; Like a sibyl, she drifts into silences and fog. (p. 373)

When she perceives sibylline qualities within herself, however, the characteristics are less flattering. In a poem entitled ‘I Do Know How Awful I Am’ she portrays herself as an elderly gipsy controlling fortune in imagery that parallels one of Ruth Fainlight’s Sibyls in ‘Aeneas’ Meeting with the Sibyl’, as we shall see in Chapter 3. Fanthorpe observes: I have two of me. Constantly they betray me. One, the older gipsy, Brown, wrinkled, with white eyelids, Who laughs her way out Of tight corners, holds fortune Between her fingers (p. 184)

She also relates the eerie appearances of Charon, the ferryman charged to transport souls from the land of the living to the dead. She was acutely aware of his presence within the Neurology Department

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where she worked and where crowds of patients waited passively to find out if they would live or die: Laconic as anglers and, like them, submissive The grey-faced loiterers on the bank, Charon, of your river. (p. 69)

Fear of death summoned him to gaze at her through the eyes of one of the patients: It was you, Charon, I saw Refracted in a woman’s eyes. Patient, she sat in a wheelchair, In an X-ray department, waiting for someone To do something to her. (p. 69)

Fanthorpe is able to recognize him, because she too was visited by him in her younger days, in a lonely, unloved emptiness, when his role was to preserve her from death: I saw you once, boatman, lean by your punt-pole On an Oxford river, in the dubious light Between willow and water, Where I had been young and lonely, being Now loved, and older; saw you in the tender reflective Gaze of the living Looking down at me, deliberate, And strange in the half-light, saying nothing, Claiming me, Charon, for life. (p. 70)

Fanthorpe draws upon Virgilian imagery in order to demonstrate the surprising persistence of the past as well as invoking him to help her articulate various epiphanies in her own life or in the lives of those around her. We have seen that her London is a Virgilian landscape peopled by the ghosts of both the Aeneid and The Waste Land. Her Virgil, however, also articulates a more widespread de´paysement, an inability ever to feel quite at home, because we are all always yearning for the eternally lost land of promise and hope. In an interview Fanthorpe expressed her identification with outsiders: ‘I’m particularly involved with people who have no voice: the dead, the dispossessed, or the inarticulate in various ways. I’m not carrying

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on a campaign on their behalf but this is the theme I recognise as having a call on me: people at the edge of things.’14 In ‘Sunderland Point and Ribchester’ she addresses the faithful Negro slave ‘Sambo’, who is commemorated at Sunderland Point, and imaginatively recreates his dreams and longing for home, before recognizing his plight simply as a particularly acutely experienced part of being human: We are all exiles, Sam, From the almost-forgotten country Before the divorce, before the failed exam, Before the accident, before the white man came. Your situation’s more extreme than most, But we all of us, all of us seek That country. (p. 229)

In an earlier poem, ‘The Guide’, Fanthorpe muses upon the various ways in which different writers have served as guides for different eras. In the first verse she commends the Greeks for the level-headed way in which they charted the Underworld, before admiring in the second verse Dante’s efficient ‘taxonomy of sin’. But it is Virgil, above all, whom she adopts as a guide, precisely because of his penetrating understanding of loss and exile, stemming from his own family’s experience of exile. She shows us that his articulation of homelessness and hell unfolds, not just in the Aeneid, but also in the lines about bee-keeping from Georgics 4: Dispossession, and the secrets Of his beemaster father, Taught Vergil more than men know, He trudged further into suffering And pity than other people, Led to accept his vocation By the annals of the hive. (p. 74)

Fanthorpe presents us with Virgil, whose secrets of the Underworld border the threshold of ‘nefas’, that which it is unlawful to know because it is too terrible, too unbearable. She follows tradition by viewing the Georgics as a precursor to the Aeneid, but on her reading

14

Wainwright (1995), quoted by Forbes (2009).

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it is possible to see the events of the Aeneid unfolding within the hive that houses the bees, who, within the conventions of ancient epic, offer a perfect image of the ideal society: He knew How drones die nobly In midsummer air after mating, Or sombrely, autumnal offerings; How the workforce fly their wings To rags, to death; how virgin knights Are stabbed in their royal cradles, How tired and failing monarchs Undertake forced marches up-country To found new colonies. (p. 74)

The description of the bees is shadowed by memories of the deaths in autumn evoked by the metaphor of falling leaves, employed, as we have seen, as a commonplace of classical epic, while the image of weary monarchs trudging onwards to found their new colonies is reminiscent of Aeneas’ journeys within Latium depicted in Aeneid 8. The successive cycles of generations of bees offer a metaphor for the way in which the Orpheus of Virgil’s Georgics must be killed after his visit to the Underworld, so that the Aeneas of Virgil’s subsequent work might survive his own sojourn in hell. In lines that echo Auden’s ‘Memorial for the City’ (1949) Fanthorpe muses on the ultimate survivor—Rome, ‘monumentally second-rate city’: He knew That the bee’s god is the Future, Which consumes first the loving, The wise, the beautiful, the brave, Because they are special, and favours The ordinary bee, the bee-in-the-air, Aeneas the survivor. So Orpheus has to die. So Rome Goes on, as Vergil knew it would, Monumentally second-rate city. (pp. 74–5)

In the last verse Fanthorpe evokes the agonies of loss that Virgil depicts in his hell, sorrows that are so piercing, so terrible, that they appear to defy expression. By pointing out that he voices the

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unbearable in ‘blunt-edged Latin’, which has become ‘scuffed by ages of misuse’, Fanthorpe highlights once again her sense of wonder at the survival of Virgil’s verse. In part this is due to the innumerable ‘echo-chambers’ behind his verse, which are, of course, all the subsequent works of art, haunted by his lines, which transmit him to us, so that he can articulate for the contemporary world also the agonies of separation and thwarted communication. This, for Fanthorpe, is Hell15—the turning-away in silence of those whom we have loved and failed—not just Dido, not just Eurydice, but also all those personally known to us. The pain is unending; its infinity knows no boundaries or landmarks: About Hell, too, he knew more Than the others. Through blunt-edged Latin, Its meanings scuffed by ages of misuse, He found ways of wording the unsayable, Fathomed echo-chambers behind the dulled And vague, and told us: Hell is a sort of underground bog. There are no landmarks. In it Those we have loved and failed Turn their backs for ever. (p. 75)

The British poet and classicist Josephine Balmer (b. 1959) also draws extensively upon the classical tradition to travel into a landscape of terrible personal grief. Having graduated from University College, London, in Classics and Ancient History, she worked for a while as a Lecturer in Classics and Comparative Literature before becoming a freelance writer and translator. In her 2004 volume Chasing Catullus,16 she blends translations and reworkings of classical texts with personal poetry. She describes the volume as ‘a journey into the border territory between poetry and translation, offering versions of classical authors interspersed with original poems, reimagining epic literature, re-contextualising classic poems, redraw15 Her characterization of hell as a ‘sort of underground bog’ recalls her London of ‘Rising Damp’, whose wasteland is underpinned by all its rivers, including Lethe, Acheron, Phlegethon, and the Styx. 16 Balmer (2004). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

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ing the past like the overwriting of a palimpsest’ (p. 9). She names as ‘transgressions’ those poems that deliberately and unapologetically modify the ‘original’ meaning of the source text, and is careful to point out that these source texts are not confined to the canon of classical literature but can also be found ‘in churchyard inscriptions, newspaper articles, even estate agent’s particulars’. For Balmer, as for Fanthorpe, evidence of the persisting significance of the classical tradition lies all around us in the most surprising of places. At the beginning of this chapter we saw how modern interpretations of the Orpheus myth give expression to the most horrific forms of violence found in contemporary society, acts that are so terrible that we are unable to imagine them, modern versions of ‘nefas’. The darkness at the heart of Balmer’s volume is not violence, but the outrage of her niece’s death from cancer at the age of 7. Balmer explains her decision to approach the writing of this tragedy through the classical tradition: For just as classical writers rewrote and translated ancient myth in order to express dangerous emotions—passion, fear, dissent—so classical translation can provide us with other voices, a new currency with which to say the unsayable, to give shape to horrors we might otherwise be unable to outline, describe fears we might not ever had have the courage to confront. (p. 9)

The effect of presenting a personal tragedy via a network of allusions to classical texts is not solely that these texts provide Balmer with a mode of expression, but also that this single loss of a small girl houses articulations of grief spanning thousands of years. Balmer has harnessed the Western Tradition to unite in sorrow with her. She herself becomes a female Orpheus travelling through poetry into the Underworld that stole her niece. Her journey takes place in three stages, which are charted by the three sections of the volume entitled ‘Before’, ‘During’, and ‘After’. She describes this descensus Averni in her preface: ‘Chasing Catullus also represents a journey of the soul, an odyssey in three stages, with a descent into the underworld, as in Homer’s epic poem, at its dark heart; a response to the death of my seven-year-old niece from liver cancer’ (p. 9).17 Balmer invokes Homer here as well as implicitly through the epigraph to the book, 17 See also Balmer (2009). The section discussing her writing of Chasing Catullus is entitled ‘Saying the Unsayable: Chasing Catullus’ (pp. 52–9).

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a citation from George Steiner’s essay ‘Homer and the Scholars’: ‘the cities are down, and survivors wander the face of the earth as pirates or beggars . . . ’; within the volume itself, however, it is Virgil whose verse accompanies her on her dark journey, as we shall see. The range of allusions to classical texts within the volume is extensive, ranging from Plato’s Republic to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from Catullus to Euripides, from Juvenal to Homer and Sophocles. Moreover, key works in the transmission of the classical tradition are also invoked, such as Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, which, of course, is an artistic reworking of Catullus 64, while the poem ‘Cancel the Invite’ looks back to Plato via T. S. Eliot.18 Balmer quite naturally employs Claudian’s version of the myth of Proserpina to depict the precise moment of her niece’s death in a poem entitled ‘De Raptu Proserpinae 2/8 6.47 A.M.’: Night settled after as the light seeped back into our black world —everywhere was light sun and sky and light— and your small daughter nowhere to be seen. (Claudian, 3. 231–44) (p. 28)

It is Sophocles who helps her articulate the inexpressible emotions of thirty-five minutes later. The poem entitled ‘Niobe’ is freighted with the mythical grief that turned the sorrowing Niobe to stone: ‘Niobe (2/8: 7.22 A.M.): ‘snow shrinking j to sigh, the sound of words you can’t say’ (p. 29). The last poem of ‘During’, the middle section of the volume, which describes the days immediately preceding and following the death, depicts a Christmas visit to Coventry Cathedral: ‘In Coventry (22/12)’. Balmer figures herself as the inhabitant of various forms of limbo. She stands in a Gethsemane lit by Piper’s window and shadowed by Sutherland’s tapestry, where she feels torn between the 18

Balmer (2004: 9) writes of this poem: ‘In this context juxtaposition proved crucial, both in the structure of the collection as a whole, as well as in individual poems; a poetic device in its own right, allowing translation and original to inform each other, tossing layer upon layer of meaning back and forth between the two. For instance “Cancel the Invite”, a poem about my niece’s funeral is followed by a reworking of a prose passage from Plato’s Republic, implicitly questioning the validity of any poetic response to such a tragedy.’

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false comforts of a past Christian faith and an angry rejection of an omnipotent father. She is unable to shake off a residual need for belief: And here I am in Gethsemane caught between Piper’s Light and Sutherland’s soul-dark shrine, an agnostic, a confirmed apostate, lighting candles for the freshly dead; a press-gang pilgrim with a Janus face whose own faith blew out years ago, still waiting on a miracle, a sign, I know, I’m sure, will never show (p. 37)

Balmer grieves not only for her niece but also for the children she herself has been unable to bear: Still I’ve not come for absolution, but to curse the hand that could make her cells divide, multiply and stop ours from reproducing . . . (p. 37)

As the image etched on her memory of her niece’s face as last seen is mirrored in the gaze of an ageing angel, Balmer glimpses the possibility of meaning, of a tenuous peace, in language that again recalls T. S. Eliot, but this time the Eliot of the Four Quartets: I know she’ll never speak to us again but today I saw her last face in the face of a ravaged angel. And this is where it starts and where it ends: grief, fear, blame—the purging flames Of loss and gain. Reconciliation. (p. 37)

That such an epiphany should take place in Coventry Cathedral is highly charged, since it is a site that hosts some of the most powerful contemporary imagery denoting loss, commemoration, and forgiveness. The medieval cathedral was destroyed in November 1940 during the blitz on Coventry and the modern cathedral incorporates artwork created from the charred remains as part of its message of life overcoming the death and rubble left in the wake of the burning and destruction of the Second World War.

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‘In Coventry’ is followed immediately by the final section of the book, ‘After’, which opens with Balmer’s translation of the lines from Aeneid 2 that depict the destruction of Troy. The juxtaposition of ‘In Coventry’ with these lines allows Balmer to figure Coventry retrospectively as a contemporary version of the archetypal burning city. And, once again, by positioning these lines at the heart of a volume dedicated to a lost child, she presents this personal loss as the devastation of everything. The loss of her niece is invested with the sorrowing caused by a fallen city, and not just one city but all the cities that have fallen from Troy down to the twentieth century. Virgil’s ‘plurima mortis imago’ (Aen. 2. 369), translated by Balmer as ‘death in its many guises’, allows the death of one small girl to accommodate also the countless deaths entailed by the fall of a civilization. Balmer’s translation carefully suppresses the references in the original to the Trojans (Teucri) and Greeks (Danai), so that the sorrow becomes universal: Who can list, who record that night’s black toll or level out its works with measured tears? An ancient city rushes to its doom, so long the master, keeper of the years; now its streets and squares were strewn with corpses, slumped in doors and alleys, rotting where they fell, polluting the thresholds of our temples; conquered, conquerors, the same blood-prices— everywhere sorrow, everywhere ruin, pain and fear, death in its many guises, lamentation thick as smoke above the walls . . . Aeneid, 2 (361–9) (p. 39)

Balmer returns to the site of devastated Troy in a later poem, ‘Creusa’, where she re-creates Aeneas’ panic-stricken return to Troy to recover his lost wife, Creusa, only to encounter her ghost. The poem shifts from the perspective of Aeneas to that of Creusa (indicated by italicized text) in respective verses. In her preface to the volume Balmer points out to us: In ‘Creusa’ the dialogue is more explicit, not just between the Trojan hero Aeneas and his dead wife, but between Virgil’s original text and my rewriting of it. My aim here was not only to blur the difference between original and

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translation but to make it unimportant, until the reader—or even the writer—can’t distinguish between the two. (pp. 9–10)

Such a technique vividly demonstrates the way in which Virgil becomes a part of us. Creusa paints her powerlessness as she watches Aeneas retreat into the distance in language that borrows heavily from the Underworld scenes of Aeneid 6: Through the gloom, ghosted, I saw Aeneas, heard him call but it was as if, as if he was fading fast, faint mountain echo; tried to speak but it was as if, as if my voice was mud, words crumbled into dust. (p. 44)

In this version Creusa reverses Aeneas’ glimpse of Dido’s shade in the murk of the Underworld. Where the fragility of Aeneas’ recognition is rendered by the lovely simile of the man who is unsure of whether he really has glimpsed the rising moon behind the clouds (Aen. 6. 453–4), Balmer conveys this fleeting uncertainty through the repetition of ‘as if, as if ’. The passage also evokes the horror of the Greek generals who attempt to call through the Underworld shadows, only to discover that their mouths will emit no sound (Aen. 6. 491–2), while recalling Balmer’s earlier poem ‘Niobe’, where she perceives ‘the sound of words you can’t say’ within the grieving mother. Balmer also echoes the famous instance from Aeneid 4 where Virgil heightens the anguish by making it unclear whether the tears he depicts belong to Dido or to Aeneas: ‘mens immota manet, lacrimae volvuntur inanes’ (But in his mind he remained unmoved; tears flood, but are wasted) (Aen. 4. 449). When Creusa remembers ‘Through the gloom, ghosted, I saw Aeneas’, the ‘ghosted’ could be describing either one of them and therefore ultimately defines them both. The episode viewed from Aeneas’ perspective includes another translation of the Aeneid, the lines where Aeneas attempts to embrace Creusa only to lose her (Aen. 2. 792–4), lines that will be repeated in Book 6, as he has the same experience with his father (Aen. 6. 699–701): Then she was gone, vanished into thin air; three times, in vain, I tried to embrace her, three times I sensed her wraith escaping, like clouds dispersed or a dream on waking. (p. 44)

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The terrible loneliness of loss, experienced by both the living and the dead on their separate shores, is heightened in the final verse, where it becomes apparent that Creusa did not even realize that Aeneas had tried to embrace her: I half-hoped he’d throw his arms around me, promise that he’d stay, always had, always would. I watched as he looked up his gods and shrine, set his ageing father on his shoulder, wrap our son’s hand in his, in miniature, walk towards the hills through the blackened vines. It was then I knew I’d been left behind. (p. 45)

Creusa can only watch as the three generations of men from her family walk into their future, a quintessentially male future of seafaring, war, and empire-building. Her isolation is chilled further as she has to watch her own child walk from her into a world where she will have no part, and her maternal tenderness is evoked by her recognition of Ascanius’ hand being a smaller version of his father’s. Creusa’s plight echoes that of Eurydice, who, ultimately, could not be saved by her husband’s efforts to wrest her from death. And, of course, within Chasing Catullus, Creusa articulates Balmer’s own anguish at the gulf carved within her own family between the living and the dead. We began this chapter by looking at the way in which contemporary versions of the Orpheus myth offered a way of contemplating the obscenity of disappeared children and the horror of contemporary forms of violence. Through their various responses to Orpheus and through their refiguring of scenes from the Aeneid, these contemporary women poets have depicted the landscape of silencing, loss, exclusion, and exile that is visited in more detail by the women writers who are the subjects of the following chapters. Mantel reminded us of how the dead crowd around us, waiting for their story to be told, waiting to be brought back into being. This is, of course, just as true of literary ghosts as of any other kind. She describes the wire stretched tight between remembering and forgetting: ‘When something touches that wire and makes it vibrate, that’s a ghost. [ . . . ] The dead exist only because the living let them. They are what we make them’ (p. 4). The following chapters will uncover the various shapes bestowed upon the Virgilian shades in the poetry

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of Ruth Fainlight, Eavan Boland, and Miche`le Roberts, analysing the historical and cultural circumstances that have prompted them to pluck the chords of literary memory and to summon Virgil’s work once again into the British and Irish landscapes.

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3 Ruth Fainlight ‘Jew. Woman. Poet.’ Fainlight’s description of herself in the poem ‘Vertical’ (p. 122)1 is famous among her readers. Each of the words of this lapidary summary indicates her vulnerability to exclusion, and to exile, and, by extension, signals her as a writer liable to look back to the works of Virgil. Though Fainlight is comfortable within her adopted country of England, she nevertheless recognizes that it is only in New York that she finds her real home, and that she is unlikely ever to live in New York again: Because my circle is made up of others like myself—English people who grew up in other countries, people who came to England as refugees or for personal reasons such as marriage, and of course, those Americans who adore England!—I feel very much at home in London. But in New York I feel entirely at home, like a fish in water. It is my place, finally. (Although I doubt if I shall live there again.)2

That Fainlight is unable to shake off altogether a sense of dislocation in England, a feeling of not quite belonging, is due in part to her Jewish ancestry. In ‘Moving’, in her 2006 anthology Moon Wheels, she describes this inability to settle down: I try to remember how it began, this restlessness: a lifetime trying to feel at home. (p. 479)

1

Fainlight (2010). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the

text. 2

Ruth Fainlight in interview with Lidia Vianu (Vianu 2006: 32).

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She observes: ‘I don’t know if all Jews feel outsiders. But I do believe that they are almost always regarded as such by the people they live among—and that it is a mistake to forget that. I don’t think I will live in America again—my family are all here: husband, children, grandchildren.’3 She explores this inability to accept Jews, hidden beneath a veneer of civility, in a poem cosily entitled ‘The English Country Cottage’, where she explores the family history that led her here: A Jewish poet in an English village: incongruous and inappropriate as a Hindu in an igloo, a Dayak in Chicago, a giraffe at the South Pole. (p. 439)

She records her father’s humiliations, as he was never allowed to forget that he did not have a full licence to English citizenship, however English he might have felt himself to be: As a youth, my father was a patriot, a Labour-voting true blue. But though he felt entirely English, the problem was: to certain natives of whatever class he was a wily, greasy Levantine and always would be. (p. 439)

Fainlight’s memory of such persistent snubs and insults makes of her dwelling within a quintessentially English country cottage a kind of betrayal, enough of a discomfort to prevent her ever from settling down with absolute ease: Sometimes I wonder if I should have known better: to sweetly smile and eat the mess of pottage—but never sell my birthright for an English country cottage. (p. 440)

Lidia Vianu sees Fainlight as a kind of wandering Jew, who is in many places at once and belongs nowhere; in response, Fainlight referred to her poem ‘My Position in the History of the Twentieth Century’, which records: ‘my consciousness of being a rich, privileged, white person—but also alludes to that recent period when I would 3

Vianu (2006: 28).

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have been an inferior, endangered “untermensch”—i.e., a Jew in Europe during the Nazi period—and contrasts those two conditions, determined entirely by place and time.’4 Fainlight readily embraces her Jewishness and draws on this heritage while exploring her identity and position in her poetry. While she herself has not been a direct target of persecution, her sense of personal history is shadowed by her knowledge and memories of her family’s suffering. Her sense of identity as a woman is similarly nuanced. She is so far removed from radical feminist politics as to seem absolutely unconcerned by feminist issues, yet is quick to offer a corrective to this view: From early childhood I have been a feminist, in that I have always insisted that women and men are equal, should have equal rights under the law, equal pay, equal opportunities etc. My earliest memories include being infuriated by men who denied this and were usually very amused by my opinions. This is the definition of an old-fashioned feminist, I know. But I would never say that I am not a feminist, or take an anti-feminist position— and I am intrigued that you write that in your opinion: ‘you could not be further from it.’ Feminism. I think this is a question of definitions of femininity. It’s true that I am not the sort of radical campus feminist you so dislike.5

It is from this position of being on the edge—a Jew accepted herself within Britain but unable to shake off the memory of her family’s oppression; a woman poet sensitive to her summary dismissal by certain men, but unwilling to attach herself to a militantly feminist cause—that Fainlight reaches to the figure of the Sibyl, most explicitly in her 1980 volume Sibyls and Others. The Sibyl is an exemplar of female wisdom and creativity, of far-sightedness and ripe understanding, a woman too disruptive and disturbing to be allowed (or to want) full access into society. In a short story, ‘The Elysium Lifestyle

4

Vianu (2006: 10, 15). Vianu returns to the theme of Fainlight’s Jewishness later in the interviews, where Fainlight tells us that: ‘My mother came from the Bukovina area (Romania), she was born there. And I do feel a profound connection to the Jewish culture of that area which was destroyed in the Second World War. But my father’s family came from Poland to England in the nineteenth century and he was born in London’ (p. 29). 5 Vianu (2006: 6).

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Mansions’, Margaret Atwood presents a Sibyl who was visited ‘as at a zoo or freak show’, who was set apart not simply by her quasiimmortality but also by her loss of pity, of human feeling. Like Fainlight, she presents the Sibyl both as someone ordinary and recognizable, as when the Sibyl remembers rejecting Apollo’s advances because of his prissy hair: ‘Anyway I didn’t exactly lust after him; it was the hairdo, all those finicky little curls’,6 but also as someone who terrifies even herself by her divinity: ‘The god did not take away my youth. That would have disappeared anyway, in the natural course of things. He did something much worse. He made me like himself, like a god: he gave me knowledge, but knowledge without pity. I never said I want to die. I said I want to cry.’7 Fainlight’s sense of herself, depicted in the first verse of ‘The English Country Cottage’, is of someone odd, freakish, who stands out like a ‘giraffe at the South Pole’. She is recognized for her gift in depicting the processes of female old age in her poetry, yet the timelessness evoked by her use of the Sibyl is perhaps also suggestive of the injustices repeated over and over again in the legacy of her Jewish family history. The Sibyl serves as a repository of Fainlight’s sense of her developing identity as a woman poet. Lidia Vianu observes: ‘The sibyl is a favourite mask, maybe the only one with you. The sibyl is the poet, the seer, sensibility, tragedy, art, the whole wide and doomed world. The sibyl is all your fears put together and well hidden.’8 In fact, through her Sibyl figures, Fainlight documents a wide range of emotions and dilemmas that she experiences as a contemporary woman poet, as we shall see. Like Michelangelo, she parades Sibyls of different nationalities, for example, in poems entitled ‘The

6

Atwood (2000: 212). Atwood (2000: 213). 8 Fainlight here explains the genesis of her first anthology of poetry to focus on the Sibyl: ‘I began the first Sibyl sequence (in Sibyls and Others, 1980) at the suggestion of the distinguished American sculptor and print-maker, Leonard Baskin, who wanted to collaborate with a poet on a book about sibyls, because he had begun a series of prints and drawings of sibyls. Then his (and my) good friend Ted Hughes mentioned to him that I would be a good choice, being well-informed on such matters. I accepted gladly. [. . .] The Sibyl was a perfect vehicle to express some of my deepest feelings’ (Vianu 2006: 16). 7

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Cumaean Sibyl’, ‘The Hebrew Sibyl’, ‘The Persian Sibyl’, ‘The Shinto Sibyl’; like Miche`le Roberts, she also categorizes her Sibyls according to personality traits, such as ‘Blocked Sibyl’, ‘Sibyl on the Run’, ‘Introspection of a Sibyl’, or ‘Sick Sibyl’. Towards the end of the twentieth century it is difficult to conceive of a Sibyl who does not look back to the weary figure, embodying modern ennui, placed as an epigram to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: ıººÆ  ŁºØ; respondebat illa: Æ ŁÆıØı Łºø.’9 Fainlight explains how she looks back still further through Eliot to the works of authors who themselves influenced him: Eliot was very important to me as a young poet, and I am sure that certain of his rhythms etc. can be detected in my work, particularly the earlier poems. Another poet I studied as a young woman was Robert Graves. Both of them felt a deep connection to the Classical World, which I share. Eliot was an influence on everyone of my generation but later it became more interesting for me to study the poets who had influenced him: the classical Latin poets, Milton, the English Metaphysical poets and of course the French 19th century poets such as Baudelaire, Corbie`re, the Symbolists etc. etc.10

‘A Sibyl’, the very first poem in the anthology Sibyls and Others, takes us back beyond Eliot to the third book of the Aeneid, where Virgil depicts the thwarted hopes and expectations of those who come to question the Sibyl: insanam vatem aspicies, quae rupe sub ima fata canit foliis que notas et nomina mandat. quaecumque in foliis descripsit carmina virgo digerit in numerum atque antro seclusa relinquit: illa manent immota locis neque ab ordine cedunt. verum eadem, verso tenuis cum cardine ventus impulit et teneras turbavit iamua frondes, numquam deinde cavo volitantia prendere saxo nec revocare situs aut iungere carmina curat: inconsulti abeunt sedemque odere Sibyllae. (Aen. 3. 443–52) 9

‘For indeed I have seen the Sibyl at Cuma with my own eyes hanging in a basket, and when those boys asked: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she would reply: “I want to die” ’ (my translation). 10 Vianu (2006: 5).

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Sibylline Sisters (Then you’ll observe a mad seer who sings, from the depths of a cavern, Fate’s decrees, using leaves to record all names and all details. Each word this virgin writes upon leaves as her song of the future, She then arranges in sequence and stores in her cave, behind locked doors. These all stay unmoved, and in place, never fall out of order. But, just the slightest draught, as the door rotates on its hinges, Blows them away. For its opening scatters the featherlike foliage. All through her hollow cave leaves flutter, but she never bothers, After this happens, to catch, to replace, or assemble the verses. People go off without answers, detesting the shrine of the Sibyl.)

Fainlight’s depiction of her Sibyl reads as follows: Anxious, the questioners, waiting those words, but she seems relaxed and calm, turning the leaves of her book, does not even glance down before her finger points the message: this cave familiar as a nest and she, its rightful tenant— no longer forced to make a choice between two worlds. (p. 150)

By her neat use of enjambement, ‘turning the leaves j of her book’, Fainlight presents us with the Virgilian Sibyl, surrounded by the fluttering, disordered leaves in her cave, before she metamorphoses into the Sibyl holding the prophetic books, reminiscent of the pensive, settled figures peopling Michelangelo’s ceiling. The enjambement of the following line corrects the misapprehension that she herself is actually reading. The Sibyl of this introductory poem is unsettling and disruptive, performing the same function to the reader as the Sibyl of the Aeneid to her listeners. Her stance shifts and changes within half-lines, denying her readers any stabilization of their impressions of her, while she herself remains unperturbed. Unlike Fainlight’s feelings of not being wholly entitled to her English cottage, this Sibyl knows herself to be the ‘rightful tenant’ of her cave. Beyond the condition of ordinary mortals, it is not the Sibyl who is in exile but rather her listeners or readers. The cost of failing to listen to the Sibyl, whose words are easily dismissed as the rantings of a hysterical female, as the insane ravings

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of a Cassandra figure, is suggested in ‘A Desert Sibyl’. The figure of the Sibyl herself is ugly, is repellent, but the fact that her landscape is the desert suggests an African connection, strengthened by her allusion to Tanit, the Carthaginian moon goddess, and she insists upon the need for Dido to hear her. As readers who are familiar with the tragedy of Dido, we are made aware of the heavy price exacted from those who fail to hear her words or who choose to gloss over them as meaningless drivel: A ranting, middle-aged albino, open-mouthed, eyes blurring sightless: that gaunt sharp-feaured desert sibyl . . . . . intent that all should hear her message, verses Tanit’s power inspired: warning for Dido, queen of Carthage. (p. 151)

The poem ‘The Hebrew Sibyl’ universalizes this risk of doom, by fusing images of Cassandra voicing her unheeded warnings about the impending fall of Troy (as she does in Book 2 of the Aeneid) and images of the incoherent confusion attendant upon the fallen tower of Babel: But when all has taken place, when the walls collapse and the Tower crumbles— that coming time, when knowledge is lost and men no longer understand each other, no-one will call me insane— but God’s great sibyl. (p. 154)

This blending of pagan and biblical imagery is a reminder, not just of Virgil’s status as a prophet of Christ, but also of the importance of the sibylline books to both traditions, by virtue of which the Sibyls appear with the prophets in Christian iconography. Fainlight’s next poem, ‘Sibyl of the Waters’, reminds us of the origins of the biblical sibyl who was believed to be a daughter of Noah: ‘Noah’s daughter j sibyl of the waters’ (p. 154), while in ‘The Sibyls in Amiens Cathedral’ she meditates upon the Christianized imagery of the pagan Sibyls and the obscure, ‘half-forgotten’ message that their representation sends into the modern world:

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Sibylline Sisters I can just distinguish which is the Delphic one, the Libyan, the Cumaean, though your look and style are those of later days, Christian times, . . . . . you stand with the Prophets—proud, pagan women, half-forgotten: like the message you brought once, but long ago, to troubled, northern souls. (p. 164)

Fainlight’s language is coloured by Christian imagery. She echoes St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, which postulates a next world that we can only glimpse indistinctly, as through a mirror: ‘At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known’—a telos that is sought by the Sibyl’s supplicants: my ecstasy a self-consuming sickness, an envy of my questioners, who are one with everything that lives and feels: sustained, embraced, and blinded by the shimmering haze which only my sick eyes can pierce to see the truth, the future, and the end of love. (‘Sick Sibyl’, pp. 160–1)

This sense of being exiled in the shadowlands of confusion and incomplete understanding is further explored in ‘The Persian Sibyl’, where Fainlight beautifully depicts the Sibyl’s withdrawal into a place that defies human understanding by alluding to The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century spiritual guidebook: The Persian Sibyl should be approached at dusk. Revelation does not prosper in clear light. She turns her book and face away to the shadows, retreats into the core of the cloud of unknowing. (p. 163)11 11 As cited in Fainlight (2010). This version differs significantly from the one in Fainlight (1980: 35).

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But the Virgilian Sibyl hovers very close to these other sibylline figures that appear to be removed in both historical and geographical terms. The insistence that twilight is the appropriate landscape for revelation is also a strong part of the Virgilian aesthetic12 maintained by Dante, who, of course, forbade Virgil, as a pagan, to enter into the full light of Paradise. The Virgilian Sibyl, who was invoked at the opening of this volume, appears again explicitly in two poems dedicated to her, ‘The Cumaean Sibyl 1’ and ‘The Cumaean Sibyl 2’. In the first of these she is once more hallowed by ‘the penumbra of another atmosphere’, as she uses the present to travel in her mind back through the years, while gazing at the future: ‘brooding upon j times past and still to come’ (p. 152). It is these visionary qualities, founded upon centuries of wisdom, that make her an ideal guide for Aeneas, whose epiphanies occur at just such meeting points of past, present, and future; as in the Underworld of Book 6, where he has to meet his past before being shown a vision of the future, or at the site of future Rome in Book 8, where Aeneas’ future city is a vision of the past city for his readers. The second presentation of the Cumaean Sibyl maintains this atmosphere of awe-inspiring sanctity, as Fainlight points out that the aged crone is a figure of salvation and forgiveness: this sibyl j personifies old age: and yet those withered breasts can still let down celestial milk to one who craves redemption (p. 152)

But it is in ‘Aeneas’ Meeting with the Sibyl’ that Fainlight’s ambivalence to her signs of age is most apparent. Ziolkowski has observed that in this poem Fainlight’s Sibyl might have come directly out of The Waste Land.13 The aggravating qualities of the Virgilian Sibyl are superimposed onto this ‘skinny gipsy’, who is both knowing and repellent. As a fortune teller she stands on the borderlines of respectable society, and yet we cannot walk away from her, just in case she is able to reveal our future. The frustration and annoyance that this 12 For a full discussion of the importance of ‘umbra’ as part of the Virgilian poetic enterprise, see Theodorakopoulos (1997). 13 Ziolkowski (1993: 235).

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provokes heighten the repulsion we feel at her unkempt appearance and the obscene signs of ageing that she is too brazen to conceal: like a skinny gypsy with a joint dripping ash in the corner of her mouth quizzing the Tarot cards, . . . . . tilting her head sideways on that mole-strewn stringy neck (he saw white hairs among her dusty curls) an inappropriate cajoling smile distorting her archaic features—‘if you give me something extra, I’ll do you a special.’ The tattered russet-purple layers of skin and cloth wrapped around her body dispersed an ancient odour of sweat or incense. (pp. 150, 151)

The dignity and nobility of Virgil’s Sibyl are corrupted by the licentious glances that flicker across the face of Fainlight’s Sibyl, perhaps betraying modern disgust at any evidence of sexual inclinations in old women. And that this Sibyl haunts the features of Fainlight herself as she moves through middle age towards old age is indicated by later poems in the volume. The ‘mole-strewn stringy neck’ looks back at Fainlight from the mirror, as she describes in ‘It Must’: no matter how often I take the little square of glass from my bag, or furtively glance into shop-windows, the face reflected back is always a shock. Those scars and wrinkles, the clumping of pigment into moles, spots, faulty wart growths around hairline and neck, the way skin’s texture has changed absolutely, become roughened and scaly, coarse-grained, every pore visible, as though the magnification were intensified: horrible. . . . . . extraordinary moments when you positively welcome the new face that greets you from the mirror like a mother— not your own mother, but that other dream-figure of she-you-always-yearned-for. Your face, if you try, can become hers. It must. (pp. 183–4)

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The longed-for figure may be the salvation-giving Sibyl depicted in ‘The Cumaean Sibyl 2’ or may be the face of one who has settled comfortably into an older body, recognizing the attendant benefits of understanding. In ‘Sibyl on the Run’ Fainlight transforms what appears to be an ordinary woman gardening in late middle age into a magnificent embodiment of female wisdom and pride: Vague gaze from tired grey eyes Under the wide brim of her hat, the fine-grained white skin of her face mud-splashed, hair tangled, uncurling, . . . . . straightens her back, raises her chin, loosens her ragged cloak, arrogant and proud; announces herself: the wisest sibyl on earth. (pp. 157–8)14

Yet in ‘Divination by Hair’ she describes how she tries to halt the progress of the sibylline features from encroaching upon her face, as they herald old age and death: IV. I feel death creeping up behind. Those fading hairs and deepening lines are the entangling net she throws. V. Witch from an ancient forest-tale; goddess; hag; Atropos-Fate; Kali; crone. Can I placate you better by carefully hiding the blaze you sear across my brow, or apeing your style? Conquering queen, your embrace is inexorable. Whether I hate or deny or adore you, you will unmake me, eternally, and create me again. (p. 187)

The eternal life of the Sibyl is guaranteed as she is resurrected over and over again within the faces of women of different ages. The

14

A more pessimistic vision is offered later in Sibyls and Others in the poem ‘Country Lady’, whose protagonist struggles to decipher messages that might make sense of a lifetime’s pent-up waste and rage (Fainlight 1980: 128). This poem does not appear in Fainlight (2010).

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‘Blocked Sibyl’ cleverly portrays a highly distressed woman whose choking misery stops her from speaking. When asked what the matter is she refuses to respond—once again Fainlight transforms an image most recognizable from everyday life into sibylline iconography: Sullen and stubborn, self willed, stupid, or just plain finished as a sibyl . . . . . Hair messed, skin blotched, eyes angrily or hopelessly averted (but it’s easy to tell she’s been crying), she won’t answer even the simple question: What is it? from her apprentice-attendants much less pronounce. (p. 161)

In her presentation of the Sibyl, Fainlight straddles the boundary between legend and real life, so that the Sibyl is at once both maddeningly arcane and remote, and as familiar to us as our own faces. It is this dissonance that jars at the ‘inappropriate cajoling smile j distorting her archaic features’ (‘Aeneas’ Meeting with the Sibyl’, p. 151). The poem ‘Aeneas’ Meeting with the Sibyl’ becomes a highly personal account of the ageing process, when read against the echoes of the later poems in the anthology. That it is also a prelude to the intimacy of Fainlight’s grief for her parents is evident in her misremembering of Aeneid 6: Remembering what came next: [. . .] the twittering shades . . . . . and then, at last, what he’d wanted: embracing Anchises his father, and learning the destiny of their descendants, the future of Rome . . . (p. 151)

Here Fainlight is distorting one of the most powerfully poignant moments of the book—Aeneas’ inability to embrace his father, who slips out of his grasp. Virgil uses exactly the same image and language as he did to depict Aeneas’ grief at the loss of his wife, Creusa, who died in the burning city of Troy:

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ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno (Aen. 2. 792–4; Aen. 6. 700–2) (Three times he tried to throw his arms around his/her neck as he stood there; three times the image, seized in vain, eluded his hands, like the light breezes and very like winged sleep.)15

Having failed to learn the first time that we are incapable of holding onto our dead, Aeneas had to experience the same pain again. Fainlight comes to realize that she has not learned this lesson either, as she finds herself orphaned in middle age, and is no longer sure of the direction she is supposed to follow. In ‘Questions’, her description of her visit to her father lying dead in the mortuary, she depicts an attempted embrace of the substance of her father, as futile as that of Aeneas trying to hold onto Anchises: How to go on being angry with the dead, remembering his mortuary face— the chill when you bent and pressed your lips against a substance no longer flesh . . . . . not believing any embrace could warm him back to life, but simply a need to lie there with him there in the casket as though that were your duty and your pleasure. You wanted nothing else. (p. 200)

The impulse to accompany her father on his final journey is presented as a version of pietas, filial duty, the quality for which Aeneas was renowned. But her difficulty in parting from him stems also from her fear of being left rudderless, as is indicated by the final verse of the poem: Is it merely anger because he died—the rankling of guilt you share with everyone alive toward their dead, a ruse of the brain to survive the time of grief; or is it a true and valid anger against the ones who brought you into the world to die but taught you nothing about how to die, and leave you now, the questions unanswered. (p. 200)

15

My translation.

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The last line of the poem evokes once again the anguish of the Sibyl’s supplicants, whose questions remain unanswered as the answers are obscured by the leaves being blown into disorder and chaos. The sense of being lost, of being left without a guide, is maintained in the following poem, ‘Not Grief but Fear’, which draws upon Dante’s depiction of Virgil as guide to Statius, in one of the most beautiful passages of the Commedia: Thou didst like him that goes by night and carries the light behind him and does not help himself but makes wise those that follow, when thou saidst: ‘The age turns new again; justice comes back and the primal years of men, and a new race descends from heaven.’ Through thee I was poet, through thee Christian.16

The Dantean allusion fuses with the image of the pebbles glinting on the path, a reminiscence of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, suggestive of Fainlight’s abiding sense of betrayal at her parents’ deaths, of having been let down: Now everything I do though it seems in memory of you is done to ward off the truth of that death you’ve gone into alone. Both fear and grief. For though you loved me well, your smoky torch glows faint and only shows me pebbles dimly glinting up ahead, reflections from the clay, but not the way. (p. 201)

It is partly through her experience of such griefs that Fainlight becomes sibylline. The shades of the dead swarm into her memory when she is asleep or when she is at work, writing. In a poem written in memory of her brother, ‘In Memoriam H. P. F.’ she observes: I shall not meet my dead again as I remember them alive, except in dreams or poems. (p. 246)17

16

Purgatorio, Canto 22, ll. 67–74 (Dante 1961: 285–7). Anne Mounic discusses this poem in order to illustrate her thesis that Fainlight inhabits the border between the world of the living and the land of the dead (Mounic 17

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Poetry becomes a version of the Underworld into which Fainlight guides us, performing once more the function of the Virgilian Sibyl; and once more, like the Sibyl, she attributes her loneliness, her separation, from the dead to her ageing. In ‘Not Well-Mapped as Heaven’ she observes: I know so many people who are dead. . . . . . How often they return, old friends, when I am half-asleep, or seated at my desk. . . . . . And yet, like friends in life, we drift apart. I move into the ageing they are spared. . . . . . Nevertheless, that place they are, surely has more expanse and depth than merely my own memory: though not well-mapped as Heaven. (pp. 197–8)

This poem too looks back to Eliot’s Waste Land, where Eliot observes of the ghosts swarming over London Bridge: ‘so many j I had not thought death had undone so many’, a line that is itself an allusion once again to Georgics 4 and Aeneid 6, where the same passage is repeated to indicate Aeneas’ astonishment at the sheer numbers of the dead. In this place of grief Fainlight finds herself suspended between the land of the living and the land of the dead. She yearns to see far enough to glimpse once more the forms of those she loved, but is bound to life. In ‘Grief ’ she describes the elegant evidence of that fine system of checks and balances which holds you in the land of the living, impotent as some laboratory monkey. (p. 197)

2001: 97–8). (Ruth Fainlight associates dreams and poems with the other world in ‘In Memoriam H.P.F’, a poem written in memory of her brother. [. . .] In the last verses of this poem, the poet addresses her dead brother, offering ample proof that enchantment is really a matter of addressing the absent one, the death figure, the figure of legend. And so the world of the dead here constitutes a new horizon—that of the imagination, that of poetry) (my translation).

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The deaths of those we love thus transform our lives into a waiting room, a period of time to be endured until we might look again upon their longed-for faces. This existence caught between the demands of this living and the yearning for the dead, the tedium and necessity of waiting, transforms grief into a condemned sibylline existence. Fainlight depicts such stasis in ‘Suddenly’: someone suddenly dies there’s still a part of life ahead for those left to learn how to survive until this stasis ends suddenly more time (p. 196)

The grief for the dead also, of course, becomes grief for the selves we used to be. Fainlight longs not only to see the dead again, but to recover her own youthful self and the past selves of those around her in a vision that sends her backwards through time to a foreordained future.18 It would need witchcraft to see your face of twenty years ago, and mine, revived, confronted as if resurrected ghosts— a banshee ceremony, screams and cries, to call them back, those masks of flesh dissolved, remade, and formed not by the grave but life. . . . . . Could who we were agree to such a future— already our past, denied or mostly forgotten— having our memories as foreknowledge? (‘Meeting’, p. 191)

It is only through the fantasies of such magic that Fainlight can ease the pains of grief and of ageing. The ‘terra incognita’ towards which she 18 Anne Mounic analyses this version of Fainlight’s Underworld in a study that also looks at the work of Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, Edwin Muir, and Sylvia Plath: ‘Ce deuil cre´e un autre horizon, celui du monde souterrain. Les cinq poe`tes e´tudie´s vivent a` la fois dans le monde et sur l’autre rive, au monde chthonien, en cet au-dela` ou` se meˆlent le souci du devenir apre`s la mort et les affres de l’inconscient’ (Mounic, 2001, 98) (This grief creates another horizon, that of the Underworld. The five poets studied live both in the world and on the other bank, in the chtonian world, in that world beyond where the anxiety of the after-life and the torments of the unconscious blend) (my translation).

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must travel will not be a recognizable Underworld, peopled by her memories of her reading and of her family, but uncharted territory that she must navigate without the consolations of any kind of religious faith. Baudelaire’s complaint ‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans’ (I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old)19 can be heard behind the opening lines of ‘Terra Incognita’. In this, one of the bleakest poems of the collection, Fainlight depicts her sibylline ennui as a joyless period of transition towards the real horrors: A day that makes me feel I’ve lived already long enough, almost forever; with nothing else especially to wait for; as though I’ve had as much as anyone can have, both good and bad: . . . . . And yet I’m left in an absence of faith so absolute that any suppositious future mocks the prospect of change: awareness which moves far beyond the spiralling, recurrent plunge into despair—terra incognita— nor, on this calm, soft, perfect autumn day, lets me forget winter’s worst storms still have to be faced. (pp. 203–4)

It is fitting that Fainlight should not have abandoned her studies of the Sibyl after the publication of Sibyls and Others. As she progresses further towards old age she continues to develop her analysis of the Sibyls and their mysteries in later volumes of poetry. In Twelve Sibyls (1991), a poem, ‘The Egg Mother’, sees the Sibyls of Sibyls and Others congregating once more: below the summit line, sibyls gather: the Delphic and the Persian, Cumaean, Erythraean, Tiburtine, and those from even further (p. 370)

In 2002 Margaret Drabble selected Fainlight’s Burning Wire as one of her ‘Books of the Year’, observing that: ‘I am also enjoying Ruth 19

Baudelaire (1972: 104).

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Fainlight’s bright and glittering new collection of poems, Burning Wire (Bloodaxe Books). Her work has matured elegantly, and this too is an exhilarating book. “In the Dream” is the poem you need if you think you may be growing older.’20 For Drabble, Fainlight not only examines the figure of the Sibyl but also, herself, acts as a guide to ageing women. It is impossible not to think of Fainlight when reading of the Latin teacher and poet Mrs Jerrold in Drabble’s own novel about older women, The Seven Sisters (2003). The very titles of Mrs Jerrold’s poems echo those of Fainlight’s Sibyls and Others: It was a slim volume, very slim, and it was dusty. The jacket was dark blue, covered with an austere and distinguished pattern of small scattered white stars. Zodiac Press. I held the little book in my hand, as she clambered down again and settled herself once more. It was called Moon. That’s all. Moon. I opened it rather nervously. Opening it seemed a very personal, invasive act. It was her second volume, dedicated to Eugene. ‘To Eugene’ was all the dedication said. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the titles of the poems, I suppose. But I was. ‘Dido to Sychaeus’, ‘Dido to Aeneas’, ‘Remember Me’, ‘Dido in the Underworld’, ‘The Birds that Perched upon the Golden Bough’, ‘She Stands on the Sea Shore and Foretells her own Death’. These were her titles. I read them to myself, and then I glanced up at her. She was sitting there, bright and neat, with a distant look on her sharp face. The look of a gypsy or a sibyl, gazing far away. But she caught my glance, and leaped back into the present.21

Pleasingly, though perhaps unwittingly, Fainlight strengthens this connection through the title of her most recent volume, Moon Wheels (2006), an anthology where she explores the connections between the sibyl and the moon, links that had already surfaced in an earlier poem ‘Facts about the Sibyl’, where she presents the moon as the ultimate sibylline form: She said that when she died she would become the face in the moon, go round and round like the moon, released from her oracular ecstasy. Only a sibyl can outstare the sun. (p. 365)

20 21

Drabble (2002b). Drabble (2003: 103–4). See also Chapter 6.

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Moon Wheels opens with an image of waiting in the early morning, illumined by the last rags of moonlight. In ‘Apogee’ the association of the Sibyl with the moon not only adds an extra dimension to this waiting, but also indicates the waiting period as a time of creativity, of being ‘alert and feverish’: Alert and feverish in the cloudy dawn of the first chill autumn night before the exact apogee of its orbit between wax and wane—as the moon alters course and turns its high, hard, wide, bald brow toward the dark, I wait for morning. (p. 478)

Fainlight explains the connections between the moon and women and poets in her interview with Vianu: ‘from an early age I have felt a strong affinity to, and connection with, the moon. The phases of the moon have always affected me, both as a woman (the menstrual cycle) and as a poet (poets are lunatics!). The muse of poetry is the moon, as far as I am concerned.’22 The gypsy Sibyl of ‘Aeneas’ Meeting with the Sibyl’ is resurrected in ‘A Border Incident’ as a Provenc¸al woman whom Fainlight encountered: an old Provenc¸al peasant woman, gaunt-faced as a gypsy sibyl, with sun-stained skin and work-warped hands, . . . . . Ignorant, I fantasised this border territory as archaic, classical (p. 493)

But these unexpected moments when a past classical world resurfaces as a present reality sometimes reveal more chilling realities. In ‘Fabulous Beings’, Fainlight depicts the Atlantic and the Mediterranean as sparring foes, embodying mighty divinities, as in the ancient myths of the sea. But today their victims are refugees, hopeful immigrants, desperate to establish some kind of security and home. The indifference of the elements, transformed into divine beings, evokes Juno’s imprecations to Poseidon to thwart Aeneas’ mission at 22

Vianu (2006: 15).

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the beginning of the Aeneid. We shall see that Eavan Boland, too, resurrects classical myth to evoke the misery of her emigrant ancestors, crowded helplessly into a fragile boat. Fainlight’s inclusion of the ‘high-speed police launch’ makes her depiction a contemporary tale, all the more harrowing for being age-old and endlessly repeated: But for me, the meeting of those waters is signified not by flags or statues but by leaking boats crowded with people desperate to reach the final border before being caught by a high-speed police launch, or drowned in a storm . . . . . . . . Those fabulous beings who control their future rarely grant good fortune—indifferent as the ocean. (p. 499)

Fainlight’s choice of the Sibyl as muse indicates a sense of helplessness at redeeming these outrages of history. All she can do is record them and allow those who consult her books to decipher the messages as best we can. Again and again she portrays a figure who has withdrawn from the world, who surveys it with a disconcertingly remote objectivity. This distance was evident in ‘A Sibyl’, the opening poem of Sibyls and Others in 1980; in 1991 she was still describing the way in which: Her eyes are staring inward into a space as endless as the distance from here to the mountains she has forgotten. (‘Inward’, p. 368)

and depicting the stance of the ‘Elegant Sibyl’: having pondered the fate of those who came to consult her and how little difference any words make, her gaze is now withdrawn and watchful as a diplomat’s. (p. 369)

On this reading the Sibyl has retreated into a remote abstraction through resignation at the inefficacy of her words. ‘Elegant Sibyl’ echoes the powerlessness that Fainlight explored in Sibyls and Others in ‘Introspection of a Sibyl’. Over the centuries it has largely been due

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to luck, historical contingency, if a female poet has been allowed to sing rather than to endure ridicule or silencing or violence: And the price for such knowledge? To have absolutely no command over your life, your words—no possibility of calculated effects or tactics of policy. But how useful you can be to others; and how lucky if rather than burning or stoning, they protect you, feed you, and let the simple folk praise you, keep you safe as a caged bird, and call you a sibyl. (p. 170)

That Fainlight is esteemed as a woman poet, heralded as a Sibyl rather than condemned as a Cassandra, is due not only to the period of her life but also to its place, as we shall see when looking at the Virgilian presence in Christa Wolf ’s Kassandra. As a Sibyl Fainlight probes her identity as a Jewish daughter and as a woman poet. Through her invocation of the Sibyl she saturates her work with Virgilian allusion. In her hands Virgil sings, as he has always sung, of mourning, and of losses that are both personal and historical. Her Sibyls are both political and domestic. But, through a process of echo and allusion, he also sings here, perhaps for the first time, of a woman’s grief at the loss of her youthful beauty, of the disintegration of her body. Fainlight’s poetry is intensely private, is deeply personal. And in this blend of such intimate detail and a more generalized sense of loss, of exile, Fainlight confirms the pattern for Virgil’s journey through the work of contemporary women writers.

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4 Eavan Boland Like Fainlight, Boland draws on Virgil’s poetry to articulate a highly personal experience of displacement and loss, which she situates within a wider context of geographical and political exclusion. Her relationship with Virgil allows her not only to voice her experience of being exiled from the canon of Western literature on account of her gender, but also to explore her position as an Irish writer, attempting to establish an identity within the wider anglophone world. Her work strengthens a wider trend of contemporary Irish writers turning to the Classics as a means of exploring their own national identity, and yet, as we shall see, the exclusion entailed by her gender means that her experience of any negotiations of her position within such a trend are highly fraught and tenuous. The most notable figure engaging with Virgil in contemporary Ireland is Seamus Heaney, who has turned again and again to the Eclogues and the Aeneid. He frames his volume Seeing Things (1991) with, at the beginning, a translation of the passage where Aeneas meets the Sibyl and finds the golden bough and, at the end, a translation of Dante’s meeting with Charon in Canto 3 of the Inferno. Heaney’s selection of these passages marks his intention to become the latest in the procession of poets who use the image of the Underworld to depict the journeys they must take to recover their memories, their images of the dead. This anthology is underpinned by Heaney’s need to find once again his dead father, and, like Aeneas, he must travel into the Underworld of the self to do so. On his journey he invokes the shades of others who were important to him—the painter Edward Maguire, the archaeologist Tom Delaney, the biographer Richard Ellmann, and the poets Philip Larkin, John Hewitt, and

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W. B. Yeats. The first poem, entitled ‘The Journey Back’, recalls the Sibyl’s warning that ‘the way down to Avernus is easy. Day and night black Pluto’s door stands open. But to retrace your steps and get back to the upper air. This is the real task and the real undertaking.’1 Larkin’s shade quotes Dante at Heaney, and expresses surprise that his own journey should have led him back to the place he started from: It felt more like the forewarned journey back Into the heartland of the ordinary, Still my old self. Ready to knock one back, A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry.2

In ‘The School Bag’ (in memoriam John Hewitt), Heaney pays homage to the poet who could almost be seen as a poetic father figure here: My handsewn leather schoolbag. Forty years Poet you were Nel mezzo del cammin When I shouldered it.3

At the same time as Heaney is attempting to ‘undrown’ his father, he is also, as Charles Martindale puts it, ‘coming home to some of the most influential traditions of Western poetry’.4 The second half of the volume celebrates Heaney’s return to life, his openness to epiphanies, his determination to experience luminous moments. In a reversal of the Virgilian trope, these experiences constitute a golden bough leading him out of the Underworld. Heaney returned to the imagery of the Underworld in his 2006 volume District and Circle, where the poets to whom he pays homage are George Seferis, Wordsworth, Pablo Neruda, Rilke, Cavafy, Auden, and Ted Hughes in poems with titles such as: ‘Cavafy: “The rest I’ll speak of to the ones below in Hades”’ or ‘To George Seferis in the Underworld’.5 But, here too, when he descends into the bowels of the earth via the London Underground, it is his father’s face who gazes back into his own from the train window, marking, perhaps, the 1 2 3 4 5

Heaney, ‘The Golden Bough’, in Heaney (1991: 2); Heaney’s translation. Heaney, ‘The Journey Back’, in Heaney (1991: 7). Heaney (1991: 30). Martindale (1997a: 1). Heaney (2006: 73, 20–1).

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mid-life moment of discovering one’s parent’s features etched behind one’s own: So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail, My father’s glazed face in my own waning And craning . . . 6

As well as using Virgil to shape a personal Underworld, Heaney also inscribes Virgil into Ireland’s history of religious division. In his 2001 anthology Electric Light he includes the poem ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’, which refers to the ‘hedge schools’ of colonial Ireland, institutions to which Catholics sent their children rather than sending them to the mainstream Protestant schools. As their name suggests, the physical structures of these schools were often ramshackle buildings, barely standing, but the education received there was in general higher than that of Protestant schools, especially in the Classics.7 Through other poems in this anthology, such as ‘Glandor Eclogue’, Heaney uses Virgil as a reminder of the dispossessions and divisions that still fracture Irish society, while his invocations are also a manuvre to move a culture that is on the margins further into the centre by alluding to one of the cornerstones of Western civilization.8 Through such poems Heaney is perpetuating what has become a feature of Virgilian reception—namely, that Virgil is appropriated by a minority side and enlisted to sing the causes of those liable to be defeated. His work reinforces the message of Translations (1981) by the Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel. In this play, which examines the rifts caused in a community when a group of cartographers arrive and translate the local place names from Irish into English, Friel explicitly overlays the divisions between colonizer and colonized 6

Heaney (2006: 19). For further discussion, see Taplin (2002: 13). See also Hardwick (2003: 92) and McElduff (2006: 183–4). 8 See Martindale (1997a: 1): ‘And for Heaney, and therefore potentially for some of his readers, even at this late hour when Latin is no longer the object of widespread study, there is seemingly still power in the canonical name. We could say, following the argument of Colin Burrow’s essay on translation, that Heaney, coming from what some might see as the “margins” of Europe, seems to be laying claim to a share of the dominant cultural authority of the “centre”.’ See also Hardwick (2003) and Ziolkowski (2007: 166–7). 7

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with Virgil’s account of the conflict in Troy. In fact the whole play ends with a citation from Book 1: hugh. Urbs antiqua fuit—there was an ancient city which, ’tis said, Juno loved above all the lands. And it was the goddess’ aim and cherished hope that here should be the capital of all nations—should the fates perchance allow that. Yet in truth she discovered that a race was springing from Trojan blood to overthrow some day these Tyrian towers—a people late regem belloque superbum—kings of broad realms and proud in war who would come forth for Lybia’s downfall—such was—such was the course— such was the course ordained—ordained by fate . . . What the hell’s wrong with me? Sure I know it backways. I’ll begin again. Urbs antiqua fuit— there was an ancient city which, ’tis said, Juno loved above all the lands. (Begin to bring down the lights) And it was the goddess’ aim and cherished hope that here should be the capital of all nations—should the fates perchance allow that. Yet in truth she discovered that a race was springing from Trojan blood to overthrow some day these Tyrian towers—a people kings of broad realms and proud in war who would come forth for Lybia’s downfall . . . (Black)9

If I have cited extensively from Heaney and Friel, it is to show that there are writers in contemporary Ireland who seem easily to have found a home in Virgil’s poetics of exile and conflict. Through the acclaimed translation of the Georgics by the farmer and poet Peter Fallon,10 Virgil also sings of the glories of the land in an Irish voice. The Virgilian presence is an established and shaping force in Irish 9

Friel (1981: 68). Fallon (2006). See Seamus Heaney’s review (2004): ‘Peter Fallon, a poet who has not only lived on a farm but has done the work of a farmer, shares this conviction about the salutary nature of his two callings and has produced a translation that is bountiful, faithful and frolicsome, a big achievement, in fact, a new poem, living its own vivid life in English. [ . . . ] The original poem is a mixture of aisling and handbook; at times it reminds you of the realism of Breughel, at times of the exquisite landscapes of Les Tre`s Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. It belongs at one and the same time in Arcadia and in the fields at the back of the house, and speaks a language that is equally flexible, able to shift between the technical, practical idiom of farming and heightened, cadenced voice of poetic tradition. Peter Fallon succeeds because he has found a way of maintaining this combination of idioms, so that what you are hearing at one moment is speech that might be heard any day from a man on a headrig or a tractor, and at the next it’s the lyric excitement of Fallon’s own voice or the back-echo of other poets and poetries.’ 10

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literary culture. And it is precisely from this culture that Eavan Boland felt so excluded when she embarked upon her own poetic career: I know now that I began writing in a country where the word woman and the word poet were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. [ . . . ] It became part of my working life, part of my discourse, to see these lives evade and simplify each other. I became used to the flawed space between them. In a certain sense, I found my poetic voice by shouting across that distance. (1995: p. xi)11

Boland insists here upon the fact that she is writing within the Irish literary tradition, and that her writing career began in Ireland. But it is important to remember that she was brought up as an ambassador’s daughter in London and later America, before returning to Ireland as a teenager. Her working life is divided between Ireland and America. For her, therefore, Ireland has always been partly a place of the imagination, a place that she has constructed from the myths and stories handed down to her. The predicament she outlines is the problem of forging a poetic identity in a culture that had no language for the female experience, a culture that grew from a Western tradition that was equally lacking: ‘Was there really no name for my life in poetry?’ Boland asked. ‘The question preoccupied me more as time went on. And if not, why not? War poetry. Nature poetry. Love poetry. Pastoral poetry. The comic epic. The tragic lyric’ (1995: 23). She remembers her younger self, greedily and anxiously scouring books of poetry ‘looking for my name. And it was not there’ (1995: 25). As she travelled to the heart of an emblematic national tradition of writing, she found nothing but a sense of loss. There was only an absence where there ought to have been poetic forebears, who could not only shape her writing but validate her presence as a woman. Though she may have learned beauties of phrase and cadence from her male poetic ancestors, there is nothing but emptiness and silence when she looks for a predecessor who will recognize her and acknowledge her enterprise. ‘The way to the past is never smooth’ (1995: 23), she warns, in a phrase that alludes to and contradicts Virgil’s claim that ‘facilis descensus Averno’ (Going down to Avernus 11

Boland (1995). References to this edition appear in parentheses in the text.

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is easy) (Aen. 6. 126).12 ‘For a woman poet it can be especially tortuous. Every step towards an origin is also an advance towards a silence’ (1995: 24). This silence haunts Boland’s poetry, but it is also her birthplace. The choice she faced was to accept the silence, which entailed accepting a place at the threshold of the poetic tradition, a position ‘outside history’, or to forge a voice that could call across the silence to assert her identity and awaken other echoes. It is a moment in the sixth book of the Aeneid that epitomizes for her the horror of voicelessness and galvanizes her to ‘forget that hinterland where you lived for so long, without a sound in your throat, without a syllable at your command’ (1995: 77). She remembers a past self as a schoolgirl, unwillingly ploughing through the Latin of Virgil as she translated his Underworld encounters. His dilemmas, his exploits, were, she remembered, foreign and rebarbative to a 17-year-old girl: All the names of the heroes, the meaningless, difficult Latin names, are recorded at this point. Glaucus. Medon. Thersilichus. I hated the names and found them difficult to remember and unlocated in any adventure I understood. And yet here was Aeneas pressing on again, surrounded by old friends, old rivals. The names, the difficulties of the text fell away. Here were his old adversaries, both pleased and terrified to see him, ready to make a run for the ships, but ready also to hail him. But as they did the moment happened: They raised exiguam vocem—a feeble voice. In the words of the Latin, the cry they attempted mocked them. (1995: 86)

Boland may not have found her name in the Aeneid, but she found an expression of that terrified helplessness that is a companion of being silenced, and: For that moment I could make a single experience out of the fractures of language, country and womanhood that had brought me here. The old place of power and heroism—the stairs and bricks of an alien building, the sting of exile—were gathered into a hell with old inscriptions and immediate force. In the face of that underworld, and by the force of poetry itself, language had been shown to be fallible. The heroes had spoken, and their voices had not carried. Memory was a whisper, a sound that died in your throat. Amidst the

12 The name Avernus was used by Romans as an alternative name for the Underworld.

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triumphs of language and civilization it was a moment of sheer powerlessness. It was something I would look back to when I became a poet. (1995: 86–7)13

Since it is Virgil who articulates for Boland the emptiness and the powerlessness to counter which she will forge her poetic identity, it is unsurprising that he should be so strong a presence in her poetry. In ‘A False Spring’ she revisits in verse that epiphany from Book 6 of the Aeneid that helped to define her as a poet: I want to find her, the woman I once was, who came out of that reading-room in a hard January, after studying Aeneas in the underworld, how his battle-foes spotted him there— how they called and called and called only to have it be a yell of shadows, an O vanishing in the polished waters and the topsy-turvy seasons of hell— her mind so frail her body was its ghost I want to tell her she can rest, she is embodied now. (2005: 178)14

The poem is haunted by her past self, who is presented as existing in limbo. Her sense of identity is so fragile that even her body is a ghost,

13

Drabble also gives a long account of this moment in The Seven Sisters: Cynthia said the best evening ever was the evening when we did lines 490–494 of the Sixth Book. [ . . . ] It’s the bit where Aeneas in the Underworld meets the Greek generals and the followers of Agamemnon, and they flee from him in terror even though they are dead. They see his armour glittering in the gloom and they flee again to their ships to escape him. It’s not a particularly interesting passage but I remember that we all became engrossed by the way the Greeks try to cry out but can produce no sound. pars tollere vocem exiguam: inceptus clamor frustratur hiantis. That’s the Latin. [...] I remember that we all found that phrase ‘a tiny cry’ very telling. We talked about it for some time. We spoke of nightmares, and trying to cry out in our sleep. We talked about sleep-talking and sleepwalking, and what the ancients believed about dreams and prophecies and the gates of ivory and the gates of horn. (Drabble 2002a: 120–1) 14

Boland (2005). References to this edition appear in parentheses in the text.

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a version of the Virgilian ‘umbra’. From her position as an established poet Boland wants to recover her uncertain, younger self and reassure her that she will not be subject to the mockery of the soundless speech, so vividly rendered through the repetition of ‘called and called and called’, only to sink wordlessly into the shadows. Boland evokes repeatedly the ghost of her past self, reading the sixth book of the Aeneid. Despite Boland’s initial reluctance to learn Latin, Virgil, as poet of refugees and exiles, may have spoken with especial force to the Irish child who was being brought up in London: when all of England to an Irish child was nothing more than what you’d lost and how; was the teacher in the London convent who when I produced ‘I amn’t’ in the classroom turned and said—‘You’re not in Ireland now.’ (2005: 155–6)15

In ‘The Latin Lesson’ she remembers discovering Virgil and, with eloquent tautness, recaptures her sense of wonder at the strange beauties of the language and of the poem and recalls how her response is curtailed by the strictures of her convent upbringing: A bell rings for the first class Today the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. How beautiful the words Look, how vagrant and strange on the page before we crush them for their fragrance and crush them again to discover the pathway to hell and that these shadows in their shadow-bodies chittering and mobbing on the far 15 Boland refers to this episode in Object Lessons also: ‘Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said’ (1995: 46). See also ‘The Game’: ‘I was a child in a north-facing bedroom in j a strange country’ (2005: 169).

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shore, signalling their hunger for the small usefulness of a life, are the dead. And how before the bell will I hail the black keel and flatter the dark boatman and cross the river and still keep a civil tongue in my head? (2005: 172–3)16

In ‘The Bottle Garden’ she indicates that she is looking back at this child from middle age through her allusion to the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ (Midway upon the journey of our life). Her opening verse indicates surprise that she has arrived anywhere, having felt so lost in returning to the silence of her origins. Here the physical environment becomes married to the Underworld depicted by Virgil; the physical constraints of her school uniform exacerbate the sense of being helplessly trapped, while the darkening twilight of a Dublin evening intensifies the shadowy gloom of the Underworld: And in my late thirties, past the middle way, I can say how did I get here? hardly knew the way back, still less forward. . . . . . here I am, a gangling schoolgirl in the convent library, the April evening outside, reading the Aeneid as the room darkens to the Underworld of the Sixth book— the Styx, the damned, the pity and the improvised poetic of imprisoned meanings; and half-aware of the open weave of harbour lights and my school-blouse riding up at the sleeves. (2005: 137–8)

For Boland the half-light of evening is the birthplace of creativity. ‘This is the hour I love:’ she claims in ‘The Women’, ‘the in-between, j neither here-nor-there hour of evening’ (2005: 141). In an earlier poem entitled ‘Energies’ she seizes this time as her own: the very title 16 For a further account of the way in which Boland uses Virgil to evoke the school days of discipline, orthodoxy, effort, and culture see York (2007: 210).

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of the poem links it to her sense of purpose, of coming alive: ‘This is my time: j the twilight closing in’ (2005: 94).17 When she attempts to resurrect the figures of former women poets in ‘The Rooms of Other Women Poets’, it is into this crepuscular world that she summons them: I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions of daylight, falling as dusk across your page, make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think I see that gesture in the way you use language. . . . . . The early summer, its covenant, its grace, is everywhere: even shadows have leaves. so I can see the bay windbreak, the laburnum hang fire, feel the ache of things ending in the jasmine darkening early. (2005: 166)

The title of this poem clearly alludes to Virginia Woolf ’s analysis of the difficulty of becoming a woman writer, A Room of One’s Own. But Boland also remembers the terrible consequences of this half-light for those who plied their trade as lace-makers, for whom ‘Lace’ was language: In the dusk I am still looking for it— the language that is lace: which [ . . . ] is still

17 The poem echoes ‘Night Feed’, where Boland makes dawn the season of her daughter, thereby giving her a similar liminality:

This is dawn. Believe me This is your season, little daughter. Earth wakes. You go back to sleep. The feed is ended. (2005: 92)

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what someone in the corner of a room in the dusk bent over as the light was fading lost their sight for. (2005: 137–8)

Elena Theodorakopoulos has shown that the fact that the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid all close with the word umbra charges each instance of the word with an aesthetic that encompasses both loss and creativity.18 That Boland shares this aesthetic is indicated by the fact that whenever she retreats into memory and inspiration she is returning to a land of shadows. Through her poetry she mourns and remembers those whose names were never recorded in the pages of history. No matter where she may find herself geographically, twilight serves to invoke the same landscape of memory. From her study in New Hampshire she writes in ‘Code’: You are west of me and in the past. Dark falls. Light is somewhere else. (2005: 290)

But the remembered light serves as access to the past, functions as a kind of golden bough to enter an Underworld and summon forth the shades of the nameless in order to lend them substance: And yet I use it here to imagine how at your desk in the twilight legend, history and myth of course, are gathering in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, as if to a memory. As if to a source. (2005: 291)

The poem ends with Boland invoking the shade as a mother. The version of her ideal, those untouchable ‘blue remembered hills’, is a female communion hallowed by Virgilian twilight: We are still human. There is still light in my suburb and you are in my mind— head bowed, old enough to be my mother—

18

Theodorakopoulos (1997).

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Sibylline Sisters writing code before the daylight goes, I am writing at a screen as blue as any hill, as any lake, composing this to show you how the world begins again. One word at a time. One woman to another. (2005: 291)

Patricia Boyle Haberstroh argues that Boland’s most explicit statement of intent is to be found in the poem ‘Fever’, in which she resurrects her grandmother, who died in a fever ward leaving behind five orphan daughters.19 Without Boland, her life, and the lives of the countless others like her, would be Names, shadows, visitations, hints and a half-sense of half-lives remain. And nothing else, nothing more unless I re-construct the soaked—through midnights; vigils; the histories I never learned to predict the lyric of; and reconstruct risk; as if silence could become rage [ . . . ] (2005: 134)20

These feverish ghosts also shiver behind the lines of one of Boland’s most explicitly Virgilian poems. The fact that she wants us to see her Underworld as a Virgilian place is made clear in ‘The Journey’ (pp. 147–50), a poem that reworks Dante’s descent into the Inferno with Virgil as his guide, so that we find Boland entering the Underworld led by Sappho. She shows us an Underworld not only peopled by women, but beset by concerns traditionally seen as feminine, as a mother, watching over small children, drifts into sleep and enters the region of Virgil’s Underworld inhabited by dead children, wailing and condemned to limbo. The poem is prefaced by an epigram from Aeneid 6: 19

Haberstroh (1996: 78). Haberstroh (1996: 79) cites Boland’s essay ‘The Woman Poet in a National Tradition’, where Boland asserts: ‘The real women with their hungers, their angers, endured a long struggle and a terrible subsistence. These women are all in our pasts. We are the heirs of their survival. They exist in history and in family archives as specters and victims, memories and ghosts. Their suffering is our common possession.’ 20

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Immediately cries were heard. These were the loud wailing of infant souls weeping at the very entrance-way; never had they had their share of life’s sweetness for the dark day had stolen them from their mother’s breasts and plunged them to a death before their time. Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI.

The poem almost seems to begin as a paean to the antibiotic, the drug that could have staved off fever and prevented the deaths of so many of these children. But Boland enters, through her imagination, into the past, where antibiotics were not available and infant deaths happened as a matter of course. By entering such a past, she inhabits the eternal parental nightmare—the loss of a child.21 And once again she is caught in a crepuscular situation as she is shifting between sleep and consciousness, ‘not sleep, but nearly sleep, not dreaming really j but as ready to believe’ (p. 148). The further she enters this underworld, the deeper the dream becomes and the more aware she grows. She and Sappho go down down down without so much as ever touching down but always, always with a sense of mulch beneath us the way of stairs winding down to a river (2005: 148)

Just as in the Virgilian Underworld Aeneas battles through the murky gloom in a landscape from which all light has been leached, where there is only ‘darkness visible’ (Aen. 6. 268–72), so Boland struggles to lend shape to the formless masses that surge out of the mists: My eyes got slowly used to the bad light. At first I saw shadows, only shadows. Then I could make out women and children and, in the way they were, the grace of love. (2005: 147)

In the Underworld Aeneas not only encounters his descendants, the future of his race, but also recognizes his companions and his enemies, his family, his mistress, and his father. Boland, too, recognizes women who belong to her world, women who are part of her

21

‘The woman I imagined—if the statistics are anything to go by—must have lost her children in that underworld, just as I came to possess mine through the seasons of my neighbourhood’ (Eavan Boland, ‘The Woman, The Place, The Poet’, Georgia Review, 44/1–2 (1990), 97–109, at 109, cited in Haberstroh 1996: 75).

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family, for they are her ancestors, the root from which she has sprung. Typically, when she imagines them back on earth, she envisages their lives at the end of the day, when the children are in bed, and they have time to dream as they are tidying up: But these are women who went out like you when dusk became a dark sweet with leaves, recovering the day, stooping, picking up teddy bears and rag dolls and tricycles and buckets. (2005: 149)

Despite these similarities, there is, nevertheless, the inexorable rift between the living and the dead, exemplified most resonantly in Virgil by Aeneas’ desperate and futile attempts to embrace the shade of his father. Between the living Boland and the ghosts of her ancestors flowed a version of Lethe that made communication impossible: I stood fixed. I could not reach or speak to them. Between us was the melancholy river, the dream water, the narcotic crossing and they had passed over it, its cold persuasions. (2005: 149)

Boland appeals to Sappho to help her record in poetry the significance of the encounter, and is told that it is through empathy and recognition that these women must be honoured. Towards the end of the poem Boland makes a number of allusions to canonical epic, the effect of which is to make it clear that she is grafting her female experience onto this male-dominated form, that the genre will, in her hands, sing also of women’s experiences and griefs and losses.22 As she and Sappho emerge from the Underworld, it is to see the stars of heaven, a deliberate evocation of Dante’s exit from the Inferno with Virgil as his guide.23 And, just as Dante was recognized and validated by the canonical authorities of the ancient world—Homer, Horace,

22 See Boland’s comment in Haberstroh (2001: 107): ‘The poetry being written by women in Ireland today is Irish poetry. It stands in the mainstream of that valuable tradition and like all such entries into a tradition, it reorders what is there.’ 23 The closing lines of the Inferno are: ‘The Leader and I entered on that hidden road to return into the bright world, and without caring to have any rest we climbed up, he first and I second, so far that I saw through a round opening some of the fair things that Heaven bears; and thence we came forth to see again the stars’ (Dante 1961: 427).

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Lucan, and Ovid—and allowed to regard Virgil as his spiritual and poetic father,24 so Sappho adopts Boland into the lineage of women poets whose duty is to remember the forgotten: I whispered, ‘let me be let me at least be their witness,’ but she said ‘what you have seen is beyond speech, beyond song, only not beyond love; remember it, you will remember it’ and I heard her say but she was fading fast as we emerged under the stars of heaven, ‘there are not many of us, you are dear and stand beside me as my own daughter’. (2005: 149–50)

In this Underworld, Boland finds both a poetic mother and a host of ancestors whom she will commemorate. In a later poem, ‘Love’, she maps the bonds linking her to her husband and her daughters and explores the impossibility of freezing present happiness. At dusk the mid-western town where they lived metamorphoses into the Underworld: Dark falls on this mid-western town where we once lived when myths collided. Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river which slides and deepens to become the water the hero crossed on his way to hell. (2005: 214)

Here too she is haunted by the knowledge that this hell houses the ghosts of dead children and shudders to remember how nearly her own daughter became one such shade. Once again she refers to the moment in hell when the Greeks call out and their voices fail; here, the allusion intensifies the cruelty of loss by evoking the attachments that are severed by a communication that is so abruptly arrested: We had two infant children one of whom was touched by death in this town and spared: and when the hero 24 See Dante, Inferno, Canto 4, ll. 82–102 (1961: 63). In Canto 1 Dante calls Virgil ‘my master and my author’ (p. 27) and in Canto 3 Virgil addresses Dante as ‘my son’ (p. 53).

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Their child is spared—on this occasion no journey to the Underworld is demanded. She and her family continue to inhabit the upper world, where they can communicate fully and freely: I am your wife. It was years ago. Our child is healed. We love each other still. Across our day-to-day and ordinary distances we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly. (2005: 214)

But the danger comes precisely when she mythologizes her husband, thus moving him out of this everyday world. To mythologize a person is to acknowledge the realm of death and the power of death. Their everyday existence is shadowed by the knowledge of a future where they will be strangers to each other. The poem closes with a reminder of the shade of Dido walking soundlessly away from Aeneas, once communication between them has broken down absolutely: I see you as a hero in the text the image blazing and the edges gilded— and I long to cry out the epic question my dear companion: Will we ever live so intensely again? . . . . . But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me. You walk away and I cannot follow. (2005: 214)

In her 2007 volume, Domestic Violence, Boland again depicts the pitiless rift separating the living and the dead, imagining a future when all that will remain of their past will be preserved in the flawed translucence of amber. The first lines of ‘Amber’ nod at the epic trope of falling leaves employed by Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton to depict the souls of the dead.25 25 In the Iliad Glaucus compares human lives to leaves (6. 146–9). In the Aeneid (6. 309–10) Virgil laments the ‘Youths in their prime set on funeral pyres while their

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It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving: trees on their hillside, in their groves, weeping— a plastic gold dropping through seasons and centuries to the ground— until now.26

And once more she voices a truth that is so unthinkable that it can only be apprehended through the faculty of reason. Emotion and instinct assert the opposite: Reason says this: The dead cannot see the living. The living will never see the dead again. (2007: 24)

It is her daughter’s death, so narrowly escaped, that Boland most fears. Over and over again she evokes a child’s absence and the attendant descent into the Underworld to search for her, so that she draws on the myth of Ceres and Proserpina and blends it with the myth of Aeneas descending to find his father. On occasion it is simply a process of growing older that brings about this loss, as she observes in ‘The Blossom’, when she asks: ‘How much longer j will I see girlhood in my daughter?’ (2005: 262). As her daughter grows away from her into adulthood she herself also becomes unable to bear further children, as she points out in the next poem ‘Daughter’: If I wanted a child now I could not have one. Except through memory. Which is the ghost of the body. Or myth. Which is the ghost of meaning. (2005: 263)

parents are watching: Countless as leaves, during autumn’s first frost, falling in forests’. In Inferno 3 Dante describes the souls of the damned: ‘As far off the light autumnal leaves j One still another following, till the bough j Strews all its honours on the earth beneath; E’en in like manner Adam’s evil brood j Cast themselves’, while Milton describes the souls of the fallen angels as being: ‘Thick as autumnal leaves, that strew the brooks j In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades j High over-arched embower’ (Paradise Lost, 1. 304–6). 26 Boland (2007: 24).

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To have a child through memory is equivalent to descending into the Underworld, retreating into a fount of memories, to find her. It seems all the more natural, then, that Boland should figure herself explicitly as Ceres in the subsequent poem entitled ‘Ceres Looks at the Morning’, in which the knowledge of her loss infuses her waking with melancholy, so that already she is illumined by the half-light of grief: I wake slowly. Already My body is a twilight. (2005: 264)

And the agony that she so fears is realized in the next poem, ‘Tree of Life’, as she searches and searches for her child: I cannot find you in this dark hour dear child. (2005: 265)

These themes and images are extensively explored in an earlier poem called ‘The Pomegranate’, a word that instantly calls to mind the myth of Proserpina, as the pomegranate seeds were the only food she took when Pluto abducted her. The penalty for eating them was her return to the Underworld for six months of the year, during which time the earth would be bound in winter. The poem begins by recalling Boland’s own girlhood, spent in exile as an emigrant Irish child in England; already London is being figured as a version of the Underworld, with its fogs and incomprehensible language. It is in London that she first reads of the abduction of Proserpina, and she remembers, as a child, identifying with the lost girl. Only later as a mother does she terrify herself with an imagined identification with Ceres. The loss of her daughter entails a descent into hell so absolute that the stars also are lost, in contrast to Dante’s emergence from hell when he was welcomed by the stars. Fortunately there is a schism between the world of the imagination and the world of reality, but one of the greatest gifts she can offer her child is her own capacity to live in the imagination with all its attendant terrors and heartaches: As a child in a city of fogs and strange consonants, I read it first and at first I was an exiled child in the crackling dusk of the underworld, the stars blighted. Later

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I walked out in a summer twilight searching for my daughter at bed-time. When she came running I was ready to make any bargain to keep her. . . . . . It is winter And the stars are hidden. . . . . . The veiled stars are above ground. It is another world. But what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time? If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. The legend will be hers as well as mine. (2005: 215–16)

It is no coincidence that ‘The Pomegranate’ links the most terrible personal loss that she can imagine with her own position as an emigrant from Ireland, since it is clear that, for Boland, individual histories within Ireland are intimately bound up with the national annals of loss and dispossession and brutality. In ‘The Lost Land’, an elegy for Ireland, she imagines the nineteenth-century refugees from famine leaving in boats for America, and the way in which their last vision of the land already transforms it into a place of myth and memory: Is this, I say how they must have seen it, backing out on the mailboat at twilight, shadows falling on everything they had to leave? . . . . . I see myself on the underworld side of that water, the darkness coming in fast, saying all the names I know for a lost land. Ireland. Absence. Daughter. (2005: 260–1)

By using Virgil to help her chart these histories of enforced exile and homesickness, Boland is contributing to a well-established tradition, as we have seen through the Virgilian allusions in Heaney and Friel. Colin Burrow argues that the Aeneid lends itself to being

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invoked at times of personal and historical transition, in that ‘every level of the poem testifies to the strain of moving between worlds’.27 We have seen repeatedly Boland’s difficulties in stabilizing her sense of home within her own country and that the sense of exile that marked her childhood has never really left her. Indeed, her vocation as poet has intensified this sense of living on the margins, since her experiences as a woman left her outside the mainstream poetic tradition in Ireland: ‘At the very least it seemed to me that I was likely to remain an outsider in my own national literature, cut off from its archive, at a distance from its energy’ (1995: 128). Her isolation as a woman poet made her more sensitive to the displacements and exiles within her country, so that ultimately it is on the edges of tradition that she finds her home and her voice: The more I thought of her, the more it seemed to me that a sense of place can happen at the very borders of myth and history. [ . . . ] And here, on the edge of dream, is a place in which I locate myself as a poet: not exactly the suburb, not entirely the hill colored with blue shrubs, but somewhere composed of both. (1995: 172)28

As we have seen, this feeling of being situated away from the centre has also informed the tradition of Virgilian reception. To move closer to the centre is to acquire greater authority, to run less risk of one’s voice being silenced. In the ninth Eclogue Virgil sharpens the pain of exile by imposing voicelessness and the loss of all the old songs on Moeris: omnia fert aetas, animum quoque. saepe ego longos cantando puerum memini me condere soles. nunc oblita mihi tot carmina, vox quoque Moerim iam fugit ipsa [ . . . ] (ll. 51–4) (Time bears all away, even memory. In boyhood Often I’d spend the long, long summer daylight singing. Lost to memory all those songs; and now my voice too Is not what it was [ . . . ])29

27

Burrow (1997: 80). See also: ‘I believe [ . . . ] that when a woman poet begins to write she very quickly becomes conscious of the silences which have preceded her, which still surround her’ (1995: 245). 29 Virgil (1966). 28

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When Boland announces herself to be a daughter of the colony, she is looking back beyond Ireland’s troubled history to the earliest depiction of a pastoral world threatened by political routing. In ‘Daughters of Colony’ she claims: ‘I also am a daughter of the colony. j I share their broken speech, their other-whereness’ (2005: 248), but she has previously named herself in ‘The New Pastoral’ as a lost, last inhabitant— displaced person in a pastoral chaos. (2005: 113)

Just as, in ‘The Journey’, she established a communion with the women who had been left ‘outside history’, so in her volume The Lost Land she feels a similar duty to bear ‘Witness’ to her dispossessed forebears within Ireland: Out of my mouth they come. The spurred and booted garrisons The men and women they dispossessed. What is a colony if not the brutal truth that when we speak the graves open. And the dead walk? (2005: 247)

That this is a Virgilian experience is made clear in a later poem, ‘The Colonists’, where the colonists are depicted as ghosts, emerging as shadows from the twilight. They are stilled and amnesiac within this half-light, so that their powerlessness evokes once more the episode from Book 6 of the Aeneid where the Greeks find themselves unable to speak, an episode that stands behind Boland’s whole poetic enterprise: They form slowly out of the twilight. Their faces. Arms. Greatcoats. And tears. They are holding maps But the pages are made of failing daylight. Their tears, made of dusk, fall across their names. . . . . . The light is there. But not their moment in it. Not their memories. Nor the signs of life they made. (2005: 253)

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In ‘City of Shadows’ she inverts the Virgilian experience by pointing out that she brought her father to his destination. The very title of the poem indicates that this destination is a version of the Underworld, and Boland reminds us that she was able to find a way out. It is, of course, through poetry that she achieved this, finding her own solution to the Sibyl’s warnings about the difficulties of emerging from hell: ‘Hic labor, hoc opus est’: Then I smelled salt and heard the foghorn. And realised suddenly that I had brought my father to his destination. . . . . . I thought whatever the dawn made clear and cast-iron and adamant again, I would know from now on that in a lost land of orators and pedestals and corners and street-names and rivers where even the ground underfoot was hidden from view, there had been one way out. And I found it. (2005: 251)

In her dreams she heals the scars of Ireland’s past through her poetry. She and a companion pass through an iron gate, in contrast to the gate of ivory, the gate of false dreams through which Aeneas emerges from the Underworld. To claim a gate of iron is to assert a stronger reality than that of Aeneas, and Boland goes on to envisage magical properties for her poetry in ‘A Dream of Colony’: I dreamed we came to an iron gate. . . . . . We began to walk. When we started talking I saw our words had the rare power to unmake history. (2005: 254)

In truth, however, she is unable to repair the past, to bring peace and security to her ancestors; all she can do is record their presence, arrest their fragile images and preserve them in poetry. She demands repeatedly of us, her readers, that we should remember, as in ‘In Our Own Country’:

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Remember the emigrant boat? Remember the lost faces burned in the last glances? The air clearing away to nothing, nothing, nothing (2007: 20)

The depiction of a boat ferrying away lost souls and disappearing into nothingness is immediately suggestive of Charon’s wherry in the Underworld. Though they are commemorated in Boland’s poem, the individual voices of these emigrants are lost, and with these voices the record of a whole way of life and state of being, so that Ireland is still damaged by their experiences: We walk home. What we know is this (and this is all we know): We are now and we will always be from now on— for all I know we have always been— exiles in our own country. (2007: 20)30

The very language that is needed to record their experiences and that forms part of the fabric of national identity is itself vulnerable and maimed by the experiences that it is asked to depict. Longing and sorrow bring language to flower, as Boland observes in ‘Distances’: ‘and the words open out with emigrant grief ’ (2005: 199), while in a poem dedicated to the composer Sean O’Riada, and entitled ‘Mise Eire’ (I am Ireland), after his symphony of that name, she meditates on the way in which a language grows from a body of emigrant and immigrant experiences, by mingling the immigrant guttural with the vowels of homesickness who neither knows nor cares that a new language is a kind of scar and heals after a while into a passable imitation of what went before. (2005: 129)

30

See also Boland (1995: 55–6): ‘Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic speech of the country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing. The street names, the meeting places—it was not just that I didn’t know them. It was something more. I had never known them. I had lost not only a place but the past that goes with it and, with it, the clues from which to construct a present self.’

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This pain scarring the language is an integral part of the process of bearing witness. In ‘In Exile’ Boland recalls meeting in childhood German girls in exile from the Second World War and recognizes the scars marking their tongues as being the same as those that it is now her duty to keep alive, to keep in people’s memory: The German girls . . . . . spoke no English, understood no French. They were sisters from a ruined city and they spoke rapidly in their own tongue . . . . . To me they were the sounds of evening only, of the cold, of the Irish dark and continuous with all such recurrences: the drizzle in the lilac, the dusk always at the back door . . . . . Here, in this scalding air, my speech will not heal. I do not want it to heal. (2005: 185)

Where the Virgilian shepherd Moeris yielded to weariness and saw the loss of the old songs as an inevitable part of ageing and exile, Boland, who also perceives herself as a ‘lost, last inhabitant in a pastoral chaos’, sees it as her duty to uncover the language once more and to make the wounds cry out in new songs in her poem ‘Beautiful Speech’: I had yet to find the country already lost to me in song and figure, as I scribbled down names for sweet euphony and safe digression. (2005: 211)

Moeris was the first to describe pastoral beauties in verse while simultaneously fearing the survival of song; Boland takes this one step further and claims that it is language itself that risks disappearing. Even before her birth, she says, she was destined to try and preserve her country’s heritage and national identity in words that are all the more fragile through being freighted by the weight of history and the weight of silenced voices and unrecorded losses. As one who lives in ‘A place on the edge. A place of resentment and beauty and conflict’ (1995: 7), she attempts to rescue those pushed to the margins

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of history and to serve as their mouthpiece. But she is only partially successful, as the title of one of her most recent poem suggests: ‘An Elegy for my Mother in which She Scarcely Appears’. It is here that she evokes both the powers and vulnerabilities of language: Irish twilight closes in and down on the room and the curtains are drawn and here am I, not even born and already a conservationist, with nothing to assist me but the last and most fabulous of beasts—language, language— which knows, as I do, that it’s too late to record the loss of these things but does so anyway, and anxiously, in case it shares their fate. (2007: 23)

Boland describes her attempts to resurrect Irish emigrants and women’s history as being part and parcel of the same process, observing: ‘The truths of womanhood and the defeats of a nation have drawn nearer to each other in my work; they make an improbable intersection’ (1995: 205). In her longing to find a voice that will accommodate both elements, Boland, like Ruth Fainlight, attempts to metamorphose herself into a Sibyl who will record unwaveringly and accurately the silenced wrongs and injustices of history in her poem ‘The Muse Mother’: If I could only decline her— lost noun out of context, stray figure of speech— from this rainy street again to her roots, she might teach me a new language: to be a sibyl able to sing the past in pure syllables . . . . . able to speak at last my mother tongue. (2005: 103)

It was in looking back at a version of that metamorphosis that Boland was able to see how, in becoming a Sibyl, she had become part of Ireland’s political history. The paradox, of course, was that she was

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entering a history from which she had been explicitly excluded. And the paradox is deepened as she invokes, once more, the archetypal epic of warfare and manly exploits to examine her role as a woman poet in the Irish literary tradition. Yet again the speechlessness of Aeneas’ foes in the Underworld is appropriated as an emblem for all those who have been marginalized and silenced: And yet one more thing remained steady: I continued to believe that a reading of the energy and virtue of any tradition can be made by looking at the political poem in its time. [ . . . ] At who can speak in the half-light between event and perception without their voices becoming shadows as Aeneas’ rivals did in the underworld of the Sixth Book. In that winter twilight [ . . . ] I had ventured on my first political poem. I had seen my first political image. I had even understood the difficulties of writing it. What I had not realized was that I myself was a politic within the Irish poem: a young woman who had left the assured identity of a city and its poetic customs and who had started on a life which had no place in them. (1995: 178–9)

We have already seen that the Ireland within which Boland is writing is an Ireland attempting to understand its national identity by mapping its experience onto classical myth. In his introductory chapter to the Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, ‘Ireland in Poetry’, Matthew Campbell names her as one of the Irish poets who has turned to Homer or Virgil in order to articulate her own hope for peace: Seemingly assured of modern classic status, in the 1990s Irish poetry also sounded an older classical note. As the poets tiptoed through the possible peace of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and Muldoon all turned to the eclogue or the pastoral elegy. The models were Homeric or Virgilian, and their recurrent note was of exhaustion after war. Written from an old world, they faced the unknown world of the future in poems of homecoming or retreat.31

Campbell catches here that sense of being caught between worlds that is a feature of Virgilian reception. On this reading Boland is united with her fellow Irish poets in clarifying their political position through references to classical myth. But in Object Lessons she argues 31

Matthew Campbell (2003: 4).

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that the contemporary woman poet enjoys a status as emblematic as that of the Romantic or Modernist male poet.32 For her, Virgil shapes not only the discourse that probes the schisms between colonizer and colonized but also helps her, as a woman, to give voice to a centuriesold silencing. In her hands, Virgil sings, not of arms and the man, but of a fragile and tentative peace articulated in the newborn tones of an Irish woman poet. 32 Rowena Fowler (2006: 396) comments on this in her discussion of Boland’s treatment of the Ovidian myth of Daphne and Apollo: ‘Classical myth and metamorphosis have afforded Boland an escape from the Yeatsian re-mythologising which left Irish women the choice of role of old crone or Helen of Troy—Mother Ireland or Kathleen ni Houlihan. Resisting such oppositions, she brings her own life and work together so as to claim for the contemporary woman poet a status as emblematic in its own way as that of the Romantic or Modernist (male) poet.’

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5 Miche`le Roberts Miche`le Roberts’s reputation rests upon her subversive feminism, often manifest in her expansion and reworking of fairy tales and biblical legends to accommodate the female perspective. This rewriting of the patriarchal canon, exemplified most clearly by the story of Mary Magdalen in The Wild Girl (1984) or the fantastical Impossible Saints (1997), is symptomatic of Roberts’s need to find her home within the Western tradition. It is significant that her first four novels have homeless women as their protagonists.1 Her sense of exclusion has been sharpened by her dual nationality, half-French half-English; she describes the division as one of the motivating factors behind her writing: ‘That was the second impetus to my becoming a writer: living in a double culture, and feeling that I lived torn apart, or split, and didn’t know where I belonged.’2 This double culture has enabled Roberts to explore her identity through both the British and the French literary traditions, so that she has written an imaginative account of Charlotte Bronte¨’s love affair with her Belgian tutor in The Mistressclass (2002), as well as The Looking Glass (2000), a novel set in Normandy and inspired by the life of Mallarme´. Her relationship with the Classical Tradition has been less recognized than her recreation of fairy tales or biblical stories, and yet she frequently engages with and rewrites episodes from classical mythology in her

1

‘All my novels had been about homeless women, and then for the first time in my life I began to have a happy relationship with a man—no accident he’s an artist—and I wrote In the Red Kitchen’ (Newman 2003). 2 Newman (2003).

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short stories, poetry, and novels.3 She shares her familiarity with Latin with her mother, who taught both French and Latin in Catholic secondary schools.4 Roberts’s Latin was learned not only from her convent schooldays in London, where, as a student accepted to study English at Oxford in the 1960s she would have needed Latin at least at O level, but also from her Catholic upbringing and regular attendance at Mass. Even before she left primary school she was able to recognize Bible stories from hearing them read out in Latin at church: At primary school I had galloped through all the books on the shelves. The teachers put me on to the Bible, to slow me down. I left for secondary school before I’d finished the Old Testament. A revelation, that Book, particularly Psalms, the Song of Songs, Job and Isaiah, bits of which, of course, I knew from hearing them read out (in Latin) at Sunday Mass.5

In an anthology of short stories, Playing Sardines (2001), Roberts adopts the Ovidian device underpinning the Heroides of the heroine of the myth, penning a letter to the male protagonist (a technique also adopted by Carol Ann Duffy in The World’s Wife). Her twentyfirst-century message, ‘Hypsipyle to Jason’, was later reprinted in Philip Terry’s anthology, Ovid Metamorphosed.6 In Roberts’s version the anguish and abandonment of the Ovidian women has been replaced by the story of a warm, companionable relationship with her husband. She appears, at last, to have found a cure for the homelessness depicted in her first four novels. It is, however, in her poetry (for which she is less famed) that her debt to Homer, Virgil, and Ovid in particular is most evident. In 1995 she published an anthology of selected poems whose title, All the Selves I Was,7 points

3 On the FAQ section of her website, Roberts defines the impetus behind her writing: ‘Growing up bilingual, in a French–English family, I was fascinated by language and by language translating itself back and forth. Also, I wrote to invent a culture, a world, I could belong in. Catholicism was a misogynistic religion and I needed to write my way out of it. In the process, I discovered the power of making shapes with words, making new realities. [ . . . ] Omniscient narrators such as God the Father and the Pope had snared me as an object in their stories: I needed to write women in as our own subjects’ (www.micheleroberts.co.uk, accessed 18 Nov. 2008). 4 Roberts (2007: 3). 5 Roberts (2007: 5). 6 Roberts, ‘Hypsipyle to Jason’, in Terry (2000: 53–7). 7 Roberts (1995). References to this edition appear within parentheses in the text.

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to its construction as a poetic autobiography. Specific and identifiable moments from Roberts’s past, such as her evocation of time spent in Bangkok, are juxtaposed with poems that put her on the same footing as characters from myth or legend, such as ‘Judith and Delilah and Me’. Roberts explores her different selves by adopting various guises of mythical characters within her poetry, so that it becomes clear that her identities are composed both of the empathy of literary imagination and of the life she has lived outside fiction. In ‘therapy 2’ the Trojan War is used as a metaphor to depict the opposing stances of two lovers in a relationship: I’m all over the place tough, sneaky, dogged as Menelaus, Ulysses, Hector and Paris, I’m those chums in drag, a pantomime beast with three legs you are like Helen only in this: your beauty, your patience, your other loves besides me (1986: 35)8

All the Selves I Was (1995) brings together poems from three volumes, the first of which establishes the absences and exclusions that comprise female exclusion. Its very title, The Mirror of the Mother, invokes the philosophy of Lacan and its recognition of yearning for fulfilment and plenitude. This is expressed most graphically in the poem entitled ‘women’s entry into culture is experienced as lack’, where the empty blanks in the lines represent the penis, the lack of which induces women’s awareness of inferiority: if he were a he would join the but at least his are always

movement friends who struggle

he has nothing to do but help them out of 8

Roberts (1986). References to this edition appear within parentheses in the text.

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Sibylline Sisters silence, he has nothing else to do with oppression he wishes they had a too so they could all just be friends (1986: 27)

It is, of course, when a child is in the mirror stage that he or she first experiences identity, and feels it as loss, as expulsion from the paradise of union with the mother. For the female child this loss, this craving to belong, is exacerbated by the sense of inferiority visited upon her. The themes of sexuality, exile, and absence dominate Roberts’s work, and their roots can be traced back to these primal feelings of exclusion and rejection. Such experiences also account for the presentation within her work of women, who veer between compulsive neediness and the warm serenity or playful teasing of older women, who are repositories of wisdom. Roberts’s grandmothers haunt both her fiction and her poetry, appearing both as the characters who dominated her childhood and, more broadly, as benevolent Sibyls or archetypal mother figures. As Roberts attempts to prepare herself for her grandmother’s death, she yearns, in ‘my grandmother is dying’, to find, for the last time, the solid comforts of childhood: death dons an apron death stirs the pudding death lets you lick the spoon . . . . . death, teach me your songs, your stories let me hug your wisdom one last time death, embrace me, death sit next to me death, oh my loved one my grandmother (1986: 53)

Roberts’s grief for her grandmother sensitizes her to the insistent pull of death. In a poem that is rife with the imagery of the sisters of Fate, the Parcae, relentlessly spinning, measuring, and cutting the thread of life, she explores her heightened sense of mortality and vulnerability in a world devoid of her grandmother’s support, as described in the poem ‘after my grandmother’s death’:

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each day is a full spool, and death winds me in her foot tap, taps rocking the cradle death is mrs moon, death is a spry spinster I am a thread the moon spins with and I come reeling in from my grief-stricken dance . . . . . the moon who eats babies on winter nights has her dark face, and rubbery hands but grandmother rescued me and held me close, she shone steady for me, then I felt so blessed (1986: 76)

The classical imagery is maintained as Roberts attempts to find her grandmother once again after death. In ‘lament for my grandmother on the day of the winter solstice’, she recalls the dreams her grandmother recounted to her, and the imagery recalls the much younger Dido of Virgil, dreaming of her husband Sychaeus, who was lost to her also: most nights, you told me, you dreamed of your dead husband love long lost, and you complained to him: where are you, lover? where have you gone? (1986: 77)

The connection to Virgil is maintained through the parallels of the granddaughter harrowing hell to recover her dead grandmother, and the narrator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, who also invokes the Virgilian Underworld to depict the futile quest for his own dead grandmother. Roberts depicts her stricken desperation to beat, to summon her grandmother back to life: my fists thunder on your breast the bony gate to Hades and the ribbed boat that takes your spirit there I harrow Hell, calling out for you lost in the dark (1986: 77)

The imagery that she employs of the vulnerable skiff charting the depths of hell, a hell mapped upon the human body, is close enough to Proust’s depiction of a comparable moment to remind us of Roberts’s dual nationality and, as a consequence, how comfortable she is within the French literary tradition:

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de`s que, pour y parcourir les arte`res de la cite´ souterraine, nous nous sommes embarque´s sur les flots noirs de notre sang comme sur un Le´the´ inte´rieur aux sextuples replis, de grandes figures solenelles nous apparaissent, nous abordent et nous quittent, nous laissant en larmes. Je cherchai en vain celle de ma grand’me`re de`s que j’eus aborde´ sous les porches sombres; je savais pourtant qu’elle existait encore, mais d’une vie aussi diminue´e, aussi paˆle que celle du souvenir; l’obscurite´ grandissait, et le vent; mon pe`re n’arrivait pas qui devait me conduire a` elle.9 (as soon as we have embarked upon the black tides of our own blood, as if on the sixfold windings of an inner Lethe, in order to traverse the arteries of the subterranean city, we are approached by solemn, grand figures: they appear to us and then go away again, leaving us in tears. I searched vainly for my grandmother’s image as soon as I had landed beneath the gloomy portals; yet I knew she still existed but that her life was as pale and as shrunken as a memory. The darkness increased, as did the wind and there was no sign of my father who was to lead me to her.)10

Throughout Roberts’s poetry Virgil is invoked particularly at moments of grief. At other moments also the Virgilian poignancy is sharpened by carrying an echo of Proust. In ‘mayday mayday’ Roberts describes the last days of her elder sister: You thrash on. Death’s hooks in your belly, your mouth. . . . . . Your voice on the telephone stumbles: so far away. (1995: 89–90)

Any literary reference to the disembodied voice on the telephone functioning as a harbinger of death looks back to Proust’s first experience of the telephone, where his grandmother’s plaintive calling evokes in the narrator’s mind the Underworld and Orpheus’ desperate cries as he attempts to reach his dead wife. The Mirror of the Mother contains a sequence of poems reworking the myth of Demeter and Persephone; Demeter, crazed with grief, longs for the return of her daughter lost to the Underworld. Roberts 9 Proust (1999: 760). For a discussion of the Virgilian elements of Proust, see Cox (1999: 139). 10 My translation.

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dedicates the poem ‘Demeter keeps going’ to her own mother, anticipating the poems in Psyche and the Hurricane that will describe her elder sister’s death from cancer at the age of 43, and her mother’s grief at the loss of her middle-aged daughter. Demeter is described as a mother who ‘listens for messages j issuing up from the roots, the invisible girl’, who ‘prays that her buried daughter may rise, j [ . . . ] waits for Persephone to return’. In the following poem, ‘Persephone pays a visit to Demeter’, the daughter addresses her mother only to display her ‘first grey hair’ and to make it utterly clear that her next journey to the Underworld will be definitive: I’m like one of those boats down there siren bawling with grief: I’m going back mother, this time I really mean it I’m really going. (1986: 96)

Roberts deploys the same technique as both Eavan Boland and Josephine Balmer as she intensifies the poignancy of her Virgilian allusions by refracting them through echoes of the story of Demeter and Persephone. When she treats the subject of her sister’s dying explicitly, she channels her grief through the ancient lines of Virgil. The poem ‘lacrimae rerum’ begins with the most depressingly pedestrian image: Another leak in the lavatory roof drip drip down the lightbulb (1995: 85)

The mood is lifted in the second verse, as she describes waking under a cloud of quilt last night’s hot sweetness still fizzing between my legs. (1995: 85)

But this is a poem about death, about the inexorable rhythms of life and death, so that her joy is brief. Any happiness serves mainly to sharpen Roberts’s grief as she looks into the future over the washingup bowl and sees her sister’s impending death: It’s your birthday next week. This time next year I think you’ll be gone

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Sibylline Sisters quietly as this water slipping over my hands. After your funeral we’ll return to your parched house. (1995: 85)

The Virgilian allusion of the title ‘lacrimae rerum’ is to the first book of the Aeneid, where the Trojans, overcome by grief at seeing their former friends and homeland depicted on a wall painting of the Trojan War, ease the rawness of their grief by imagining the future, both so that they might situate their loss within a cycle of human history in which cities fall, each with an unimaginable cargo of loss, only to rise again as empires, but also so that they might be comforted through their commemoration in art: ‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent j solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem’ (Human events stir tears; what dies has the power to move minds. Cast off fear! These rumours, this fame, will bring you some safety (Aen. 1. 462–3). Roberts’s poem reverses the effect of the Virgilian original; her poem is heavy with misery as she anticipates her loss: I carry your dying inside me as real as milk as I’ll carry on getting the roof fixed making love weeping into the washing-up (1995: 85–6)

The chores that nag at her attention are banal enough to offer her space for her grief while also asserting the humdrum rhythm of a life that will carry on past the bleakness of her sister’s death into the future. And it is here that the effect of the Virgilian intertext offers a glimmer of comfort—the rawness of such losses is smoothed in the long run by a recognition that they are shared, that they have always been woven into the fabric of human history. In ‘Persephone pays a visit to Demeter’ Roberts’s sister describes her dying as a boat returning to the Underworld. Roberts employs comparable imagery when, in ‘Penelope awaits the return of Ulysses’, she depicts a Penelope whose job it is both to weave and to unweave in order to create.

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Night-boat pushes through darkness. Cargo of tangled threads I try in the morning to gloss into words. This is the dream-work: to weave, to unweave. (1986: 117)

That this is aligned to Roberts’s writing practice is clear from her description of how she works: I print out at night what I’ve written during the day, because I like reading hard copy and can scribble corrections on it more easily. Poetry, however, I write in longhand on big sheets of paper. I write these out over and over, twenty versions perhaps, the poem growing a bit more each time, until it’s done. I redraft a great deal. That’s what writing means: rewriting.11

The Underworld becomes, not only a house of death, but a site of creativity and inspiration. This is its function in Roberts’s novel The Book of Mrs Noah (1987), where the sibyls, or contemporary women writers, travel with Mrs Noah on the Ark in search of their stories. Although Roberts alludes only fleetingly to Virgil in The Book of Mrs Noah, her insistence on forging a female perspective within a male-dominated literary tradition, and her presentation of contemporary women writers as Sibyls, offer many insights into and parallels with the women discussed in this volume. In an earlier poem, ‘the sibyl’s song’, Roberts acknowledges the painful birthing pains of female creativity: having crouched, having borne down and down, having yelled having delivered myself having danced, having bitten cloth, beaten air, until the song came having delivered myself of a strong song I collapse, gasping, with dissolved bones. (1986: 49)

As Roberts depicts her Muse, her fount of inspiration, her poem becomes increasingly Sapphic. Once again through her invocation of classical figures she is treading in the footsteps of French writers such

11

www.micheleroberts.co.uk (accessed 18 Nov. 2008).

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as Gide, Proust, and Wittig, all of whom allude to Virgil in order to include him within a tradition of homosexual writing: she who came to me, she who called out loud she who licked at my ear like flame, and sank in deep as a wound, she who swelled in me . . . . . I will sing high in the fire oh let the fierce goddess come (1986: 49)

Roberts develops further this fascination with the figure of the Sibyl in The Book of Mrs Noah. The writers on Roberts’s Ark are female, are a series of irreverent Sibyls, and the only male on board is the Gaffer, God the Father, he who makes gaffes. The Sibyls are no longer defined by nationality, as in the Sistine Chapel, but by personal qualities, so that Roberts’s Sibyls are the Correct Sibyl, the Deftly Sibyl, the Re-Vision Sibyl, the Babble-On Sibyl, and the Forsaken Sibyl. The Gaffer is there to listen to the stories that form a history of women’s experience and to learn from his mistakes. From the beginning it is clear that the women on board the Ark are outsiders and have been cast aside from mainstream literary experience: The Ark of Women is the Other One. The Salon des Refuse´es. Des Refusantes. Cruise ship for the females who are only fitted in as monsters: the gorgons, the basilisks, the sirens, the harpies, the furies, the viragos, the amazons, the medusas, the sphinxes. Where shall we go, the women who don’t fit in? Those of us who are not citizens but exiles? Those of us who are not named as belonging, but as outcasts, as barbarians? Into this Ark of Women. The Ark of Women has been founded by an international committee of sibyls in order to guard and encourage women’s creativity. (1987: 19–20)12

To be branded as such a monster, several of whom have come straight from the pages of the Aeneid—the harpies, the furies, and the amazons—it is enough simply to be a woman.13 Alarmingly, this view is 12

Roberts (1987). References to this edition appear within parentheses in the text. Keith points out that it is precisely these female figures who engender the wars within the Aeneid: ‘Thus the Eumenides sit between War and Discord at the threshold 13

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enshrined within the system governing our libraries, those storehouses of wisdom and enlightenment, as Roberts points out later in the novel: ‘The Dewey system, used in all the public libraries in Britain, places Woman in a sub-section of Sociology along with Lunatics and Gypsies. (Wanderers)’ (1987: 132).14 In order to find some kind of home for themselves in the world, Roberts’s women need to visit the sites of the literature that has shaped their culture and to establish a place for themselves within it. The invitation that Mrs Noah issues to the Sibyls also anticipates the trip undertaken by Drabble’s heroine, Candida Wilton, who travels in the footsteps of Aeneas from Carthage to Naples as one of the band of seven sisters: Dear Sibyl: this is an invitation to join me, Mrs Noah, on board the Ark. The purpose of my voyage, though not necessarily of yours, is to solve a problem: to discover how other women survive: to sail towards, and explore, the western Isles, in order to arrive at a solution. I need companions. I’ll leave you free all day to get on with your writing: I simply suggest that in the evenings we could get together and tell each other stories. I need to hear your stories. Will you come with me? (1987: 32)15

of the underworld (6. 279–81); the Dirae appear on the shield of Aeneas in the company of Mars, Discord and Bellona at the battle of Actium (8. 700–703); and the Fury Tisiphone rages on the battlefield at the very centre of the action in the Italian war (10. 760–761). The Furies not only symbolise the violence of war but actively summon the man to battle throughout the poem. Aeneas follows the summons of an Erinys when he rushes into battle during the sack of Troy (2. 337–338) and the Trojan and Latin troops muster for war in Book 7 at the summons of the Fury Allecto’ (Keith 2000: 34). 14 Roberts makes the same point in her autobiography, where she describes her training to become a librarian: ‘The classification system used in British public libraries was the Dewey Decimal one, which divided knowledge into ten hierarchically arranged categories, broken down into subsections of subsections. Women were classified in a subgroup under Category Seven alongside Lunatics and Gypsies. Men did not feature: as designers of systems they were assumed to be as omnipresent and invisible as God the Father’ (Roberts 2007: 63–4). 15 In her critical work also Roberts equates water with the Underworld of memory and creativity: ‘Water in all the folk tales and fairy stories of Europe, is the place which allows us to become fluid and to dissolve. It’s the in-between place, the crossing-over place, like dusk or dawn; it’s the place of transitions and transformations. It’s the place of imagination, of memory, the place where we’ve buried all the feelings and experiences we can’t bear to remember, all the desires and anxieties we want to forget’ (‘Words across the Water’, in Roberts 1998: 143).

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Roberts perpetuates one of the strongest traditions in Western culture, by blending Virgilian and biblical imagery. She achieves this, not just by including God as the Gaffer, but also by the transfiguration of Mrs Noah into a Sibyl. In her plucking of leaves and her smoky obfuscation of her surroundings, Mrs Noah resembles the Virgilian Sibyl:16 I point at the brazier which I set up earlier in front of the altar on a tripod. At its foot is a wreath of laurel. I pull a spray of leaves out of the wreath and cast them onto the glowing coals, causing smoke, a sweet stench, to eddy forth. – I don’t accept inspiration coming from anyone but God the Father, grumbles the middle-aged man: sheer idolatry. – Be quiet, I snap: if you want to take part in our group then you must have the courtesy to abide by our rituals. I turn to the others. – Who wants to be priestess? Who will consult the sacred fire? The Forsaken Sibyl’s voice is unexpectedly confident. – You, Mrs Noah, You must become a sibyl too, like the rest of us, as I told you before. (1987: 51)

The Gaffer objects to any deviation from the stories from the ancient world. But, as Mrs Noah assumes the identity of a Sibyl, she intones corrections to ‘the story you may have read in the library, in the books written by men’ (1987: 52). ‘Hear me,’ she cries, pointing out: ‘This story has an earlier version. Rewritten, it has been almost erased. Its forgotten words, trampled in the dust of the male scholars’ sentences, yelp in their elegant pauses, poke through the gaps between their graceful lines’ (1987: 52). In her efforts to rescue the voices of women from silence, Mrs Noah focuses on the myth of Daphne and Apollo, which appears in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and chastises Apollo for locking up Daphne’s version of the story inside his own. It is entirely appropriate that the Metamorphoses should be invoked, since Ovid was recounting the history of the world from a new perspective, and glorying in his ability to spin stories that defy 16

See Aeneid 3. 443–51. In The Book of Mrs Noah Roberts makes the connections between leaves and books explicit, as she describes the leaves of the oak (a sacred tree) thus: ‘the edges of the oak leaves are rusty brown, and some are already fallen on the grass like tiny wrinkled books’ (1987: 143).

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regulation and order and prescription. As Mrs Noah comes to the room of metamorphoses, she finds: ‘Here all the rules are broken, joyfully. Here chaos reigns for the sheer pleasure of it’ (1987: 66). In Roberts’s version, the Bible is an attempt to control and subjugate this chaos: ‘God the Father didn’t approve of this state of affairs, so he sent the Flood. It’s all there, in chapter six of the Gaffer’s novel. God the Father wanted order. So he invented heterosexuality, monogamy and the family’ (1987: 66–7). And, while Mrs Noah knows that she and the rest of her sex have been among the victims of this tyrannical order, she nevertheless feels a sneaking sympathy with his need to curb the endless proliferation of narratives and stories. The freedom of expression that these women seek, the utopia of female mythmaking, carries its own price—not only that the unleashed current of these suppressed tales will overwhelm the narrators, but that women, too, will be liable to create ghettos of writing that themselves will exclude and oppress. The Gaffer is not only threatened but bewildered by the surge of female creativity, and finds himself in exactly the same position as the women whom he once excluded—on the margins, looking in, attempting to find his own name, his own story, in what they write: He strokes his chin. First of all, some research. How to define men’s writing? What do men write about? What is this thing the sibyls keep banging on about called masculinity? He could start here, in the Reading Room. A man is: not-a-woman. Scan all these female texts, discover what they leave out, then plunge into that blank space and explore. (1987: 236)

While Mrs Noah is exhilarated by her plunge on an ark through that blank space, she has acquired enough sibylline wisdom and prescience to know that the utopia that she forges through stories is an illusory Underworld: I develop eyes of piercing vision, capable of seeing down through the wooden hull of the Boat, through the fathoms of ocean underneath us, right down to the stones and gravel and sand that once formed the earth, the dry land. I build a new world there, one of my own choosing. A childish vision, idealistic, impossible. I know that. I fill it with people who are as fluid as water, flowing past each other in peace and letting each other alone. (1987: 82)

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In an essay on comparative literature, ‘Words across the Water’, Roberts compares the impulse to establish connections and links between stories and experiences to a journey undertaken by boat, and draws explicitly upon Virgilian imagery to do so: European literature provides us with a potent image of a boatman ferrying frightened people across a cold, dark stretch of river: Charon taking the souls of the dead across the river Styx, the entrance to the underworld. Dante takes the classical image from Virgil’s Aeneid and reshapes it. Dante stands, in his persona as pilgrim as well as poet, next to his poet-guide Virgil, watching as the queue waiting to get on the ferry finally wakes up to what’s in store [ . . . ] Does the thought of reading a translation, venturing into the unknown, call up deep, unconscious images of being taken across dark waters to a place we dread; the finality of death?17

As we have seen, in the Aeneid the Cumaean Sibyl famously warns Aeneas that the descent into such a hell is easy, that the real task is being able to retrace one’s steps into the upper air: ‘sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad aurasj hoc opus, hic labor est’ (But to recall those steps, to escape to the fresh air above you, j There lies the challenge, the labour!) (Aen. 6. 128–9), and Mrs Noah discovers the truth of this at the heart of her unbridled, exuberant chaos of stories: ‘I understand the Gaffer’s point of view, because now I want to retrace my steps and find the way out. But which way did I come? There is no sign saying Exit, no red arrow pointing’ (1987: 68). Not only is Mrs Noah overwhelmed by the proliferation of tales, but she also comes to realize that a quest to establish a utopian world, in which all voices can be heard and where there will be no oppression, entails accommodating not only women but all categories of people who have been victimized and silenced. Towards the end of the book, both the Deftly Sibyl and the Forsaken Sibyl recognize this also. As the Deftly Sibyl types: Her small hammers reconstruct what she knows: a partial vision, limited, the joins showing. So be it. You do what you can, while the dispossessed line up on the path outside and beat at the door and she opens it. All the homeless pour into her heart and squat it, their anger and despair a further hammer

17

Roberts, ‘Words across the Water’, in Roberts (1998: 141–3).

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fragmenting her even as she strives to build sentences that will last, to do her job capably. They dictate to her: a catalogue of wild cries. (1987: 279)

The fusion of these categories of the oppressed is also, as we shall see, a feature of Boland’s poetic underworld, where the ghosts of the women who have been placed ‘outside history’ meld with the ghosts of the emigrant Irish, driven into exile from their country. The Forsaken Sibyl also is haunted as she writes, both by the suffering of Londoners in the Second World War and by the ongoing suffering of refugees and exiles. Not only is the London of the Second World War a quintessentially Virgilian site, as we shall see in the discussion of A. S. Byatt, but, by presenting London as a city of rubbish and ruin, Roberts, too, evokes Eliot’s The Waste Land and, by extension, the figure of the exhausted, world-weary Sibyl, which he uses as an epigram: Smashed light fittings dangle from the walls. The electricity fails. Neighbours complain about noise and mess. Invoices must be haggled over. Pall of thick dirt enters every pore of the house, dissolves it, dust to dust. At night she lies sleepless in her grimy bed, ears cocked for the scrabble of birds and rats across the gaping building site on the other side of her door. Open the door: step out into nothingness; the void; half the house swinging loose from a single hinge. She is lonely. By day she feeds on brief interchanges with the builders, with shopkeepers. By night, she thinks of Londoners in the last war, emerging from bomb-shelters in the morning to find their homes toppled and smashed, of the people across the world driven by war and poverty into refugee camps, squatting under cardboard shelters to await death, watching the children sicken, their bellies swell. (1987: 281)18

The violence and suffering can be countered only by a constant desire to re-create the world, to attempt to maintain belief in the possibility of peace and equity: But perhaps renewal has to be achieved repeatedly, by each of us, by each community. The divine child has to be born, with labour and struggle, in each of us: the discovery of how to create a world of freedom and justice,

18

See also: ‘I spend the rest of the day exploring the city. Weeds choke the public gardens. Grass grows thickly in the cracks between paving stones. The fountains are dry. A dead horse, covered in black flies, sprawls outside the State Museum’ (1987: 135).

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how to live fully, how to stop hating and killing, how to prevent the planet from being blown up. (1987: 101)

Roberts’s blending throughout the book of biblical and pagan imagery serves as a reminder that Virgil was initially hailed as a prophet of Christ through the Fourth Eclogue, or the Messianic Eclogue, which celebrates the birth of a child who heralds a Golden Age of peace. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, to see him being invoked by writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, who is examining the cultural divisions of a post-9/11 America, or Janet Lembke, whose translation of the Georgics is shadowed by the ecological threat hanging over the planet. Just as Roberts treats a suffering that has extended far beyond the category of women, so too she universalizes sibylline qualities so that they can belong to any woman, a strategy that she shares with Ruth Fainlight. When Mrs Noah thinks of her own female ancestors, she finds in her grandmother’s tone and expression the acerbic weariness of a Sibyl who has seen too much, who would prefer to be left in peace to decipher her messages from the stars and the winds: it’s an effort for her to readjust her eyes and focus on me rather than on wheeling empty air, on stars. Her face is austere: all neediness has long since been scoured away from it by the winds she lives amongst and loves. [ . . . ] I can read your thoughts. They don’t interest me. I’m weary of the world you still choose to live in. I have nothing to say to you except this: you are naı¨ve and stupid and ignorant; you have never listened to me or taken my advice; and so now I wash my hands of you. (1987: 15)

Her mother, too, has absorbed a fund of wisdom through years of silent watching and waiting, though her sibylline qualities are far gentler and more benign: ‘Her mother’s eyes are brown, deep-set, sunk into shallows of bone, surrounded by webbed lines. Eyes that look unflinchingly at her husband’s minor cruelties, at her own yearnings and silences, at her children’s squabbling. Tired eyes sometimes, beautiful eyes, eyes holding an infinity of knowledge’ (1987: 93). It is precisely these silences and yearnings to which Roberts is now attempting to give expression. One of the characters of the book equates the silencing and repression with death, using the metaphor of snow to illustrate this. Ever since Charlotte Bronte¨’s vivid creation in Villette of the

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figure of Lucy Snowe as an embodiment of stifled passion and creativity, snow has evoked female suppression and spiritual death. But ultimately Roberts’s sibyls reject death, haunting the libraries until they can be brought to life again in new texts: Cold, white pieces of sky fall down day by day, smoothing out my world, blotting out my thoughts. God’s silence wraps me up, hushing me, putting an icy finger to my lips. I open my mouth and the whiteness of the sky falls onto my tongue, dissolving, pouring down my throat like sweet milk. Welcome, death. In you I drown. Until I’m reincarnated, born again into the next story. I’m the ghost in the library, cackling, unseen, from between the pages of the sacred texts, waiting my chance to haunt a new generation of readers. I’m what’s missing. I’m the wanderer. (1987: 89)

It is apt that the ghost should be figured as a wanderer, since it is wanderers and refugees above all who have identified with Virgil’s tale of exile. The oxymoronic imagery of patient restlessness, as the ghosts bide their time waiting to be reborn for a new generation, is quintessentially sibylline. It is time to examine the shapes such reincarnations assume within Margaret Drabble’s depiction of twenty-first-century Sibyls, who carry the history of their cultural pasts within them as they roam the streets of London, a contemporary metropolis.

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6 Margaret Drabble At first sight Margaret Drabble’s novels seem an improbable place to find Virgil. Her fiction probes the conflicts and contradictions facing highly educated women of the late twentieth century, and map the course of her own life and career.1 Her first novel, A Summer Birdcage (1963), examines the choices open to a young woman graduate, poised on the brink of adulthood, weighing up the attractions of marriage or a career. Her later novels analyse the position of women in late middle age, looking back over the life they have lived and attempting to construct a narrative that will make sense of it. A sense of loss haunts Drabble’s uvre, as her characters are constantly aware of the lives they never led and of the possibilities denied to them each time they choose a direction in life.2 1

‘Margaret Drabble’s novels follow the trajectory of her own life. In the early works the focus is on the situations of women who are having to make their lives cohere around a jumble of partly lapsed, partly operating rules, as they struggle to maintain their own direction in life, often in the midst of marriage and childbearing’ (Parker and Todd 1983: 161). See also Cronan Rose: ‘With the possible exception of Jerusalem the Golden which Drabble claims was based on her mother’s life rather than her own . . . it is certainly possible to watch Margaret Drabble moving through the life cycle as one novel succeeds another and the chirpy new graduate of A Summer BirdCage gives way to the middle-aged writer in The Middle Ground who is “bloody sick of bloody women”(Cronan Rose 1985a: 8). 2 ‘Margaret Drabble is the most contemporary of novelists: a whole generation of women readers identify with her characters, who they feel represent their own problems. Her heroines were preoccupied with the difficulties of fulfilment and self-definition in a man’s world, the conflicting claims of selfhood, wifehood, and motherhood, long before the women’s lib movement really got going. Most of her leading characters are women, attractive and highly educated. In youth they are bewildered by their twin destiny as intelligentsia, on the one hand, and sexual beings, on the other. How to reconcile the two? Drabble heroines suffer characteristically

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The longing for a position that would offer fulfilment as a mother, as a wife, and as an intellectual is indicated by Drabble’s titles, many of which suggest that their protagonists are straining after an unattainable ideal, for example, Jerusalem the Golden (1967), The Realms of Gold (1975), The Radiant Way (1987), and The Gates of Ivory (1991). Drabble’s characters struggle not only to find a niche in which they can realize their full potential but also to find a guide to, a map of, their experiences within a male-dominated society. In 1975 Marion Vlastos Libby pointed out that Drabble’s ‘central protagonist [ . . . ] is always a woman and the society in which she lives is always depicted, accurately, as deeply patriarchal and class-bound, the problem of the individual’s capacity of self-determination is inevitably tied to the feminist perspective’.3 In order to create a way of existing within this society Drabble’s protagonists must revisit the past, must meditate on the way in which the past has created them. This is perhaps most evident in The Realms of Gold, whose heroine, Frances Wingate, is an archaeologist, so that through her profession she must uncover and evaluate the past. Clare Hanson argues that Drabble exploits this possibility to make us more aware of the various hidden strands that shape our experiences within Western culture: ‘In likening Frances to Boadicea, who resisted the Roman invasion of Britain, Drabble reinforces the point that Frances stands in opposition to the classical tradition and to various dominant strands in Western culture.’4 At the same time, however, when Frances needs to distract herself from the pain of her toothache, she instinctively recites to herself Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, Horace, and Virgil. Drabble’s heroines have to negotiate the same paradox over and over again—they are caught at the tail end of a tradition that has bypassed much of their experience, thereby failing to provide them with a mouthpiece, but at the same time it is this very tradition that has shaped them, and as yet they have found no alternative. The best that they can do is to

from a combination of intellectual arrogance and diffidence, a fear of their gifts and confusion as to how they should be used’ (Grosvenor Myers 1974: 13). 3 Vlastos (1975: 176), cited in Cronan Rose (1985a: 2). 4 Hanson (2000: 111).

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critique these texts by incorporating them into their own personal experience.5 Drabble’s characters frequently use the image of the Underworld, as a site for recovering their memories and evaluating their experiences. The Gates of Ivory is prefaced by a citation from Homer,6 and at the end of The Peppered Moth (2000), the novel in which Drabble attempts to resurrect her mother by giving imaginative expression to her thwarted ambitions and smouldering rage, she equates her experience of writing her mother’s story to a descent into the Underworld: There is an underworld story from another mythology about a woman who wished to enter hell to seek for her loved one. Only the dead could enter hell, so she made herself as one of the dead. She rubbed herself with dead rat water in order to disguise herself with the smell of dead rat, and thus she was able to pass the guardians of the dead. I feel, in writing this, that I have made myself smell of dead rat, and I am not sure how to get rid of the smell.7

The difficulty of entering the past, of engaging with the pain of betrayal is also explored in her latest novel, The Sea Lady (2006), which analyses the ebbing and flowing personal relationship between the celebrity and academic Ailsa Kelman and the marine biologist Professor Humphrey Clark. Humphrey Clark travels by train towards a reunion with Ailsa in the fictional Finsterness, a place that for him was golden with pristine childhood memories and the place where he first met her. An omniscient narrator attempts to guard him from investing too much emotion in the place by citing the Sibyl’s warning of the difficulty of returning from the Underworld: Beneath the bell tower, robed in scarlet and bottle green and black. In July, on the north-east coast, overlooking the North Sea. Hic labor, hoc opus est. (p. 25)8 5

‘Drabble cites canonical texts in order to critique them, to contest their founding assumptions through a more readerly form and a more woman-centred content’ (Hanson 2000: 111). 6 ‘Dreams, said Penelope to the stranger, may puzzle and mislead. They do not always foretell the truth. They come to us through two gates: one is of horn, the other is of ivory. The dreams that come to us through the traitor ivory deceive us with false images of what will never come to pass: but those that appear to us through the polished horn speak plainly of what could be and what will be’ (Homer, The Odyssey, 19. 560–5). 7 Drabble (2001: 392). 8 Drabble (2006). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

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The closer Humphrey comes to recovering these memories of formative childhood experiences during the Second World War, the more urgently and mournfully intones the voice of warning: How far back can we go? The past is dry and may never flower for us. It is not a question of memory, and it is not a question of effort. It is a question of good faith. Only for the pure of heart will the past revive. To the impure, it remains dead and lost, lost and dead. Hic labor, hoc opus est. It is hard, it is hard. When the heart is corrupt, the enterprise is doomed.9 Too late, too late, booms the foghorn over the grey fog and the invisible water. Try again, try again, tolls the bell from the bell tower over the steep slates of the roofs of the city. Turn again, turn again, tolls the bell. To fail is to fall is to die. To move forward we must move back, back to the plain land of bread and butter, when we were as little children, with few temptations, in a carefully rationed world. (p. 42)

Before Humphrey can achieve any kind of epiphany, however, he must struggle through humiliation and grief. Towards the end of the book we are reminded yet again: Hic labor, hoc opus est. It is hard, it is hard. Goodness and generosity are required of him. But he is not up to it. He cannot clamber up to the light of day. He surrenders to grief. (p. 287)

But the key to Finsterness, to the Underworld, is a recognition of it as a place that is both light and darkness, a place that harbours gloom and resentment but also the possibility of purification through forgiveness:

9 Drabble’s work here echoes Michel Butor’s La Modification (1957), itself an extended meditation on the nature of the Virgilian Underworld. When the protagonist, Delmont, begs the Sibyl for entry into the Underworld, she retorts: ‘Non, point pour toi. Point pour ceux qui sont e´trangers a` leur de´sirs.’ (No, absolutely not for you. Absolutely not for those who are strangers to their desires.) (Butor 1957: 215; my translation).

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‘The word Finsterness,’ said the Public Orator, in summation, ‘suggests, as some of you will know, Darkness. In the German language, Die Finsternis means darkness, obscurity or gloom. And Humphrey Clark was here as a child during the darkness and gloom of the Second World War. But to the children of Finsterness, it was a place of light and learning’. (p. 335)

The passage is not only prefaced by the Sibyl’s warning about the difficulties of emerging from the Underworld (hoc opus, hic labor est—this is the task, this is the labour (Aen. 6. 129)) but in its insistence on gloom and obscurity also evokes Virgil’s vivid depiction of an Underworld where night has leached the colour from the world, where the very heavens are shrouded in murky gloom: ‘ubi caelum condidit umbra j Iuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem’ (when Jupiter buries the sky’s vaults j Deep beneath ghost shadows, when black night robs substance of colour) (Aen. 6. 271–2). Drabble situates this Underworld in the Second World War, one of the most Virgilian periods of European history.10 By travelling back to Finsterness Humphrey has travelled back into the past, has examined the way in which his childhood moulded his future self, and, for a moment, is able to redeem the instances of misery and humiliation by holding them up to the light of forgiveness: As Humphrey watches her antics, it comes to him that forgiveness need not be maintained in time. It may come in an instant, like grace. It need not endure. One may be redeemed in an instant. Repentance needs only an instance, a measurement too small to show on the clock face. They have forgiven one another, for this instant, and that will suffice. (p. 341)

Drabble’s characters have reached a point where they understand the contingency of circumstances and the provisional nature of emotions. The gates to the Underworld may still be open, but moments of humanity and communion offer the hope that emergence may at least be possible.11 10

See Cox (1999: 57), Josipovici (1984), and Ziolkowski (1993: 203), where he refers to 1944 as the annus mirabilis Virgilianus that saw the publication of Eliot’s ‘What is a Classic?’, Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, and Jackson Knight’s Roman Vergil. 11 The open-endedness of this novel is a typical Drabble strategy, as Lorna Irvine points out: ‘The persistent avoidance of endings in Drabble’s novels reflects throughout the victory of life in a dramatized struggle between the life and death urges, a seemingly calculated recommendation for controlling nihilism’ (Irvine 1985: 84).

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Though Virgil surfaces in several of Drabble’s novels, it is in the novel The Seven Sisters (2003) that the Virgilian imagery and references are the most sustained. We shall see that Drabble writes herself into a Virgilian tradition, explicitly adopting the Virgil of twentiethcentury Britain. She is an heiress of T. S. Eliot as her Virgil sings of a tradition that appears to be redundant and depicts the wastelands of London where communication no longer takes place. But her Virgil is also a Virgil who speaks for refugees and exiles. In this novel, as in the poetry and poetic treatises of Boland, the exiles are women who have been exposed to the Western tradition as part of their education and culture, yet who have been denied the rights of full citizenship within the tradition. The protagonist of The Seven Sisters, Candida Wilton, is a middleclass woman who, in late middle age, finds herself divorced from her husband and rejected by her family. After her divorce she flees the humiliation of sympathy within her home town and turns to the bleak anonymity offered by London. London is presented as a foreign land, with its own language and customs that are alien to Candida: ‘I don’t think I can recapture that first sense of disbelieving amazement I used to feel in these streets. I was an Alice in Wonderland’ (p. 55).12 Eventually she comes to recognize that the inhabitants of this new world are her kindred spirits, that the rootlessness offered by London is her natural environment, is home: It’s a nice evening tonight. I’ll go for a short walk by the canal, and join the other no-hopers, killing time before time kills them. Killing time on their bicycles, with their fishing umbrellas, with their sad dogs, with their trailing grandchildren. Jogging, loitering, plodding. That’s my proper place. That’s my destiny. (p. 140)

Drabble is renowned as a chronicler of London, as in her novels she charts the many different faces of an evolving modern city.13 Here 12

text.

Drabble (2003). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the

13 In an interview with Gillian Parker and Janet Todd in 1980 she describes the writing of The Middle Ground: ‘It’s very much a London novel. It’s also about feminism slightly. It’s called The Middle Ground [ . . . ] Because London life is so immediate and rapidly changing I wanted to write about the texture of it’ (Parker and Todd 1983: 177).

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the city is a site of exile, a twenty-first-century wasteland, and Candida gives a vivid account of how it feels to be caught in this emptiness with a meaningless past stretching behind, and an expanse of meaningless future lying ahead: Nothing much happens to me now, nor ever will again. [ . . . ] I cannot help but feel that there is something important about this nothingness. It should represent a lack of hope, and yet I think that, somewhere, hope may yet be with me. This nothingness is significant. If I immerse myself in it, perhaps it will turn itself into something else. Into something terrible, into something transformed. I cast myself upon its waste of waters. (p. 3)

Her description evokes the indeterminacy, the perpetual exile of the Aeneid. Throughout the Aeneid Aeneas is suspended between his past and his future. He is driven out of Troy, and the poem ends before he founds Rome, so that the point of arrival, the teleology that will make sense of everything, is absent. Virgilian imagery colours this description of the wasteland of Candida’s existence, but equally it is through Virgil that she is offered the hope of an exit from a barren existence, as she embarks on a quest for identity, itself a Virgilian theme. The imagery of wandering at the mercy of the ocean prompts a comparison with Aeneas’ lengthy travels at sea before reaching his goal as he journeyed from Troy via Carthage to Italy. In order to give her life some bearings, to structure this emptiness, Candida enrols on an evening class on the Aeneid, partly in the hope that she will find some friends and partly because she finds it endearingly quaint that anyone would imagine that there might be a place for Virgil in contemporary London: You wouldn’t think you could go to an evening class on Virgil’s Aeneid in West London at the end of the twentieth century, would you? And in fact you can’t anymore, as it’s closed. But you could, then, two years ago, when I joined it. It was a real lifeline to me in those first solitary months of my new London life. It was an excellent class. I enjoyed it, and I was a conscientious student. Why did I join it? Because its very existence seemed so anachronistic and so improbable. Because I thought it would keep my mind in good shape. Because I thought it might find me a friend. Because I thought it might find me the kind of friend that I would not have known in my former life. (p. 10)

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Through her decision to study the Aeneid Candida incorporates Virgil into her London existence, so that he stands over the successive transformations of her world and is midwife to her rebirths. When the evening class is shut down, Candida feels once again as if she has been cast into exile: ‘We Virgilians hadn’t got to know each other well enough to stay in touch naturally. We hadn’t had time to build up an easy extra-mural social life. And some of us just weren’t Health Club types. We were made homeless, and turned out to wander our ways’ (p. 12). Paradoxically, however, the very closing-down of the evening class provides Candida with an entre´e into a new world, the ultramodern world of the Health Club, with its machinery and saunas and gym. She is caught between two worlds, and once again it is Virgil who is her passport into the future: ‘It was a new world in there, an amazing new world. I would never have dared to enter it had I not had a passport from the old world of Virgil. I would not have felt that I had the right. I am not very bold’ (p. 14). Although Candida appears to attribute her impulse to follow the course to a somewhat quirky happenstance, it eventually becomes apparent that her interest in, and reverence for, Latin dates back to her days as wife of a headmaster and further still to her schooldays. Though she sat the highest grade of exam in Latin at school, the ‘S’ level, she does not have enough confidence to stand in to cover for the Classics teacher at her husband’s school: ‘I said no, I wouldn’t take her class. I said my Latin wasn’t good enough. And it wasn’t. Latin is a serious subject. You can’t play around with Latin. I have a respect for Latin’ (p. 79). She remembers her own teacher as one who staunchly upheld the values of a tradition that was in the process of collapsing and dying around her. She was ‘an excellent teacher. Maybe all Classics teachers are excellent. They sing in the dark and shore up the ruins. They play with tragic brilliance the endgame’ (p. 83). Drabble is, of course, alluding not only to Beckett’s Endgame (1957), but also to Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which depicts the futile attempts of a civilization to make sense of its culture when this culture has failed and been broken into pieces. ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins,’ laments Eliot, who also prefaces the poem with an epigram describing the Sibyl’s longing to die, reinforcing still further the picture of a world that has lost its roots and is doomed to live out its days in meaningless despair.

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This explicit allusion to The Waste Land makes it clearer that Drabble’s London is directly descended from the London that Eliot so vividly depicts. Her London is a melting pot of individuals in exile from their real identities and unable to comprehend each other’s tongues as they wander through the ruins and detritus. As Candida walks the streets, she notices: ‘Mattresses, abandoned pushchairs, old rugs, bicycle parts, motorcar parts. Car exhausts, broken wing mirrors, bumpers, sawn-off planks of wood’ (p. 55). The city is infested with ‘Pigeon dirt, dog dirt, cat dirt, human dirt. City dirt’ (p. 56). The Waste Land, too, is a poem strewn with London filth and emphasizes the fact that London is a ruined city, a city of bits and pieces, the capital of a defunct empire.14 As Charles Martindale points out, ruins remind us of the beginnings of a tradition or civilization; while pointing out that we stand at the end of it, they are ‘signs both of origins and of ends or the end. Ruin also to a degree restores art to nature, or blurs the distinction between them.’15 Martindale follows Vance in seeing the rubbish itself as creating a direct link between the London of The Waste Land and ancient Rome: A form of waste is rubbish, and rubbish certainly features in the world of The Waste Land, for example the detritus floating in the Thames, the empty bottles, sandwich papers and other testimony of summer nights. Rome too has been seen as a rubbish heap; in the nineteenth century one of the commonest signs in the city read, precisely, immondezzaio.16

He argues persuasively that The Waste Land forms part of a literary tradition that perceives London as a modern version of ancient Rome: The Waste Land is a London poem, but London had long been seen as the heir of Rome, even as maybe more truly Rome than the modern city which bears the name; or such is the burden of a famous opening sentence by another expatriate American, Henry James: ‘The Prince had always liked his

14 ‘Beneath T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland [sic] lie the history and mythology of imperial Rome, fragmented and transposed to our century in the dying British Empire’ (Vance 1989: i. 387). 15 Martindale (1995: 254). 16 Martindale (1995: 254).

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London, when it had come to him; he was one of the Modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber . . . If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge.’17

On this reading the London that Candida inhabits is a direct descendant of ancient Rome. Its individuals are aliens to each other, passing by like ghosts. Although Candida’s name means ‘bright’ or ‘shining’, her light burns dimly in London: ‘Candida looks dim and miserable, the dimmest of the stars’ (p. 238). She explicitly likens herself to the ghost orchid that she occasionally glimpses through the murk: ‘It disappears and reappears without warning or reason. Its ghostly pallor glimmers in the depths. I will not see it flower amidst the urban garbage by the towpath of the Grand Union Canal. Perhaps the French gentleman saw a blossoming of my ghostly self And I, in my turn, saw his ghostly spirit flower’ (p. 124). The passage evokes not only the golden bough, hidden in obscurity, but also Dido’s shade, glimpsed indistinctly through underworld gloom: ‘obscuram, qualem primo qui surgere mense j aut videt aut vidisse putat per nubila lunam’ (Dimly, the way one sees, or imagines one has seen, the wandering j Moon on the first of the month rise up through a veil of enshrouding cloud) (Aen. 6. 453–4). Drabble’s London is haunted by ghosts, quite as much as Eliot’s The Waste Land (ll. 60–5), which itself relied on an allusion to Virgil’s depiction of the throngs of the dead in Aeneid 6 (306–12). matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae, impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum: quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto quam multae glimerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus trans pontum fugat et terris immitit apricis. (Mothers and full-grown men and the bodies of great-hearted heroes Finished with life, young boys, young girls who have never been married, Youths in their prime set on funeral pyres while their parents are watching: 17

Martindale (1995: 244).

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Countless as leaves, during autumn’s first frost, falling in forests, Countless, as clustered birds escaping the turbulent deep sea, Flocking towards dry land when the freezing cold of the season Routs them across great seas, propels them to lands that are sun-warmed.)

In this spectral city Candida longs to be given substance and weight by being recognized and spoken to, by being acknowledged as her ‘true’ self. But, just as the Sibyl prefaces Eliot’s Roman London, she also haunts the twenty-first-century city whose impenetrable graffiti are a contemporary version of the Sibyl’s unfathomable messages: ‘What were they, these things called sea food: surviving the queue and eat static and day one’ (p. 56); ‘many of these graffiti were impenetrable. Who was speaking to whom, on these city streets? Nobody was speaking to the person that is me. Nothing was aimed at me’ (p. 57). But Candida is forced to recognize uncomfortable truths about herself and eventually sees that she is not the person she had imagined herself to be: ‘I realize now that all my life I’ve been an unthinking racist, and that I am one still. I simply cannot get used to all these foreigners in London pubs and on London streets. I don’t expect to see black people buying mineral water in supermarkets, or pints of beer in a public house’ (p. 79). Candida’s appraisal of herself in a new light contributes to the initiatory element of her experience, an aspect that has always formed part of the Underworld experience. That Candida will be forced to travel through a personal version of the Virgilian Underworld is indicated by Drabble’s choice of the Goldbourne Road for much of the London scene, a road that does not exist but whose name recalls the Virgilian golden bough.18 As much as The Waste Land, The Seven Sisters is a bricolage of cultural memories that demands a constant process of reassembly and reinterpretation on the part of each of the sisters. As one of these, Valeria, points out: ‘We live in a palimpsest of memories’ (p. 203). Candida’s London experience is largely a record of the ways in which she and her friends resituate Virgil in the twenty-first century. Occasionally this leads to seemingly incidental asides, such as Candida’s reference to Dido when she thinks of her own insomnia: ‘I moved out 18

I owe this point to my student Kathleen Hamel.

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of my husband’s bed and said that I preferred to sleep alone. I made the excuse that this was because I slept so badly. Exsomnis noctesque diesque’ (p. 74). One of the effects that taking the night classes on the Aeneid has on Candida is that London, a new and changing city, is constantly filtered through a web of Virgilian allusion. Literature becomes an integral part of her life’s fabric.19 When the building that housed the evening classes is demolished in order to make way for a new Health Club, she likens her situation to that of the Phoenicians in Book 1 of the Aeneid: ‘I thought of Dido and the building of the city of Carthage. Like seething bees in early summer the Phoenicians built their new hive on the African shore. (That’s an Epic Simile.) [ . . . ] Even so rose up my Health Club, lofty and proud’ (p. 13). The hellish filth of London is suggested by the diminishing number of birds who flock there, and this immediately reminds Candida of Virgil’s hell, a place so foul that no birds can fly above it: ‘There aren’t so many birds in London. The sparrows are dying or disappearing, nobody knows why. The omnivorous pigeons and the predatory magpies survive. I would like to visit the birdless lake of Avernus. Where no birds sing’ (p. 62). (Of course, when she does eventually arrive at Lake Avernus, she finds it thronged with birds— either Virgil was wrong, or Italy too has been subject to climate change.) The streets she treads, the museums she visits, all conspire to remind her of Aeneas and his journey: ‘Candida is remembering her many trips to the National Gallery, in the early months of her loneliness. She is thinking of Turner and wondering if he had ever been to Carthage’ (p. 203). And, the more Candida and her friends, the seven sisters, engage in this process, the more plentiful and resonant the connections become. Even their Christian names recall the classical world, especially that of her most fearless friend, Anaı¨s, which must inevitably remind us of Aeneas. When Mrs Jerrold, the teacher of the evening class, thinks of Candida, it is in literary terms:

19 cf. Margaret Drabble in interview with Diana Cooper-Clark: ‘So, I don’t see it as decorating one’s books with literature. I think that literature is a part of life ’ (CooperClark 1985: 22).

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Mrs Jerrold is a seer, and she can see Candida walking forlornly by the dark canal with its scrubby weeds and its iridescent oils and its detergent odours. She sees her walk past the cemetery, with its broken wall and its cracked graves and its tilted funerary monuments. She sees her floating in the dank water, like Ophelia. At evening by the sour canals/ We’ll hope to hear some madrigals . . . she often remembers these lines of Eugene’s friend, Cecil Day-Lewis. (p. 176)

It is no accident that Mrs Jerrold’s mind should turn to Cecil DayLewis, since he is one of the most notable translators of Virgil into English. At one point Candida’s class compares his version with that of Dryden and Jackson-Knight. Together with the evocations of The Waste Land, these references to eminent English Virgilians make it clear that Drabble is inscribing The Seven Sisters into the British classical tradition. That she is shaping this tradition to accommodate the experiences of women is indicated, in part, by the prevalence of sibylline imagery. Of all the characters in the novel Mrs Jerrold is the most sibylline, not least because she is the oldest. As the teacher of the group, it is she who provides her class with the key to their own initiatory experiences. She herself has already published a volume of Virgilian poetry entitled Moon that appears to lay especial emphasis on the female experience within the Aeneid. In this context its very title evokes Dido’s shade, barely glimpsed by Aeneas in the Underworld: Moon. I opened it, rather nervously. Opening it seemed a very personal, invasive act. It was her second volume, dedicated to Eugene. ‘To Eugene’ was all the dedication said. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the titles of the poems, I suppose. But I was. ‘Dido to Sychaeus’, ‘Dido to Aeneas’, ‘Remember Me’, ‘Dido in the Underworld’, ‘The Birds that Perched upon the Golden Bough’, ‘She Stands on the Sea Shore and Foretells her Own Death’. These were her titles. I read them to myself, and then I glanced up at her. She was sitting there, bright and neat, with a distant look on her sharp face. The look of a gipsy or of a sibyl, gazing far away. (pp. 103–4)

The physical description of Mrs Jerrold is immediately reminiscent of the depictions of the Sibyl to be found in Ruth Fainlight’s poetry.20

20 See Chapter 3 above. Margaret Drabble has expressed her admiration for Fainlight’s work, selecting Burning Wire as one of her favourite reads of 2002 (Drabble 2002).

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And the very titles of the poems are similar to those in Sibyls and Others, while the title of the anthology, Moon, uncannily foreshadows Fainlight’s volume Moon Wheels, which appeared in 2007, and which also contains eight explicitly sibylline poems. The titles of Mrs Jerrold’s poems also anticipate the seven sisters remembering Dido on the shores of North Africa, keeping faith with their own cultural heritage, paying tribute to the women of antiquity: Queen Dido gazes from her battlements across the centuries for their approach, for she knows that they remember her. Remember me, she cried, and, against so many odds, through so much forgetfulness, through the death of so many empires, they do remember her. They keep their tryst. (p. 168) These women keep faith with the past, they keep faith with myth and history. (p. 171)

But it is Candida, herself a spurned wife flirting with notions of suicide, who remembers Dido most vividly, a Dido mediated to her through Shakespeare: Then she [Candida] goes back to the window, and gazes out once more, for a while, at Orion and the night sea and the night sky. In such a night Stood Dido with a willow in her hand. (pp. 190–1)21

Candida’s musings bring not only Dido to mind, but also Drabble’s earlier heroines, especially Frances Wingate, who concentrates on reciting Shakespeare and Virgil to ward off the pain of toothache. These intertextual echoes remind us that Candida is a quintessential Drabble heroine, who struggles to find the life for which her education has equipped her, but whose existence is also enriched by the literature that informs it. It is Mrs Jerrold who gives Candida the tape cassettes that contain nothing but impenetrable sounds, reminding Candida of the squeaking of the souls in the Underworld. Candida’s frustration and bewilderment at receiving such a gift parallel the thwarted hopes of the supplicants of the Cumaean Sibyl in the Aeneid, who are forced to leave the cave, disappointed: 21

The Merchant of Venice, V. i.

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Mrs Jerrold’s tape is playing. But it doesn’t make any sense. All I can hear is a sort of watery wailing, an underwater echoing sound. A wailing sound, against a watery bubbling and gushing. Am I playing it at the wrong speed or frequency? Has the tape perished? Is it a joke? Is it some very modern kind of music? Or is it a recording of whales or dolphins? Or of someone drowning in a well or canal? Is it a recording of the death of Jane Richards in the Lady Pond? [ . . . ] Perhaps she has lent me a recording of the squeaking souls of the dead in the Underworld. It isn’t a very interesting sound, but it’s curiously distinctive. (p. 114)

That Candida should imagine that she can hear the dead is an indication of how much she feels that she inhabits the no-man’s-land between life and death. She toys with the idea of suicide to the point of fictionalizing her death in her diary. She also experiences a near-death experience that she longs to share with Mrs Jerrold, since she recognizes in her a kindred spirit who also inhabits a world peopled by ghosts: So that was my Near-Death Experience. Not very dramatic, but revealing. And not, in itself, unpleasant. Mrs Jerrold is in her mid-eighties, but she is sharp as a needle. She looks as though she is looking into the hereafter. This isn’t fanciful. She really does look at times as though she can see across to the further shore. Perhaps, if one spends much time with the long-dead, one can see them clearly. (p. 110)

Candida describes her own existence on the threshold of life and death: ‘I neither live nor die’ (p. 125), she claims.22 As she depicts her life, she ends up describing a specifically female condition—the predicament of a generation of women whose children have grown up and left them behind in a wasteland of nothingness. ‘My life is so useless,’ observes Candida. ‘I am redundant. Life has made me redundant. I am retired from it, though I have never had a job from which to retire’ (p. 133). The imagery of Candida eking out a living death is once more reminiscent of the Sibyl, and specifically that Sibyl evoked by Eliot in his epigram to The Waste Land: ‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere,

22 Here too Candida is echoing the experience of an earlier Drabble creation. In The Ice Age we are told that ‘Alison there is no leaving. Alison can neither live nor die’ (p. 295).

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et cum illi pueri dicerent: ıººÆ Ø ŁºØ; respondebat illa: Æ ŁÆØ Łºø’ (For indeed I myself have seen the Sibyl at Cuma with my own eyes hanging in a basket, and when those boys said: ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she would answer: ‘I wish to die’). As Candida drifts through late middle age, her body changes—she becomes drier, more wizened, more of a husk, and in this also she becomes more of the sibylline figure, crouched in a basket, whom Eliot invokes: ‘She is heavier than she was in her youth and in her young womanhood and in her middle age, and yet she is also lighter, for she feels herself to be nearer to the dryness of the sun and to the purifying of the fire. The fluids are drying out of her skin and her limbs and her entrails’ (p. 246). At one point her friend, Julia, likens their situation to that of the sea urchins whose flesh has been sucked out of their shells, but who continue to scuttle and rattle about after death (p. 205). Paradoxically, however, the more sibylline Candida becomes, the more vulnerable she is to being led astray by modern methods of ordering existence. She succumbs to the urban myths about the National Lottery, believing that she will win the first time she buys a card, believing that the messages deciphered on the scratch cards will have the power to change her life, will allow her to embark on her journey to Italy in the footsteps of Aeneas. Once more, like the Sibyl’s supplicants in the Aeneid, she is disappointed and thwarted by the messages she receives: When I win the Lottery, I can go to Italy on my own terms, and choose my own company. I found one of those things called Scratch Cards on my seat on the Tube on my way back from a National Gallery lecture last week and I have to admit that I took it home and scratched it. It said Scratch and Win, so I scratched. All it said to me then was Better Luck Next Time. I didn’t think much of that as a message. (p. 135)

Candida is also fascinated by the inexorable rigidity of computer solitaire, which allows no shuffling of the cards in the hope of more optimistic combinations. The solitaire games that she plays function as an emblem of the ways in which she tries to acquire control over her existence, lays her cards open, but is thwarted by the capriciousness of the way in which they unfold. The sibylline connections with the cards are strengthened by the sisters’ praise of Mrs Jerrold’s

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foresight when she thinks of bringing cards on their journey to Carthage and Naples: Even Candida Wilton, who was brought up to think card games wicked, says she would like to learn. They agree that it is too late now to take in anything new, but the next evening, after the Latin lesson, they will have a bridge lesson. Mrs Jerrold produces from her bag two packs of playing cards. ‘You see,’ she says, ‘I came prepared. I can do card tricks, and I can tell fortunes, and I can play bridge. They congratulate her upon her foresight. (p. 185)

The forces that enable Candida to follow Aeneas’ journey are quite unexpected, however. She benefits from a substantial dividend that arrives out of the blue and quite suddenly a host of possibilities are opened up. She initiates a reunion of the Virgil class, and together they plan a trip to Italy in the footsteps of Aeneas. To Candida it seems like an act of fate: ‘It was clear that fate had long intended that I should go to Naples, Cumae and the Phlegrean Fields. The markers were all pointing in that direction. My journey, like that of Aeneas before me, was foreordained’ (p. 143).23 In the best Virgilian tradition Candida associates her pilgrimage with the birth of a new identity, the start of a new life: ‘Shall I learn to speak in other tones and other tongues when I leave these shores? Do I still have it in me to find some happiness?’ (pp. 160–1), she asks. This quest for identity is marked throughout the book by shifts in narrative voice. Much of the book is a diary written in the first person, but with headings referring to Candida in the third person.24 Roland Barthes has pointed out that the third person is used for realist narrative, when the author believes him or herself to be in control of the character’s destiny, whereas the first person is used as testimony.25 Candida’s shifting between the two, a typical Drabble 23

Candida’s eagerness to travel aligns her to Drabble’s earlier heroines. See Ellen Lambert: ‘Thus Drabble begins her novelistic career with an image of travel, and all her heroines will be in various ways, but always also in this primary literal sense, great travellers. It’s the outer expression of that inner state of hopefulness, not bound to any specific course or destination. For the true traveller (and Sarah is one of these) is as much in love with the journey itself as with its end’ (Lambert 1985: 32). 24 It is notable that similar games with narrative voice are a feature of other modern Virgilian fiction, especially Michel Butor, La Modification, but also Gabriel Josipovici, Vergil Dying. See Josipovici (1984). 25 Barthes (1953: 37).

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strategy, indicates uncertainty as to who she really is, which voice really represents her.26 She struggles to find her voice, not only through her own diary, but also in an account that she presents as her daughter’s diary, where she impersonates her daughter writing about her after her death, before she lets the reader in on the ruse. None of these strategies ever quite works. Candida does not arrive at a narrative voice that can accommodate all the different versions of herself, the masks that she adopts without always realizing that she is doing so. Her departure from London is marked by a switch from the personal diary into a third-person narrative. This change of narrative voice is accompanied by an optimistic wish to find a different, more vibrant Candida on the shores of the Mediterranean: Candida herself, freed from her own whining monologue, is also aware that she has turned into another person, a multiple polyphonic person, who need not pretend to be stupid, who can use long words or make classical allusions if she wishes, without fear of being called a pedant or a swot or a semieducated fool or somebody trying to be too-clever-by-half. (p. 172)

Even at the end of the second section, entitled ‘Italian Journey’, the narrative is left open and unclear, as Candida makes her way towards the Sibyl’s cave in Cuma, past the sights described by Goethe and Chateaubriand in their own Italian Journeys. She is a conscientious student of the Aeneid, and might therefore have expected to find the message she heard to be ambiguous. As she approached the cave, she heard the Sibyl entreating her: Submit, whispers the wizened Sibyl, who lost her frenzy a thousand years ago. Be still, whispers the dry and witless Sibyl from her wicker basket. Be still. Submit. You can climb no higher. This is the last height. Submit. But it is not the last height. And she cannot submit. Who is that waiting on the far shore? Is it her lover or her God? (pp. 246–7)

Despite her sense of always being an outsider, Candida’s real home is in a postmodern world, where the controlling ideologies are 26 Irvine sees this narrative strategy as a way of Drabble engaging in a metafictional commentary on the art of fiction: ‘Like Sarah in A Summer Bird-Cage, Jane is presented as the author of the novel but the split between third and first person narrative allows her to conduct a self-conscious discussion of the craft of writing’ (Irvine 1985: 77).

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suspect and where there are no outside structures that offer a firm sense of identity. But she has come too far to give up on the quest, to submit as the Sibyl urged. She has been invited on this personal quest by the Aeneid and specifically by Book 6. She tells us that: ‘I’ve been re-reading Book 6. It’s an invitation’ (p. 95), before quoting at length from Dryden’s translation. And, just as Aeneas’ journey was fraught with unforeseen diversions, delays, and catastrophes, so too is Candida’s. Their stay in Naples is altered by the news that the partner of one of the sisters has been gravely injured in London, necessitating a change of plan: ‘Over supper, they make more plans. Clearly, everything is different now. The Virgilians, like Aeneas before them, have been washed off course, and will have to plot another route’ (p. 241). But, for all their plotting, their routes lead them nowhere. There is no bright, new life awaiting Candida and no extraordinary revelations. There may be alterations in her life—for one thing she re-establishes contact with two of her three estranged daughters—but at the end of the book she is back in London once more, skirting around the rubbish, trying to find a way forward. Her Italian Journey has been a journey with no real point of arrival, and, here too, she resembles Aeneas, for whom Rome was only ever a place of the imagination.27 The Seven Sisters is a novel full of paradoxes. In a world that has apparently broken free from its cultural references, a group of ageing women gather to read Virgil, precisely because his presence appears to be so anachronistic. And yet, the more they read, the more they find evidence of the classical world all around them. Virgil is brought to life by them, is resurrected by precisely the sort of people who are made to feel that they had no real right to him in the first place. Against all the odds, Virgil articulates for them the loneliness of their status and role within society. This is reinforced in Drabble’s 2009 work, a book that moves from cultural history to a kind of autobiography, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws,

27 Again Candida might be seen here to resemble Frances Wingate from The Realms of Gold. Ellen Cronan-Rose observes: ‘In the later novel Frances truly learns the lesson Clara had wilfully rejected, that “the true golden realm lies not in future goals, but in one’s past roots, in the home which one has left behind and returns to with a shock of recognition’ ”(Cronan Rose 1985a: 9).

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where she reflects upon the death of her Auntie Phyl in a care home, a death that is all too bleakly ordinary: Auntie Phyl’s last months in the care home were extra pieces. They were unnecessary. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.28

It is all the more remarkable that Drabble’s women should be the modern pilgrims of Virgil, as they are plotting a journey that has hitherto been mapped exclusively by men. Drabble alludes to several of these forebears—Goethe, Paul Klee, Chateaubriand, Berlioz, and Hermann Broch. Theodore Ziolkowski has demonstrated persuasively that Virgil’s legacy has been one from which the female voice is largely and conspicuously absent, despite the plight of Dido.29 And yet Margaret Drabble has shown how resonant Virgil is for these postmodern, third-age women; how eloquently he gives voice to their experiences, how he invites and guides them in their own quest for identity. The book opened with a vivid depiction of the wastelands of nothingness inhabited by redundant, middle-class women in their sixties. It closes with a reminder of Candida’s gender, as she pursues her journey, still waiting, still hopeful of finding some kind of destination:30 As for me, I have no home. This is not my home. This is simply the place where I wait. The sky, tonight, is streaked with blood above the dying city. It bleeds for me now that I bleed no more. I am filled with expectation. What is it that is calling me? Stretch forth your hand, I say, stretch forth your hand. (p. 307)

28

Drabble (2009: 329). Ziolkowski (1993: passim). 30 Ellen Lambert sees such hopefulness as a quintessential feature of the Drabble heroine: ‘It is, at bottom, the same pleasure, the same experience, she herself finds in the novels of Arnold Bennet: “he always leaves me,” she says, “with a sense that life is full of possibility.” That phrase, I should say, describes more aptly the vital quality of her own work. And particularly of her heroines, for it’s what pre-eminently they share—an eagerness, an ineradicable hopefulness about life’ (Lambert 1985: 31). 29

7 A. S. Byatt A. S. Byatt’s work has always been densely intertextual, and has always reflected the impossibility of separating artistic nourishment from lived experience. Her writing draws heavily upon writers and artists as diverse as George Eliot and Matisse, Browning and Van Gogh. For Richard Todd, Byatt’s uvre constantly negotiates how far the writer is justified in drawing upon his or her own life experiences, while also asking ‘profound questions about tradition (both literary and artistic) and the individual talent’.1 One of the questions that fascinates her is probing how far characters are shaped by their relationships with books, discovering how an identity can be formed by the interplay between ‘then’ and ‘now’.2 To date, insufficient attention has been paid to Byatt’s extensive engagement with the classical texts standing at the head of Western tradition, and the uses to which she puts classical mythology. Her choice of the name Cassandra for the doomed sister of her second novel, The Game (1967), is charged with cultural memories of the tragic Trojan princess.3 In The Matisse Stories (1993) she draws upon 1

Todd (1997: 5). ‘And I wrote all the poems thinking, none of these poems should exist without having a clue towards the modern story, as well as existing in the past as part of the story. So there is a lot of this kind of verbal flickering, which is, of course, at its very root—it’s the nature of reading. That’s why we read in a scholarly way, that’s why we read critically, in order to hear the flickering of the words both then, and now’ (Noakes 2004: 14). 3 See Chevalier (1999: 19): 2

asb: This reminds me of the image which I gave to Marcus in The Virgin in the Garden and to Cassandra, the original Cassandra in a play I kept writing but never worked out, which is of a kind of funnel of light which then crosses like a bobbin.

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Ovid in ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, whose protagonist, Susie, is a classicist. But it is the Persephone myth and its variants that exert a particular fascination upon her (especially its reworking by Shakespeare in A Winter’s Tale). This myth haunts all the works in The Frederica Quartet, especially after the death of Frederica’s sister, Stephanie, who was herself particularly drawn to A Winter’s Tale and who entertained visions of the Underworld and fertility as her husband made love to her after their wedding: This inner world had its own clear landscape. It grew with precise assurance, light out of dark, sapphire rising in the black-red, wandering in rooted caverns [. . .] coming out into fields of flowers, light green stalks, airy leaves, bright flowers moving and dancing [. . .] They have their own lights, Virgil said of his underworld [. . .] and the light [. . .] shone through flower stalk and running water, in the rippling heads of the flowers and corn a sunless sea brimming with its own shining [. . .] She was this world and walked in it, strayed lingering and rapid between the line of leaves and the line of sand and the line of the fine water, the line perpetually glittering and falling, perpetually renewed.4

Ceres and Persephone resurface also in Byatt’s most famous work, Possession, whose closing lines allude to Milton’s reworking of the myth:5

The image I formed for Cassandra was, as it were, of a burning glass with all the light coming in, and because Apollo had said she could not tell the truth, it could not come out, so it was destroying her and I do see myself as auctor, as a person who is, as it were, the meeting point of a lot of things coming in which then, on the whole, come out [. . . ] jlc: And Cassandra in The Game, too. asb: Yes, she in a sense also saw things but couldn’t speak whereas her sister wrote. 4 Byatt (1979: 281–2). See Clare Hanson’s discussion of this passage, where she observes that: ‘The use of Virgil, conflating the underworld of Classical mythology and the fertile female body, further establishes a connection between sex and death which it important to Stephanie: it is emphatically pagan and affirmative, emphasizing renewal and rebirth rather than Christian repudiation of the body’ (Hanson 2000: 135–6). 5 Todd argues that the end of the novel mythically complements the beginning, where the young scholar, Roland Mitchell, pilfers a manuscript from the British Library: ‘Roland’s act has mythic as well as literary antecedents; reference to Herakles’ role in the Persephone/Proserpine abduction myth is a wonderfully judged piece of ironic intertextuality. Herakles’ rescue of Alcestis from Hades (Thanatos or Death) inverts Pluto’s abduction of Persephone, who (though also rescued by Demeter at Zeus’ behest) must nevertheless remain in Hades for half of each year. Byatt has repeatedly spoken of the attractive power that the Persephone myth exerts on her

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‘There,’ he said, crowning the little pale head. ‘Full beautiful, a fairy’s child. Or like Prosperpine. Do you know “that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world”?’ (p. 510)6

At the very beginning of the book Byatt connects the myth of Persephone to Virgil’s Underworld through the imagined commentary on myth of the fictional Victorian poet, Randolph Ash: Hence Hercules remained the deity to propitiate in order to find treasures, whose God was Dis (identical with Pluto) who carries off Proserpine (another name for Ceres or grain) to the underworld described by the poets, according to whom its first name was Styx, its second the land of the dead, its third the depth of furrows . . . It was of this golden apple that Virgil, most learned in heroic antiquities, made the golden bough Aeneas carries into the Inferno or Underworld. (p. 4)

The woman poet with whom Ash has an affair, Christabel LaMotte, also draws upon Virgilian imagery. She, however, turns to the Cumaean Sibyl for imagery that allowed her to explore the absence of possibility and experience of confined spaces that was integral to the experience of so many Victorian women: Who are you? Here on a high shelf In webbed flask I Hook up my folded self Bat-leather dry. . . . . . What do you hope? Desire is a dowsed fire True love a lie To a dusty shelf we aspire I crave to die. (p. 54)

imagination. Herakles’ intervention is thus benevolent (if “tricksy”) and it beautifully complements (and ethically tempers) Roland’s act’ (Todd 1997: 25). 6 Byatt (1990). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

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Academic passion, the need to ‘possess’ a revered author, forms much of the substance of the novel and creates the ties between the Victorian pairing of Ash and LaMotte and the modern pairing of Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey. Maud Bailey describes how this poem by LaMotte ‘became a kind of touchstone’ (p. 53) to her, as it offered her a way of thinking about female claustrophobia and illuminated her thinking about the thresholds she perceived in works by Emily Dickinson, and presumably Emily Bronte¨: Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong. The Sibyl was safe in her jar, no-one could touch her, she wanted to die. I didn’t know what a Sibyl was. I just liked the rhythm. Anyway, when I started my work on thresholds it came back to me and so did she. I wrote a paper on Victorian women’s imagination of space. Marginal beings and Liminal Poetry. About agoraphobia and claustrophobia and the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space, the wild moorland, the open ground, and at the same time to be closed into tighter and tighter impenetrable small spaces—like Emily Dickinson’s voluntary confinement, like the Sibyl’s jar. (p. 54)

Through her invented poem for a fictional poet Byatt explores the significance of Virgil to the Victorian imagination, and the legacy of that reception for subsequent readers. More broadly, her retellings of fairy tales and myth indicate her sense of being shaped by her immersion in the stories at the heart of Western culture. Her French translator Jean-Louis Chevalier once asked her in an interview to name the writers who had formed her writing being. He suggested Milton, Racine, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, George Eliot, Proust, and Iris Murdoch. Byatt reminded him of Coleridge before agreeing: Those certainly and beyond those, Herbert, and Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne, who are more hidden because I don’t talk about them so much. Also, a little bit, Thomas Mann. I don’t love him but he figures in the shape I have of the world. Possibly also, Virgil to a certain extent, because of the accident of my having done Aeneid VI and the bit about the golden bough for my A levels.7

7

Chevalier (1999: 19). Byatt’s memories of her own reading as an A level student echo that which she gives Frederica in The Virgin in the Garden: ‘Well I know Phe`dre and Le Misanthrope and Vol de Nuit and Hamlet and The Tempest and Paradise Lost IX and X and Keats (1820) and Wuthering Heights and Kubla Khan and Goethe’s lyrics, a

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The pleasure that she finds in establishing connections and teasing out links is not confined to literature, however. In the last volume of The Frederica Quartet, A Whistling Woman (2002), Byatt depicts an impassioned and inspirational schoolteacher who urges the evacuee schoolchildren in his care to see Latin as alive and intrinsically connected to the British culture under threat during the Second World War: Languages, said Mr Shepherd, show us that our way of seeing the world is incomplete. You must learn to translate English into Latin, and Latin into English, precisely and beautifully, but you must never suppose that the one is the same as the other. A man thinking in Latin is not thinking the same thoughts as a man thinking in English. [ . . .] To know Latin, boys, is to know part of the history of this country, which we are defending, part of its roots and origins [. . .] They were sent away to find words beginning with e, or ex for homework. First, said Mr Shepherd, write down those you have thought of without the dictionary. Then use it. Connect your words. Connect them. It is more interesting than Lotto, I think. Is ‘Lotto’ Latin, sir? asked a wit. No, said Mr Shepherd. It is Old English and comes from Llot, or Fate or Destiny. It is to do with drawing lots—bits of wood, or short straws. It may be related to Old Norse, hlant, blood of sacrifice. In this interesting case the French and Italian appear to derive from the English. The Latin is sors, sortis. The sortes virgilianae was a kind of fatal lottery which consisted of opening Virgil’s writings at random, and reading the fate allotted to you on the page. A sorcerer is expert in sortes. He makes, or divines (divinare, to conjure, French deviner to guess) fates.8

In The Little Black Book of Stories (2003) Byatt draws on Virgil in her depiction of the grey isolation inhabited by an Alzheimer’s sufferer and her husband/carer. The Virgilian imagery is horribly well suited to evoke an existence that is being progressively eroded by broken memories and by a past that has come untethered from the moorings of stability and reason. Mado and James Ennis, whose names echo Dido and Aeneas,9 are exiles from the everyday life of ordinary society. Mado’s name cruelly points to her predicament, and her madness condemns her to live in a present tense that has no selection, and Persuasion and something by Kleist because those are my A Level set texts. Oh, and some Ovid and Tacitus and Aeneid VI’ (Byatt 1991: 294). 8 Byatt (2002: 107, 109). 9 James shares his surname with the protagonist of Anthony Burgess’s Virgilian A Vision of Battlements, written in 1949 but not published until 1965. For a discussion of Burgess, see Ziolkowski (1993: 141–5).

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hope of a future, and where the past appears to unravel meaninglessly and chaotically. Her world is grey in its ever-narrowing hopelessness: ‘She was staring at the television screen, which was dead and grey and sprinkled with dust particles. Her face was dimly reflected in it, a heavy grey face with an angry mouth and dark eye-caverns’ (p. 234).10 Her wandering through this limbo offers a parallel to the wandering endured by Aeneas, suspended between the lost past of Troy and the future of Rome, unrealized within the pages of the Aeneid. Such an exile, a wandering between two worlds, is a quintessential feature of Virgilian reception and has been associated with a loss of identity ever since Aeneas had to descend into the Underworld to find his past in the form of his father so that he was able to assume responsibility for the future of his race.11 James, too, is suspended helplessly in this grey no-man’s-land between past and future: ‘He walked down streets of identical grey houses to the High Street, waited for his pension in the Post Office’ (p. 237). As he does his errands he fields kind enquiries about Mado from people who used to know her: ‘She was full of life, always one for a joke, said the butcher, recalling someone James barely remembered and could not mourn’ (p. 237). When James is visited later by ‘the Fetch’, he describes the emptiness of their lives in language that recalls both the existential despair of Beckett: perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my own story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.12

10

Byatt (2003). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text. Potent examples of loss of identity in Virgilian reception include Dante’s need to descend into hell before he is able to enter paradise as an integrated self and the character of Virgil hovering on the threshold of life and death in Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1983). 12 Beckett (1959: 352). That James and Mado inhabit Beckett’s world is also indicated by the resemblances that they bear to the married couple in All That Fall. Mrs Rooney shares the name Madeleine with Mado. She too is mad, but is nevertheless conscious of the difficulties she has in speaking coherently. She describes herself as ‘not half alive nor anything approaching it’. Like James and Mado, Mr and Mrs Rooney are haunted by the ghost of the daughter whom they never bore (Beckett 1957). I owe this point to Dick Collins. 11

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and Dido’s request of Aeneas that he at least maintain the shell of their relationship for a short time, as she begs him for the reprieve of a ‘tempus inane’ (Aen. 4. 433), a time during which he will stay though they both know that he will leave eventually: ‘How long has she been like that?’ ‘Five years since she knew who I was,’ he said. ‘I do my best, but it isn’t enough. We are neither of us happy, but we have to go on.’ (p. 254)

As James talks about Mado’s mental wanderings with the home help, Mrs Bright (whose name highlights the energetic and vital contrast she offers to Mado and James), Mado’s ravings overlay their exchange with memories of Dante, lost in a dark wood, awaiting Virgil as his guide: Mrs Bright said ‘Where does she wander, I ask myself.’ ‘Nowhere,’ said James. ‘She sits here. Except when she tries to get out. When she rattles the door. [ . . . ] Her poor brain is a mass of thick plaques and tangles of meaningless stuff. Like moth-eaten knitting. There’s no-one there, Mrs Bright. Or not much of anyone.’ ‘They took her into a dark a dark darkness and lost her,’ said Mado. (p. 236)

Mado is perhaps dredging up vestigial memories of the earliest indications of the disease, the first sign of which for James was when a stranger brought her home saying that she had been found wandering, that she had appeared to be lost (p. 238). The Dantean imagery is maintained as James goes into Boots and chooses a soft-toy Teletubby for Mado, who watches the programme avidly on television.13 James surveys the figures hanging in their cellophane cases and, in a moment of pleasurable spite, chooses the green one for her because his name is Dipsy. As they hang before him, however, their limp shapes blend with mental images of the damned, even if these are images that he ends up rejecting: ‘He had a vision of ragged bodies flailing, in a spin cycle. Not the circles of Heaven and Purgatory and Hell, but rag dolls flailing in a spin cycle’ (p. 240). The souls who are

13 This obsession with the Teletubbies was a feature of Iris Murdoch’s experience of Alzheimer’s. Murdoch was a strong influence on Byatt, who wrote a monograph on her (Byatt 1965).

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buffeted hither and thither in the Inferno are located in the second circle of hell, where Dante ‘came to a place where all light was mute and where was bellowing as of a sea in tempest that is beaten by conflicting winds. The hellish storm, never resting, seizes and drives the spirits before it; smiting and whirling them about, it torments them.’14 James instinctively thinks in terms of the Classical Tradition as a result of his training as a Classics teacher, a training that shaped his personality: ‘He believed, in a classical way, in good temper and reason’ (p. 241). One of his strategies for mapping out the future is to filter his plans through a background of classical texts. It is notable that he and Mado chose classical names for the baby that they never managed to conceive: ‘the conjured child had refused to enter the circle. It had had names—Camilla, Julius, when they were romantic, Blob and Tiny Tim when they were upset or annoyed’ (p. 241). To counter the emptiness of his existence with Mado, and to ward off a similar fate for himself by exercising his mind, he spends the evenings reading the sixth book of the Aeneid: When she had got to bed he sat and tried to read Virgil. He thought that the effort of remembering the grammar and the metrics would in some sense exercise his own brain-cells, keep the connections in there flashing and fluent. O pater, anne aliquas ad caelum hinc ire putandum est animas. He had thought of joining an evening class, even of doing a Masters or a Doctorate, but he couldn’t go out, it wasn’t possible. Every time he forgot a phrase he had once known by heart, singing in the nerves, he felt a brief chill of panic. Is it beginning? I used to know what the pluperfect of ‘vago’ was. The gruff voice complained from her bedroom and he went to unknot the sheets. He didn’t like going to bed himself for he so dreaded being woken. So he dozed over Aeneid VI and heard the ruffle of his own snore. (p. 249)

That he should cite the phrase that means ‘O father, surely we must believe that some souls go from here to heaven’ (Aen. 6. 719) allows us to glimpse his desperate wish that this situation in which Mado is trapped should not continue any longer. Paradoxically, by reading in order to escape from the dead reality of his everyday life, and in order to protect against the same fate, he joins Mado in bringing the world of Virgil back into being. When 14

Dante (1961: 75).

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Mado retreats further and further from reason into the past, she is returning to wartime London and summoning into being the people whom she knew then: And then there were the wartime ghosts who walked again. Friends bombed in their sleep, friends shot down over Germany, men and women sent out on missions—‘Come in Akela, Akela come in’—the old voice beseeched, cracking. He himself was many people. (p. 246)

The image of the wartime ghosts walking again within a remembered London is haunted by T. S. Eliot’s reworking of the classical image of the hordes of dead. In Eliot’s The Waste Land these dead are the soldiers from the First World War streaming over London Bridge: Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and frequent were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. (ll. 60–5)

In Byatt’s version Mado becomes a sibylline figure, uttering in an aged voice phrases from the past that make sense to her but appear meaningless to others. By a cruel twist of the disease her mind returns to a time when it was fluent and sharp and conversed with the intellectual elite: ‘her colleagues were elegant poets, shadowy foreigners and expert linguists. Her London was burning and hectic’ (p. 247) This burning, hectic London of the Blitz was one of the most potent periods of Virgilian reception. Ziolkowski names 1944 as the ‘annus mirabilis Virgilianus’, as it saw T. S. Eliot giving the inaugural address of the newly formed Virgil Society, a speech that was later published as ‘What is a Classic?’ This same year also saw the publication of Jackson Knight’s landmark work of scholarship, Roman Vergil, and Cyril Connolly’s meditation on ruined Europe, The Unquiet Grave, published under the name of Palinurus, Aeneas’ helmsman. At around the same time, Ziolkowski reminds us, there was also the publication of C. S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and Maurice Bowra’s From Virgil to Milton (1945; completed

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in 1944).15 This flowering of interest in Virgil was partly a legacy of the bimillennial celebrations of his birth in 1930, but was driven far more powerfully by the fact that in the Second World War people were able to hear with especial acuity the voice of loss and exile pervading the Aeneid. George Steiner observes: In the Second World War recognitions seemed to alter. The shattered, burnt cities were still perennial Troy. But the desolate light on them is that of Virgilian pathos rather than Argive–Homeric triumph. It is not so much Odysseus homeward-bound but Aeneas the refugee, the man hunted towards the unknown with the scarred remnants of his people who addresses our fortunes.16

This is the burning, hectic London to which Mado returns, a London vividly described by the medieval scholar Helen Waddell, who posits it as the reason for maintaining Virgil as part of the school curriculum: It is a strange thing to remember that in the meridian of her power, she herself (Rome) looked back to her beginnings in a conquered city and a burning town: and the man who gave her immortality was the hollowcheeked sad-eyed Virgil of the Hadrumetum mosaic. If all else goes from the schools, let us at least keep the second book of Virgil. I speak of it with passion, for something sent me to it on that September afternoon when the Luftwaffe first broke through the defences of London, and her river burned. You remember the cry of Aeneas waking in the night, the rush, arming as he went, the hurried question—‘Where’s the fighting now?’ and the answer: Come is the ending day, Troy’s hour is come, The ineluctable hour. Once were we Trojan men, And Troy was once, and once a mighty glory Of the Trojan race.17

By allowing Mado to resuscitate this period of heightened Virgilian interest, Byatt is able to inscribe this Virgilian story into one of the most powerful strands of the Virgilian tradition. The London 15

Ziolkowski (1993: 129–34). See also Hurst (2006: 203–4), where she describes Dorothy L. Sayers’s, mock-epic poem about cats, ‘Aeneas at the Court of Dido’, written in 1945. 16 Steiner (1990: 10). 17 Waddell (1976: 40, 43). Cited in Martindale (1984: 15–16). London during the Blitz is also depicted in Virgilian terms by Elizabeth Bowen in The Heat of the Day. See Burke (2007: 77–95).

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of the Second World War was so evocative of Virgil that Auden, writing his ‘Memorial for the City’ in 1949, anticipates Steiner by describing the attempts to cope with the aftermath of war in these terms: Even now, in this night Among the ruins of the Post-Vergilian City Where our past is a chaos of graves and the barbed-wire stretches ahead Into our future till it is lost to sight, Our grief is not Greek . . .18

James and Mado are possessed by their shared past, a period of history that was intensely Virgilian and during which they themselves acted Virgilian roles.19 The characters of Aeneas and Creusa, Aeneas and Dido, whom they unconsciously adopted during the war, return to haunt them in their old age to the point where they rework and modify the parting scene between Dido and Aeneas. As James dozes over Aeneid 6 one night he is suddenly woken by a frantic knocking at the door. He opens it to admit a young woman who has been pursued through the streets and has turned to his door for safety. He calms her down, offers her some whisky, and as they chat she displays unexpected knowledge about Mado, rebuking him for tying a pink ribbon in Mado’s hair: ‘She doesn’t like pink,’ she told him. ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘She hates it. She always did. Babyish she said. Wouldn’t wear pink panties or a pink slip. Ivory or ice-blue, she liked and red.’ (p. 256)

18

Auden (1976: 450–1). In an interview Byatt points out that her fascination with the way in which people can become possessed by literary characters from the past was part of her motivation in writing Possession: ‘I think this is the only novel I’ve written in which the title word is the first thing I’ve thought of. The story I like to tell—which is a true story—is how I used to watch Kathleen Coburn, the great Coleridge editor, walking round and round the circular catalogue in the British Museum library and I thought, “Here is a woman who, as far as I can see, spends every waking moment, and a lot of the sleeping moments, of every day, thinking about Coleridge.” And then the word came into my mind, with the immediate sense of demonic possession. I thought, “Does he possess her? Has this dead man taken over this living woman? or has she taken possession of him, because we read his thoughts as mediated by her?”’ (Noakes 2004: 12). 19

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The conversation leads into James’s choice of Dipsy, the green Teletubby, and the young woman pointing out that he should have chosen Po, the red one, whose name is the same as that of the river that leads into the Underworld. He is surprised by her classical knowledge, but perhaps should not have been, for when he asks her name she says: ‘Dido. I call myself Dido, anyhow. I’m an orphan. I cast my family off and other names with it. I like Dido. I must go now’ (p. 256). James now appears to be re-enacting Virgil with this young woman, but it is an Aeneid in which the roles are reversed. It is she who decides that she will have to go, and James who feels ‘a wild sense of loss, with her departure, as though she had brought life into the room—pursued by death and the dark—and had taken it away again’ (p. 257). And whereas in the Aeneid it is Aeneas who travels to the Underworld and finds Dido again, here it is Dido who brings life into this house of living death. After her departure James reflects sadly in biblical terms: ‘She was the quick and he was the dead. She would never come again’ (p. 258). Dido’s visit unsettles James, who now seems to be inhabiting more fully the past that Mado inhabits and who is unsure whether this is a sign of the disease affecting him also: What happened to him now, was that as he woke out of nap over his book, or stumbled into his bedroom undoing his buttons, he saw visions, heard sounds, smelled smells, long gone, but now there to be, so to speak, read and checked. (p. 261)

These smells are those of the burning city that remained in the nostrils of Londoners who had gone out to survey the ruins after a bombing raid. In part, it is in the house because he had bought another bottle of whisky in order to try and recapture Dido’s visit and Mado had thrown it over the rug where ‘the smell lingered, mixed with the ghostly smoke and ashes of burning London in 1941’ (p. 264). And as James now lives in a world where the distinction between the living and the dead has been horribly blurred, so he remembers the difficulty of knowing in wartime London who among his friends were ghosts and who were still living: Death was close. Friends you were meeting for dinner, who lived in your head as you set off to meet them, never came, because they were mangled meat under brick and timber. Other friends who stared in your memory as

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the dead stare whilst they take up the final shape your memory will give them, suddenly turned up on the doorstep in lumpen, living flesh, bruised and dirty, carrying bags of salvaged belongings, and begged for a bed, for a cup of tea. (pp. 262–3)

Ironically, when he wearies of the days spent with Mado and these ghosts, he uses the Aeneid as his means of escape and goes ‘back to the Underworld and perpetual twilight’ (p. 265). His reading of the Aeneid colours his memories of the early days of his relationship with Mado. On the day when they make love for the first time, both of them have eyes that are bright with unshed tears, recalling the line from Aeneid 4 that is famously indeterminate, so that the reader cannot know whether Virgil is referring to the tears of Dido or of Aeneas: ‘mens immota manet, lacrimae volvuntur inanes’ (Aen. 4. 449) (But, in his mind he remained unmoved; tears flood, but are wasted). Byatt makes it explicit that both James and Mado weep: ‘and then she broke down and kissed him all over his body, and her eyes were hot with tears’ (pp. 259–60), ‘and his eyes which had watered but never wept, were full of tears’ (p. 260). But into this twilight, and against all the odds, the young woman Dido returns to visit him, announcing herself ironically in terms borrowed from the Trojan War: ‘I came bearing gifts,’ she said. ‘To thank you’ (p. 265). James, too, reverts to classical metaphor as he describes the crowd of ghosts peopling his house: ‘We are quite a crowd, quite a throng of restless spirits, he said these days thick as leaves and only two of us flesh and blood’ (p. 267). To describe the dead as leaves is to return to the earliest traditions of classical epic. Homer used the simile in the Iliad (6. 146 ff.), and Virgil reworked it in the sixth book of the Aeneid to show Aeneas gazing upon the sheer mass of the dead (Aen. 6. 306–10).20 James tells Dido of the love affair between Mado and him during the war, and describes how he sent beautiful citrus fruits to her from his posting in Algiers (like Aeneas, he leaves the burning, war-torn city and ends up in North Africa): ‘They were lovely things—golden, and yellow and shining’ (p. 267). To the reader’s mind, in this story steeped in Virgilian imagery, the golden fruits reflect the light of the Golden Bough, an image that seized Byatt’s imagination as a 20 Dante also reworks this metaphor (Inferno, 3. 112–17), as does Milton (Paradise Lost, 1. 301–4). See also Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Spring and Fall to a Young Child’: ‘Margaret, are you grieving, over Goldengrove unleaving.’

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schoolgirl.21 Dido completes the story by telling James what he had never known—that when Mado opened the crate and pulled the fruits out they crumbled into piles of delicate moss-green powder. It is now, for the first time, that James realizes that Dido is Mado, who has returned to him in revenant form. Once more the poetry of T. S. Eliot shimmers behind his response, as he echoes ‘Gerontion’,22 before touching her live, warm flesh, after which he still believes that she is a figment of his maddened imagination: ‘I am an old man. I am going mad. You are a phantasm.’ [. . .] You see?’ ‘No, I don’t. I believe I believe you are there.’ (p. 268)

Dido describes Mado’s war years as a time when everything had been taken away from her: She used to say, Hitler had destroyed the days of her youth, and the quiet days of her marriage, and the child she might have had. And given her drama—too much drama—and dissatisfaction, and eternal restlessness, so she could never be content. She thought these thoughts with great violence, most especially when she was living the quiet days that were simply a semblance of quiet days, a simulacrum of a life, so to speak. (p. 269)

In this scenario Hitler is playing the role of Juno, who condemned the Trojans to eternal restlessness, eternal wandering, with their hopes of establishing a home perpetually thwarted. And the quiet days that she is forced to endure during James’s absence are another version of the ‘tempus inane’ (Aen. 4. 433), the empty time, for which Dido begs Aeneas as a last resort. When James left to take up his posting, the two of them bring to life the age-old tableau of devoted wife kissing soldier husband, a scene that was also played out in the Aeneid by Hector and Andromache: ‘And 21 ‘When I was at the end of my schooling, I was beginning to see that the gods were more real and dangerous than I had supposed as a small girl, reading my storybooks. When I read Aeneid 6, where the golden bough shines on the shores of the underworld, and the Sibyl writhes in her cave, I felt a shiver down my spine which was recognition of power’ (Byatt 2000: 137). 22 Eliot prefaces his 1920 poem ‘Gerontion’ with the lines: ‘Thou hast nor youth nor age j But as it were an after dinner sleep j Dreaming of both.’ The poem closes with an evocation of ghosts summoned by memory: ‘Tenants of the house, j Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.’

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when you left she knew she was not pregnant, and gave you a little peck on the cheek—acting the little English wife—no Romeo and Juliet kissing—and off you went, with your kit-bag, into the dark, temporary or permanent’ (p. 270). James returns, almost immediately, though whether as a ghost or living is at first impossible for Mado to determine: ‘And there you were—there he was—on the doorstep. She thought it was a ghost. The world was full of walking dead in those days’ (p. 270). It is to a Virgilian city that James has returned. Again Byatt reminds us that ‘the sky was full of flames and smoke’ (p. 271). It is the London described by Helen Waddell, and this is made even more explicit as James runs desperately to a site of bombed devastation in search of Mado, his wife: ‘And I ran. I ran up against the barriers, and the wardens tried to turn me back, and I said, that’s my home, my wife’s in there’ (p. 272). Just as Aeneas ran back into the burning city of Troy to find his first wife, Creusa, so James runs back to the flames to find Mado. Where once Aeneas found a ghost, James finds a living woman: ‘There was nothing left,’ said Dido. ‘Except each other.’ She said ‘You said you were Aeneas looking for Creusa in burning Troy.’ And she said to you ‘I’m not a ghost; I’m flesh and blood.’ And they kissed, with soot on their tongues and the burning city in their lungs. Flesh and blood. (p. 273)

The episode presents a stark contrast to the situation in which James and Mado now find themselves, where James is shackled to the living shell of a long-absent wife. Where once there were acrimonious scenes between Dido and Aeneas at his departure, with Dido threatening suicide if he were to leave, Byatt reverses the scene so that Dido’s anger is driven by James’s reluctance to help Mado find release. Any hope of him seeing her again is dependent upon his willingness to respect the wishes and dignity of his still-living but lost wife: ‘You make me angry,’ said Dido in Madeleine’s23 voice. ‘All those young Germans in the war, with their lives in front of them, and their girls and their

23 Madeleine is the name used for the intelligent young woman of James’s memories, in contrast to the Mado of the present day. Not only does Byatt’s choice of name allow for an abbreviation that echoes Dido, but the name itself is inextricably linked to memory, because of the Proustian episode with the madeleine cake. I owe this point to my student Ste´phanie Heurtier.

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parents, that was all right, your own young pilots on missions with wonderful brains humming with cleverness and hope and rational fear—that was all right. But a miserable hulk decorated with a pink ribbon—’ (p. 274)

As Dido leaves the house, James asks if he will see her again; the answer is dependent upon himself and upon the choices he makes. Once more there is a reversal of the original myth—where once Dido threatened suicide if Aeneas left without seeing her again, here it is clear that James can hope to see Dido again only if he assists Madeleine’s suicide. We are left in limbo at the end of the story. Mado’s ravings have acquired a new edge since the appearance of her spirit demanding death: ‘“Night”, said mad Mado, more and more angrily, “night, night, night, night, night” . . . .’ [. . .] “Night,” said Mado. “Just a rest, for a while,” said James’ (pp. 275–6). The ambivalence of James’s answer intensifies the qualities of suspension and uncertainty that have always accompanied the Virgilian tradition. It is unclear whether the rest that he offers is eternal or simply a respite in the monotonous grind of their lives. The ending of Mado’s story is in his hands, as once the end of Dido’s tale was in the hands of Aeneas. Virgil uses the Dido episode to illustrate how fraught the issues of duty were to Aeneas—how his sense of obligation to Dido brought him into direct conflict with his duties to his fatherland and to his divinely decreed future. Byatt’s version of the myth strikes right at the heart of the Aeneid’s tragic dimension. Virgil’s compassion is aroused by the inescapable pain of being alive, the tears that are a part of the human condition, famously defined in Aeneid 1. 412: ‘sunt lacrimae rerum.’ Such tears resurface in Aeneid 4 as an inevitable consequence of Aeneas’ decision to leave Dido and found Rome, but it is unclear whether the tears are those of Dido or of Aeneas. Aeneas has been forced to make a choice that will compromise either his destiny or his humanity; either he must fail to found Rome or he must destroy Dido’s happiness. Such ethical anguish is replicated in ‘The Pink Ribbon’, where James must choose between keeping Mado imprisoned in the meaninglessness of Alzheimer’s, or feeling himself to be a criminal as he releases them both by assisting her suicide. In Byatt’s hands the legend of Dido and Aeneas is not brought into the twenty-first century in order to study the anguish of abandonment and victimhood. Rather she uses it in

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order to probe the issues of loyalty and betrayal within a loving partnership, and the terrible strains laid upon carer-spouses in the contemporary world. In 1993 Byatt wrote a poem ‘Working with Cliche´s’, which reworks the myth of Proteus, recounted in the fourth book of the Georgics,24 examining the clash of familiar material and the new forms into which it is moulded. ‘The Pink Ribbon’ retains all the important elements of the age-old encounter between Dido and Aeneas— conflicted loyalty, acrimony, abandonment, the threat of suicide— and yet they are reworked into an unbearably moving examination of one of the scourges of today’s world. The power of the story derives from Byatt’s ability to make our minds shuttle from the original version of the Dido myth in the Aeneid via its importance to a bombed and burning London to its fragmented reflection in a world governed by Alzheimer’s. Once more Virgil is invoked in the search for identity: he guides both James and Mado out of limbo into a shared past, offering them at least the hope of recovering their integrated selves. 24

For a discussion of this poem, see Campbell (2004: 269–70).

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8 Christa Wolf Christa Wolf ’s Kassandra (1983) is, perhaps, the twentieth century’s most acclaimed female response to and rewriting of ancient epic. As an East German woman writer whose work was subject to the censorship of the authorities in her own country, at a time when Europe appeared to be lurching towards the death throes threatened by the cold war, Wolf was particularly moved by the figure of the Trojan princess who was doomed never to be heeded as she uttered the terrible prophecies about the downfall of her homeland. Much has been written about the way in which Wolf breathes life into the shadowy form of Cassandra, whom she resuscitates from the Iliad and from Aeschylus’ Oresteia. She herself writes about the way in which inspiration came upon her in the series of essays that depict the genesis of Kassandra, published as Voraussetzungen einer Erza¨hlung: Kassandra (Conditions of a Narrative: Cassandra) and that form part of the volume of the English translation.1 In this account she lays especial emphasis upon the way in which Cassandra sprang from the pages of Aeschylus into her imagination: begann ich die ‘Orestie’ des Aischylos zu lesen. Ich konnte mir noch zusehen, wie ein panisches Entzu¨cken sich in mir ausbreitete, wie es anstieg und seinen Ho¨he punkt erreichte, als eine Stimme einsetzte: Oh! Oh! Ach! Apollon! Apollon!

1 Wolf (1983b); the translation is in Wolf (1984). References are to these editions and appear in parentheses in the text.

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Kassandra. Ich sah die gleich. [ . . . ] Mir schien, dass sie als einzige in diesem Stu¨ck sich selber kannte. (p. 10) (I began to read Aeschylus’ Oresteia. I witnessed how a panic rapture spread through me, how it mounted and reached its pinnacle when a voice began to speak: Aiee! Aieeee! Apollo! Apollo! Cassandra. I saw her at once. [ . . . ] It seemed to me that she was the only person in the play who knew herself.) (pp. 144–5)

It is perhaps because Wolf herself lays so much emphasis upon the ancient Greek texts, coupled with the fact that she first conceived of the novel while on holiday in Greece, that as yet no attention has been paid to the connections between Kassandra and the Aeneid. This is all the more surprising in that it is Wolf who imagines most vividly the Aeneas before the Aeneid, seen through the eyes of Cassandra, who has fallen in love with him. The relationship that she conjures up between Cassandra and Aeneas is a prefiguring of the doomed relationship between Dido and Aeneas. Moreover, Cassandra’s deepening awareness of the dangers facing Troy and her subsequent captivity within the ruined city, establishes Troy as a ghost city, inhabited by shadows, which is precisely the identity it has within the Aeneid, where its remembered glories foreshadow the imagined splendour of Rome. These Virgilian echoes in a narrative that resurrects one of the lesser-known females of the Aeneid, as it explores the place of women in ancient and modern civilizations, the power of language, and the dangers of silence, represent an important stage in Virgil’s journey through the works of contemporary women writers. Wolf ’s very description of the way in which the novel developed within her is Virgilian, though she does not mention Virgil directly. As she remembers the way in which she and her female friends negotiated the Crete of 1980, she anticipates Drabble’s fictionalized depiction of female solidarity, and the way in which the seven sisters receive disembodied messages on mobile phones, a contemporary form of oracular pronouncement. Wolf ’s female travellers also receive indecipherable instructions over the phone, which perplex them and lead them astray, fulfilling a twentieth-century version of the Sibyl’s role:

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hatte ich nun also eine bestimmte Nummer anzurufen und den auf Englisch vorgebrachten Anweisungen einer Frauenstimme zu folgen, deren Besitzerin wir niemals zu Gesicht bekommen wu¨rden und die daher in der Erinnerung zu einer Geisterstimme werden wu¨rde, um somehr, da sie uns ungeahnte Wege schickte, deren Sinn uns dunkel blieb. (p. 47) (I had to call a certain telephone number and follow the instructions of a female voice that spoke in English. We never got to see the owner of this voice face to face and so in memory it turned into a spirit voice; all the more so, as it sent us along enigmatic paths whose meaning we could not fathom.) (p. 185)

It is no accident that one of the first descriptions of the telephone in literature relies upon a Virgilian allusion to evoke within the reader the heavy sense of loss and the destabilization that such communication had on those unfamiliar with it. Proust’s use of the Orpheus myth from Georgics 4 to convey his sense of abandonment as his grandmother put down the phone ensures that Virgil is not far from similar equations of the telephone’s ‘unreal voice’2 with messages from other worlds.3 It is into a Virgilian space, where the women feel distanced from the reality of their former lives and where they meditate upon memory and loss, that this disembodied voice leads them. By a stroke of serendipity, the real world that they have left behind them is precisely that which Wittig conflates with a mythical landscape in order to establish her own lesbian Dantean/ Virgilian space, as we shall see in the next chapter:

2 Wolf goes on to observe that: ‘Die irreale Telefonstimme hat uns nicht irregefu¨hrt, doch nun wollen wir in Heraklion wohnen, und sogar billig’ (p. 51) (The unreal voice on the telephone did not mislead us but now we want to live in Heraklion, and what’s more, to live cheaply) (p. 189). 3 ‘Pre´sence re´elle que cette voix si proche—dans la se´paration effective! Mais anticipation aussi d’une se´paration e´ternelle! [ . . . ]Il me semblait que c’e´tait de´ja` une ombre che´rie que je venais de laisser se perdre parmi les ombres, et seul devant l’appareil, je continuais de re´pe´ter en vain: “Grand-me`re, grand’me`re”, comme Orphe´e reste´ seul, re´pe`te le nom de la morte’ (Proust 1999: 848, 850) (This voice that is so close is a real presence—effective in separation! But it is also the anticipation of an eternal separation! [ . . . ] It seemed to me that she was already a dearly loved shade whom I had just left to get lost amidst the shades, and alone in front of the telephone I continued to repeat in vain ‘Grandmother, grandmother’, as Orpheus, left alone repeats the name of the dead woman) (my translation).

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Wir halten es selbst nicht fu¨r ganz unansto¨ssig, am Rand der Wiese oberhalb des Dorfes zu sitzen und uns mit Namen und Titeln zu unterhalten, die kein Mensch in einem dieser Do¨rfer je geho¨rt hat oder je ho¨ren wird. So, also in San Francisco gibt es Theatergruppen von Homosexuellen und Lesbierinnen, aber mir scheint, dass ihre Existenz fu¨r Sue, die lebhaft von ihnen erza¨hlt, im gleichen Augenblick schon unwesentlich wird. (p. 49) (We ourselves find it not completely proper to sit at the edge of the meadow above the village and to talk about names and titles which no-one in any of these villages has ever heard or ever will hear. So, in San Francisco, there are theater groups made up of homosexuals and lesbians; but it seems to me that at the same moment that Sue is telling me about them in an animated tone, their existence has already become immaterial to her.) (p. 187)

As the contemporary world melts away, the presence of the past, and the awareness that the present is the future’s past, becomes ever more acute: wird in dreitausend Jahren noch irgendein Mensch, hier oder anderswo, glauben, dass die Toten irgendwo hingehn, und dass sie fu¨r den vielleicht beschwerlichen und du¨steren Weg Wegzehrung, Vorsorge der Lebenden brauchen, zu der die selber nicht imstande sind? Wird irgend jemand noch daran denken, es den Toten leichter zu machen? wird es zwischen Lebenden und Toten noch irgendein Mitgefu¨hl, ein Erinnern geben? Gedenken, Erza¨hlen, Kunst? (p. 51) (Three thousand years from now, will there be anyone left here or anywhere else who still believes that the dead travel somewhere, and they need travelling provisions for their perhaps arduous and dismal journey, provision from the living that they are incapable of supplying for themselves? Will anyone still think about making it easier for the dead? Will there still be some empathy, some memory, between living and dead? Remembrance, storytelling, art?) (p. 189)

The consolations for mortality that Wolf is seeking are those recognized in the promise made in front of the wall painting in Aeneid 1, where the sorrows for the heavy losses depicted on the wall are soothed by an imaginative leap into a future where the pain will have mellowed into melancholy: ‘haec olim meminisse iuvabit.’ It is at the very edge of Europe that Wolf found herself meditating upon this weight of history. Overwhelmed by a feeling that all structures such as homeland, language, and community were disappearing and taking her identity with them, she travelled in her

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mind to the Minoan civilizations, which offered her a utopian image of a community where women were respected as the equals of men, so that their views and opinions received equal consideration. It was, as she observes, Homer who was the first to produce a common source for the Achaean destruction of Troy and the existence of a Cretan king named Minos. She remembers how her feelings of loss underpinned a certain detachment, which allowed her to view her predicament both as a woman, and as a twentieth-century European threatened by the cold war, with a certain objectivity: Wohnen aber, hatte man uns geraten, solle man in dem malerischen Nauplia, der venezianischen Hafenstadt; dem Rat folgten wir, und hatte ja auch niemand vorhersehen ko¨nnen, dass gerade hier, gerade in der stunde zwischen sieben und acht, als ich, gierig wie beim erstenmal, das Leuchten der Ha¨user um die Hafenmole von Nauplia in mich aufnehme, hier an einem der su¨dlichsten Zipfel Europas, jenes Gefu¨hl von Verlorenheit mich u¨berfallen wu¨rde, dass den Verlust aller Koordinaten signalisiert, in die wir uns einbetten. [ . . . ] eine Krankheit, die ich nicht Heimweh nennen wollte, schnitt die Verbindung zwischen mir und diesen Stra¨sschen, diesem prallrunden Mond, diesem blankgefegten Himmel ab. (p. 75) (But we had been advised to stay in the picturesque Venetian port of Nauplia. We followed this advice and no-one could have foreseen that it would be here of all places, precisely between the hours of seven and eight while I was soaking in the glow of the houses around the Nauplia pier; here, at one of the southernmost tips of Europe, that I would be overwhelmed by that sense of forlornness that signals the loss of all the co-ordinates where we embed ourselves, to which we cling. [ . . . ] A malady which I did not want to call homesickness severed the tie between me and these little streets, this plump round moon, this polished sky.) (p. 215)

Wolf ’s experience, as she describes it here, is aligned to Boland’s aching at the sufferings of her homeland and the silencing of her sex. And the remedy, which she found as she uncovered the history of Troy, comes paradoxically close to Wittig’s vision of an ideal community: merkwu¨rdig ist es schon, dass sie alle sich scheuten, Schlu¨sse aus der Tatsache zu ziehn, dass Frauen in der Malerei der minoischen Ku¨nstler einen derart beherrschenden Platz einnahmen; wenn Menschen der westlichen Zivilisation ganz allgemein Kreta zum gelobten Land ru¨ckwa¨rtsgewandter Sehnsu¨chte machten: Feministinnen, in der Frauenbewegung engagierte Frauen sahen in

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den Ko¨nigreichen der Minoer die Gemeinwesen, an die ihr sehnsu¨chtiges utopisches Denken, durch Gegenwartserfahrung und Zukunftsangst in die Enge getrieben, als ein Konkretum anknu¨pfen konnte. Es gab es doch einmal, das Land, in dem die Frauen frei und den Ma¨nnern gleichgestellt waren. (p. 61) (It is remarkable that their authors were all afraid to draw conclusions from the fact that women held such a dominant place in the paintings of Minoan artists. They continued to be afraid even when throughout Western civilization Crete was being turned into the Promised Land of those who looked to the past to satisfy their longings—namely feminists, women committed to the women’s movement, who, hard-pressed as they were by the experience of the present and fears about the future, saw in the Minoan kingdoms the social bodies to which they could concretely attach their utopian speculations and yearnings. So once upon a time, there really was a country where women were free and equal to men.) (p. 200)

That such enlightenment should be part of the history of Troy makes the silencing of Cassandra all the more terrible; she becomes the archetype, the mother of all those women whose voices have gone unheard throughout the ages. ‘Nach der Seherin verstummte, die ihre Nachfolgerin war, die Dichterin, jahrtausendlang’ (p. 146) (In the wake of the prophetess her successor, the woman poet, grew silent for thousands of years) (p. 296), observes Wolf. As a result of this silence, the story of women stands outside history, as Boland discovered. Wolf points out: ‘In Kassandra ist eine der ersten Frauengestalt u¨berliefert, deren Schicksal vorformt, was dann, dreitausend jahre lang, den frauen geschehen soll: dass sie zum Objekt gemacht werden’ (p. 86) (Cassandra is one of the first women figures handed down to us whose fate prefigures what was to be the fate of women for three thousand years: to be turned into an object) (p. 227). And this systematic silencing of the vulnerable, this invisible form of oppression, is for Wolf at the heart of the most sinister threat ever to hang over civilization. Centuries of annihilation through silencing have culminated in the atomic bomb: Wenn die atomare Gefahr uns an die Grenze der Vernichtung gebracht hat, so sollte sie uns doch auch an die Grenze des Schweigens, an die Grenze der Zuru¨ckhaltung unserer Angst und Besorgnis und unserer wahren Meinungen gebracht haben. (p. 88) (The atomic threat, if it has brought us to the brink of annihilation, must then have brought us to the brink of silence too, to the brink of endurance,

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to the brink of reserve about our fear and anxiety, and our true opinions.) (p. 230)

For Wolf the outrage visited upon Cassandra reverberates not only up to the present day, but into the future. From her vantage point at the edge of Europe, Wolf describes her recognition of Cassandra’s injury as an obscenity that is at the root of Europe, so that its malign influence extends, and will extend, to the end of Europe’s history: Ein Gewaltakt an einer Frau begru¨ndet im grieschischen Mythos die Geschichte Europas. Mein Schmerz um diesen Erdteil ist teilweise auch ein Phantomschmerz: nicht nur der Schmerz um ein verlorenes Glied, auch der um noch gar nicht ausgebildete, nicht entwickelte Glieder, um nicht wahrgenommene, nicht gelebte Gefu¨hle, um uneingelo¨ste Sehnsucht. (pp. 90–1) (An act of violence inflicted on a woman founds, in Greek myth, the history of Europe. My pain for this continent is in part a phantom pain: not only the pain for a lost limb, but for limbs that have not yet been formed, not yet developed; for unlived feelings, unfulfilled longings.) (p. 232)

This sense of a Trojan history that is doomed to play itself out from generation unto generation offers a further dimension to Wolf’s presentation of Troy as a ghost city. Not only is it a city that has been reduced to a shadow of its former self, but it is a city that stands as a ghostly palimpsest behind the European cities that themselves look back to Rome, and by extension Troy. On this reading, it becomes not only natural but almost a necessity that Wolf should resurrect Aeneas, the founding father of Rome, so that it is clear that his story, his suffering, like that of Cassandra, should set the template for European history. The Aeneas who swims into Wolf ’s imagination is not the heroic father of a glorious Roman empire. Rather, he parallels Cassandra in the air of hopelessness and defeat that he carries with him. Wolf ’s recognition of the loneliness attendant upon a political destiny, of the ways in which ideology strips people of their humanity and sets them irrevocably apart, makes of her Aeneas a deeply tragic figure. That her imagined Aeneas bore the features of people Wolf had known, partisans engaged in their own bloody battles, reinforced his status as father of a Western civilization that had been founded upon strife. To read the Aeneid after reading Wolf ’s re-creation of Aeneas is to become ever more acutely aware of the pathos of tragic inevitability

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in Aeneas’ gesture, as he raises in triumph the shield that bears the histories and destinies of his descendants. In Wolf ’s account, Aeneas’ helplessness stems, not from the fact that he rushes upon his destiny, burning with triumph and heedless of the cost, but because her Aeneas is a man who has seen the horrors and is unable to articulate them. As Wolf gazed upon her imagined Aeneas, she saw the head of Orpheus floating on the waters after he had recognized that his poetry was not enough to regain Eurydice. And hovering behind Wolf ’s depiction of this is the fate of Ophelia, so that Aeneas’ despair is aligned with the silent madness that is the result of enforced submission and repression: Eine blutige Geschichte aus der Partisanenzeit, an der nicht das Blut das wichtige war, sondern der allma¨hliche Verlust der inneren Zusammenhangs eines u¨ber die Massen geschundenen Menschen mit seinen Mitmenschen, am Ende mit seinen engsten Kameraden. Ich wollte nicht wissen, wie es enden musste, nicht mehr heute nacht, ich legte das Buch weg, nahm das Vorauswissen, wie in diesem Jahrhundert Aufbegehren, Widerstand enden, mit in den Schlaf, sah zuletzt noch den Gesichtsausdruck dieses Partisanen vor mir, eines jungen Mannes dunklen Haars und Barts, dessen Haupt—so altertu¨mlich dru¨ckte mein sprechendes Schlafbewusstsein sich aus—auf einmal auf den Wassern schwamm, ich kann es nicht anders sagen. Irgendwo muss mir in diesen Tagen das singende Haupt des Orpheus begegnet sein. Ein Ju¨nglingshaupt, von dem ich wusste, es geho¨rte zu einem Manne namens Aineias, schwamm, umgeben von Teichrosenbla¨ttern und anderen Gru¨nzpflanzen, auf glattem o¨ligen Wasser und sah mich an, schmerzlich fordernd, und ich wusste natu¨rlich, ohne es ausdru¨cklich denken zu mu¨ssen, dass dieser Aineias auch der junge Partisan war, dessen mit Gewissheit entsetzliches Ende ich nicht mehr hatte erfahren wollen; das also diese beiden u¨ber drei Jahrtausende hin wie beila¨ufig den gleichen Ausdruck aufgepra¨gt bekamen, den Ausdruck der nicht aufgebenden Verlierer, die wissen: sie werden immer wieder verlieren, immer wieder nicht aufgeben, und das ist kein Zufall, kein versehen oder Unglu¨cksfall. sondern: so ist es gemeint. Was doch immer keiner glauben will—jenes Haupt, das auf dem Wasser schwamm, glaubte und wusste es, und das war der furchtbarste, der eigentliche Jammer, und es war das ho¨chste Entzu¨cken: Aineias. (pp. 46–7) (A bloody history from the partisan period in which the important thing was not the blood but the gradual loss, by an inordinately abused man, of his inner relatedness to his fellow human beings, and in the end to his closest comrades. I did not want to know its inevitable ending, not this evening.

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I put the book away, took with me into sleep my foreknowledge of how rebellion and resistance end in this century. Just at the last I saw the facial expression of this partisan, a young man with dark hair and a beard, whose head—such was the archaic language in which my consciousness expressed itself in my sleep, suddenly floated upon the waters; I do not know how else to say it. Somewhere in the last few days I must have come across the singing head of Orpheus. A youthful head, which I knew belonged to a man named Aeneas, was floating on smooth, oily water, surrounded by petals of water lilies and other verdure. He was looking at me, painfully demanding. And I knew, of course, without expressing it, that this Aeneas was also the young partisan whose assuredly ghastly end I had not wanted to know. Knew that these two men, separated by more than three thousand years, had as if casually been imprinted with the same expression, the expression of losers who do not give up, who know: they will lose again and again, and again and again will not give up, and that is no accident, no mistake or mishap, but it is meant to be that way. The thing that no-one ever wants to believe—that head floating on the water believed and knew, and that was the most dreadful shame, the real crying shame, and it was the greatest delight: Aeneas. (pp. 184–5)

Wolf ’s delight at being able to identify and put a name to the face etched by the pain of all who have been unable to make their suffering known, and to voice warnings that people will heed, is not only that she can add further resonance to the fate of Cassandra, but that she herself feels a form of kinship with Aeneas. It is no accident that Aeneas is conflated with Orpheus, since for Wolf it is only by recognition of plurality, of a multiplicity of voices and resonances, that brute force can be countered. In the 1980s, with Reagan in the White House, and with the escalating threat of a nuclear war that would annihilate Europe, she felt more than ever that it was her duty, as a writer, to find a means of expression that would articulate the impending end of civilization at the end of the twentieth century. In an observation that bleakly mirrors the conflict between America and the Middle East in our own century, Wolf suggests that the time for her role as ‘Cassandra’ is, if anything, over-ripe: Die meisten Kra¨fte werden gebraucht zur Abwehr der Irrsinnsnachrichten, besonders aus den USA, zum Beispiel dem Ausbruch kollektiven Wahnsinns bei der Ru¨ckkehr der Geiseln aus dem Iran. Bei uns wa¨chst die Liste derer, die weggehn. Ta¨glich Kampf um Arbeitsfa¨higkeit, von ‘Lust’ nicht zu

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reden.—Jetzt muss man nicht mehr ‘Kassandra’ sein; Die meisten beginnen zu spu¨ren, was kommen wird. (p. 97) (Most energies are used up in warding off the insane news that is coming in, especially from the United States; for instance, the outbreak of collective madness when the hostages return from Iran. The list of people here who are going away keeps growing. Daily struggle for the ability to work, not to mention for ‘enjoyment’. Now you no longer need to be ‘Cassandra’; most people are beginning to see what is coming.) (p. 239)

Ironically, however, Wolf ’s lectures about the conditions that prompted her to take up the story of Cassandra did end up being censored in East Germany, so that the parallels between herself and the doomed Trojan princess are stronger than she may initially have imagined.4 Wolf ’s impulse to turn to the story of Cassandra in order to voice a warning about the threat to her own world does not derive solely from the fact that Cassandra offers her the obvious figure of the silenced prophetess. For Wolf, the very structures of the patriarchal epics underpinning Western civilization go hand in hand with the violence that they depict. They themselves inflict and represent violence through their systematic and unthinking sidelining of women: Das Epos, aus den Ka¨mpfen um das Patriarcht entstanden, wird durch seine Struktur auch ein Instrument zu seiner Herausbildung und Befestigung. Vorbildwirkung wird dem Helden auferlegt, bis heute. Der Chor der Sprecherinnen ist verschwunden, vom Erdboden verschluckt. Als Heroine kann die Frau nun Gegenstand der ma¨nnlichen Erza¨hlung werden. Zum Beispiel Helena, die, zum Idol erstarrt, in den Mythen u¨berlebt. (p. 147) (The epic, born of the struggles for patriarchy, becomes by its structure an instrument by which to elaborate and fortify the patriarchy. The hero is made to serve as a model and still does so down to the present day. The chorus of female speakers has vanished, swallowed up by the earth. The woman can now become the object of masculine narrative, in the role of heroine. Helen, for example, who, rigidifed into an idol, lives on in the myths.) (p. 297)

4

For a detailed account of the censorship, see Graves (1986: 944–56).

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That Cassandra is enclosed in just such a narrative inflicts further outrage upon her; Wolf recognizes the paradox: Empfinde die geschlossene Form der Kassandra-Erza¨hlung als Widerspruch zu der fragmentarischen Struktur, aus der sie sich fu¨r mich eigentlich zusammensetzt. Der Widerspruch kann nicht gelo¨st, nur benannt warden. (p. 120) (I experience the closed form of the Cassandra narrative as a contradiction to the fragmentary structure from which (for me) it is actually composed. The contradiction cannot be resolved, only named.) (p. 266)

While such a contradiction can be identified only when looking back to the epics of Homer and Virgil, Wolf ’s translation of the figure of Cassandra into the modern novel represents an urge to move away from a Cassandra objectified by the accounts written by men in order to explore her subjectivity in a genre that privileges open-endedness and shifting viewpoints. Wolf ’s narrative is circular. It opens with an image of Cassandra reconstructing in memory the stone lions in front of Priam’s palace, now destroyed. ‘Hier war es. Da stand sie. Diese steinernen Lo¨wen, jetzt kopflos, haben sie angeblickt’ (p. 5) (It was here. This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her; now they no longer have heads) (p. 3). By the close of the book the past has become so much more real to her than her impending execution that the lions have come back to life: ‘Hier ist es. Diese steinernen Lo¨wen haben sie angeblickt. Im Wechsel des Lichts scheinen sie sich zu ru¨hren’ (p. 159) (Here is the place. These stone lions looked at her. They seem to move in the shifting light) (p. 138). From the very beginning Cassandra’s reconstruction through memory of the Troy that has been lost is Virgilian in tone, not least because the Aeneid offers numerous examples of Troy as a ghost city. In Aeneid 1 the Trojans weep to see their city and the war depicted as a war painting; in Aeneid 3 Aeneas and his men happen upon Andromache, re-creating in the dust an image of Troy to soothe her terrible grief for her family and her homeland, and throughout the book the lost city serves as a prefiguring of Rome, the city of the future. Like the Andromache of Aeneid 3, Cassandra comforts herself in her captivity by re-creating in memory the Troy of her childhood. The parallels between the two women are ironic, given Andromache’s envy of Cassandra’s plight:

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Andromache’s grief haunts Wolf ’s depiction of Cassandra, especially as it is filtered through Baudelaire’s evocation of Andromache in ‘Le Cygne’, his own poetic account of grief for the Paris of his youth that was swept aside by Haussmann’s urban renewal projects, a poem dedicated to Victor Hugo, who was himself in exile on the Channel Islands, looking back to his homeland of France. The first stanza evokes the Andromache of Aeneid 3: Andromaque, je pense a` vous! Ce petit fleuve, Pauvre et triste miroir ou` jadis resplendit L’immense majeste´ de vos douleurs de veuve, Ce Simoı¨s menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit, A fe´conde´ soudain ma me´moire fertile (Andromache, I think of you. This small river, A poor, sad mirror where once shone forth The mighty majesty of your widow’s griefs, This mendacious Simois which swells from your tears Has suddenly awoken my fertile memory)5

Baudelaire goes on to depict the sour decay of the city around him before using the ruins before his eyes as prompts to reconstruct in his mind the Paris of the past: Paris change! mais rien dans ma me´lancolie N’a bouge´! palais neufs, e´chafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient alle´gorie, Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. (Paris is changing! But nothing in my melancholy Has shifted! New palaces, scaffolding, blocks, Old suburbs, all becomes an allegory in my mind And my dear memories weigh heavier than rocks.)6 5

My translation.

6

My translation.

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As Wolf ’s Cassandra rebuilds in memory the Troy of her childhood, her words echo both Virgil and Baudelaire: Dies alles, das Troia meiner Kindheit, existiert nur noch in meinem Kopf. Da will ich es, solang ich Zeit hab, wieder aufbaun, will keinen Stein vergessen, keinen Lichteinfall, kein Gela¨chter, keinen Schrei. Treulich, wie kurz die Zeit auch sein mag, soll es in mir aufgehoben sein. Jetzt Kann ich sehen, was nicht ist, wie schwer hab ichs gelernt. Helenos. Ach Helenos, andersgearteter Gleichaussehender. Mein Ebenbild—wa¨r ich ein Mann geworden.Wa¨r ichs doch!’ (p. 31) (All this, the Troy of my childhood, no longer exists except inside my head. I will rebuild it there while I still have time, I will not forget a single stone, a single incidence of light, a single laugh, a single cry. It shall be kept faithfully inside me, however short the time may be. Now I have learned to see what is not, how hard the lesson was. Helenus. Oh, Helenus, identical in appearance, different in kind. The image of me—if I had been a man. If only I were!) (p. 28)

This image of remembered Troy superimposed upon the ruins in front of her serves as a reminder to Cassandra of the richness of multiplicity, of various identities. As she looks back over the downfall and ruin of Troy, she becomes increasingly aware of having been trained to view the identities of those around her (both people and places) as immutable, as fixed. As her viewpoint of history becomes more nuanced, however, she recognizes that the site of Troy is inhabited by a plethora of various Troys: ‘Was ging vor. Wo lebte ich denn. Wie viele Wirklichkeiten gab es in Troia noch ausser der meinen, die ich doch fu¨r die einzige gehalten hatte. Wer setzte die Grenze fest zwischen Sichtbarem und Unsichtbarem?’ (p. 23) (What was happening? What kind of place did I live in? How many realities were there in Troy besides mine, which I had thought was the only one? Who fixed the boundary between visible and invisible?) (p. 20). The tragedy of Troy’s downfall is not only that it entails the loss of all of these different Troys, both seen and unseen, but that it strips away the identity of its citizens whose sense of self grew in the shelter of the national myths and stories. And, of course, Wolf ’s work is alive with allusions to other writers meditating on the fall of empires, of cities, who themselves were influenced by Virgil, so that Cassandra’s lament for the fall of Troy resonates with similar lamentations uttered at the

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downfall of nations and capitals throughout the ages. When Hector and Cassandra converse, both heavy with the unspoken knowledge that Hector must soon die, Cassandra attempts to console him by pointing out that Troy is already dead: ‘Ich sagte ihm, dass Troia nicht mehr Troia war’ (p. 116) (I told him that Troy was no longer Troy) (p. 111). Her words, however, echo du Bellay’s lamentation at the ruins of Rome—‘Rome n’est plus a` Rome’ (Rome is no longer in Rome)—and create within the narrative one of those quintessentially Virgilian moments where the reader knows that the future will chill still further the present experienced by the characters within the text. Rome, the empire that will redeem the fall of Troy, is itself destined to fall into ruin and prompt lamentation in its turn. Wolf, whose own identity as a writer in the 1980s was powerfully linked to the issues she was negotiating as an East German, equates the loss of national identity with silence. Cassandra describes how her captivity deprived her of her nationhood in a passage that presents her as a muted Sibyl, since the form of her imprisonment parallels the existence eked out by the Sibyl in the epigram to Eliot’s The Waste Land: Nicht durch Geburt, ach was, durch die Erza¨hlungen in den Innenho¨fen bin ich Troerin geworden. Durch das Geraune der Mu¨nder am Guckloch, als ich im Korb sass, habe ich aufgeho¨rt, es zu sein. Jetzt, da es Troia nicht mehr gibt, bin ich es wieder: Troerin. Nichts sonst. Wem sag ich das? (p. 37) (It was not my birth that made me a Trojan, it was the stories told in the inner courts. I stopped being one when I was caged in the basket, as I heard the whisper at the mouths at the peephole. Now that Troy no longer exists, I am one again: a Trojan woman. And nothing more. To whom can I tell that?) (p. 33)

As Eliot’s Sibyl heralded the depiction of a civilization that was nothing more than an accumulation of dying ruins, as Wolf ’s lectures on the writing of Kassandra express anxiety about the impending demise of Europe, here Cassandra looks at the site of a lost civilization and recognizes that she herself has no identity outside of Troy. Like the Sibyl she has no one who has the capacity to hear and recognize what she is saying. As Virgil’s Andromache has to scratch the image of Troy into the mud in order to try and recapture her past, and thus herself, Cassandra is but the shell of her former self outside of the national body that moulded her.

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It was the glory of Troy that formed the landscape of her childhood but, true to her Minoan female forebears who were able to voice their political opinions freely and expect to be heard (foreshadowing the Utopian communities envisaged by both Wolf and Wittig), Cassandra’s earliest memories are bound up with the political fortunes of Troy: Dies ist mein fru¨hestes Bild, denn ich, Liebling des Vaters und an Politik interessiert wie keines meiner zahleichen Geschwister, ich durfte bei ihnen sitzen und ho¨ren, was sie redeten, oft auf Priamos’ Schoss, die Hand in seiner Schulterbeuge (die Stelle, die ich an Aineias am meisten liebe), die sehr verleztlich war und wo, ich sah es selbst, der Speer des Griechen ihn durchbohrte. (p. 16) (This is the earliest picture I remember, for I, Father’s favourite and interested in politics like none of my numerous siblings, was allowed to sit with them and listen to what they were saying; often seated in Priam’s lap, my hand in the crook of his shoulder (the place I love best on Aeneas) which was very vulnerable and where I myself saw the Greek spear run him through.) (p. 13)

It is significant that Cassandra links her earliest memories to her love for Aeneas, not just because her passion creates so much of the dramatic impulse of the narrative, but because this conflation of the personal and the political forms one of the conflicts that the Aeneid struggles throughout to resolve. That it is Aeneas who confirms for her a sense of identity is indicated by the fact that she assumed her destiny as prophetess in front of him: ‘es war kein Zufall, dass diese fremde Stimme, vor der ich mich in Sicherheit bringen musste, mich an Aineais anklammern, der ershrocken war, aber standhielt’ (p. 42) (it was no accident that this strange voice which had stuck in my throat many times already in the past should speak out of me for the first time in Aeneas’ presence) (p. 39). Wolf ’s articulations of grief at the loss of a homeland, her evocations of shadow cities, imbue her narrative with Virgilian pathos, but it is through her focus on the figures of Anchises and Aeneas that she signals that the narrative of Kassandra foreshadows the action of the Aeneid and that it becomes clear that the two texts comment upon and illuminate each other. As will also be the case for Dido, Cassandra binds all her hopes of happiness up with her love for Aeneas. In a terrible prefiguring of Dido’s suicide within eyeshot of Aeneas’ parting ship, Cassandra

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indicates that for her all joy vanished with Aeneas’ departure from Troy, with Anchises on his shoulders: Das letzte Mal hab ich gela¨chelt, als Aineias—seinen Vater, den alten Anchises, auf dem Buckel—mit seiner Handvoll Leute an mir vorbeizog, in Richtung Ida-Gebirge. Unwichtig, dass er mich in dem haufen gefangener Frauen suchte, nicht erkannte. Ich sah: Er kommt davon, und la¨chelte. (p. 33) (The last time I smiled was when Aeneas passed me headed towards Mount Ida with his handful of people, carrying his father, old Anchises, on his back. It did not matter that he failed to recognize me when he looked for me among the crowd of women captives. I saw he was getting away, and smiled.) (p. 30)

The evocation of Aeneid 2, entailed by the image of Aeneas carrying his father out of the captive city, reminds us, of course, of the figure of Creusa. In Wolf ’s version Creusa does not figure; it is Cassandra whom Aeneas turns back to see again. But the absence of Creusa from the narrative highlights even more strongly the parallels between Cassandra and Dido. Cassandra becomes the Dido of Troy. The names of Dido and Aeneas are naturally linked in the consciousness of Western civilization, but in Cassandra’s mind it is her own name that sings together with that of Aeneas in her memory: ‘wir sagten uns kaum mehr als unsre Namen, ein scho¨neres Liebesgedicht hatte ich nie geho¨rt. Aineias Kassandra. Kassandra Aineias’ (p. 93) (We said little more to each other than our names; I had never heard a more beautiful love poem. Aeneas Cassandra. Cassandra Aeneas) (p. 88). Because of her love for him, for as long as is possible she resists knowing that he must leave, that she must be the first of his abandoned women: ‘Ich glaube, und verstand ihn, doch verstand ihn nicht, dass Aineias lieber ging als blieb’ (pp. 93–4) (I believe—and I understood him yet failed to understand—that Aeneas preferred to leave rather than to stay) (p. 88). Like Dido, she has a clear grasp of her country’s political position, and is accustomed to conversing with men about matters of politics and state. Unlike Dido, however, she understands the political imperative that must drive Aeneas away from her: ‘Wir hatten nicht die Zeit, u¨ber meine Weigerung, mit ihm zu gehn, die nicht die Vergangenheit betraf, sondern die Zukunft, uns gru¨ndlich auszusprechen. Aineias lebt. Er wird von meinem Tod erfahren’ (p. 100) (We did not have time to finish talking about my refusal to go with him, which had to do not with the past but with the

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future. Aeneas is alive. He will learn of my death) (p. 95). Cassandra is able to exercise self-control in the face of historical circumstances because she understands the way in which individual stories and happinesses are swallowed up by the prerequisites of history. It is Anchises who was her teacher in such matters, unfolding for her to enable her to envision the future, and so performing precisely the role that he will perform after death for Aeneas in the Underworld, when he shows him the future history of Rome: So legte es kurz und bu¨ndig Anchises aus, der Vater des Aineias, der mich, die Ko¨nigstochter, Priesterin, die Geschichte Troias lehrte. Also ho¨r doch mal zu, Ma¨dchen. (Des Anchises langer Kopf. der hohe, vollkommen kahle Scha¨del. Die Unzahl der Querfalten auf des Stirn. Die dichten Brauen. Der helle listige blick. Die beweglichen Gesichtszu¨ge. Das starke Kinn. Der heftige, oft zum Lachen, o¨fter zum Schmunzeln aufgerissene oder verzogne Mund. Die schlanke kraftvollen Ha¨nde mit den heruntergearbeiteten Na¨geln, des Aineias Ha¨nde.) (pp. 34–5) (That is how Anchises, Aeneas’ father, explained it to the king’s daughter, the priestess, when he taught me the history of Troy: short and to the point. ‘Just you listen, girl.’ (Anchises’ long head. The high, completely bald skull. The multitude of wrinkles running the breadth of his forehead. The thick eyebrows. The bright, crafty gaze. The mobile features. The forceful chin. The irascible mouth, often gaping or twisted with laughter, more often in a grin. The slender, powerful hands with their nails worn down by toil: Aeneas’ hands.)) (p. 31)

Wolf emphasises the humanity of Anchises in this passage, reminding us of humanity’s vulnerability as she focuses on the genetic traits that are handed down from generation to generation. It is not solely that the hands of his father offer her an opportunity to bring Aeneas into her mind’s eye again, but that the image of flesh remembering flesh emphasizes Anchises’ mortality. The world of Wolf ’s Kassandra is not governed by the gods, as the worlds of Homer and Virgil are, so that utterances that were once divine acquire an extra pathos in Wolf by being placed in the mouths of those who are simply human. Cassandra herself glances at the deep-rooted vengefulness of Juno with the observation that ‘die Kette der fu¨r unsre stadt unheilvollen Ereignisse sich in grauer Vorzeit verlor’ (p. 40) (the chain of events ruinous to our city stretched back to remotest anti-

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quity) (p. 37), evoking Virgil’s explanation for the Trojan War at the beginning of Book 1 as being driven ‘saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram’ (1. 4) (on account of the mindful wrath of Juno). But it is Anchises’ sardonic reservation about any envisaging of an end to the war that echoes Jupiter’s weary question towards the end of the Aeneid (12. 793): ‘quae iam finis erit, coniunx? quid denique restat’ (What will the end be now, o wife? what remains in the end?): Jubelnd lief das Volk durch die strassen, Ich sah eine Nachricht zur Wahrheit werden. Und Priamos hatte einen neuen Titel: ‘Unser ma¨chtiger Ko¨nig.’ [ . . . ] Zweckma¨ssige Neuerungen, sagte Panthoos. Was man lange genug gesagt hat, glaubt man am Ende. Ja, erwiderte ihm Anchises trocken. Am Ende. Ich dachte wenigstens den Sprachkrieg aufzuhalten. [ . . . ] Wie lange hab ich an die alten Zeiten nicht gedacht. Esstimmt: der nahe Tod mobilisiert nochmal das ganze Leben. Zehn jahre Krieg. Sie waren lang genug, die Frage, wie der Krieg entstand, vollkommen zu vergessen. Mitten im Krieg denkt man nur, wie er enden wird. Und schiebt das Leben auf. Wenn viele das tun, entsteht in uns der leere Raum, in den der Krieg hineinstro¨mt. Dass auch ich mich anfangs dem Gefu¨hl u¨berliess, jetzt lebte ich nur vorla¨ufig. (pp. 69–70) (The people ran through the streets cheering. I saw a news item turn into the truth. And Priam had a new title: ‘our mighty king.’ [ . . . ] ‘Practical reforms,’ said Panthous. ‘When you have said something long enough you come to believe it in the end.’ ‘Yes,’ Anchises replied dryly, ‘in the end. I hoped at least to impede the language war [ . . . ]’. How long it has been since I thought about the old days. It is true what they say, the approach of death does make your whole life pass before you. Ten years of war. That was long enough to forget completely the question of how the war started. In the middle of a war you think of nothing but how it will end. And put off living. When large numbers of people do that, it creates a vacuum within us which the war flows in to fill. What I regret more than anything else is that, in the beginning, I too gave in to the feeling that for now I was living only provisionally.) (p. 65)

And, although Anchises recognizes the fundamental role played by language in war, his own discourse about history and war is enhanced by his poetic turns of phrase, so that Cassandra finds herself seduced by the beauties of cadence and imagery: ‘oi, oi. Doch in des Anchises strikter Nu¨chternheit was immer auch etwas wie Poesie, dem konnte ich mich nicht entziehn’ (pp. 35–6) (Oi, oi. But Anchises’ stringent

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clearheadedness never lacked for a kind of poetry, either; I could not resist that) (p. 32). The power of language to provoke either submission or revolt is recognized by those attempting to control the course of history. The world of Wolf ’s Troy is uncomfortably close to a contemporary America where the devastation inflicted by air-borne rockets and bombs is poetically rendered as ‘star wars’: ‘Krieg durfte ¨ berfall’ er nicht heissen. die Sprachregelung lautete, zutreffend: U (p. 76) (We were not allowed to call it ‘war’. Linguistic regulations prescribed that, correctly speaking, it be called a surprise attack) (p. 71). Wolf ’s repeated warnings about the power of language, its ability to take on a life of its own and forge its own realities, echo the Virgilian depiction of Fama, who starts off as a tiny, diffident creature but who then swells into a monstrous force, sweeping through the streets and leaving broken lives in her wake (Aen. 4. 174–88). Language that has been repressed, or is doomed never to be heeded, is all the more potent. Wolf ’s depiction of the surge of prophecy within Cassandra is alarmingly close to Virgil’s description of Fama. At first the voice within her breast is a tiny, whistling sound, but it gains strength until it erupts and tears her apart: Stillstand der zeit, ich wu¨nsch es niemandem. Und Grabeska¨lte. Endgu¨ltge fremdheit, schien es, gegenu¨ber mir und jedermann. Bis endlich die endsetzliche Qual, als Stimme, sich aus mir, durch mich hindurch und mich zerreissend ihren Weg gebahnt hatte und sich losgemacht. Ein pfeifendes, ein auf dem letzten Loch pfeifendes Stimmchenm das mir das Blut aus den Adern treibtund die Haare zu Berge stehn la¨sst. das, wie es anschwillt, sta¨rker, gra¨sslicher wird, all meine Gliedmassen ins Zappeln, Rappeln und ins schleudern bringt. Aber die stimme schert das nicht. Frei ha¨ngt sie u¨ber mir und schreit, schreit, schreit. Wehe, schrie sie. Wehe, wehe. Lasst das schiff nicht fort! (p. 63) (Time stood still. I would not wish that on anyone. And the cold of the grave. The ultimate estrangement from myself and from everyone. That is how it seemed. Until finally the dreadful torment took the form of a voice, forced its way out of me, through me, dismembering me as it went; and set itself free. A whistling little voice, whistling at the end of its rope, that makes my blood run cold and my hair stand on end. Which as it swells, grows louder and more hideous, sets all my members to wriggling and rattling and hurling about. But the voice does not care. It floats above me, free, and shrieks, shrieks, shrieks. ‘Woe,’ it shrieked. ‘Woe, woe. Do not let the ship depart!’) (p. 59)

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It is significant that Cassandra is destroyed, ‘dismembered’, since the cries that she utters are those that foretell the destruction of her homeland, a place that has bestowed upon her her sense of self. Because her utterances were so violent, appeared so extreme, it was easy to ignore them, and to dismiss Cassandra herself as a lunatic. In yet another echo of the Virgilian Fama, Cassandra remembers that ‘Unter den Geschwistern habe sich in Windeseile das Geru¨cht verbreitet, ich ser wahnsinnig’ (p. 64) (Lightning swift the rumor spread among my brothers and sisters that I was mad) (p. 59). The story of Cassandra offers one of the earliest instances of this conflation of women’s voices with the utterances of the insane; that the manuvre persisted is indicated by Miche`le Roberts’s observation, discussed in Chapter 5, that as late as the 1970s the Dewey system categorized Women with Lunatics, Gypsies and Wanderers.7 And yet, in the wreckage of this once glorious city, in the ruins of a place that had given birth to her as a politically engaged and responsible woman, lunacy at least gave her the semblance of an identity at a time when all others had been lost: Wahnsinn als ende der Vorstellungsqual. Oh, ich genoss ihn fu¨rchterlich, umgab mich mit ihm wie mit einem schweren Tuch, ich liess mich Schicht fu¨r Schicht von ihm durchdringen. er war mir Speise und Trank. Dunkle Milch, bitteres Wasser, saures Brot. Ich war auf mich zuru¨ckgefallen. Doch es gab mich nicht. (p. 64) (Lunacy: an end to the torture of pretence. Oh, I enjoyed it dreadfully. I wrapped it around me like a heavy cloak, I let it penetrate me layer by layer. It was meat and drink to me. Dark milk, bitter water, sour bread. I had gone back to being myself. But my self did not exist.) (p. 60)

Even before Troy fell, it was turning into a city of shades, inhabited by those who had lost the capacity to think or see for themselves, who were swept along to war because they needed to believe in the rhetoric of those in power. The parallels between Wolf ’s imagined Troy and the history of twentieth-century Germany that she herself had witnessed are evident. The language that she uses to depict the

7 Significantly, one of the landmark critical studies of women’s writing, Gilbert and Gubar (1979), is entitled The Madwoman in the Attic.

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resolutely unseeing, uncomprehending Trojans could equally well have been applied to her own time: Wie stand es denn um meine Troer, dass sie uns, das Tru¨ppchen, das man durch ihre Gassen trieb, nicht sahn? Einfach nicht sehen, das ist einfach, sah ich. Ihre Augen fand ich nicht. (p. 89) What was happening to my Trojans that they did not see our little band being driven through their streets? It was simple, I saw: simply not to see. I could not find their eyes. (p. 84)

In a vicious circle the more the Trojans saw the life of their city diminishing, the more they lost their capacity for independent, responsible thought, and the more they insisted upon the reality of the cause that they thought they were defending: In Helena, die wir erfanden, verteidigten wir alles, was wir nicht mehr hatten. Was wir aber, je mehr es schwand, fu¨r um so wirklicher erkla¨ren mussten. So dass aus Worten, Gesten, Zeremonien und Schweigen ein andres Troia, eine Geisterstadt erstand. (p. 90) (In the Helen we had invented, we were defending everything that we no longer had. And the more it faded, the more real we had to say it was. Thus out of words, gestures, ceremonies and silence there arose a second Troy, a ghostly city.) (p. 85)

Once again it is through the abuse and suppression of language that life is leached from the city. It is because the Trojans choose to believe and to perpetrate the falsehoods being pedalled to them that their city is gradually transformed into an Underworld of half-truths and half-lives. And once again Virgil, through the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas, also pointed out that a life built on premises that are known to be fake, hopes that are known to be false, is nothing but the shell of a life. It is for such a simulacrum of existence that Dido begs the departing Aeneas, when she begs for ‘tempus inane’, an empty stretch of time that would allow her to get used to the idea of losing him before his actual departure. This ‘tempus inane’ has become the daily habitat of Troy: Die Zeit schien langsamer zu laufen, blass und schemenhaft blieb sie mir im Geda¨chtnis, unterteilt nur durch die grossen Rituale, an denen ich mitzuwirken hatte, und die o¨ffentlichen Orakelverku¨ndigungen, zu denen unser Volk, der Tro¨stung sehr bedu¨rftig, zusammenstro¨mte. (p. 94)

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(Time seemed to slow down; in my memory it was pale and ghostly, punctuated only by the great rituals I had to help perform, and by the public oracles to which our people flocked for desperately needed comfort.) (p. 89)

As in the Underworld, its denizens glide through an existence in which they are capable of performing only shadow-gestures. Again and again Wolf emphasizes that Troy is the city of the dead, that it is inhabited by the umbrae of the afterlife: ‘Schattenhaft tratet ihr, Marpessa, an den Rand meines Gesichtsfelds. Wurdet zu Schatten. Entwirklicht. Wie auch ich selbst, je mehr ich das, was der Palast des Eumelos befahl, fu¨r wirklich nahm’ (pp. 90–1) (You all stepped like shadows, Marpessa, to the edge of my field of vision. You became shadows. Deprived of reality. As I myself became unreal, the more I treated as real what the palace of Eumelos commanded) (pp. 85–6). As Cassandra looks back in memory at this place and time, its citizens blend into a host of ineffectual and anonymous ghosts: Durch dieses starre Bild laufen Gestalten. Viele namenlos. (p. 105) (Figures move through this unmoving picture. Many have no names.) (p. 100) Doch ohne meinen Willen nahm mein Geda¨chtnis diese Tatsachen einfach nicht ernst genug. Als seien sie nicht wirklich. Nicht wirklich genug. Als seien es Schatten-Taten. (p. 111) (But although I did not wish it, my memory simply did not take these facts seriously enough. As if they were not real. Not real enough. As if they were shadow-deeds.) (p. 106)

Cassandra’s passion for Aeneas is the only force at this time that makes her feel alive; their love alone had the power to anticipate the bright vitality of a future beyond the war, to restore life to the ghostliness of their times: Ich liebte ihn mehr als mein Leben. Er lebte nicht bei uns, wie manche jungen Ma¨nner, die an Ko¨rper oder Seele durch den Krieg bescha¨digt waren. Sie kamen wie die Schatten, unser pralles Leben gab ihnen Farbe, Blut, auch Lust zuru¨ck. (p. 138) (I loved him more than my life. He did not live with us like many young men whom the war had damaged in body or soul. They arrived like shadows; our blazing life restored their color, blood, zest.) (p. 132)

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Once more, it is through a projection into the future that consolation is brought to a bleak present, and through her reference to Anchises that Wolf reminds us that Anchises’ display of the future heroes of Rome to Aeneas in the Underworld performs precisely this function: Wir waren dankbar, dass gerade wir das ho¨chste Vorrecht, das es gibt, geniessen durften, in die finstere Gegenwart, die alle Zeit besetzt ha¨lt, einen schmalen Streifen Zukunft vorzuschieben. Anchises [ . . . ] nicht mu¨de wurde, uns vorzuhalten, das sei immer mo¨glich. (p. 140) (We were grateful that we were the ones granted the highest privilege there is: to skip a narrow strip of future into the grim present, which occupies all of time. Anchises [ . . . ] never tired of maintaining that it was possible to do this.) (p. 134)

And yet it is this very ability of his to confer reality upon the present that alerts them both to the sinister imperatives of his mission. As they recognize that his departure, their separation, is inevitable, they prefigure the same scene that will take place between Dido and Aeneas. Virgil famously used a phrase that made it impossible to know whose tears they were that were flowing: ‘lacrimae volvuntur inanes’ (Aen. 4. 449) (tears vainly flowed). By refusing to assign the tears to either Dido or Aeneas, Virgil, of course, made it clear that either one of them, or both, could be weeping. Wolf paints a comparable scene of mutual desolation: Aineias fragte nicht. Weiss, weiss leuchtete sein Ko¨rper in der Dunkelheit. Er beru¨hrte mich. Nichts regte sich. Ich weinte. Aineias weinte. Sie hatten uns geschafft. Trostlos gingen wir auseinander. (p. 121) (Aeneas did not ask. His body glowed white, white in the darkness. He touched me. Nothing stirred. I wept. Aeneas wept. They had finished us. Desolately we parted.) (p. 115)

As Aeneas moves nearer and nearer to his mission, the more heroic he becomes and, of course, the more unreal. Like Helen, he becomes a cipher of desperately needed beliefs and hopes. As he turns into the hero who can shoulder these (as he literally does at the end of Aeneid 8, when he bears upon his shield the ‘famamque et fata nepotum’ (l. 731) (stories and destinies of his descendants), he becomes less and less human and more and more the reification of an ideal. He is transformed into the father of Western civilization by an era that needed him

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to perform this role, but it is a role that denies him the comforts of companionship. ‘Gegen eine Zeit, die Helden braucht, richten wir nichts aus, das wusstest du so gut wie ic’ (p. 144) (You knew as well as I did that we have no chance against a time that needs heroes) (p. 138), observes Cassandra, anticipating Dido’s complaint about precisely the same phenomenon that turns her Aeneas into a man of stone: nec tibi diva parens generis nec Dardanus auctor, perfide, sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens Caucasus (Aen. 4. 365–7) (No goddess gave you birth, no Dardanus authored your bloodline! Caucasus, jagged with flint, fathered you! [ . . . ] perfidious liar!)

Cassandra’s more sophisticated grasp of historical necessities enables her to recognize the imperative behind this phenomenon: ‘Einen Held kann ich nicht lieben. Deine Verwandlung in ein Standbild will ich nicht erleben’ (p. 144) (I cannot love a hero. I do not want to see you being transformed into a statue) (p. 138). Wolf ’s resistance to such reifications wrought by history is the prompt behind her rewriting of the fall of Troy from a female perspective, her creation of what Anna Kuhn terms ‘a female aesthetic of resistance’.8 Through her choice of Cassandra as the mouthpiece, Wolf breaks the cast of the reified Cassandra, as she appears to us in male-authored works, as Kuhn points out: ‘Wolf tells us that she wanted to know who Cassandra was before anyone wrote about her, that is, before she was distorted into a Frauenbild, a male image of women, by the male literary tradition.’9 Her aim to provide a counter-history that would recount the war as experienced by women entails a counter-version of all the stories that have flowed from the Trojan War, a women’s history, of the kind envisaged by Cassandra: Aber, ich fleh dich an: Schick mir einen Schreiber, oder, besser noch, eine junge Sklavin mit scharfem Geda¨chtnis und kraftvoller Stimme. Verfu¨ge, dass sie, was sie von mir ho¨rt, ihrer Tochter weitersagen darf. Die wieder ihrer Tochter, und so fort. So dass neben dem Strom der Heldenlieder dies

8

Kuhn (1988: 178).

9

Kuhn (1988: 195).

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winzge Rinnsal, mu¨hsam, jene fernen, vielleicht glu¨cklicheren Menschen, die einst leben werden, auch erreichte. (p. 86) (But I implore you: Send me a scribe, or better yet a young slave woman with a keen memory and a powerful voice. Ordain that she may repeat to her daughter what she hears from me. That the daughter in turn may pass it on to her daughter, and so on. So that alongside the river of heroic songs this tiny rivulet, too, may reach those faraway, perhaps happier people who will live in times to come.) (p. 81)

Wolf’s need to look back across thousands of years to the silenced effigy of Cassandra, and to warm her into a living, reflective, and responsible commentator, is a bleak reminder that progress with regard to the condition and status of women has been far less than it should have been and that this systematic suppression of women’s voices and experiences is a significant contributing factor to the crisis Europe was facing in the 1980s.10 The fact that Kassandra rapidly attained iconic status by being widely read and reviewed (and censored within Wolf’s own country) is a further indication of how it was responding to a gap in the way in which Western civilization has unremittingly presented history from a male perspective.11 And in a world that is collapsing under events that have been shaped by the uses of abuses of language, Wolf still needs to believe, as a writer, in the power of language to redeem death, to enable immortality. As her Cassandra points out: Ich suche ein Wort fu¨r ihre Erscheinung, ich kann nicht anders, mein Glaubem dass eine geglu¨ckte Wendung, Worte also, jede Erscheinung, jedes Vorkommis befestigen, ja oftmals sogar hervorbringen ko¨nnen, u¨berdauert mich. (pp. 100–1) (I search for a word to describe her; I cannot help that; my belief that a successful phrase—words, that is—can capture or even produce every phenomenon and every event, will outlive me.) (p. 95)

It is the fragility of this hope, pitted against the tumult of centuries of oppression and bellicose history, that moves Wolf closer to the

10 ‘In her Cassandra project, Wolf broadens her analysis by exploring how the patriarchy’s systematic exclusion of women has helped shape our present catastrophic world political situation’ (Kuhn 1988: 178). 11 ‘Occidental literature, which begins with the Homeric hero stories, is for Wolf a literature of the victors, “a heroization of bloody crimes” ’ (Kuhn 1988: 186).

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Virgilian version of the Trojan War. There have been a number of lucid expositions of the links between Homer and Aeschylus and Wolf;12 as yet, however, there have been no studies of the Virgilian qualities of Wolf ’s Cassandra, even though, as Porter points out: ‘Wolf [ . . . ] rejoins her classical sources, to an extent that may have exceeded even Wolf ’s expectations.’13 The links between Wolf and Virgil do not rely solely upon the fact that Wolf brings to life both Anchises and Aeneas, and creates a doomed love affair for Aeneas. In Cassandra Wolf is recounting the Trojan War precisely from the viewpoint of the vanquished, just as Virgil does. Both Virgil and Wolf present Troy as a ghost city that is destined to haunt its erstwhile citizens and their descendants from generation to generation. For Wolf, Troy itself becomes a version of the Underworld, peopled by ghosts (the Virgilian umbrae). It is a place where Cassandra is forced to witness horrific events and recognize terrible truths. As she observes: ‘Man zahlt fu¨r die Fahrt in die Unterwelt, die von Gestalten bewohnt ist, denen zu begegnen keiner gewa¨rtig ist’ (p. 65) (You pay for journeys to the underworld which is full of shapes that no-one is prepared to meet) (p. 61). One of the most chilling truths is that the whole war is founded upon a phantom belief. All the while that they are fighting over Helen, Helen is absent, is away with the King of Egypt.14 And, while Wolf highlights the emptiness of the war, she emphasizes the pernicious power of rhetoric to shape history. The silenced figure of Cassandra is an eloquent symbol of female oppression, but in Wolf ’s account she also adopts the mantle of the Sibyl, as she attempts to counter the rumours coursing through the city, which are, of course, Wolf ’s version of the Virgilian Fama. For Wolf, as for Wittig, the ideal resolution to male violence and female exclusion is the establishment of predominantly female communities. Wolf ’s version of such a utopia is less extreme than Wittig’s all-female, lesbian community. For Wolf it is a return to the Minoan matriarchal ideals, and forms yet another community haunted by the

12

See, in particular, Gilpin (1989), and Porter (1989). Porter (1989: 388). 14 Kuhn (1988: 200): ‘Reverting to the tradition in which Paris abducts Helen only to lose her to the king of Egypt, Wolf reveals the cause of the Trojan war to be a phantom.’ 13

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city of Troy.15 Through the pervasive allusions to the Aeneid and to works that are themselves inspired by the Aeneid, such as the poetry of Baudelaire and du Bellay, Wolf ’s Kassandra is a significant presence in the female response to Virgil at the end of the twentieth century. 15 Kuhn (1988: 206): ‘Anchises’ completely integrated role in the cave community is consonant with Wolf ’s rejection of a separatist feminism. His significance for the cave community cannot be minimized. Together with Arisbe this nature-bound person is seen as exemplary. Indeed the cave community, which consists predominantly of women, appears as a mirror image of an earlier Troy, the Troy in which Hecuba still played an important role within patrilinear society.’ For a comparison of Wittig and Wolf, see also Komar (1992).

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9 Monique Wittig Ever since the publication of Les Gue´rille`res in 1969, Monique Wittig has been renowned for her reworking of canonical texts, including classical epic. Part of her mission was to alter radically a patriarchal cultural tradition and history that had suppressed the voices and experiences of women. One of the strategies that she employs to highlight this absence within Les Gue´rrille`res is to replace the epic list of heroes, a staple of classical epic, with a list of female names, making sure to include those who figure within literature and history. For example, in the list below, through the names of E´ponine and He´le`ne she not only invokes the Iliad, the first epic of all and the tale of a war triggered by the beauty of Helen, but also the national epic of France, Les Mise´rables, where E´ponine, a secondary character, dies heroically on the barricades: DE´MONE E´PONINE GABRIELLE FULVIE ALEXANDRA JUSTINE PHILOME`LE CE´LINE HE´LE`NE PHILIPPINE ZOE´ HORTENSE SOR DOMINIQUE ARABELLE MARJOLAINE LOYSE ARMANDE1

Another device that Wittig uses is to place words originally voiced by men within the mouths of women, so that the utterance acquires a new meaning and significance from a female context. The closing lines of her first book, L’Opoponax (1964), appropriate words from 1 Wittig (1969: 56). See Hewitt (1990: 134): ‘Wittig’s novels abound in female names, as well as the names of famous men that have been feminized, as she searches for new ways of conceiving of the female subject through our cultural tradition.’

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Sce`ve expressing heterosexual love, so that she enables the protagonist Catherine Legrand to express her lesbian love for Vale´rie Borge: ‘On dit, tant je l’aimais, qu’en elle encore je vis’ (p. 253)2 (I loved her so much that people said that I still live in her).3 Indeed, Wittig’s work is driven not so much by a feminist as by a lesbian agenda. For Wittig the distinction is a crucial one. Given her commitment to speaking on behalf of marginalized sections of society such as women and children,4 it may at first sight seem that she has elected to give a voice to a further oppressed category within traditional patriarchal society—female homosexuals. But, in a polemic that develops Beauvoir’s famous observation ‘On ne naıˆt pas femme, on le devient’5 (One isn’t born a woman, one becomes one), Wittig argues that the very concept of ‘la femme’ has been established by men: ‘La femme’ n’est pas chacune de nous mais une construction politique et ide´ologique qui nie ‘les femmes’ (le produit d’une relation d’exploitation). ‘La femme’ n’est la` que pour rendre les choses confuses et dissimuler la re´alite´ ‘femmes’.6 (‘Woman’ is not each one of us, but a political and ideological construction that denies ‘women’ (the product of an exploitative relationship). ‘Woman’ is not there except to confuse things and to mask the ‘women’ reality.)

The impulse to make of her writing not just ‘feminist’ writing, but rather ‘lesbian’ writing, stems from her need to break free from such man-made categories: ‘Lesbienne’ est le seul concept que je connaisse qui soit au-dela` des cate´gories de sexe (femme et homme) parce que le sujet de´signe´ (lesbienne) n’est pas une femme, ni e´conomiquement, ni politiquement ni ide´ologiquement.

2

Wittig (1964: 253). See Jean Duffy’s discussion, where she points out that this ending of L’Opoponax is a ‘typical parting shot from Wittig (and one which anticipates her later work)’ (Duffy 1990: 204). 3 All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated. 4 So Duffy (1990: 214): ‘In both L’Opoponax and the subsequent feminist work she is focusing on sections of society—children and women—who have been regarded as incompetent and marginal to serious male activities but where the potential for development is at a maximum.’ 5 Beauvoir (1949: 285). 6 Wittig (1980: 80).

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Car en effet ce que fait une femme c’est une relation sociale particulie`rement a` un homme, relation que nous avons autrefois appele´ de servage, relation qui implique des obligations personnelles et physiques aussi bien que des obligations e´conomiques.7 (‘Lesbian’ is the only concept I know that has transcended the categories of sex (woman and man) because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, not economically, not politically, not ideologically. For in fact what makes a woman is a social relationship especially to a man, a relationship that at other times we called slavery, a relationship that implies personal and physical obligations as well as economic obligations.)

Wittig’s third novel, Virgile, Non (1985) (translated as Across the Acheron), depicts the quest of the protagonist ‘Wittig’ to find her lost female beloved in paradise. ‘Wittig’ is led on a journey that zigzags between hell, purgatory, and paradise by a female protagonist, Manastabal. This afterlife is fantastical and mythical, but is also situated recognizably within a modern-day San Francisco, one of the most noted gay centres of the world. Virgile, Non has never acquired the stature and iconic status that certain of Wittig’s other books achieved, such as Le Corps lesbien or Les Gue´rrille`res. This is possibly due to the fact that it is perceived as more light-hearted, more ludic, than Wittig’s more obviously polemic works,8 and much of the imagery is comically far-fetched, such as her creation of the fantastical creature the Ulliphant. At the same time, however, these playful elements are countered by accounts of female oppression that are all the more terrible for the way in which they echo the imagery of Holocaust testimony, an aspect of the book that has not yet been discussed. The connections between Dante’s Inferno and the manmade horror of the camps are well attested.9 Wittig ensures that her 7

Wittig (1980: 83). See Duffy (1990: 226): ‘The world of Virgile, Non is undoubtedly the most humorously playful. The world of Virgile, Non, like that of the Divine Comedy, is a microcosm, bringing together the real and the fantastic, the ancient and the contemporary, the finite and the infinite.’ 9 Such connections are made most famously between Primo Levi and Dante as a result of his account of trying to preserve his humanity by reciting Dante in the camps: Primo Levi, If This is a Man. George Steiner also aligns Dante with Auschwitz, going so far as to suggest that Dante’s work acted as a template for the realization of ultimate horror: ‘The camp embodies, often down to the minutiae, the images and chronicles of Hell in European thought and art from the twelfth to the eighteenth 8

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exposition of systematic female subjugation is chilled by her allusions, not just to Dante’s imaginary torments, but also to the way in which these were surpassed by the unimaginable reality of the camps. The imagery that she employs conflates the shades of the Virgilian Underworld with the victims of the concentration camps. As we shall see, this is a manuvre that she shares with Joyce Carol Oates. Through the work of writers such as these, it is not just Dante’s hell that stands behind the representation of the concentration camps but the Virgilian Underworld also. There is a palimpsest of horror contained in the testimonies or evocations of the camps that brought to life the sufferings imagined by artists such as Virgil, Dante, and Bosch. The corollary, of course, is that their ghostly presence in Holocaust literature means that their works are irrevocably stained by what happened. Through its evocation of the most graphic example of human torture and oppression, Wittig’s fantasy of hell is underpinned by an awareness of the limits to which humans are capable of taking the oppression of selected groups. Like the character of Dante, the protagonist ‘Wittig’ maintains the name of her author but is given a female guide, Manastabal, who is ‘loin d’avoir la douceur du Virgile de Dante’10 (far from having the gentleness of Dante’s Virgil). And yet, of course, Wittig alludes not only to the Virgil who led Dante through the afterlife, but also to Virgil, the author, whose work stands behind and forms a template for the Commedia, and beyond that for Wittig’s own text. Paradoxically, by reworking Virgil within a lesbian text, Wittig is returning to one of the earliest and strongest features of Virgilian reception, which is the treatment of homosexual love; Virgil developed this particularly in the second Eclogue, where the hapless Corydon questions his attractiveness to Alexis. This homosexual Virgil has been especially centuries. [ . . . ] It is in the fantasies of the infernal, as they literally haunt Western sensibility, that we find the technology of pain without meaning, of bestiality without end, of gratuitous terror [ . . . ] The concentration and death camps of the twentieth century, wherever they exist, under whatsoever regime, are Hell made immanent. Because it imagined more fully than any other text, because it argued the centrality of Hell in the Western order, the Commedia remains our literal guidebook—to the flames, to the ice fields, to the meat hooks’ (Steiner 1971: 53–5). 10 Taken from blurb on the back cover of Wittig (1985). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

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favoured in twentieth-century France, where he features in the works of Gide, such as the defence of homosexuality, Corydon (1911), and is invoked by the Baron de Charlus in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.11 Wittig signals that this is the Virgil whom she is appropriating by describing her guide Manastabal’s uncharacteristic and momentary gentleness in these terms: ‘Mais elle, avec la douceur d’un Virgile preˆt a` ce´der au premier beau garc¸on venu’ (p. 109) (But she, with the sweetness of a Virgil who is ready to succumb to the first handsome boy who comes along). Furthermore, the most famous treatment in France of the Orpheus myth, itself made famous by Virgil’s treatment in the fourth Georgic, is that of Jean Cocteau (1950) in which the title role is played by Jean Marais, Cocteau’s lover. Indeed, the blurb on the back of the book attempting to evoke Wittig’s landscape of hell for the potential reader exhorts: ‘Imaginez l’espace d’un film de Cocteau quand les personnages remontent le temps et se de´placent au ralenti, a` cause de la force du vent’ (Imagine the space in a film by Cocteau when the characters climb back through time and move in slow motion because of the strength of the wind). Of course, in the case of both Cocteau and Wittig, we are not just travelling back through time in a mythical sense, but are also travelling back to the literary texts (classical, medieval, biblical) on which they base their adaptations. Wittig indicates that she is following a well-trodden literary journey from the very first paragraph, where she says that she is ‘encore heureux qu’on n’ait pas a` porter des tuniques pour entreprendre ce voyage tout ensemble classique et profane’ (p. 7) (still happy that we didn’t have to wear tunics to undertake this journey, which is classical and profane at one and the same time). As Dante’s descent into hell is modelled upon the sixth book of the Aeneid, where Aeneas visits the Underworld, so Wittig bases her own postmodern, lesbian quest upon these two mainstays of the patriarchal Western tradition that she is seeking to revise. The phrase ‘classique et profane’ highlights Virgil’s significance to both the classical and Christian literary traditions, a point that is blurred by the English translation, which renders it as ‘sacred and profane’.12 Wittig moves immediately from

11

See Cox (1999: 87–8).

12

Wittig (1987: 7).

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her invocation of Virgil and Dante to a description of Manastabal, her guide: Au lieu de c¸a, la tenue et la de´marche de Manastabal mon guide, ont quelque chose de familier. Sa chemise gonfle´e lui claque autour du torse et des bras. Le vent plaque ses cheveux contre son craˆne dont la forme est visible. Elle a les mains dans les poches de son jean et marche comme dans un film muet. (p. 7) (Instead of that the garb and bearing of my guide Manastabal strike a familiar note. Her billowing shirt whips her around her torso and arms. The wind flattens her hair against her skull, whose outline is visible. She has her hands in her jeans pockets and walks as if she’s in a silent film.)

While these winds evoke the tempestuous blasts relentlessly tossing about Dante’s Paolo and Francesca,13 the imagery of a guide to the Underworld struggling against strong winds in a silent film is irresistibly reminiscent of Cocteau’s Orphe´e. Some of the eeriest moments in the film version of Orphe´e unfold in silence as the protagonists battle against the wind in order to travel the wrong way into hell. Orphe´e himself asks: ‘Pourquoi avez-vous l’air d’avancer contre le vent?’14 (Why do you seem to make way against the wind?). These initial resemblances between the two works are strengthened later in the text where Wittig describes a crowd of lesbians on bikes, an image that owes much to Cocteau’s representation of the raging Ciconean women15 as early French feminists dressed in leather jackets and riding motorbikes. Cocteau’s treatment of the Orpheus myth is thus invested with the chic glamour of the 1950s Parisian intelligentsia. The effect of all these literary allusions, which operate from the very beginning of the book, is primarily destabilization. The world that Wittig depicts is alien, is surreal; the opening of the book tells us: ‘Les aires sont de´pourvues de toute ornementation. Le sable passe en 13 Canto 5, ll. 28–33, in Dante (1961: 75): ‘I came to a place where all light was mute and where was bellowing as of a sea in tempest that is beaten by conflicting winds. The hellish storm, never resting, seizes and drives the spirits before it; smiting and whirling them about, it torments them.’ 14 Cocteau (1950: 64). 15 In the original legend after Eurydice’s death, Orpheus is so overcome by grief that he is unable to sing of anything else. Slighted by his inattention, the Ciconean women become enraged and tear his head from his body and throw it into the river. His disembodied head continued to lament for Eurydice. See Virgil, Georgics 4, 317–558.

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lames fines et dures sur les surfaces battues’ (p. 7) (The space is stripped of any ornamentation. The sand passes in fine, hard ridges over the beaten surfaces). At the same time we recognize it; it is familiar to us. Wittig maintains this tension of defamiliarization throughout the book by ensuring that the action shifts constantly between a mythical Underworld and modern San Francisco. The very architecture of San Francisco lends itself to this conflation of the real and the fantastic, as in the following passage, where the Golden Gate bridge becomes transformed into the Golden Gate that is the entrance to paradise: Je me tiens a` l’une d’elles avec Manastabal, mon guide, dans le parc de la Porte Dore´e ou` on est de garde, elle avec son rayon laser telle l’ange a` la sortie du paradis et moi avec une mitraillette. (p. 41) (I attend one of these with Manastabal, my guide, in the Golden Gate park where we are on guard, she with her laser beam, just like the angel at the exit from paradise, and I with my sub-machine-gun.)

For Jean Duffy, the location is chosen precisely in order to highlight women’s exclusion from the Western tradition: ‘The location of her Divine Comedy in an America full of excess and bad taste is determined by the fact that women and America share a common feature—a longing for a cultural history which would put them on an equal footing with the rest of the world.’16 Wittig does not rely exclusively on geography to wrong-foot the reader. She throws out fragments of a myth, enough for a reader to begin to think that they recognize the literary landmark, and then undercuts it and pulls the rug out from under our feet. At the beginning of the book ‘Wittig’ attempts to use her memories of myth to orient herself, to predict what Manastabal might be about to do next, but the context has changed too much: Qu’attend-elle? Va-t-elle me prendre sur ses e´paules pour me faire faire le passage? Mais le passage de quoi? Il n’y a pas de fleuve ici. Il n’y a pas de mer. (p. 8) (What is she waiting for? Is she going to take me on her shoulders to make me make the crossing? But the crossing over what? There’s no river here. There’s no sea.)

16

Duffy (1990: 226).

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Wittig’s initial impulse is to believe that Manastabal will carry her on her shoulders, as Aeneas once carried his father Anchises out of the burning city of Troy, but she then recognizes that the elements of the myth are changed—there is no water for them to seek their new land by sea. And this same echo of the Aeneid is undercut a little later when ‘Wittig’ politely offers to forgo Manastabal’s help, or indeed to swap roles if need be. Wittig’s wry subversion of the myth is introduced by a passage that recalls the biblical episode of Ruth vowing never to leave Naomi;17 the fusion of classical and biblical echoes both maintains the Christianization of Virgilian reception, and reminds us that Wittig is reworking multiple staples of the Western literary tradition: Guide-moi, je ferai de mon mieux pour te suivre. Qu’il pleuve ou qu’il vente, qu’il neige ou qu’il greˆle, qu’il tonne ou qu’il fasse une chaleur a` crever, j’irai. Je n’aurai pas besoin que tu me portes sur ton dos, comme il est de tradition pour ce genre de passage. Meˆme au contraire je pourrai te porter si besoin est. (p. 10) (Guide me, I’ll do my best to follow you. Whether it rains or blows a gale, whether it snows or hails, whether it thunders or burns with a stifling hear, I shall go. I don’t need you to carry me on your back, as is the tradition for this kind of crossing. On the contrary, I can even carry you, if need be.)

Part of the reason why Manastabal and ‘Wittig’ cannot pursue their journey by sea is that their hell is located in a wind-swept desert at the centre of the earth, onto which Wittig transposes the circles of Dante’s inferno. At first it is the circularity of the earth that strikes ‘Wittig’: L’espace est si plat qu’il donne a` voir la circularite´ de la plane`te a` l’horizon. On semble donc marcher exactement au milieu de la terre. On suit en effet le chemin qu’il faut prendre pour aller en enfer puisque c’est la` que, selon elle, Manastabal, mon guide, me conduit. (p. 8) (The space is so flat that it allows you to see the circularity of the planet on the horizon. So we seem to be walking exactly in the middle of the earth. In

17

‘Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back from following you. For where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people are my people, and your God my God; where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus may God do to me, and so may He do more, if anything but death separates me from you’ (Ruth 1:16–17).

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fact we are following the path that we must take to go to hell, since it’s there that, according to her, Manastabal my guide is leading me.)

The centre of the earth opens up, however, to reveal a sequence of circles from which the sound of unimaginable suffering can be heard: A son discours tous les cercles de l’enfer re´unis s’ouvrent et du gouffre ne parviennent qu’une lumie`re glauque et des ge´missements si horribles qu’on n’ose pas en deviner la nature. (p. 9) (At her speech all the conjoined circles of hell open up and from the depths emerge only a sickly yellow light and such horrible groans that you wouldn’t dare to guess at the nature of them.)

The effect of this proximity of hell to earth is to remind us that the two places can be interchangeable, that the suffering that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other is equivalent to any of the infernal torments of the damned. As Wittig’s progression through the Underworld zigzags so much between earth and limbo, paradise and hell, in contrast to Dante’s linear progression, it is sometimes difficult to remember if the misery is infernal or earthly. The confusion is heightened by Manastabal’s insistence that the damned souls that ‘Wittig’ will behold are, in fact, still living: Les aˆmes damne´es que tu vas rencontrer sont vivantes meˆme si elles font des vux ardents pour ne plus l’eˆtre. Elles sont anonymes et je te de´fie bien de leur trouver des particularite´s propres a` leur fabriquer un manteau de gloire. Pour elles, l’horreur et l’irre´missibilite´ de la souffrance ne sont pas cause´es par l’ignominie des actions. Je t’emme`ne voir ce que partout on peut voir en plein jour. (p. 9) (The souls of the damned whom you are going to meet are living, even if they make ardent pleas no longer to be so. They are anonymous and I challenge you indeed to find any individual characteristics from which to make them a cloak of glory. The horror and irredeemable nature of suffering are not caused for them by the ignominy of actions. I am taking you to see what can be seen everywhere in the full light of day.)

Manastabal’s description reverses the condition of the damned souls who inhabit the Virgilian Underworld and who long to rejoin the ranks of the living once more and to find once again the light of life:

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By blurring the boundaries between the living and the dead, Wittig is emphasizing the suffering that is caused everyday, that can be seen wherever one chooses to look, and that goes unnoticed because it is so much part of the order of things that it appears natural. In hell, as on earth, these female souls are anonymous and unremarkable; they have too little individuality to be able to cloak themselves in glory. In Wittig’s universe the women who do manage to forge a name for themselves are lesbians, abhorrent accidents of nature. By a manuvre that is typical of Wittig, it is through the paraphrase and transposition of Dante’s quest to the female author/protagonist ‘Wittig’ that it becomes clear that she is on a pilgrimage to find her female lover. Before they set off on their journey Manastabal clarifies: Sache donc que je suis ici avec toi sur la recommandation de celle qui t’attend au paradis et s’est mise en peine de te voir si mal embarque´e pour l’enfer. (p. 10) (So let it be known that I am here with you on the recommendation of she who awaits you in paradise, and who is distressed to see how ill equipped you are for your journey to hell.)

Furthermore, as ‘Wittig’ approaches hell it becomes clear that the taunting and jeering that she is forced to endure is linked to the gender of her lovers. On the edge of hell she is assailed by an eagle—a version of the Virgilian harpies who attacked Aeneas—who threatens: Vas-tu arreˆter ce jeu imbe´cile avec ton fusil et tes balles ou faut-il que je te laboure la figure de telle sorte qu’aucune de tes amantes ne puisse plus te reconnaıˆtre? (p. 12) (Are you going to stop this stupid game with your gun and bullets or will I have to scratch your face so deeply that none of your lovers will be able to recognize you anymore?)18 18 Jean Duffy (1990: 222) also sees this bird as a modern parodic equivalent of Dante’s eagle of justice.

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When ‘Wittig’ actually enters hell, her naked state causes uproar among the female souls, who believe that she has come in to try and corrupt them. Even in hell her sexuality condemns her to deepest exile. She is accused of transgression into an inappropriate circle: ‘Est-ce pour m’insulter et te moquer de moi que tu viens dans ce cercle, transfuge, rene´gate? Tu gonfles tes biceps, tes triceps, tes dorsaux’ (p. 13) (Have you come into this circle to insult and mock me, you deserter, you renegade? You flex your biceps, your triceps, your dorsal muscles). As the damned soul tries to ward away Wittig’s influence she exhorts: ‘Va-t’en d’ici et laisse-moi mener ma barque comme je l’entends. Va baiser ou` tu appartiens et ne quitte surtout pas la rue Valencia’ (p. 13) (Get lost from here and let me do my own thing. Go and fuck where you belong and, above all, don’t leave Valencia Street). This, however, loses the classical colour offered by the mention of steering a bark in hell and the reminder that Aeneas, too, caused consternation by his arrival in the Underworld, vexing in particular the ferryman Charon, who worried that Aeneas’ living weight would capsize his bark. The reference to Valencia Street acts as a further reminder that hell already exists on earth and, just as ‘Wittig’ and her kind are unwelcome intruders in hell, on earth also there is no place that they can call home: Vole donc vers tes plaisirs, cours vers le coin de la vingt-quatrie`me rue pour retrouver tes pareilles. Pour la plupart d’ailleurs vous n’avez ni feu ni lieu. (p. 13) (Fly away then to your pleasures, run to the corner of twenty-fourth street to find your own kind. Moreover, most of you don’t have a place to call home.)

As the damned fulminate against lesbians they use the language of corruption and contamination that discriminates effectively against selected categories of society: Crois-tu que je n’aie pas oreilles pour entendre? Je sais tout de la peste lesbienne qui doit selon vos dires gagner de proche en proche toute la plane`te. Il n’y a pas longtemps une prophe´tesse inspire´e a vitupe´re´ contre vous et supplie´, avec des larmes sur les joues, incessamment prostre´e dans des prie`res ardentes, rampant sur les genoux, qu’on vous empeˆche de corrompre les enfants dans les e´coles. (p. 14) (Do you think I don’t have ears to hear you? I know everything about the lesbian plague that must, according to you, take over the whole planet little

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by little. It’s not long since an inspired prophetess fulminated against you and begged, the tears running down her cheeks, endlessly prostrated in ardent prayers, grovelling on her knees, that you should be prevented from corrupting children in the schools.)

The passage not only recalls Camus’s denotation of the hordes of Nazis swarming through France as ‘la peste’, but also invokes the figure of Cassandra, the prophetess doomed never to be believed, who spoke of Troy’s impending doom in the second book of the Aeneid, but who is used here to militate against the insidious evils of homosexuality. Once more the Virgilian elements of Wittig’s narrative are subverted, since it is clear that the prophetess’s warnings are heeded all too zealously, and she becomes revered as the ‘sainte personne’ ready to fulfil Christ’s threats about the punishments in store for those who corrupt the young: Avec la voix du juste, cette sainte personne a rappele´ la parole sacre´e selon laquelle il vaudrait mieux vous mettre a` toutes la pierre au cou, infaˆmes cre´atures, et vous noyer jusqu’a` la dernie`re, plutoˆt que de laisser par vous le scandale arriver. (p. 14)19 (In the tones of the just, this holy person recalled the sacred word according to which it would be better to hang millstones around all your necks, vile creatures, and to drown every last one of you, rather than to allow scandal to arrive through you.)

It is, in fact, Wittig herself, striding up and down the launderette that serves as the antechamber of hell,20 who seeks to make herself understood among those who are unwilling to hear: Aussi bien, de`s qu’elles ont eu commence´, je me suis mise a` marcher de long en large dans la laverie automatique, essayant mon style noble pour attirer leur attention et disant: (Malheureuses! Ecoutez-moi!) Mais elles ne m’ont pas e´coute´e. J’ai lance´ mes bras vers le ciel (que j’ai pris a` te´moin) en criant: 19 ‘But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea’ ( Matt. 18:6). 20 The launderette provides a fitting parallel to the circles of hell, as the clothes caught in the spin cycles replicate the souls whirling around in torment. See Chapter 7, where I discuss Byatt’s use of the same analogy.

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(Sapho m’est te´moin que je ne vous veux aucun mal puisque au contraire je suis venue ici comme votre de´fenseur et redresseur de torts car je soupc¸onne que, comme les maux, ils pullulent parmi vous.) (pp. 15–16) (In any case, as soon as they’d begun, I started to walk up and down the launderette trying out my lofty style to attract their attention, saying: (Hapless creatures! Listen to me!) But they didn’t listen to me. I threw my arms up to the skies (which I invoked as a witness), crying out: (Sappho is my witness that I wish no harm to you, since on the contrary I have come here as your defender and redresser of wrongs for I suspect that, like evil deeds, they proliferate among you.))

Like Christa Wolf, Wittig assumes the guise of Cassandra in order to voice truths about the subjugation of women that nobody wants to hear. It is unsurprising that in her attempts to do this she should invoke Sappho, who is not only the earliest woman poet, but the most iconic of lesbian poets. The fact that part of hell consists of the impossibility of making oneself heard, of being able to dignify one’s suffering by articulating it, is indicated by the fact that the women whom she addresses here quite simply form a circle and lurch back and forth emitting a whistling sound. Their antagonism towards ‘Wittig’ is coloured not only by classical depictions of the vengeful Furies, but also by the whirling dervishes to be found in medieval depictions of hell, such as that of Dante: ‘elles se mettent a` tourner sur elles-meˆmes en s’arrachant les cheveux dans la plus pure tradition classique, telles des toupies ou des derviches tourneurs’ (p. 17) (they begin to turn on themselves while tearing out their hair in the purest classical tradition, like spinning tops or whirling dervishes). The blend of Virgilian and Dantean imagery is maintained as one of these women hurls herself into a tumble dryer so that she is quite literally spun around furiously, while ‘Wittig’ likens the seething crowd to the Bacchantes who tore to pieces the poet Orpheus and who were reincarnated as militant, aggressive women by Cocteau: Une autre dans son effroi se jette dans un se´choir qui tourne encore et fait la` le plus beau charivari. Enfin il y a des chances que ces furies me re´serveraient le meˆme sort que les bacchantes a` Orphe´e si un e´ve´nement exte´rieur sous la forme d’une cape miraculeusement vole´e a` un se´choir par Manastabal, mon guide, et jete´e sur moi pour de´rober aux regards ma nudite´, cause d’apre`s elle de tout ce chahut, ne les en empeˆchait. (p. 17)

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(In her terror another throws herself into a dryer which is still turning and makes a terrible racket there. Mind you there is a chance that these furies were reserving for me the same fate as the Bacchantes for Orpheus had they not been prevented by an outside event in the form of a cloak miraculously stolen from a dryer by Manastabal, my guide, and thrown over me to conceal my nudity, which, according to her, was the cause of all this bedlam.)

The depiction of the vestibule to hell as a launderette where hapless souls fall into the tumble dryers and are whirled around furiously indicates the parodic, ludic nature of Wittig’s rewriting of Virgil and Dante. A terrible darkness shadows this scene, however, if we compare it to autobiographical accounts of a twentieth-century hell that is so extreme, so unimaginable, that it can only appear fantastical in its telling. In Aucun de nous ne reviendra, the first in the trilogy that makes up Auschwitz et apre`s, Charlotte Delbo depicts the conditions endured by the female prisoners through a series of surreal, absurd images that both anticipate Wittig’s work to an uncanny degree and echo the Underworld torments imagined by both Virgil and Dante. In a place so far removed from the land of the living that those inhabiting it were already dead (‘Nous e´tions mortes a` nous-meˆmes’ (p. 58) (We were dead to ourselves), observes Delbo21), the women congregate and scream a soundless, communal cry that stands outside of time, of history: Pour l’e´ternite´, des teˆtes rase´es, presse´es les unes contre les autres, qui e´clatent de cris, des bouches tordues de cris qu’on n’entend pas, des mains agite´es dans un cri muet. (p. 57) (For all eternity, shaved heads, pressed one against the other, which break out in cries, their mouths twisted with cries that are not heard, hands wrung in a soundless cry.)

As desperately as they cry, however, there is only silence. Virgil’s emotional acuity in presenting as one of the most terrifying elements of his own Underworld the panic of the Greek generals when their shouts are stillborn is validated in the most appalling way imaginable. Delbo repeats these depictions of silent screaming again and again: 21

text.

Delbo (1970a). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the

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Elles hurlaient parce qu’elles savaient mais les cordes vocales s’e´taient brise´es dans leur gorge. Et nous, nous e´tions mure´es dans la glace, dans la lumie`re, dans le silence. (p. 57) (They screamed because they knew, but the vocal chords had broken in their throats. And as for us, we were encased in ice, in light, in silence.) Soudain, comme a` un signal, elles se mettaient toutes a` hurler. Un hurlement qui s’enflait, montait, montait et s’e´largissait au-dessus des murs. Ce n’e´taient plus que des bouches qui hurlaient, hurlaient au ciel. Un parterre de bouches tordues [ . . . ] Rien n’entendait ces appels du bord de l’e´pouvante. Le monde s’arreˆtait loin d’ici. (p. 81) (Suddenly, as if at a signal, they all began to scream. A scream that swelled and rose, rose and expanded above the walls. There was nothing but mouths that were screaming, were screaming to heaven. A floor of twisted mouths [...] Nothing heard these screams from the edge of terror. The world stopped far away from here.)

For Delbo there is a clear demarcation between reality and this absurd world of ghosts and horror in which she is imprisoned. Auschwitz is a place, a condition, so far removed from the lives lived by ordinary people that it is impossible to describe. The testimonies brought back from there cannot sustain its truth, but collapse into fictions, stories that can only be pale imitations of the truth. Early in her narrative Delbo observes in apparent surprise: ‘Et maintenant je suis dans un cafe´ a` e´crire cette histoire—car cela devient une histoire’ (p. 45) (And now I am in a cafe´ writing this story—for it is becoming a story). The corollary of this is that the imagined hells of Dante and Virgil are brought into reality, into their ultimate expression, in the accounts of the concentration camps. This is not just because Dante’s inferno served as a template for the construction of hell, as Steiner postulates, but also because these Underworlds, where Virgil and Dante represented the ultimate in human suffering, offered images to those bearing testimony that allowed them to begin to convey what they had endured. Delbo borrows from Dante in depicting the female SS guards as classical Furies:

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Je sors de l’hallucination d’ou` surgissaient les teˆtes grimac¸antes, les teˆtes de furies congestionne´es, e´chevele´es [ . . . ] Elles sont trois furies qui vont et reviennent et frappent tout sur leur passage, sans s’arreˆter un instant, criant, criant toujours les meˆmes mots, les meˆmes injures re´pe´te´es dans cette langue incompre´hensible. (pp. 61, 77) (I emerge from the hallucination out of which rose grimacing heads, the dishevelled, livid furies’ heads [ . . . ] They are three Furies who go and come back and strike everything in their way, without stopping for a moment, shouting, always shouting the same words, the same abuse repeated in that incomprehensible language.)

Her imagery not only looks back to the horned demons whipping the sinner in Canto 18 of the Inferno,22 but is also refracted through the Dantean allusions that Wittig uses to colour her version of a specifically female hell. The crowds of the female damned who process past Manastabal and ‘Wittig’ are ushered along by ‘une foule de cagoules blanches qui talonnent de pre`s les retardataires, les faisant se haˆter a` coups de poings, de cravache, dans des grands cris de haine’ (p. 97) (a host of white hoods who tread on the heels of the tardy, hurrying them along with blows from their fists or riding crops, amid loud cries of hatred). These screams of hate contrast to the petrified silence of the damned, who have been mutilated by clitoridectomy and whose stillness terrifies ‘Wittig’: Les aˆmes damne´es quant a` elles de´filent dans le plus grand silence et, dans l’extre´mite´ de leur malheur physique n’e´mettent pas meˆme un soupir, elles passent pe´trifie´es. C’est bien c¸a le pire et je pre´fe´rerais mille fois le murmure teˆtu de la gare centrale ou les hurlements les plus atroces du dernier cercle de l’enfer. (p. 97) (But as for the souls of the damned, they process in the deepest silence, and in the extremes of their physical pain don’t even utter a sigh, they pass by petrified. That’s the very worst this, and I would prefer a thousand times over the stubborn muttering of the central station or the most bloodcurdling shrieks from the last circle of hell.)

22

‘On this side and on that along the gloomy rock I saw horned demons with great whips lashing them cruelly behind. Ah, how they made them lift their heels at the first strokes! Truly none waited for the second or the third’ (Canto 18, ll. 34–9, in Dante 1961: 229).

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Manastabal corrects ‘Wittig’ to point out that they are indeed traversing the last circle of hell, whereupon, in a moment of infernal solidarity, ‘Wittig’ also finds herself unable to speak: ‘Je n’ai pas de voix a` re´pondre a` cause de la constriction de ma gorge’ (p. 97) (I have no voice with which to reply because of the sudden tightening of my throat). That Wittig’s evocation of the Holocaust is quite deliberate is indicated in the section where she views the procession of women accompanied by their appendages. Motherhood burdens these women, and yet they are unable to see any escape route from their condition. Manastabal indicates to ‘Wittig’ that the only service that they can offer these women is to show them an escape route from their condition: ‘Et elle me rappelle qu’on n’est pas en enfer pour donner tort aux aˆmes damne´es mais pour leur indiquer si besoin est le passage pour sortir’ (p. 53) (And she reminds me that we aren’t in hell to condemn the damned souls but to show them if need be the way to get out), an observation that recalls Virgil’s statement: ‘facilis descensus Averno [ . . . ] sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est’ (Aen. 6. 126–9) (The way down to Avernus is easy [ . . . ] but to recall your steps and to come out into the upper air again, that is the challenge, that is the task).23 Until these women can be shown that motherhood neither is compulsory nor should be a burden, they will continue to slouch along, bearing the marks of those who have been stripped of their individuality and humanity: ‘En effet leurs figures ne brillent pas et leur de´marche n’est pas alerte. Elles portent un sourire sans e´clat mais permanent car il est leur e´toile jaune’ (p. 51) (In fact their faces don’t glow and their gait is sluggish. They wear a smile that doesn’t dazzle, but which is unceasing, for it is their yellow star). That these women should be marked out makes it far easier to track them down and kill them: ‘On leur fait endosser un uniforme qui les fait repe´rer imme´diatement dans une foule comme celles a` abattre. Un nume´ro matricule n’est pas ne´cessaire’ (p. 41) (They are made to wear a uniform that marks them out immediately in a crowd as those to slaughter. A registration number is unnecessary). Wittig emphasizes the Holocaust imagery to

23

My translation.

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such an extent that her crowds of skinhead, butch bikers—a modern version of the Bacchantes—are haunted by the shaved heads of the concentration-camp inmates: Il y a celles qui vont la teˆte rase´e avec au front grave´ la sorte de menace qu’elles sont. Il y a celles qui s’avancent les e´paules ceintes de cuir noir avec dans leurs manches des couteaux. (p. 45) (There are those who go with shaved heads with marks on their foreheads to indicate the kind of threat that they are. There are those who go forward with their shoulders encircled by black leather and knives up their sleeves.)

The Virgilian imagery also coalesces with memories of Holocaust victims in the episode entitled ‘La Gare centrale’. By choosing to use the station as a stage on the journey to hell, Wittig emulates writers such as Michel Butor, whose protagonist of La Modification (1957) was borne into a Virgilian Underworld on a twenty-four-hour train journey between Paris and Rome. At the same time it is impossible to dissociate the image of the station as gateway to death from the trains that were used to convey millions to the concentration camps. Delbo again, perhaps unconsciously, echoes Virgil when she describes the route from the station as the route that can be taken only once. The way to hell is easily followed—it is the emergence from hell that is the near-impossibility: ‘une gare ou` ceux qui arrivent ne sont jamais arrive´s, ou` ceux qui sont partis ne sont jamais revenus. C’est la plus grande gare du monde’ (p. 9) (a station where those who arrive have never arrived, where those who have left have never returned. It’s the largest station in the world). Once more, on Delbo’s account, the sheer scale of the Holocaust is so extreme that it lends an air of unreality, of the absurd, to any attempts to depict it: Et qu’on ne craigne pas d’en manquer il arrive des trains et des trains il en arrive tous les jours et toutes les nuits toutes les heures de tous les jours et de toutes les nuits. C’est la plus grande gare du monde pour les arrive´es et les de´parts. (p. 19) (And let no one fear missing a train, trains and trains arrive every day and every night they arrive at all the hours of all the days and of all the nights. It is the largest station in the world for arrivals and departures.)

Some of those who passed through this station, Delbo points out, had already been travelling for eighteen days and had turned on and

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killed each other, having become maddened by their situation: ‘Il y a ceux qui avaient voyage´ dix-huit jours qui e´taient devenus fous et s’e´taient entretue´s dans les wagons’ (p. 15) (There are those who had travelled for eighteen days who had gone mad and had killed each other in the carriages). Delbo’s account of ‘la plus grande gare du monde’ hovers behind Wittig’s description of the suffering of the damned in ‘la gare centrale’. Here, too, the torments that they have been forced to endure have driven them to attack each other: Avouez au grand jour, mise´rables cre´atures, que pour mieux mener a` bien vos corve´es vous n’avez pas he´site´ a` e´craser, pie´tiner a` mort, de´manteler vos semblables, ni a` transformer ce hall de gare en charnier. (p. 37) (Confess in broad daylight, miserable creatures, that in order better to finish off your chores you didn’t hesitate to crush, to trample to death, to pull apart your own kind, nor to turn this station hall into a slaughterhouse.)

Yet for Wittig the worst torments are not witnessing the broken bodies, torn and mangled on the railway tracks, but hearing the endless muttering of the same words in a multitude of different languages, an image that lends a terrible sense of infinity to her representation of this station of death also: Mais le pire est encore le marmottement incessant qui vient aux le`vres sans discontinuer a` partir du moment ou` le train entre en gare. Son caracte`re affreux tient au fait qu’il se produit sur autant de le`vres a` la fois, car, si les mots diffe`rent, le sens et la forme du marmottement sont les meˆmes. (pp. 32–3) (But the worst thing is still the endless muttering that comes to their lips without any respite from the moment that the train comes into the station. Its horrific character stems from the fact that it’s produced on so many lips at one and the same time, for, even if the words are different, the meaning and the shape of the muttering are the same.)

The indeterminate hum of this muttering drowns out the possibility of any dialogue, leaving each of the victims enclosed in their own individual prison, which is, at the same time, identical to that of all the others. Here, too, it is clear that a significant aspect of hell is the impossibility of being heard, as well as of hearing enough to be able to make some kind of sense of the experiences. When remembering the station, ‘Wittig’ observes:

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Mais la me´moire de l’e´pisode de la gare centrale en sort tout atte´nue´e et en quelque sorte supportable, quoique l’incompre´hensibilite´ demeure, ce qui est a` mon sens un des pires tourments. (pp. 40–1) (But the memory of the episode in the central station emerges from there quite diminished, and bearable to some extent, although the incomprehensible nature of it remains, which is to my mind one of the worst torments.)

At the darkest point of ‘Wittig’s’ infernal experience she longs for the gentle steadiness associated with the canonical version of Virgil as author and Dante’s guide: Je ne lui dis pas que je me serais contente´ du doux Virgile dans cette aventure. Mais je ne peux pas m’empeˆcher de poser la question: Comment fais-tu pour garder un visage serein et calme au milieu de tant d’infortune, Manastabal? (p. 34) (I don’t say to her that I would have been happy with the gentle Virgil in this adventure. But I can’t stop myself from asking the question: How do you manage to keep a serene and calm expression in the midst of so much wretchedness, Manastabal?)

Like Dante, like Aeneas before him, she gazes in wonder at the sight of such suffering. However, in a manuvre typical of Wittig, at the same time as she invokes Virgil, she also subverts him. Whereas Virgil emphasized the near-impossibility of emerging from hell, Manastabal points out to ‘Wittig’ that she is the latest in a series of flesh-and-blood visitors to hell, several of whom simply give up and turn back again: Wittig, il n’y a pas d’autre chemin pour atteindre le paradis ou` tu veux aller. Tu iras donc jusqu’au fond de l’enfer avant de parcourir de l’autre coˆte´ du chemin des limbes et alors seulement tu pourras te diriger vers le but ou` tu aspires. D’autres en grand nombre s’y sont essaye´ avant toi. Parmi celles qui n’ont pas pu se de´terminer a` continuer, certaines ont rebrousse´ chemin quand il en e´tait encore temps, d’autres sont tombe´es dans l’abıˆme que tu vois devant toi. Il y en a un certain nombre qui ont re´ussi a` atteindre le but. (pp. 33–4) (Wittig, there is no other path to get to the paradise where you want to go, And so you will go right to the bowels of hell before arriving on the other side of the path of limbo and only then will you be able to make your way to the place you are aiming for. Many others have tried before you. Among those who couldn’t bring themselves to carry on, some turned back while there was still time, other fell into the abyss that you see in front of you,

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There are a certain number who managed to get to the place they were aiming for.)

The price of turning one’s back on the trip through hell is, as in Dante, refusal of admittance into paradise. And, just as Dante remembers the names of Christ, Paul, and Aeneas, all of whom preceded him in visiting hell; and just as Aeneas met his forebears to encourage him on his quest, so ‘Wittig’ asks for the names of the women, ‘celles’, who preceded her on this journey, but to such a request no answer is forthcoming, suggesting that Wittig’s is the first account of a woman’s journey through the Underworld. One of the signs of a feminist reworking of canonical texts is imposing a new direction on the journey that is followed, throwing into confusion the order established by the male-authored texts. We have seen how Miche`le Roberts’s Gaffer is piqued and unnerved by the way in which her Sibyls disorder his text. In Virgile, Non Manastabal chides ‘Wittig’ for her confusion of genres, which is, of course, also a way of pointing to Wittig’s conflation of the mythical and contemporary world: Que feras-tu d’un cheval en enfer, Wittig? Souviens-toi qu’on n’est pas dans un western. Parfois ta confusion des genres a ve´ritablement quelque chose de barbare. (p. 63) (What are you going to do with a horse in hell, Wittig? Remember that we’re not in a western. Sometimes your mixing up of genres really has a barbaric quality to it.)

Furthermore the protagonists also reject the idea of following the established pattern of circles as they journey through hell: (J’ignore, Wittig, si les cercles de l’enfer ont e´te´ de´nombre´s. Mais qu’a` cela ne tienne, je n’ai pas l’intention de te les faire visiter dans l’ordre.) Il me faut beaucoup d’entrain pour dire alors: (Allons-y dans le de´sordre, donc.) (p. 20) ((Wittig, I don’t know if the circles of hell have been numbered. But never mind that, I have no intention of making you visit them in order.) I have to muster a lot of energy to say then: (So let’s go forth in disorder.))

Wittig has abolished the linear progression from hell to paradise and the attendant moral lesson that access to paradise can be attained only by the purification of the soul. Just as the boundaries between

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earth and the afterlife are blurred in Wittig’s account, in a similar way she moves seamlessly in the narrative between hell, limbo, and paradise as a way of reinforcing the lesson that hell can be abolished, that a utopia can be established on earth in the form of a community that values those who were previously excluded and where dialogue is promoted and facilitated. One of the effects of rejecting the Dantean model of the linear journey is that the accounts of limbo and paradise are interwoven with the episodes in hell, making it clear how each offers variant and distorted versions of the same elements. Shortly after ‘Wittig’s lament for the damned at the station who endlessly voice meaningless utterances that block out dialogue, she and Manastabal visit paradise, where, instead of the crowds of the wretched they encounter a throng of angels: Une cohorte d’anges dore´s et noirs enjambent les ruisseaux pleins d’arums et atterrissent a` pieds joints. Manastabal, mon guide, est couche´e sous un arbre a` marguerite sans rien dire. Il me semble distinguer, quand le vent doux cesse de vibrer dans mes oreilles, le chant des voix conjugue´es de l’assemble´e ce´leste. Je l’entends bien en effet et parfois les voix se diffe´rencient et se font entendre a` leur tour. (p. 47) (A throng of black and golden angels cross the streams that are full of arums and land with their feet together. Manastabal, my guide, is lying under a daisy bush without saying anything. It seems to me that, when the soft breeze stops humming in my ears, I can make out the song of the voices of the heavenly band lifted together in song. I can, in fact, hear it clearly, and sometimes the voices separate from each other and can be heard in turn.)

In this vision of paradise the voices join in harmony, yet each voice can also be heard individually, when appropriate. The language that they speak conveys plenitude and fulfilment to an extent that it is not translatable on earth—it is a version of the Word beyond speech, or the ‘love that moves the sun and the other stars’.24 Manastabal acknowledges the inevitable loss in translation, while instructing ‘Wittig’ to render it as best she can:

24

Paradiso, Canto 34, in Dante (1961: 493).

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Ce que tu entends est sans paroles. C’est la musique des sphe`res et la voix des anges. Ecris-donc l’ope´ra toi-meˆme, Wittig, mais non sans que j’en prenne connaissance mot a` mot. (p. 48) (What you can hear has no words. It is the music of the heavens and the voices of angels. So write the opera yourself, Wittig, but not without telling me of it word by word.)

Not only does paradise represent the plenitude of language, but Wittig indicates that the absence of language, or an inadequate language, entails the loss of paradise, the loss of hope. As language fails, the borderlands of paradise recede: Je tends vers toi, mon beau paradis, du plus profond de l’enfer, bien que je ne te connaisse que par e´clairs et que si les mots me manquent tu disparais comme dans une he´morragie a` l’envers. (p. 64) (I yearn towards you, my beautiful paradise from the furthest depths of hell, even though I only know you in flashes and that if my words fail me you disappear like a haemorrhage in reverse.)

Such a vision makes more acute the suffering of those whose voices have been stifled or silenced, who have been left outside history.25 This is made still more explicit later in the book when Wittig again observes: Je demande a` Manastabal, mon guide, d’ou` vient le manque de mots si subit qu’il fait du ciel un figement bleu. Je dis: (C’est comme une he´morragie a` l’envers.) Et Manastabal mon guide: (Ou encore l’envers du paradis.) Sans l’ardente espe´rance de voir re´apparaıˆtre leur foule brillante et aile´e, nul doute que je tomberais du ciel sur-le-champ, entraıˆnant Manastabal, mon guide, dans ma chute. (p. 127) (I ask Manastabal, my guide, the source of this lack of words that is so sudden that it freezes the sky into a blue emptiness. I say: (It’s like a haemorrhage in reverse.) And Manastabal my guide says: (Or indeed the other side of paradise.) Without my burning of hope of seeing their shining

25 See Duffy (1990: 222): ‘Language is full of unforeseen dangers, and Wittig’s oversights and loose usage stand as a warning to the linguistically naı¨ve reader. Wittig gives vent to her own frustration in an emphatically placed central passage where she laments the gulf between her verbal facility in the enumeration of hell’s atrocities and her inarticulacy in the face of paradise. Destructive critique comes easily; the construction of a Woman’s Language is beset by monumental difficulties.’

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winged throng appear again, there is no doubt that I would fall headlong from the sky, dragging Manastabal, my guide, with me in my fall.)

It is hope that protects ‘Wittig’ from the fall from paradise. Virgile, Non is not simply a rewriting of the Virgilian epic, but is a reworking of all the patriarchal epics that have taken their roots from Virgil. Most obviously, it is a feminist version of the Commedia, but through her allusions to Milton and Paradise Lost Wittig indicates that it is our perspectives on all of Western culture, all those texts rooted in the works of Virgil, Father of the West, that she has to modify. It is a rethinking, a remembering, of the whole world that has given birth to the position in which Wittig finds herself. Manastabal indicates the magnitude of her task when she observes: ‘Ah Wittig, tout cela est de la petite guerre. Que peut-on y gagner quand c’est le monde entier qu’il faut reposse´der?’ (p. 46) (Ah Wittig, all this is a sham war. What can be gained from it when it’s the whole world that we need to repossess?). This is why Wittig does not confine her allusions just to Virgilian shades or Dantean sinners and guides. We find Milton’s angels clustering in the corridors linking heaven and paradise: J’aperc¸ois Azrael, l’ange brillant de la mort, dans une cohorte de transfuges de l’enfer. J’aperc¸ois avec eux Appolyon et Abbadon, les anges de l’abıˆme. J’aperc¸ois en outre Zadkiel, Uriel, Michael, Chamuel, Raphael, Jophiel, Abdiel. (p. 111) (I can see Azrael, the dazzling angel of death, in a crowd of deserters from hell. I can see Appolyon and Abbadon with them, the angels of the abyss. Beyond them I can see Zadkiel, Uriel, Michael, Chamuel, Raphael, Jophiel, Abdiel.)

At times these angels merge with other messengers from the two worlds, as in this passage that also recalls once more Cocteau’s depiction of the souls wandering between the living and the dead in Orphe´e: On peut distinguer, allant et venant le long des passerelles qui relient le paradis et les limbes, des anges en pagaille, des che´rubins, des se´raphins, des archanges et des message`res des deux mondes. (p. 110) (Coming and going along the passageways that link paradise and limbo can be seen angels in disarray, cherubim, seraphim, archangels and messengers from the two worlds.)

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In her anxiety about becoming trapped in this limbo, ‘Wittig’ has already echoed the Sibyl’s warning about the difficulties of emerging from hell, though the way down might be easy: ‘Es-tu bien suˆre qu’on en reviendra?) (p. 109) (Are you quite sure that we’ll come back from there?) For Wittig her hope is ‘ardente’, is burning/blazing, because it harmonizes with the ‘telos’ of her journey, which is not, as in Dante, a reunion with one beloved, but rather entry into a female utopia, communion with all the shining souls of the blessed. The journey to full access, full acceptance within such a group, is fraught with difficulties. Paradoxically it is when ‘Wittig’ is close to paradise that the Virgilian imagery becomes particularly prevalent. The river Acheron is placed as a kind of antechamber to this utopia. At the beginning of the book it serves as a vehicle of forgetfulness, where ‘Wittig’ inhales long draughts of stultifying air in order to subdue her rage and pain: Je suis assise avec Manastabal, mon guide, au bord du fleuve Ache´ron. L’eau dans laquelle on trempe les pieds est chaude. Il s’en de´gage des vapeurs de soufre qui forment des nuages ocre a` la surface de l’eau et dans les champs ou` apparaissent par e´clairs des chevaux. J’inhale jusqu’au fond des poumons pour e´tourdir ma cole`re et mon tourment. (p. 38) (I am sitting with Manastabal, my guide, on the banks of the river Acheron. The water in which we are dangling our feet is warm. From it rise up sulphurous gusts, which form ochre clouds on the surface of the water and in the fields, where glimpses of horses appear now and then. I breathe in and fill my lungs in order to dull my wrath and torment.)

It is only towards the end of the book that she realizes that Acheron, traditionally the river separating the living from the dead, is composed of tears: ‘Manastabal, mon guide, dit: (les larmes qu’on verse pour les mortes sont noirs et jaunes. Voici le fleuve qu’elles forment et qui tel quel traverse l’enfer) (p. 122) (Manastabal, my guide, says: (the tears that we shed for the dead are black and yellow. Here is the river that they form and that crosses hell just as it is)). The pain and loss entailed by being human are such that, where once the bark of the Underworld threatened to capsize under the living weight of Aeneas, here it sinks, having been pulled down by its burden of grief: ‘A un moment donne´ le bateau s’enfonce sous le poids des larmes’

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(p. 125) (At a given moment the boat founders under the weight of tears). And yet it is through the sorrows of witnessing the harrowing visions of suffering here that the living become galvanized to act as a force for change. The ‘peˆche miraculeuse’ is a version of the Adamic ‘felix culpa’. Where once the Fall, Adam’s sin, necessitated the birth of Christ as redeemer, here the eyes of those visiting the afterlife are opened to the naturalized, age-old versions of silencing and torture: Ah Manastabal mon guide, tu parles d’une peˆche miraculeuse. Ainsi donc les larmes verse´es pour les mortes vont payer pour la liberte´ des vivantes. Que je te suis reconnaissante de m’avoir fait faire ce voyage. (p. 125) (Ah, Manastabal my guide, you speak of a miraculous sin. Are the tears shed for the dead going to pay for the freedom of the living then? How grateful I am to you for having made me take this journey.)

It is only a soul that has become committed, actively engaged, that will gain access to this utopia whose language is incomprehensible because it is still being forged: ‘Seule la passion active, Wittig, conduit a` ce lieu, bien que les mots pour le dire, n’existent pas’ (p. 107) (Only active passion, Wittig, leads to this place, although the words to speak of it don’t exist). Wittig employs sibylline imagery to evoke this language that can exist only in paradise, that cannot be used to communicate with those who have not undergone the journey and witnessed the torments themselves. As once the Sibyl wrote her prophecies on leaves that were then blown out of order and fluttered indecipherably about her cave, here too words take on the form of leaves, and drift and float in the winds that have been a feature of Wittig’s vision throughout the book: Des samares dans leur vol descendant, tels quels, les mots tombent par mille, l’air en est empoisse´. Des ailes de papillons au battement doux, tels quels, ils froˆlent les yeux par milliers. Des feuilles se de´tachant des arbres en une nuit, tels quels ils tombent silencieux, enflant ou s’amoindrissant dans leurs formes. (p. 126) (Just as winged ash seed descending in flight words fall in their thousands, the air is sticky with them. Just as butterfly wings gently beating, they brush against our eyes in their thousands. Just as leaves dropping from trees in one night they fall silently, their shapes swelling out or dwindling.)

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Where once, however, Virgil used the image to convey the frustrations of failed communication, here the fluttering of the winged words is driven by hope: ‘Jamais leur pre´sence physique ne m’aura cause´ une joie plus parfaite. Je dis: (Je tends vers toi mon beau paradis)’ (p. 126) (Their physical presence will never have brought me a more perfect joy. I say: (I yearn towards you my beautiful paradise)). There is a further unexpected reversal of the Virgilian imagery of the Underworld to depict the joy of Wittig’s paradise. Virgil’s Underworld is called ‘Avernus’, a name that stems from the Greek a – ornos, ‘without birds’, as the stench emitted by the sulphurous fumes of hell ensured that no birds flew over its entrance. Wittig’s souls in bliss may not be endowed with a language decipherable to humans, but their language of happiness is composed of the blending of angel voices with the song of the birds who flock to paradise in such numbers that Wittig is able to establish an epic list for them: Toute sorte d’oiseaux traversent les lieux, certains ne faisant que passer, d’autres s’y attardant et s’y e´battant. Il y a des hirondelles, des oiseauxmouches, des geais bleus, des corbeaux, des percrix, des merles, des pe´licans, des mouettes, des cormorans, des gre`bes, des plongeons, des orfraies, des he´rons, des aigrettes [ . . . ] Leur concert se joint et s’ajoute a` la musique des anges et a` leur parler serein. (pp. 137–8) (All kinds of birds cross the places, some just pass over, others linger and frolic there. There are swallows, humming birds, blue jays, crows, partridges, blackbirds, pelicans, gulls, cormorants, grebes, divers, ospreys, herons, egrets [ . . . ] Their concert blends with and swells the music and serene speech of the angels.)

The literary landscape of Wittig’s novel has much in common with the Virgilian landscapes created by the other women writers under discussion. It is a landscape scarred by exclusion, oppression, and torture. Wittig invokes sibylline imagery in order to forge a new landscape, the utopian landscape of community, tolerance, and inclusion. Her allusions to recent history indicate her awareness of the serious political role that literature, and the reshaping of literature, must play. It is time to look at the ways in which the Aeneid is reshaped in the work of a contemporary of Wittig’s, the American writer, Joyce Carol Oates.

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10 Joyce Carol Oates As the work of Boland, Wittig, Wolf, and Byatt reminds us, Virgil speaks with especial force at times of national crisis. The story of the Trojans—driven from a burning city that they knew to be doomed, forced to travel far away to vanquish in their turn other civilizations so that they might found a new race and the new empire of Rome— offers solace to later generations caught up in their own wars and driven into exile, while at the same time being invested with everdeepening poignancy as the cycle of war, exile, and devastation continues. The two voices of Virgil’s Aeneid, the triumphant voice of empire and the melancholy voice of loss,1 both clamour ever more urgently—on the one hand, the influence of the Aeneid is such that it continues to speak for all people, from every walk of life; on the other hand, its terrible burden of grief and loss grows heavier with each new conflict at which it is invoked. We have seen how important Virgil has been to those bearing witness to the Second World War in the 1940s and to the cold war of the 1980s. There is almost a sense of inevitability to a Virgilian presence in the work of those attempting to articulate the anger, cultural rifts, and bewildered grief of the United States after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It is no accident that two of America’s most prominent and prolific novelists, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, should each have published in 2004 novels that portrayed contemporary America while invoking the works of Homer and Virgil respectively. Both authors are examining the tensions between different classes and different ethnic groups within America today. Roth’s The Human 1

Parry (1963: 266–80).

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Stain depicts a relationship between an elderly professor and a much younger, black cleaning woman; the title character of Oates’s The Tattooed Girl is a barely literate young girl who, driven by the antiSemitic hatred of her pimp boyfriend, wages a murderously vengeful campaign against her employer, a writer engaged on a translation of the Aeneid. The parallels between the enterprises of Roth and Oates are made stronger still by the fact that Philip Roth is the dedicatee of The Tattooed Girl. It is natural for Oates to look to Virgil in the wake of attacks that threatened the very fibre of America’s being precisely because Virgil is associated so strongly with the reassertion of national identity after conflict. In America, however, there is an extra dimension to his invocation at a time when the United States was desperately clinging to anything that bolstered a belief in its strength and permanence; Virgil, and Virgil’s Rome, have been intrinsically linked to the creation of the national identity of America from the very beginning. The New World, looking back to and commemorating European values and culture as it forged its future, was an obvious descendant of the Trojans, who left their own country to found the capital of the world.2 At the beginning of his chapter on ‘Virgil in the New World’, Ziolkowski argues: ‘For most of the four centuries of our history, Virgil has provided dominating images for the American consciousness.’3 Gilbert Highet offers the detail of one of these images, as he points out: The Great Seal of the United States bears three quotations in Latin—the famous e pluribus unum, ‘one (made) out of many’; novus ordo saeclorum, ‘ a new term of ages’, the sentiment expressed in Virgil’s Messianic poem and in Shelley’s famous revolutionary chorus, ‘The world’s great age begins anew’; and annuit coeptis, ‘(God) has favoured our enterprise’, an adaptation of the opening of Virgil’s Georgics.4

So, when Oates publishes a novel post 9/11 that examines the divisions in American society, she is shoring up America’s fragmented identity with a highly resonant appeal to its past.

2

Michel Butor’s travelogue of twentieth-century America, Mobile (1963), is haunted by reminiscences of the Eclogues. See Cox (2007). 3 Ziolkowski (1993: 146). 4 Highet (1949: 399).

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In addition to her invocation of Virgil at a time of national crisis, Oates also has the immigrant element of her family history that predisposes so many writers towards Virgil. She herself has always lived in America, where she was born and brought up in rural western New York. However, she was born into a polyglot family, which included Irish immigrants, Hungarian immigrants, and German Jews. The idyllic background of her childhood was disrupted by the violent deaths of two of her grandparents and the threatening behaviour of many of her classmates. In many of her novels she renames her home state ‘Eden County’, but her representations of contemporary America seethe with tension and violence. Since she published The Tattooed Girl in 2004, she has analysed the case of Love Canal—the poisoning of a community by a polluted landfill next to the Niagara Falls—in The Falls (2005); has probed the grief of the daughter of a murdered woman in Mother, Missing (2005); has graphically depicted the ramifying impact of gang rape in Rape: A Love Story (2006); brought to life the racial tensions and riots of 1970s America in Black Girl, White Girl (2006), and examined murder within the family and serial killing in The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007). This prodigious output within a period of three years is entirely typical of Oates. The Gravedigger’s Daughter is her thirtysixth novel, but she has published numerous works of criticism, as well as poetry, a journal, and short stories. Within this abundance of books she has also adopted a multiplicity of styles and narrative voices. Lorna Sage describes her as ‘at once chameleon and prolific, she confuses “high” modernism and “low” genre writing; the very volume of her work mocks the notion of a stable canon, that would put writing in its place, over against the promiscuity of reading’.5 The sheer quantity of her output, as well as the variety of her styles and settings—which range from mock-Victorian detective fiction (Mysteries of Winterthurm (1984)) to the modern campus novel (Unholy Loves (1980) or I’ll Take You There (2003))—allows her to accommodate an abundance of literary influences. The Tattooed Girl is not the first time she has engaged with the Classical Tradition. A poem, ‘Wooded Forms’, written in 1973 and depicting classical dryads, was

5

Sage (1992: 186).

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selected by Nina Kossman for her anthology Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (2001). More extensively in her novel Do with Me What You Will (1974,) Oates presents a passive heroine, Elena, an erstwhile photographic model who, like Helen of Troy, is simply a prize, a vacant beauty.6 As Sage points out, the very title Do with Me [ . . . ] is a translation of a piece of legal Latin (nolo contendere).7 While it is Virgil who is the dominant intertext within The Tattooed Girl, the novel also alludes to Nietzsche, the Bible, Pascal, Primo Levi, Catullus, Homer, and Greek tragedy.8 Oates points out that the book is an exploration of identity and anti-Semitism: ‘The rise of anti-Semitism is alarming in America, and the novel is very much based on that—the hatred of people based on ignorance. The novel is inspired by what I see going on in the world after September 11, 2001.’9 The protagonists of the novel feel themselves to be outsiders, unassimilated within society, a plight that is especially prevalent within the United States, where the rate of immigration is so high. The central story of the novel is the relationship between the wealthy academic and writer, Joshua Seigl, and Alma, the uneducated, disadvantaged young girl whom he hires as his assistant as he attempts to finish his translation of the Aeneid, while becoming progressively sicker from a muscular wasting disease. As Oates uncovers Alma’s family history—which is all too depressingly ordinary—it becomes difficult to see how she could emerge from the underclass into a position that would be acknowledged within society. For Oates, the silently insidious ways in which America maintains its outcasts on the edge is comparable to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Alma is: an American type. She’s from a background that’s very poor, uneducated, very bigoted, but her tattoos are an analogue to the Holocaust victims’ prison-camp tattoos, her tattoos are ugly, defacing, like someone scribbling

6

See Sage (1992: 187). Sage (1992: 183). 8 In Farry (2004: 12), Oates observes of the protagonist: ‘Well, you know, The Tattooed Girl has a background of Greek tragedy—there are lots of allusions to Greek literature—and Joshua is behaving like a Greek tragic hero. He brings about his destruction through his own actions.’ 9 Farry (2004: 12). 7

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on the wall. They are acts of vandalism on her body. They’re not works of art; she didn’t elect to have them. She’s in a cycle of abuse, too.10

These parallels that Oates establishes between Alma’s victimhood and the suffering within the concentration camps make it all the more ironic that Alma’s anti-Semitism, fuelled by her pimp-boyfriend Dimitri, should drive her to ever-more inventive methods of torturing and destroying her employer. Furthermore, the blind ignorance sweeping Alma along is highlighted by the fact that Seigl’s background is so mixed—while his father was Jewish, his mother was Presbyterian and had him baptized in the Presbyterian Church: Their parents’ marriage, intensely romantic at the start, had been what is quaintly called ‘mixed’. That is, Protestant, Jew. Seigl’s full name was Joshua Moses Seigl. There was a name with character! He’d been named for his father’s father who had been a rich importer of leather goods in Munich, Germany, in the 1920s and 1930s; not many miles from the small rural town with the name, at that time, innocuous, Dachau.11 (p. 7)

Oates’s presentation of Seigl’s family history not only allows her to probe contemporary forms of anti-Semitism, but also serves as a reminder that this wealthy, highly respected figure also belongs to a family of immigrants, a family driven from the Old World of Europe to the hope of a future within America. The long-ago sorrows suffered by his father still lived within Seigl, who: ‘missed his parents, often. Especially his father. He’d loved them both. Especially the reticent, mysterious Karl Seigl who’d been sent as a child to the New World, to escape the Old World, but in the journey seemed to have lost his childhood, as he’d lost his family for whom there could be no recompense’ (p. 109). Seigl’s impulse to re-create in his imagination the experiences of his ancestors is a form of pietas, an act of filial duty and responsibility, one of the qualities for which Aeneas is most renowned. And the exile that he commemorates, the crossing from the Old World to the New, is not only quintessentially American, but also quintessentially Virgilian. Moreover, the book opens at a time of personal crisis for Seigl, a recognition that he is no longer 10 11

text.

Farry (2004: 12). Oates (2004). References are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the

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healthy enough to manage alone, so that he faces transition and suspension within his own life: He had known it must happen soon. And yet he wasn’t prepared for it happening so soon. ‘I can’t do it any longer. No more.’ He meant, but could not bring himself to acknowledge, I can’t live alone any longer. (p. 3)

It is at this point, as Seigl teeters on the edge of indignity and dependency and the fears of an undiagnosed illness, that Virgil first appears in the book: Easy is the way down into the Underworld: by night and by day dark Hades’ door stands open . . . He smiled at these lines of Virgil floating into consciousness like froth on a stream. He told himself he wasn’t frightened: his soul was tough as the leather of his oldest boots. (p. 4)

Like Boland and Drabble, Oates cites the Sibyl’s warning to Aeneas about the ease of a descent into hell and the difficulties of a subsequent exit. That Seigl’s personal hell is part of the fabric of the hell of the contemporary world is emphasized by the fact that the book by which he became famous, The Shadows, is a fictional re-creation of the Holocaust, an episode that drove so many immigrants into America. Part of the emotional tension of The Tattooed Girl is generated by Seigl’s guilt in winning esteem for his depiction of a historical atrocity in which he himself had no part. More widely, Oates examines the various shapes that guilt takes as it becomes the legacy passed from generation to generation. Seigl’s wasting disease is a visible and physical manifestation of the crippling effect of knowing an apparently safe and privileged childhood within a family that has emerged from the camps: Philosophy frees, history enslaves. I am not my ancestors, Seigl thought desperately. I am not my father, I am scarcely myself. (p. 49)

Seigl is as much burdened by his ancestors’ past as Aeneas is by his descendants’ future. He is scarcely allowed his own identity because of the legacy of trauma within his family, which suffered in one of the most cataclysmic events of history. The attraction of the Aeneid to

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him was not just that it reflected the divisions and fissures fracturing contemporary America, but also that it offered the image of a man weighed down by his father: Sondra asked, was it his translation of The Aeneid he’d been working on and Seigl said yes. He’d made a start a few years ago, re-examining the poem from the perspective of the contemporary world of divisiveness, nationalism, blood-consciousness and blood-feuds. He’d never been a great admirer of Virgil; he’d much preferred Homer. But there was something now in The Aeneid, the shaping of an individual’s destiny by historical, not personal forces, that excited him. The founding of a city and of a civilization; the subordination of individual desire; the Trojan hero, so very unlike the Greek brute Achilles, carrying his elderly father on his back . . . (pp. 50–1)

The title of Seigl’s book, The Shadows, points to the impossibility of emerging whole from such an event by evoking a world whose inhabitants walk on the borderline between life and death, a world parallel to Eliot’s Waste Land, which was itself, of course, a response to the First World War. Its title points to an abiding sense of exile and the impossibility of ever acquiring full citizenship within society: ‘One of the motifs of The Shadows had been the yearning of displaced, homeless people for home’ (p. 56). It is a title that acknowledges his father’s tenuous grasp of life in America, his adopted country: ‘And so Karl Seigl had an American self: yet always, as he would one day confide to his son, he was a posthumous being, and moved like a ghost among other living human beings, a wraith out of Hades’ (p. 55). The sense of fragility is all the more striking, given that his father, Karl Seigl, had himself no direct experience of the camps: ‘he, too, had been told fragments of history, by the few relatives who’d survived and contacted him in the 1950s. Family history as a sort of immense spiderweb spanning part of two continents’ (p. 55). There are moments in Seigl’s sickness when he perceives his progressive weakness as a version of the sorrow that had hollowed his father out from within: ‘Seigl was thinking of his father’s melancholy, that deepened with the years. Faint tremors in his eyelids and hands. Karl Seigl had been a large, imposing dignified man and yet: something had hollowed him out from within, you could see. The slowness of his speech. As if sometimes he had to summon words from a distant place and time’ (pp. 44–5). As he lies

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on the ground, having collapsed out on his own one day, Seigl muses further on the links binding individuals to their family histories. He sees his current sickness as a form of nemesis, as punishment for his hubris in assuming the personal histories of others: One of the motifs of The Shadows had been the yearning of displaced, homeless people for home. The physical dwellings, views from windows, trees, gardens, filigree of cracks in ceilings, random and unremarked sights of surpassing beauty and anguished worth, once they are lost. Joshua Seigl who’d never in his lifetime been lost, a cherished son, had played a ventriloquist’s trick in reverse, taking as his own the voices of others who yearned for home. Now he knew the feeling. Now, he was no trickster of words. [ . . . ] So Seigl called into the wind. Not panicking: he’d be able to drag himself, if all else failed. And sensation was returning to his legs, which maybe meant muscle-strength, too. Easy is the way down into the Underworld: by night and by day dark Hades’ door stands open; but to retrace one’s steps and to make a way out to the upper air, that’s the task, that’s the labor. (pp. 55–6)

And yet, if Seigl’s complex relationship to his book The Shadows teaches us anything, it is that this feeling of homelessness pervades America. He describes himself, born and brought up in the States, as ‘European by temperament, not American’ (p. 49), reminding us that, for many Americans from immigrant families, the USA appears to offer an insubstantial and inauthentic simulacrum of the European culture that it has attempted to import. It is a place in which identity is borrowed. And the more Oates develops Seigl’s connections with others, the more widespread the malaise appears to be. When interviewing for the post of his assistant, having specified that a knowledge of Latin would be helpful, Seigl finds himself confronted by a series of earnest graduate students. One of these (Essler) was eager to praise Seigl’s book and make it clear he had read it: He told Seigl that he was a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Rochester, Religious Studies, writing a dissertation on post-Holocaust literature, and that of all the material he’d encountered, both European and American, The Shadows remained to him the most haunting because it was elliptical and poetic, rarely direct. He said: ‘In the world you’ve created we see the shadows of things, not the things themselves. We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn’t reveal. We become collaborators in shadows . . . ’. (p. 10)

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Another (Kempton) made the mistake of reverentially citing Virgil as he gazed over Seigl’s view of the river Tuscarora and Lake Ontario in the far distance: In the wind, his lank thinning hair blew fretfully. He wore a fresh-laundered white shirt for the interview, trousers with a conscientious crease, absurdly large jogging shoes. He intoned, ‘ “Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vaso” ’. (This was Virgil, book one of the Aeneid: ‘Odd figures were glimpsed in the waste of waters.’) Seigl winced at the prospect of having to bear on a daily intimate basis this priggish parody of his own long-vanished youth. (p. 16)

While Oates parodies the type of the over-zealous graduate student, offering a rare glimpse of humour, the observations of both men point to the loneliness prevalent in modern America. The citation from Book 1 of the Aeneid evokes isolated figures struggling not to drown, while Essler’s observations about his response to The Shadows echoed the feelings of lack that Seigl himself voiced: ‘For a flawed soul longs to be healed: in secular times, we require the stranger to complete us, where we lack the strength to complete ourselves’ (p. 9). The recurring horrors of history have led to a rootlessness that has leached the substance from modern-day Americans. Those who could barely emerge from the camps were not the last in their families to feel themselves to be little more than ghosts. The invocation of Virgil in a narrative exploring such a phenomenon adds a twenty-first-century dimension to the Virgilian umbrae and their aesthetics. As in the work of Wittig, the procession of victims from the Holocaust forms a modern version of the countless shades streaming through the Virgilian Underworld. And, when Seigl attempts to educate Alma about the meaning of the Holocaust, his intoning of the names of the camps forms a modern and horrible parody of the lists of names that are a constitutive feature of classical epic: ‘Holocaust is a term to indicate the systematic genocide of more than six million Jews and the deaths of more than five million Gentiles in Europe by the Nazis. Treblinka, Ponar, Belzec, Chelmo, Birkenau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Dachau’ (p. 247). But Seigl and his family are not alone in their experiences of the hell of loneliness and exclusion. Part of the effect of Oates’s repeated citation of the Sibyl pointing out that ‘easy is the way down into the Underworld’ is to alert us to the fact that so many Virgilian Underworlds coexist within

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contemporary America. While Seigl struggles with his burdens of mauvaise foi, filial duty, and an identity stunted by the terrible legacy of history within his family, his assistant Alma describes her background in equally Virgilian terms. The irony of this illiterate and slow-witted girl belonging to any kind of world that could be linked to Virgil is sharpened by her very name, Alma. The epithet most commonly applied to Aeneas’ mother, Venus, is ‘alma’, ‘loving’. Not only is Alma’s relationship with Seigl driven by hatred, but he also adopts a paternal stance towards her. The pattern of the Virgilian original is inverted—the loving mother is transformed into a daughter filled with murderous loathing. And Alma comes from a hell that ensures that she will stay at the bottom of society, where such vengeful antagonisms can most effectively be fuelled. The very name of her home town infuses it with all the horrors of Virgil’s imagined hell, and reminds us of the way in which American geography is overlaid by a wish to re-create Europe. Here it is clear that even the darkest corners of the European imagination can find a home: He wanted to know: where’d she come from? Her eyes blinked slowly. Just now? Or—then? Then. Her forehead crinkled. As if she was trying to remember. She said, almost inaudibly, what sounded like ‘Akron’—‘Acheron’? Dmitri asked her to say it again and again she said what might have been ‘Akron’—‘Acheron.’ But this place wasn’t in New York State, it was in Pennsylvania. In the mountains. (p. 29)

Like those of Karl Seigl, Alma’s responses are blurred and muffled. This enables Oates to draw explicitly the parallels between the American ‘Akron’ and the Virgilian ‘Acheron’, as Dmitri has to ask her to repeat herself, as he thinks he may have misunderstood. If Alma is incapable of communicating clearly, if her wits are befuddled, there is at least the suggestion that this may be because of the noxious atmosphere in which she was brought up: ‘The air you breathe in like the poisoned air rising in white smoke-plumes out of the cracked earth and deep inside the earth the mines burning. There were jokes on the radio, wisecracks about Akron Valley. Hellfire. PA’ (p. 101). Systematic poisoning and burning are not a fate reserved exclusively for the victims of the Holocaust. Alma remembers a childhood governed by the dangers of the burning mines among which she grew up: ‘Some places, the ground is hot to touch. Sinkholes, poisonous gases. You

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couldn’t play outside’ (p. 143). Those who inhabited this environment stagnated there, and, denied of dreams of a better life, ensured their damnation by adding a few vices of their own: ‘Half the men in the Busch family had emphysema. And Alma’s mother was always coming down with bad colds, bronchitis. You couldn’t blame just the mines the men worked or the smoky air, common sense told you it was cigarette smoking, too. Not that anyone gave a damn enough to stop’ (p. 149). Virgil’s campi flegrei, the Burning Fields, are here transposed to America. To the question ‘Where do you live?’, Alma claims defiantly: ‘I live in Hell. I am a child of Hell. I am an American and a child of Hell. Ask me if I am happy. I am’ (p. 142). Oates’s anger at the obscenity of the wealthiest country in the world forcing its citizens to live in such conditions is suggested by the biblical allusions in the vision of the apocalypse that Oates foresees. The imagery of America being visited by the Antichrist, reaping punishment for the way in which it has treated the disadvantaged, is horribly potent in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Oates blends a subversion of Psalm 121 (‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills whence cometh my help’) and Psalm 23, with its promise of being led by a shepherd to still waters. Such distortion in a work that alludes so heavily to Virgil serves as a reminder of how strongly linked Virgil is to the Christian tradition and glances at Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the Messianic Eclogue, which also promises a return to a world of rural peace after the birth of a divine child: Lift up your eyes unto the hills where the vapor rises. Where help comes from the sky. Tall grasses, saplings. The jungle is returning. It’s a gift for those who have refused to leave the Akron Valley, this peace. Old people mostly. Lead me to the still waters, restore my soul. The Anti-Christ is imminent. If the sky darkens, if there is thunder out of silence. A soul is like white smoke rising seeking the Lord. Out of the highway cracked everywhere like ice the smoke is rising like steam. Something breathing. They say that the fires in the mines could have been put out years ago but Akron County failed to act. The State of Pennsylvania failed to act. (pp. 142–3)

When Alma is in New York State thinking of Akron county, her homesickness brings to mind the hymns sung in that infernal landscape: ‘She missed Akron valley. The smoke lifting like white vapour from cracks in the earth, the way tall grasses and saplings were growing out of the

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broken pavement, there was a strange beauty in these things. Even the smell of the air that made your eyes sting. She missed the old hymns. Lift thine eyes’ (p. 192). The promise in the Bible to the faithful is thwarted by the negligence of those entrusted with the welfare of the American citizens who failed to look after them, a subject that Oates revisited in 2005 in her novel The Falls. The landscape in Akron is peopled by those whose growth has been stunted, whose health has been compromised, yet who cling both to life and to their native home: ‘Yet nobody will die. They are in their eighties, nineties. Some younger, like Delray Busch, not even sixty. Why should we leave, this is our fuckin’ home’ (p. 143). The place offers a chillingly appropriate American parallel to the Virgilian Avernus and the area around it, which, even today, is still known as the campi flegrei, the Burning Fields: corripit hic subita trepidus formidine ferrum Aeneas strictamque aciem venientibus offert, et ni docta comes tenuis sine corpore vitas admoneat volitare cava sub imagine formae, inruat et frustra ferro diverberet umbras. Hinc via Tartarei quae fert Acherontis as undas. turbidus hic caeno vastaque voragine gurges aestuat atque omnem Cocyto eructat harenam. (Aen. 6. 290–8) Aeneas, Trembling, fear welling up at the sight of them, grabs for his steel sword’s Edge as a line of defence as they surge at him. He would be lunging, Uselessly slashing the menacing shadows apart with his steel blade, Did not his scholarly escort explain that they’re bodiless, flimsy, No more than flickers of life in the hollow illusion of shaped form. Here’s where the pathway to Acheron, Tartarus’ river, commences. Here, in a riot of mud and a suctioning vortex, a whirlpool Seethes before vomiting up into Cocytus all of its thick silt.

As befits a place based on this European model, Oates’s Akron has become an anteroom to the afterlife, a version of the Underworld. That the image of hell which it offers is a pale precursor of the apocalypse becomes evident when the Tattooed Girl is asked yet again where she lives: Where do you live they asked the Tattooed Girl. I live in Hell she laughed. For always the Tattooed Girl was good for a laugh.

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And yet. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her cunning. (p. 144)

Ironically, the criminal disregard of the impact that the continually burning mines was having not just on the health of local residents but also on the environment resulted in a phenomenon that reversed one of the indicators of Virgil’s hell—the absence of birds. In Aeneid 6 the stench that is belched from the opening of Avernus has led to its very name—it is a – ornos, the Greek for ‘without birds’. In Oates’s landscape the excess heat in the region has had the opposite effect: ‘The bird population is up. Not just starlings and grackles, but jays, cardinals, robins, songbirds. The temperature is higher on average than anywhere in the state. Over their windows people tape polythylene sheeting to save on fuel’ (p. 144). A similar reversal of the Virgilian phenomenon is noticed by Margaret Drabble’s seven sisters, who suggest global warming as a possible catalyst of the change.12 Alma’s background offers as vivid a version of a Virgilian hell as the shades who haunt Seigl’s imagination. Virgil appears at every turn in the geography and history of this land that attempted to base itself upon a Roman identity, and it is guilt, both individual and collective, that fosters the conditions under which he speaks most urgently. Although Seigl is suffering from the guilt of his appropriation of his ancestors’ suffering in the Holocaust, and the wealth and glory that this earned him, he has failed to learn that his own life story is inextricably linked to the literary pursuits in which he is engaged. Early in the book he reflects ruefully about the naive and callow young man who borrowed the experiences of others without recognizing the legacy of death and stunted identity that these sufferings had conferred upon him, also. He belongs to The Shadows every bit as much as his forebears: ‘The proud, young author of The Shadows. He who’d written so “poetically” about death, others’ deaths. Somehow, even while transcribing the Holocaust, Seigl had seemed not to understand that all this applied to him, too’ (p. 70). But, even as realization about his earlier literary enterprise dawns

12 Drabble (2003: 225): ‘The lake is by no means birdless. That is the first thing they notice. The accepted etymology of the word Avernus must be utterly false, or climactic conditions have changed beyond recognition since Virgil last came this way.’

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upon Seigl, he is attempting to escape the harsh realities of the present by retreating into the world of the Aeneid, a world that he believes to be far distant from his own:13 Out of revulsion at the contemporary world, Seigl had increasingly turned to the ancient world, drenched in its own species of blood, yet remote, sanctified by distance and the eloquence of its language. Absurd for him to be translating the Aeneid, instead of confronting his own subjects, but what were his subjects? (p. 68)

The further Seigl engages with the Aeneid, however, the more it resonates both with his everyday life and with the subjects of his other literary enterprises. Far from providing him with an escape from the fear and indignity of his illness, and the conflicts raging in the household and in the country around him, the lines of Virgil both reflect and prefigure his travails, both those within his family history, which he has had to imagine and those that he experiences within his everyday life. We have already seen how Seigl related Aeneas’ foreboding in front of the gates of Hades to his own uncertainty about the future in the face of his illness. His painfully slow progress through the work mirrors the legends about Virgil’s equally slow working practices, but also enables Oates to emphasize that the visit to Hades still lay ahead. In Seigl’s personal life, as in the translation, the real tribulations are still to come: ‘He took up his work sheets where he’d left off. It was his custom to write in longhand, crossing out most of his lines. After years of fevered work alternating with periods of inactivity and numerous drafts, he was only in Book 2 of the Aeneid. The visit to Hades still lay ahead’ (p. 94). Seigl’s limited imaginative awareness has already led him to win glory for himself through what he has come to recognize as a hollow simulacrum of the experience of the Holocaust. When his sister, Jet, chides him for frittering away the talents that produced so powerful a 13

In a journal entry in 1981, Oates points out that the current woes of a world in the grip of starvation, governed by the likes of Reagan, were no worse than the afflictions suffered in the ancient world: ‘Ordinarily one has about himself or herself a kind of protective coat, a barrier, an ozone layer through which not a great deal can penetrate; not impersonal catastrophes, news of disaster elsewhere, statistics re. Starvation etc., the divers woes of the world, which are no worse now, than at the time of Chaucer . . . or Homer . . . or Swift . . . ’ (Oates 2007: 408–9).

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book, he observes: ‘Jet, The Shadows belongs to the past. The young man who wrote it is no more. I think now that we have no right to appropriate the Holocaust. We’re two generations removed. We’re Americans, for Christ’s sake. It’s sick’ (p. 120). As a young man, he was unable to understand the obscenity of borrowing such an experience; as an older man, he fails to recognize that such an action cannot be safely packaged away in the past. It is the fame bestowed upon him by The Shadows that has brought him to the attention of Dmitri, Alma’s anti-Semitic boyfriend, and has fuelled the campaign of hate against him. And the age-old feelings of antagonism towards the Jews portray a sector of American society that resents the help given to others, that is tired of the demands for assistance, for tolerance: Dmitri had heard that the Jews of Europe hadn’t made much effort to escape or fight the Nazis. They’d expected other people, American soldiers for instance, to do their fighting for them. It was like that in Israel now. The US always bailing Israel out, billions and trillions of dollars down that rat hole, well how’s about we don’t bail them out for a change, give the Palestinians a break. (p. 35)

Moreover, not only is his past work directly linked to the campaign waged against him now, but it is a similar lack of insight and vision that prevents him from understanding that, for all its melancholy beauties, Virgil’s work sings of the lives of individuals caught up in the tide of a history riven by cultural divisions and imperial domination. Oates’s decision to mire him in the translation of Book 2 enables her to foreground his limited appreciation of the Aeneid’s resonance. He uses his translation as a pretext to fend off his sister’s intrusive interest: ‘Seigl said, in his driest voice, “Jet, there’s nothing remotely wrong here. It’s been a quiet morning until now, I’m working on Book II of the Aeneid. I’m thirty-eight years old, not eighteen. My private life is my own business”’ (p. 107). He is, however, at work on the very book in which it is made clear to Aeneas that he cannot have a private life, that his fortunes are inextricably linked to those of his race and of the empire he must found. Yet again and again he tries to escape into Virgil: ‘What solace in the dignity and sonorousness of Virgil’s poetry’ (p. 133), he observes. And, in the context of an America torn apart by religious divisions and awaiting an apocalyptic

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punishment for its callous neglect of its citizens, Oates’s selection of the measured, comforting lines into which Seigl wants to retreat must surely be ironic: ‘For what sanity in Virgil’s Latin. What precision. Even in the nightmare tale of the deaths of Laocoo¨n and his helpless sons, what beauty of speech. From Tenedos, on the placid sea, twin snakes endlessly coiling, uncoiling, swam abreast to shore’ (p. 94). Such lines can offer the reassurance of distance only to those who choose not to see any parallels between Virgil’s twin vehicles of destruction emerging from the placid plains of the sea, and the nightmare tale of 2001, which also began in New York with two deadly machines swooping in out of a calm blue expanse. If the Aeneid appears to provide Seigl with an escape from his own life and times, it is because he does not share the vision of Aeneas, is unable to behold past and future with sufficient understanding: ‘Yet he lived as if in the historic present tense. Lacking the shield of Aeneas. Lacking the personal/historic perspective’ (p. 145). It is Seigl’s need to compartmentalize his work on the Aeneid, to use it as a way of deflecting attention, that generates much of the conflict within the household. Both Alma and his sister, Jet, resent the distance that Seigl places between himself and them by using Virgil. Jet dismisses his translation with the same contempt with which she treats Alma: ‘“And you, in here, translating Virgil.” Virgil was pronounced like Alma with infinite scorn’ (p. 138). Indeed, Jet becomes so enraged that her appearance suddenly mutates into the embodiment of one of Virgil’s Furies, especially as they appear in Aeneid 12:14 ‘One of the Dirae his sister was. Head entwined with coils of snakes and wings to race the wind ’ (p. 138). Given the antagonism between Jet and Alma, it is ironic that each should dismiss Virgil in precisely the same contemptuous tone. For Alma, Seigl is an overprivileged Jew, set apart from miseries and hardship and growing wealthier by the day on his royalty cheques. ‘A jolt to the heart. That was what Seigl needed not boring old mildew books books fucking 14 ‘dicuntur geminae pestes cognomina Dirae, j quas et Tartaream Nox intempesta Megaeram j uno eodemque tulit partu, paribusque revinxit j serpentum spiris ventosasque addidit alas’ (Twin plagues by the name of Dirae are said to exist j Born in hell with Megaera, in one and the same birth, to the never discerning Night. Night endowed them with matching j Ringlets of snakes and added wings like the winds they would glide through) (Aen. 12. 845–8).

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books’ (p. 156). And, though Alma could not have known that Virgil is commonly hailed as Father of the West, he nevertheless epitomizes in her mind precisely the learning and culture that set Seigl apart from her world, which deepens the gulf between them: ‘He’s at the dining room table reciting poetry I guess it is “Vir-gil” rocking forward and back in his chair his eyes shut not knowing anyone else exist’ (p. 156; emphasis in original). Virgil’s work not only prefigures the cultural divisions within society at large, but fuels those very divisions within the intimacy of Seigl’s own household. The irony of this is deepened when we remember that all three characters—Jet, Alma, and Seigl—animate aspects of the Aeneid, and bring it to life within the twenty-first century. Jet becomes one of the Dirae, Alma comes from the burning plains of Akron, while Seigl assumes the role both of the Dido who is too tormented to sleep and the ferryman, Charon, whose eyes are flaming torches: ‘Prowling the house sleepless. Eyes burning in their sockets’ (p. 171).15 At the same time in his misplaced trust and gratitude he perceives Alma as a contemporary Dido, as one who recognizes the suffering of others and wishes to alleviate it: ‘No stranger to trouble myself I am learning to care for the unhappy. Like Virgil’s Dido she seemed to him, had seemed to him from the start, not in eloquence for she had none, but in her manner and her physical being. Her touch’ (p. 242). Wherever the characters of this novel turn, there is an image from the Aeneid that reflects their situation. The fact that they come from backgrounds that vary so widely in terms of privilege and status reminds us not only of the vast sweep of family histories that have made their way into the USA, but also of the Aeneid’s capacity to speak with equal force for opposing sides, the ‘two voices of the Aeneid’. Alma experiences the Aeneid as a weapon of exclusion and feels put down by the superiority of Seigl’s classical education, little suspecting that the hellishness of her own home town is prefigured by the description of Acheron in Aeneid 6. Seigl perceives his work on

15 ‘At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura [ . . . ] haerent infixi pectore vultus’ (Now though, the queen [Dido], long since pierced through by her terrible anguish [ . . . ] Anguish grants no peaceful repose, no respite for tired limbs) (Aen. 4. 1, 4); ‘portitor [ . . . ] Charon [ . . . ] stant lumina flamma’ (Charon [ . . . ] is the ferryman [ . . . ] and his eyes glare flame in their bright gaze) (Aen. 6. 298, 300).

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the Aeneid as an antidote to his other work, in particular, The Shadows, and yet his other books and projects send him back all the time to the issues explored by Virgil. And, having spent time away from Virgil, he feels a sense of guilt, as if he has been found wanting in the qualities of filial duty and loyalty that are expressed by the epithet pius: ‘Working now on both Redemption and the dithyrambic play Why/Warum? Which he’d abandoned in despair years before. And sometimes he returned to Virgil as a guilty son might return to his father’ (p. 175). The very titles of his projects are revealing. The fact that ‘Why’ appears in both English and German signals it as a response to the Holocaust, while ‘Redemption’ points to his guilt at having appropriated the suffering for his own glory, and gained wealth and status for an inauthentic narrative. And the feelings of filial neglect that he experiences when he has abandoned Virgil for some time should have alerted him to the connections between his various works. His writing is an attempt to put flesh on the image of his father, to breathe life into the figure who had always seemed absent: ‘his sense of his own father was blurred, uncertain. Sometimes he believed that everything he’d ever written, every effort of his imagination, had been an attempt to pay homage to Karl Seigl, who had eluded him’ (p. 218). Seigl’s translation of Virgil is a natural extension of all these literary quests for his father, not so much because Virgil is the ultimate literary Father of the West, but because the Aeneid offers so powerful an image of Aeneas trying, and failing, to embrace his father’s ghost: ‘tua me, genitor, tua tristis imago saepius occurrens haec limina tendere adegit; stant sale Tyrrheno classes. da iungere dextram, da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro.’ sic memorans largo fletu simul ora rigabat. ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno. (Aen. 6. 695–702) (‘Father, your sad image, rising before me Time and again compelled me to push to this boundary’s threshold. Anchors are down in the Etruscan waters. We’ve made it! So, father, Give me your hand! Give it, don’t pull away as I hug and embrace you!’

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Waves of tears washed over his cheeks as he spoke in frustration: Three attempts made to encircle his father’s neck with his outstretched Arms yielded three utter failures. The image eluded his grasping Hands like the puff of a breeze, as a dream flits away from a dreamer.)

The passage is, of course, already haunted: not only by its conscious allusion to the parallel episode in the Odyssey where Odysseus seeks the shade of his mother,16 but also, and directly, to the beginning of Aeneas’ story, where he loses his wife, Creusa, and fails to embrace her ghost amid the burning ruins of Troy. That Virgil uses exactly the same words to describe the elusiveness of both father and wife reminds us that Aeneas’ history is full of ghosts. And the nature of Seigl’s preoccupations and quests means that these literary ghosts, the Virgilian umbrae, have taken up their places alongside Seigl’s imagined, fictional ghosts in The Shadows. Towards the end of the book Seigl appears to be attempting to turn away from Virgil more and more. And yet, the more he tries to distance himself, the more Virgilian his enterprises become: He’d set aside the Virgilian translations. Temporarily. He was working on poetry of his own, and on a new novel set in the future where all times were contemporaneous, simultaneous. History was no longer linear but spatial, and human beings were no longer opaque but transparent as jellyfish. Their souls visible as quivering upright flames inside the skins and intricate skeletal structures of their bodies. (p. 171)

The presentation of the coexistence of different times is quintessentially Virgilian and charges some of the most powerful episodes of the Aeneid. Aeneas gazes in the present tense upon a shield that displays scenes from both the past and the future, and the pilgrimage around the site of the future Rome evokes the rustic past for Virgil’s readers able to gaze upon the present glory of Rome, while suggesting that the city is always liable to be ruined and overgrown with thorns and grasses once more in the future. And the very invocation of Virgil in

16 This passage is also later evoked by Oates: ‘Sensing his weakness, smelling blood like predators, the souls of the dead hovered near. In Homer’s Hades Up and out of Erebus they came flocking. Thousands swarming from every side. Shambling, shiftless dead. [ . . . ] It was horrible to think that among them were Seigl’s elders. His parents, grandparents. His ancestors’ (p. 272).

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the twenty-first century ensures that this work, written in a dead language over 2,000 years ago, is experienced as a present reality. It is, of course, Seigl’s very need for redemption that impels him towards a narrative where past and future coexist, where the answers to the ‘why’s of the past are already present, are an integral part of the past. This closure, this unity, is something that the Aeneid does not offer. Virgil allows his readers a glimpse of such a luxury, acknowledges the human need for it, before ending his uvre with the killing of Turnus, a moment that makes no sense of the misery and suffering entailed by the founding of an empire. That Virgil withholds the peace of plenitude and completion accounts for Seigl’s sense of being let down by the work at precisely the moment when he himself ‘had lost all strength. He was too weak to deflect the passage of the present moment, let alone the course of history’ (p. 272). As his body fails, his empathy with Virgil declines further and further: At first, Seigl was able to work. To a degree. He wanted to concentrate on the Aeneid. He was fierce and stubborn in his dedication to the massive poem even as, he was beginning to sense, his motive for having begun translating it was waning. Virgilian melancholy and subordination to destiny had less appeal to him now, he didn’t know why. His soul had been altered by the alterations in his body. His soul was a shadow, a reflection of his body. Was that it? (pp. 267–78)

As Seigl weakens, he reverses his father’s experience by feeling progressively less European: ‘I’ve been feeling very American lately,’ he told his friends. ‘My old European soul is being sloughed off ’ (p. 267). And yet, paradoxically, he feels himself more and more to be a shadow, a shade, that quintessentially Virgilian identity. Furthermore, in his sickness and anguish at his life’s work, which has not only been unfulfilled but has won unmerited plaudits even as it deepens the wounds inflicted upon the oppressed, Seigl becomes a kindred spirit of the dying Virgil of legend, most richly imagined by Hermann Broch. The despair of Broch’s Virgil as he glimpses the appalling crimes that will be endorsed by self-serving readings of the Aeneid is close to Seigl’s cry of horror when he confesses of The Shadows: ‘Alma! You were right—I lied. I couldn’t tell the truth. They tried to buy their way out—to deny that they were Jews. I lied for them. They argued that they were Christians, they’d married into Protestant families and they’d con-

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verted. They begged, they pleaded, they tried to negotiate with the Reich, they made payments to Nazi officials to allow them to emigrate, the Nazis took their money—of course!—but it made no difference, their property was “Aryanized”, they were herded into the camps like the poorest of the Jews, the Jews they scorned, that’s why I call them “the shadows”—they were never real. Alma, you were right, I’m so ashamed.’ Seigl’s voice was shrill and desperate. There was no sensation in his legs, he’d become a torso to be stacked like firewood. ‘They—they sent me away. I was saved. I was the only one. I couldn’t betray them. I had to lie for them! I’m so—’ (p. 273)

It is at the end of his life that Seigl recognizes that his life work is based upon a lie, is a form of betrayal, one of the false dreams emerging from the gates of ivory that Virgil depicts. His guilt is not so much in the appropriation of others’ suffering but in his presentation of those who adopted anti-Semitism to save their own skins as Jewish victims whose agonies had to be commemorated. The book closes in a welter of fury. Seigl dies, acutely conscious that his work is worse than a husk of the book for which he is renowned, though he and Alma forge a bond of understanding and mutual respect before his death, and she benefits from his will. However, when his sister Jet returns to the house after the funeral, she catches sight of a family heirloom, a Venetian glass necklace, around Alma’s neck. Maddened by fury and grief, she seizes a kitchen knife and butchers Alma; the book closes on a false peace as Jet claims: ‘It’s over. There’s justice now’ (p. 307). The justice meted out by Jet is as stained by personal vengeance as Aeneas’ decision to slay Turnus, even as he begged for his life. The parallels are strengthened by the fact that both Aeneas and Jet are prompted to kill, having glimpsed personal objects, Pallas’ sword belt and the Seigl’s family necklace, that were invested by the sacred bonds of friendship and family feeling. A gruesome murder in twenty-first-century America alerts us once again to the problematic ending of the Aeneid, reminds us that the epic that celebrates the founding of the heart of Western civilization closes with an act of unredeemed brutality. The two voices of the Aeneid continue to clamour in contemporary America. Seigl, himself, was aware of this ambivalence, as he found a bleak comfort in the well-worn lines from Aeneid 1: ‘Maybe someday it will

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be cheering to remember even these things. This line of Virgil he’d long contemplated. For was it an expression of the most profound pessimism or, perversely, optimism?’ (p. 236). The violence of Oates’s narrative highlights the savagery within Virgil’s work also, yet the persistence and continually renewed relevance of the Virgilian sorrows offer their own version of hope to the modern world.

11 Janet Lembke ‘The Georgics is a poem for our time,’ declares Lembke in the preface to her translation of the Georgics (2005: p. xiii).1 While Joyce Carol Oates uses Virgil to explore the dangers facing the United States from the divided social factions at the heart of the community, Lembke’s concern is to alert us to the irreversible damage caused to the landscape by government policies that have been driven by material gain and have resulted in both dispossession and climate change. The allusions to the Aeneid sharpened the grief at rootlessness of Oates’s characters; Lembke’s decision to translate the Georgics for the twentyfirst century demonstrates her belief that Virgil’s treatise on farming can still offer us valuable lessons about the catastrophic consequences that are attendant upon greed and a criminal disregard of the need to respect the delicate equilibrium between human sustenance and nature’s ecologies. She reminds us of the increasingly bleak relevance of Virgil’s advice about farming: ‘A message inhabits the instructions: only at our gravest peril do we fail to husband the resources on which our lives depend’ (2005: p. xiii). This is not the first time that Lembke, whose books include nature writing as well as translations of classical works, has asserted the value of looking at the American landscape through the prism of Greek and Roman literature. In Skinny Dipping and Other Immersions in Water, Myth and Being Human she describes a richly experienced pleasure in living off the produce she has grown in language that is heavily accented with echoes of the Georgics: 1 Lembke (2005). References are to this edition; page numbers, where needed, appear in parentheses in the text.

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We’ll store Earth, as well: onions and garlic with braided leaves, green beans, carrots, corn on the cob, cucumbers and the dill with which to pickle them, butternut squash for eating plain or making pies, and always tomatoes that, fresh or preserved, retain the rich red heat of summer sun. Later, even in winter’s most frigid darkness, that heat will rise fragrant and delicious. And we’ll touch Earth again. (1994: 18)2

One of the primary challenges in Lembke’s translation was to overcome the foreign qualities of the Georgics. She writes of her decision to adopt modern terminology for the places Virgil depicts, in an attempt to make the poem appear less distant to modern readers.3 In certain instances this entails offering a geographical explanation instead of the original name, or replacing it with a visual image: ‘I have also taken some liberties to help today’s reader feel more at home. Virgil’s Rhodope, a mountain range in western Thrace, becomes, simply, either Rose Mountain or a Thracian range’ (p. ix). In bringing Virgil’s landscape alive in this way for her readers, Lembke hopes to awaken them to the ache of dispossession that permeates both Virgil’s poetry and contemporary America: [Virgil] understood what happened to the land when smallholders were dispossessed. People went hungry when it became an unproductive kingdom of weeds. [ . . . ] The Georgics, ignited by a deeply felt personal experience, is in many respects a heartfelt cry for homecoming, for returning landholders and their families to the fields and pastures they had lost through no fault of their own. [ . . . ] it may well provoke a contemporary reader to think wistfully of the disappearance of family farms across North America, though the reasons are far different from those of Virgil’s day. (pp. xvi–xvii)

While she is driven, as a translator, by the imperative to alert her readers to the enduring relevance of Virgil’s poetry, as a nature writer she has already described in Skinny Dipping how Virgil’s poetry

2 Lembke (1994). References to this edition appear in parentheses in the text. The last sentence cited looks back to Lembke’s book on the restorative powers of vegetable gardening (Lembke, 2001). 3 ‘But the poem was written two millennia ago. The practices it recounts, the tribes and lands it mentions, and its many place-names are foreign indeed, in many cases striking no contemporary resonance. So, in an effort to bridge the gap between then and now, to make the poem more accessible and less remote, I have used the presentday names of some geographic features, like towns, lakes and rivers’ (2005: p. ix).

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enables her not only to articulate her relationship with the land, but also to deepen it by allowing her to perceive natural phenomena through language that is already millennia old. Moreover, listening to the sounds of the earth offers new dimensions to her understanding of classical texts: Listening to wind music is like listening to a chanting, singing language that hypnotizes even though it cannot be understood. It seems possible that the human singers of narratives—the Genesis poet, Homer, Virgil, and all their named and nameless descendants—have taken lessons from the wind and used its tricks to give their story-songs compelling voice—changes of pace and volume, pauses for suspense and catching breath, onomatopoeia, repetition, riddles. (1994: 52)

Hearing this voice establishes a connection with the ancient world that enlivens her relationship with the earth, in contrast to a scientific understanding that leaves her cold: ‘Though we’re twentieth-century cognizant of the physical circumstances causing unseen, unheard atmospheric gases to move hither and yon, the Chief and I prefer the Homeric view, that the wind is alive’ (1994: 57). And the chill of dread with which she envisages the savage rains washing away the farmers’ investments indicates how natural it is that her work as a classical translator should include the Georgics.4 Some rains are not so benign—from the ancient sky-burst that sent Noah drifting across new-formed seas for forty days to the here-and-now downpours that do not cease for days on end but flood the Mississipi, break its levees, and drown not only the seeds just planted in the fields but a thousand thousand hopes and dreams. But today’s rain is water from heaven. And, oh, we have needed it. (1994: 21)

It is, in fact, through her sensitivity to the natural world, made more acute by the lessons she has learned from ancient texts, that Lembke is able to make a compelling case that the entrance to the Underworld and the source of the river Styx are to be found in the United States. In a fascinating chapter in Skinny Dipping she details the mythical geographies of the Styx and the course it follows through the epics of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, before revealing that the Styx was 4

Her translations include Euripides’ Electra and Hecuba and Aeschylus’ Persians.

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discovered in West Virginia by an eighteenth-century explorer, Thomas Lewis, her five-times-great-grandfather. The chapter begins with a brisk assertion that the Underworld depicted in classical epic has found a living reality in the United States, a claim that adds a further dimension to the American urge to map Rome and its literature onto the culture and landscape of the States: ‘The river Styx is not a myth. It’s not a figment of poetic imagination. Nor is it a metaphor for the stark dividing line between life and death. No one can dabble fingers and toes in a metaphor and get them wet. The time has come to set the record straight’ (1994: 109). As Lembke reads her ancestor’s travel journal, she recognizes that it is as a direct result of his classical education that he is able to recognize the Styx when he happens upon it: First of all, Virgil gives him the physical clues by which he can recognize the place. The surveyor of the Styx is, after all, an educated man, beneficiary of a classical education—reading, writing, arithmetic and lots of Latin [ . . . ] Because the boy has been required, in the ordinary course of his schooling, to read and parse the Aeneid, and very likely the Odyssey, it happens that when the man comes all unsuspecting upon the River Styx, he knows it instantly for what it is by Virgil’s ancient description. On the far side of a steep gorge, amid a measureless forest of pine and oak and holly, through shadowy marshes, the cold, black river flows. (1994: 134)

The extracts that Lembke cites from the travel journal replicate in astonishing detail the description Virgil offers of the Styx and the landscape around it. As the explorers get closer to the river, they observe the marshy quality of the land they are crossing: ‘Marshy— the word has the ominous sound of a sibylline whisper’ (1994: 123), observes Lembke. When the surveyors arrive they recognize the river from the classical texts to such a degree that they name it the Styx. Lembke cites directly from the journal: 406 poles X the River of Styx total for this Day This River was called Styx from the Dismal apperance of the place Being Sufficen to Strick terror in any human Creature ye Lorals Ivey & Spruce pine so Extremely thick in ye Swamp through which this River Runs that one Cannot have the Least prospect except that they look upwards . . . . .

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the Water of the River of Dark Brownish Cooler & its motion So Slow that it can hardly Be Said to move its Depth about 4 feet the Bottom muddy and Banks high (1994: 124)

For Lembke, the magic of discovering this American Styx through her ancestor’s eyes lies, in part, through the promise it offers of further Styxes awaiting discovery, affording future navigators the possibility of stepping themselves into the roles of Aeneas and his men: ‘Good evidence places one of the Styx’s head springs in the underworld, and there’s certainly another in West Virginia. Why then should the Styx not find still another upwelling in the outerworld of space? And when tomorrow’s explorers reach its astonishing banks, there shall be no lack of men and women, heroes all, to risk the dire crossing and return with new reports’ (1994: 135). It is from this background of perceiving physical evidence of Virgil’s lines still living in the American landscape that Lembke embarked upon the project of translating the Georgics. While one of her avowed aims in her translation is to make Virgil’s world accessible to contemporary readers, and while her version is enhanced by her solid practical understanding of growing plants and working with the land, she nevertheless consciously reaches back to a period that is foreign to us and allows its strangeness to shimmer through her lines. Her decision to translate some of the classical terminology in her choice of names is, perhaps, most striking in Georgics 4, where she faces the challenge of eam circum Milesia vellera Nymphae carpebant hyali saturo fucata colore, Drymoque Xanthoque Ligeaque Phyllodoceque, caesariem effusae nitidam per candida colla, Cyddipe et flava Lycorias, altera virgo, altera tum primos Lucinae experta labores, Clioque et Beroe soror, Oceanitides ambae, ambae auro, pictis incinctae pellibus ambae atque Ephyre atque Opis et Asia Deiopea et tandem positis velox Arethusa sagittis. (ll. 334–44)

Day-Lewis renders these lines:

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the nymphs, her companions, were carding Fleeces of Miletus dyed a rich glass-green colour— Drymo, Xantho, Ligea, Phyllodoce were their names and their tresses were loose and glittering about their snow-shine necks: Cyddipe too and corn-blonde Lycorias, one a virgin, The other but now had felt her travail pains for the first time: Clio and Beroe her sister, both Ocean princesses, Both of them gold-adorned and girt with dappled skins: The Ephyrean was there, and Opis, and Deiopeia, And Arethusa the fleetfoot, her arrows at last laid by.5

In Lembke’s hands this passage becomes one that seems strangely familiar to us, in part because her version carries the Shakespearian resonances of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed from A Midsummer’s Night Dream,6 while at the same time evoking figures from fantasy literature, a genre that has known enormous popularity from the late twentieth century onwards: The nymphs around her were carding Anatolian fleeces dyed the rich color of bottle-green glass— Woods Girl and Golden and Clear Voice and Fancy Leaf hair gleaming, loose flowing over white shoulders; [and Radiant and Sprightly and Festive and Wave-Catcher] Proud Filly, too, along with Wolf Eyes, the one a virgin the other new to childbirth’s goddess-given pangs, and Proclaimer, her sister Comet, both daughters of Ocean, both decked with gold, both dressed for the hunt in decorated hides and Corinth and Awe and Divine Face from Asia and Arethusa, fleet huntress, her arrows at last laid aside.

But Lembke does not always choose to render the foreign names into language that is readily accessible to a modern ear. On occasion this reveals the level of classical knowledge that she may reasonably 5

Day-Lewis’s translation is in Virgil (1966). Lembke’s decision to introduce a bank at Georgics 4. 32 ‘inriguumque bibant violaria fontem’ with ‘and let banks of violets drink at a thirst-quenching spring’ also carries the suggestion of ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, j Where violets . . . ’ while her translation of Book 2. 404 ‘frigidus et silvis Auilo decussit honorem’ accurately uses ‘shakes’ for ‘decussit’, resulting in ‘the frigid North Wind shakes summer’s beauty from the woods’, a rendering that evokes Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example: ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.’ 6

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assume her readers to have; at the very beginning of Georgics 1 it is telling that she translates ‘Liber’ at line 7 as ‘old Planter God’, but when it comes to ‘alma Ceres’ she is able to preserve the goddess’s name as ‘generous Ceres’. At line 63 she translates ‘Deucalion’ as ‘Prometheus’ son’, clearly expecting that a modern reader might well have heard of Prometheus, but is perhaps less likely to have read Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1. On other occasions the translations offer an understanding of what the names meant to an ancient ear. Especially vivid is her rendering of ‘Lyaeus’ (Georgics 2. 229), the god of wine, as ‘Body-Relaxer’. When she translates the names of the sea deities, she explains her rationale in the notes: ‘Virgil simply lists Glaucus, Panopea, and Ino’s Melicertes, the last being the son of Ino, daughter of Cadmus who founded Thebes. The adjectives appended to each name in the English translation reflect the meanings of the names’ (2005: 84): ‘Glauco et Panopeae et Inoo Melicertae’ (l. 437) come to life as ‘gray-green Glaucus, all-seeing Panopea, sweet Melicertes’. This strategy is also in evidence when Lembke translates line 78, ‘Lethaeo perfusa papavera somno’, as ‘as do poppies suffused with forgetful sleep’, lest any readers are unaware that the river Lethe runs through the Underworld, cleansing souls of the memories that bind them to the earth. In Georgics 2 Lembke’s strategy of translating proper names into names that are meaningful to a contemporary reader has a startling effect. As Virgil praises the sources of water that keep the land fertile and fresh, he addresses them directly: an mare quod supra memorem, quodque adluit infra? anne lacus tantos? te, Lari maxime, teque, fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens Benace marino? (ll. 158–60)

Day-Lewis preserves the Virgilian names, which establishes a landscape that is far distant from his readers’ experiences and knowledge. Need I commemorate the Upper sea and the Lower? The lakes so great? Lake Larius the greatest of them all, Lake Benacus that tosses and growls like a little ocean.

Lembke, on the other hand, alerts us immediately to the fact that these lakes are the very ones that will be known already to many of her readers, as they are popular modern tourist destinations:

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Just a few lines later Virgil describes the quality of men born of Italy: haec genus acre virum, Marsos pubemque Sabellam adsuetumque malo Ligurem Volscosque verutos extulit, haec Decios Marios magnosque Camillos Scipiadas duros bello et te, maxime Caesar, qui nunc extremis Asiae iam victor in oris imbellem avertis Romanis arcibus Indum. (ll. 167–72)

Day-Lewis’s translation preserves the sense of distance, or foreignness, while also conveying an imperial sneer as he translates ‘imbellem [ . . . ] Indum’ as ‘war-worthless Indians’: Active her breed of men—the Marsians and Sabellians Ligurians used to hardship, Volscian javelin-throwers; Mother she is of the Decii, Marii, great Camilli, The Scipios relentless in war; and of you, most royal Caesar, Who now triumphant along the furthest Asian frontiers Keep the war-worthless Indians away from the towers of Rome.

Here again Lembke chooses to translate the qualities associated with certain of the tribes of Italy rather than their names, so that they appear all the more vividly before the reader’s eye, especially as she chooses words such as ‘guerilla’, which carries sinister modern connotations. By once more privileging modern terminology as she translates ‘imbellem [ . . . ] Indum’ as ‘the unwarlike Middle East’, Lembke creates a pathos that is absent from Virgil and Day-Lewis. In our world the Middle East is one of the most bellicose and divided regions of the world, especially in terms of its fraught relationship with the West. Through her translation Lembke looks back to a gentler, long-past period of its history: She has borne a sharp kind of man—hill-town guerillas, Mountain men raised with adversity, fighters with short spears; hers, too, men skilled in war—the Decii and Marius, the great Camillus, the Scipios and you, Caesar, best of all, already victor in remotest Asia, who now keeps the unwarlike Middle East far from our Roman hills.

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At times, however, Lembke deliberately chooses a word that is etymologically linked to the Latin and that sounds foreign to a modern ear, but that offers its own poetic beauties to her translation. At Book 2, lines 70–1, the original ‘ornusque incanuit albo j flore piri glandemque sues fregere sub ulmis’ becomes ‘and a mountain ash turns white, j candent with pear-flowers, while hogs root acorns beneath an elm’. (Day-Lewis renders these lines as: ‘the mountain ash blown white j With pear blossom, and pigs munched acorns under an elm tree.’) By translating ‘incanuit’ as ‘turns white’, Lembke points to the meaning of ‘candent’, a word that shines out through its strangeness. This effect is all the more striking by being immediately followed by the earthiness of the rooting hogs. Through such devices Lembke manages to ensure that the poem is accessible, appears modern, while at the same time indicating that it comes from a far-distant time and culture. On occasion she highlights this capacity of Virgil’s poetry to speak to all times and places by carefully selecting words that carry a sense of timelessness within them, thereby straddling the world of myth and the gritty realism of rural life. One such instance occurs in Georgics 1, where Virgil is stressing how late into the night countrymen and their wives must work: interea longum cantu solata laborem arguto coniunx percurrit pectine telas, aut dulcis musti Volcano decoquit umorem et foliis undam trepidi despumat aeni. (ll. 293–6)

By selecting the adjective ‘eternal’ to translate ‘longum’ rather than the more obvious ‘lengthy’, Lembke conveys a deep weariness—the work is unending, is never completed—but she also anchors her translation in the world of myth and the world of work around us. while his wife, lightening her eternal work with song, runs her lively shuttle through the loom’s warp threads or cooks down the sweet must of new wine over the fire, using leaves to skim off the foam in the simmering copper kettle.

‘Eternal’ ensures that Virgil’s countrywoman becomes the archetype of all women everywhere who lighten their load with song. The countrywoman of this first Georgic, cheerfully singing as she plies her task, stands in stark contrast to the arcehtypal poet, the broken figure of the

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Orpheus of Georgics 4, whose songs fail to offer him any consolation, but that lead instead to his mutilation and murder at the hands of the Bacchantes. Lembke’s emphasis on the same landscapes and figures recurring from generation to generation is also to be found later in Georgics 1, as she translates Virgil’s description of the ways in which Nature becomes alert to the advent of rain: ‘aut arguta lacus circumvolitat hirundo j et veterem in limo ranae cecinere querelam’ (2005: 377–8). Her version reads: ‘or the chittering swallow swoops gracefully around the ponds j and the frogs in the mud croak their old-astime complaint’. By eschewing the more obvious ‘old’ for ‘veterem’ in favour of ‘old-as-time’, Lembke establishes once again that her version stretches back to this ancient poem, which itself reaches back into a still more distant world. Her translation of ‘arguta’, which conveys a shimmering, silvery sound (Virgil uses it to depict the sound of the ilex’s leaves at the opening of Eclogue 7), with ‘chittering’ vividly evokes the high-pitched business of a swallow’s call. She uses the same adjective at Georgics 4. 307, to depict the swallow, ‘a chittering barn-swallow’, even though the Virgilian adjective used there is ‘garrula’ (chattering): ‘garrula [ . . . ] hirundo’. At one and the same time her translation establishes Virgil’s work as foreign and mythical, while also setting it in a landscape that she brings alive for her readers through her own keen observations of the natural world.7 In her preface Lembke explains that part of her rationale for undertaking the project was that the Georgics had a tradition of being translated by men whose contact with the natural world was sorely limited: ‘The few currently easy-to-come by translations of the Georgics, from John Dryden’s to those of C. Day-Lewis (Oxford, 1940) and L. P. Wilkinson (Penguin, 1982), have been rendered by men who know much about poetry but little about farming. In with grain, out with corn! Out with truncheons and buskins, in with sturdy twigs and boots’ (p. x). A cheerful briskness blows through 7 There is a comparable moment in Georgics 3, where, rather than rely upon her reader’s recognition of the harsh Scythian winters, Lembke speaks instead of the ‘fabled source in the Arctic’: ‘qualis Hyperboreis Aquilo cum densus ab oris j incubuit, Scythiaeque hiemes atque arida differt j nubila’ (ll. 196–8): ‘as when a continuing North Wind bears down from its j fabled source in the Arctic, spreading far and wide Asia’s storms j and dry clouds’.

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Lembke’s version, which conveys the energy and earthiness of a rural life by eschewing staid renderings. Where Day-Lewis’s oak stretches its branches out majestically: ‘Far and wide she stretches her boughs, her steadfast arms j A central column upholding that heavy spread of shade’, Lembke’s translation of Georgics 2. 296–7 (‘Tum fortis late ramos et bracchia tendens j huc illuc media ipsa ingentem sustinet umbram’) is much snappier: ‘Stretching out sturdy limbs and arms on all sides, standing j smack-dab in the center, it casts a huge green shade.’ A little further on in the same book Virgil depicts the coarse merriment of the Italian farmers: ‘nec non Ausonii, Troia gens missa, coloni j versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto’ (ll. 385–6). DayLewis’s translation of these lines conveys the image of boy scouts enjoying a jaunt: ‘The Ausonians, too, settlers from Troy, are accustomed to hold a j Beano, their poems unpolished and unrestrained their jokes.’ Lembke, however, revels in the uncouth bawdiness of the scene: ‘Indeed, Italy’s people, descended from Trojan stock, j make sport with rude verses and loud, unchecked belly laughs.’ Towards the end of this book, where Virgil points to the perils of drunken behaviour, Lembke’s strategy of translating the characteristics of the ancient names rather than relying upon a modern reader’s patchy knowledge heightens the violence of the scene: Bacchus et ad culpam causas dedit; ille furentis Centauros leto domuit, Rhoecumque Pholumque et magno Hylaeum Lapithis cratere minantem. (ll. 455–7)

Day-Lewis’s translation reads: Much, indeed, he has done deserving blame. It was he Who maddened and killed the Centaurs, and Rhoetus and Pholus and made Hylaeus brawl and go for the Lapithae with a bottle.

Lembke, on the other hand, translates ‘Rhoecumque Pholumque j et [ . . . ] Hylaeum’ into a recognizable group of swaggering and aggressive young men, egging each other on and ending up in trouble: Bacchus even offers cause for blame, as well: he made the Centaurs— A stud, a son of Hell, a would-be rapist—so drunk that they died when he threatened the Lapiths with his great jug.

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Lembke’s translation has met with mixed reviews; the criticism it has attracted has mainly been on account of small slips and inaccuracies. In modern times it is Day-Lewis’s translation into English of the Georgics that has above all achieved the canonical status only previously given to Dryden’s version. Lembke may not have achieved the consistently elegant accuracy of Day-Lewis, but what distinguishes her translation are frequent subtle touches that betray the fact that she can see exactly the scene Virgil is depicting from her own close relationship with the natural world. This is the case right from the start of the poem (Georgics 1. 12–13), where Virgil describes the impatient horse as ‘frementem [ . . . ] equum’, for which Day-Lewis selects ‘neighing horse’. Under Lembke’s guidance, however, the reader is able to imagine more vividly the shudders and snuffles of a horse raring to go, as she settles for a ‘whickering horse’.8 At the beginning of Book 2, Lembke knows exactly what kind of soils Virgil is recommending for different plants: ‘pinguibus hae terris habiles, levioribus illae’ (l. 92). Where Day-Lewis settles for ‘one suited to heavy soil, one to light soil’, Lembke evokes much more vividly a brittle, stony soil with ‘one adapted to rich soil, the other to hardscrabble’. Indeed, Lembke’s practical experience of cultivating the earth enables her to correct Virgil’s own misapprehensions. As one of her notes to Book 2, where Virgil offers advice on the best way to graft trees, she observes: ‘Only one of these grafts is actually possible, that of chestnut and beech, which belong to the same botanical family. Unrelated species cannot be successfully grafted. No matter; Virgil’s pictures are truly marvellous’ (2005: 86). Lembke’s urge to show the way in which the modern American landscape shines through Virgil’s descriptions of the ancient Italian landscape leads her to use quintessentially American terms at various moments in the text. Where Virgil’s hunters blithely accept beer and cider instead of wine—‘et pocula laeti j fermento atque acidis imitantur vitea sorbis’ (Georgics 3. 379–80), which Day-Lewis translates as ‘and gladly j Make do with beer and a rough cider for draughts of 8

There is a comparable moment at Georgics 3. 93–4, where the Latin reads: ‘et altum j Pelion hinnitu fugiens implevit acuto.’ Day-Lewis keeps the same verb: ‘And made the peaks of Pelion resound with a stallion’s neighing’, while Lembke varies her verbs, as did Virgil: ‘and filling Pelion’s heights with his whinny’.

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wine’—Lembke chooses a term that is unfamiliar outside of North America: ‘and happily imitate j the vineyard’s drinks with sour serviceberry juice’. Elsewhere, for ‘nec salici lotoque nec Iadaeis cyparissis’ (Georgics 2. 84), she selects ‘all willows, all hackberries and every last cypress’, where Day-Lewis has chosen ‘the willow, the nettle tree or the cypresses of Ida’. And, where Virgil’s strong bulls are busy ploughing the earth at Georgics 1. 65, ‘fortes invertant tauri’, which Day-Lewis translates as ‘your strong bulls should turn’, Lembke offers the sight, more familiar to North Americans, of oxen hard at work: ‘let your strong oxen deep plow it’. It is, however, Lembke’s choice of words to translate phenomena connected with climate that strikes a more modern and chilling note, reminding us of her injunctions in the preface to heed Virgil’s warnings about due respect for the earth and the consequences of greed and the plundering of her resources. At Georgics 1. 43 Virgil describes the snow melting on the mountains in early spring: ‘Vere novo, gelidus canis cum montibus umor j liquitur.’ Day-Lewis’s translation depicts a fairly benign process: ‘Early spring, when a cold moisture sweats from the hoar-head j Hills’, but Lembke uses a far more modern term ‘meltwater’, which is becoming inextricably associated with the effects of global warming: ‘At spring’s beginning, when icecold meltwater runs down j from the mountains.’ Later on in Book 1 (l. 333), when Virgil depicts worsening weather—‘ingeminant Austri et densissimus imber’, which in Day-Lewis’s hands becomes ‘The south wind doubles its force and thicker falls the rain’—she uses the term ‘wind-force’, a word that strikes particular fear into a contemporary reader, who is learning to dread the increasing frequency and violence of hurricanes and tornadoes attributed once again to global warming. A comparable note is achieved at Georgics 2. 225, where Virgil describes the effects of flooding on the land: ‘et vacuis Clanuis non aequus Acerris’. Day-Lewis renders this as: ‘And where the floods of the Clanuis have emptied old Acerrae’, but Lembke’s version offers a far more vivid scene that is all too recognizable to a contemporary reader witnessing flooding more and more often: ‘and the silt dumped on towns by Campania’s flooding river’. It is through the lightest of touches such as these that Lembke underlines the contemporary resonances of this ancient text for a world reaping the consequences of our increasing abuse of the earth.

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In this way Lembke anticipates an emerging trend in classical reception, whereby contemporary writers are turning to ancient texts in order to explore ecological concerns.9 One of the most striking aspects of Lembke’s preface is her assertion that previous translations of the Georgics have been marred because the male translators knew so little about farming. Though she does not explicitly point it out, it appears remarkable that it should fall to a woman to enliven her translation with the sound practical detail of one used to working closely with the land. Still more remarkable is the fact that her acknowledgements to those who offered her guidance about the appearance and behaviour of horses, sheep, and goats were also women: Debra Schrishuhn, who breeds Egyptian Arabian horses, made sure I used modern horse terms to translate Virgil’s descriptions. Where he used alta, which might well be translated as ‘high’, to characterize a noble neck, I use instead ‘arched’, for a neck that’s ‘high’ is nowadays seen as a fault. My veterinarian daughter, Lisa Lembke, provided much information on sheep and goats. (2005: p. x)

Though Lembke’s translation is not feminist, or even female-oriented, in any way, she nevertheless alerts us to a surprising level of professional expertise, in terms of both classical education and agriculture. The predominance of women offering professional advice about the rearing and treatment of animals may seem to be a sign of the times, a sign that in the twenty-first century you may as easily come across a female horse breeder or vet as a male. Yet, if we remember that the most powerful American response to the Georgics was also penned by a woman, perhaps it is not so surprising after all. At the beginning of the twentieth century Willa Cather was also turning to the Georgics in her most famous novel My Antonia (1918), and, like Lembke, was exploring its capacity to alert contemporary readers to the perils facing the earth.10 Lembke’s final acknowledgement is to a female contemporary of Cather’s, her 9 For example, both Jeanette Winterson (2006) and Carol Ann Duffy (2009) have turned to the myth of Atlas in order to depict an earth that is growing ever more weary, ever more onerous to bear. 10 Ziolkowski (1993: 150): ‘The single novel by Cather in which Virgil clearly informs the whole, providing a pattern rather than random associations, is the one

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great-aunt, whose love of Latin steered her great-niece’s enterprise over a hundred years later: Last but not least, a ghost is to be credited. S. Bess Summerson, my maternal grandmother’s sister, died before I was born. But on the flyleaf of a book that I treasure she signed her name and wrote the date, October 19th 1894 [ . . . ] I felt my great-aunt’s guiding presence as I journeyed between Latin and English. (2005: p. xi)

The Georgics that emerges from this journey between Virgil’s classical past, the piety paid to a nineteenth-century female ancestor and contemporary America depicts a landscape that is indelibly imprinted with Virgilian imagery, thereby reminding us once again how fundamental Virgil has been to the construction of the American national identity. usually regarded as her masterpiece, My Antonia (1918). Alerted by the epigraph, Optima dies . . . prima fugit (whose source at Georgics 3. 66–7 is not identified at this point), the attentive reader gradually comes to realize that Cather’s novel constitutes her own elegiac laudes Americae and a Virgilian appeal for the preservation of agrarian values in the face of the encroaching industrialization that was everywhere evident in the United States.’

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12 Ursula Le Guin At first sight Le Guin’s 2008 novel Lavinia may appear to be a natural extension of the fantasy fiction for which she is most renowned,1 with its depictions of a far-distant land, conflicts between kings, queens, and princes, and conversations with spirits. The book tells the story of Lavinia, the Italian princess who had been promised to Turnus, but who becomes Aeneas’ prize as he defeats Turnus and takes over Latinum. Lavinia, who is one of the slightest and most overlooked characters from the Aeneid, tells the story of her girlhood, of the events surrounding her marriage with Aeneas, and of Aeneas’ death and her widowhood. She finds a voice, not only with which to address readers of the twenty-first century, but also with which she can converse with the spirit of Virgil and challenge him over his presentation of the Aeneid from so imperial and male a point of view. Le Guin situates these conversations between Lavinia and Virgil in a ‘nowhen’ space, a place out of time, so that on occasion Lavinia, whose fictional existence preceded Virgil’s, looks ahead to the birth of her creator. At other times she looks back to the time when she was brought into being at the hands of Virgil, as her creator. This extra-temporal dimension underlines the endless capacity of the Aeneid to create its own futures, to be made new and find a fresh voice asserting its relevance over two millennia later and in a new world on a different continent. In part Le Guin achieves this through her awareness, shared with Lembke and Oates, of how deeply

1 She is, perhaps, best known for The Earthsea Quartet, comprising The Wizard of Earthsea (1971), The Tombs of Atvan (1972), The Farthest Shore (1973), and Tehanu (1990).

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America is indebted to ancient Rome. She observes: ‘They were coarse, they were brutal [. . .] Vergil’s idea of a hero’ (p. 279).2 As I indicated in Chapter 1, Le Guin has become anxious that the learning of Latin is now so rare that Americans are at risk of becoming disconnected from an enormous and vital part of their heritage. Through giving a voice and substance to one of the slightest female characters of the Aeneid, she animates not only Virgil’s epic world, but the ethos and landscape of the Georgics and of the Eclogues also; it is in this blend of all three works that she perceives the parallels between far-off Italy and contemporary America. Ever since I first read about it I’ve been drawn to Rome, not the sick, luxurious Empire of the TV sagas, but early Rome: the dark, plain Republic, a forum not of marble but of wood and brick, an austere people with a strong sense of duty, order and justice: farmers who spent half the year in the army, women who ran the farm meanwhile, extended families whose worship was of the fire in their hearth, the food in their granary, the local spring, the spirits of place and earth. (pp. 278–9)

Moreover, by selecting Lavinia as the protagonist of the book, she not only redresses the injustice of Lavinia’s slight appearance within the Aeneid, but also focuses upon a character who has been forced to witness the outrage of finding her homeland of Latinum colonized by the invading Trojan army, so that the aching loss behind the Eclogues and the Georgics finds a resonance here also. Through Lavinia, Le Guin reminds us of the suspicious hostility felt towards immigrants who threaten jobs, who change the landscape and alter the way things have always been done: ‘Every farmer hates a foreigner, and here was a troop of fancy fellows from somewhere who thought they could walk in and take over Latium, shoot the deer, marry the princess, push honest men around’ (p. 126). As Lavinia remembers her childhood spent on the farm, she evokes the world of Virgil’s Eclogues: The farm was a place of endless industry, people working everywhere all day; but unless the forge was lit and the anvil clanging, or a drove of cattle was penned in close by for castration or for market, it was deeply quiet. Distant mooing from the valleys and the murmur of mourning doves and wood 2 Le Guin (2008). References are to this edition and appear within parentheses in the text.

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doves in the oak groves near the house made a continuous softness of sound into which other noises sank away and were lost. I loved that farm. (p. 14)

The peacefulness and security in which the farm was held belonged to a time before Aeneas arrived with his colonizing army. Lavinia alludes heavily to Eclogue 4 to evoke the serenity and safety of her father’s reign: We could do this because the peace my father had brought to Latium was real and durable. In that peace, little children could watch the cattle, shepherds could let their flocks wander in the summer pastures with no risk of theft, women and girls need not go guarded or in bands but could walk without fear or any path in Latium. (p. 30)

But the setting of the farm also entails recognition of the harsh labours demanded by rural life, so that Lavinia’s memories of watching the countrymen toil in order to eke a living from the land look back to the Georgics also: I’ve never plowed, but I’ve watched our farmers at it all my life: the white ox trudging forward in the yoke, the man gripping the long wood handles that buck and rear as he tries to force the plowshare through the soil that looks so meek and ready and is so tough, so shut. He strains with all his weight and muscle to make a scratch deep enough to hold the barley seed. He labors till he’s gasping and shaking with exhaustion and wants only to lie down in the furrow and sleep on his hard mother’s breast among the stones. (p. 5)

The inclusion of these echoes to the Eclogues and the Georgics in a work based upon the Aeneid offers a reminder of how closely linked all of Virgil’s books are. Through such pastoral allusions Le Guin travels back to an idealized past, even as she is including a recognition of the troubled futures of the Aeneid, by means of a strategy that extends the quality of timelessness within the Aeneid that stems from Virgil’s ability to bind past, present, and future into moments that stand outside time. The most famous of these occurs in Aeneid 8, where Evander shows Aeneas around the site of future Rome, the Capitoline hill, allowing Aeneas to imagine the Roman landscapes of the future, while at the same time bringing to life for his readers the buildings of contemporary Rome or buildings that have already ceased to be. Pilgrims of both Rome and the Aeneid have returned to this moment again and again, expanding its capacity to accommodate different

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moments from history simultaneously. Le Guin steps in the footsteps of Gibbon, Goethe, Chateaubriand., et al. by creating a scene between Lavinia and Virgil that echoes this moment and, by doing so, endorses its iconic status: My poet tried to describe for me that place as he knew it when he was alive, or will know it when he lives, I should say, for although he was dying when he came to me, and has been dead a long time now, he hasn’t yet been born. He is among those who wait on the far side of the forgetful river. [. . .] There will be temples of marble splendid with gold on the hilltops, wide arched gates, innumerable figures carved of marble and bronze; more people will pass through the Forum of that city in a single day, he said, than I will see in all the towns and farmsteads, on all the roads, in all my life. (pp. 9–10)3

Not only does she emulate Virgil’s introduction of pastoral into the world of the Aeneid, but, by alluding to the Fourth Eclogue, the Messianic Eclogue, she brings to mind the medieval belief in a Virgil who is unknowingly foretelling the birth of Christ, even though he thinks he is simply looking back to the golden ages of the past: ‘That is what it was like in the age of Saturn, my poet said, the golden time of the first days when there was no fear in the world’ (p. 16). Moreover, her choice of a setting that is half-dream half-reality not only endorses Bruno Snell’s famous assertion that the Eclogues are set in ‘a far-away land overlaid with the golden haze of unreality’,4 but also reminds us of her own pedigree as an acclaimed writer of fantasy. Le Guin emphasizes the importance to her of setting her story in a world that straddles the boundaries of reality and the imagination: ‘More knowledge than we used to have about them [the Latins] is coming to light, but still, I’m glad that my story is set in Vergil’s semimythological, non-historical landscape, defined by a poet, not by the patient uncertainties of archaeologists’ (p. 276). This shift into a dreamworld is made apparent at the very beginning of the book,

3

Charles Martindale (1997a: 5) analyses the effect of reading synchronically the Virgilian episode: ‘Rome, the eternal city is always both the world capital, caput rerum, the metropolis which Augustus found brick and left marble, and sweet especial rural scene, both the res publica restored by political and military might and the locus of a renewed Age of Gold. Such a Rome, itself a new Troy, could be simultaneously always both standing proud and yet in embryo or in ruins.’ 4 Snell (1953: 282).

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where Lavinia sets out the agenda of a modern woman, to find a voice and to assert an identity, while at the same time employing language that is haunted by Virgilian echoes. From the beginning of the book the imagery that Lavinia deploys carries an echo from Virgil’s lines. When she evokes the sound of the oars striking the water on page 1, she alludes to the quintessentially Virgilian ‘umbra’ while deploying an image borrowed from Aeneid 5 of oars mimicking the sound of birds’ wings (Aen. 5. 213–16). And right from the start of the book Lavinia is conversing with a phantom: ‘His face is stern yet unguarded; he is looking ahead into the darkness, praying. I know who he is’ (p. 2). The shade is, of course, Virgil, staring ahead into the unknown of his future, his Christian future. The image carries echoes of Virgil’s appearance as a ghost in Dante5 and, later, in the closing pages of Thornton Wilder’s The Cabala (1926), where he speaks eloquently of the fall of Rome and its resurgence in the new world.6 But it is through the sense of failure and guilt that Lavinia attributes to Virgil that he resembles most strongly Hermann Broch’s Virgil, chilled with horror on his deathbed at the realization of the inadequacy of his work to withstand the abuses of civilization that will become part of its history and afterlife. His reappearance within Le Guin’s work serves as a reminder that the silencing of women’s voices, their exclusion from history, is also a part of the oppression and tyranny from which the dying Virgil attempted to wrest the Aeneid and its receptions. Lavinia’s Virgil, ‘my poet’ as she calls him, also becomes aware of the injustices that he has dealt her within the poem only as he lay dying: He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He’s not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half-lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect. He grieved for that, I know; he grieved for me. Perhaps

5

Le Guin later alludes explicitly to Dante’s Virgil, as she makes Virgil remember the day when he met a man in the middle of the road in a dark wood, for whom he acted as guide (p. 61). 6 Wilder (1969: 138): ‘ “Farewell Virgil!” The shimmering ghost faded before the stars, and the engines beneath me pounded eagerly towards the new world and the last and greatest of cities.’ I am grateful to one of OUP’s anonymous readers for directing me towards this allusion.

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where he is now, down there across the dark rivers, somebody will tell him that Lavinia grieves for him. (p. 3)

Lavinia’s gesture of forgiveness soothes the raw edges of Aeneid 6, where Dido, grieving for her past across the dark rivers, coldly nurses her resentments against Aeneas. But Lavinia’s readiness to forgive testifies precisely to those qualities given to her by Virgil within the poem that made it so easy for her to be overlooked in the first place: ‘chaste, silent, obedient, ready to a man’s will as a field in spring is ready for the plow’ (p. 5). And yet Lavinia longs to emerge from this silence, to find her voice. Like Boland, like Cixous, she longs for her line of writing to extend back into the past and to connect with an identity that belongs to her: ‘I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I’m not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing. I speak Latin, of course, but did I ever learn to write it?’ (p. 3). It is because she never learnt to write that she was dependent upon Virgil to recognize her identity, and to bring it to life, but the tragedy is that he barely manages to do so. Lavinia depicts her identity outside Virgil’s lines as hazy and barely discernible, but she is scarcely more recognizable from the slight picture that he built up of her: ‘As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all. Before he wrote, I was the mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy’ (p. 3). By resurrecting her in this way, Virgil has condemned her to immortality through his verse as someone who barely existed, has entrapped her within an endless present that is as constrained and as wearisome as the lifespan of the Sibyl. As Lavinia reflects upon the life that she has scarcely managed to live, her plangent tones echo the plight of Drabble’s ‘seven sisters’, who complain in late middle age that they have been made redundant by life. Indeed Lavinia’s claim on life is so slight that she fears becoming no more than one of Virgil’s ‘false dreams’ depicted in Aeneid 6: My life is too contingent to lead to anything as absolute as death. I have not enough real mortality. No doubt I will eventually fade away and be lost in oblivion, as I would have done long ago if the poet hadn’t summoned me into existence. Perhaps I will become a false dream clinging like a bat to the

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underside of the leaves of the tree at the gate of the underworld, or an owl flitting in the dark oaks of Albunea. (p. 4)

Lavinia’s sense of herself as half-living half-dead enables Le Guin to develop further the sibylline imagery that defines the narrow constraints of Lavinia’s life: ‘If I must go on living century after century, then once at least I must break out and speak. He didn’t let me say a word. I have to take the word from him. He gave me a long life, but a small one. I need room. I need air’ (p. 4). Lavinia’s sense of claustrophobia evokes the cramped basket in which the Sibyl was forced to eke out her existence. At the beginning of the third millennium Le Guin’s sibylline imagery directs the readers’ thoughts back to Eliot’s vision of a dying and decayed world through the epigram to The Waste Land. Here, Lavinia’s Virgil bestows upon her all the qualities of the Sibyl, except for the faculty of expression. And, even as she wrests the right to expression from him, her sense of her own identity is so fragile that she is never quite certain whether she is alive or dead: All the same, sometimes I believe I must be long dead, and am telling this story in some part of the underworld that we didn’t know about—a deceiving place where we think we’re alive, where we think we’re growing old and remembering what happened when we were young, when the bees swarmed and my air caught fire, when the Trojans came. (pp. 4–5)

Yet the abiding sense of failure gnawing at Lavinia’s Virgil erodes his own sense of identity also, so that he too expresses the sense of unreality, of needing to be dreamed into being in language that is resonant with Shakespearian echoes.7 ‘I am a wraith,’ he said. ‘I am not here in my body. My body is lying on the deck of a ship sailing from Greece to Italy, but I don’t think I’ll get to Brundisium even if the ship does. I am sick, I am dying, I am on my way to . . . to Acheron . . . Or else I am a false dream. But they come from under there, don’t they, the false dreams? They nest like bats in the great tree at the gates of the kingdoms of the 7

e.g. Prospero in The Tempest, IV. i. 156–8: We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

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shadows . . . So maybe I am a bat that has flown here from Hades. A dream that has flown into a dream. Into my poem. [. . .] A dream within a dream . . . within the dream that has been my life.’ (pp. 38–9)

By referring explicitly to Virgil’s dying journey, Le Guin again evokes Virgil’s laments in Broch not only at his shame but also at his abiding sense of having always skirted around the edges of existence.8 Le Guin’s decision to resurrect Lavinia both deepens and redeems his guilt, since she shines a light on the many instances throughout the Aeneid where a woman’s history has passed unnoticed, has been untold, but Lavinia’s awareness and articulation of these moments at least offer her the opportunity to revisit them and voice the female experience. One of the most moving examples of this is Lavinia’s recognition that grief at the loss of her infant sons had driven her mother, Amata, into madness, and that her plight was never dignified by any recognition on the part of her father, the king: ‘It was the game they played, that she could be mad yet not mad because he would not know she was mad’ (p. 33). Since Amata’s madness was suppressed, unnamed, she was given no help, and her sorrow was left to fester, poisoning her relationship with her daughter, until she almost becomes a human version of the vengeful Juno, all the more so as she becomes a champion of Juno’s favourite, Turnus. Within the Aeneid Virgil refers fleetingly to Amata’s condition, but in Lavinia it shadows the background to all the experiences of Lavinia’s girlhood and youth. When she converses with Virgil and he depicts to her the anguish and loneliness of the Underworld, it is a place she recognizes for having lived alongside it all her life. After she is widowed, she becomes afraid that she has internalized this landscape of despair, that the paths leading into it followed her maternal bloodline: ‘I feared for the first time that I had my mother’s weakness, her madness. At night I went

8 See Broch (1983): ‘Only at the edge of his fields had he walked, only at the edge of his life had he lived. He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work [. . .] a lodger in his own life’ (p. 5); ‘the translucent and glittering pictures of his life’s landscape, once so dazzling had grown dim, had withered and dried away, his verses which he had twined about them had dried up and fallen away, all this had blown away like faded leaves’ (p. 75).

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into dark places in my mind. I went down underground among shadows and could not find the way up and out’ (pp. 228–9). Lavinia herself points out her own personal foibles, especially those that are mentioned within the Aeneid. Right at the beginning of her narrative she clarifies for us exactly how limited Virgil’s portrayal of her was: ‘And yet [. . .] the life he gave me in his poem, is so dull, except for the one moment when my hair catches fire—so colorless, except when my maiden cheeks blush like ivory stained with crimson dye’ (p. 4). Almost the only personal characteristic that Virgil gives to her is this propensity for blushing (Aen. 12. 64–9). It is poignant to see how Lavinia herself emphasizes this tendency, as if she is making as much as she possibly can out of the few lines that Virgil spared for her: ‘My voice shook, and the fierce red blush of shame and anger ran over my face and body as I spoke’ (p. 137); ‘Hearing her begging, I blushed with shame till tears filled my own eyes. I felt the red blood color my face, my neck and breast and body. I could not move or speak’ (p. 159); and again, later, ‘I could not speak, but blushed the way I do, turning red all over’ (p. 211). Even as she adds flesh to the very bare bones of Virgil’s description of her, Lavinia is also pressing the shade of Virgil for stories about other women mentioned in the Aeneid. As she gazes upon Aeneas’ magical shield, with the various pasts and futures of Rome chased upon it, she is struck by how little space is occupied by women: ‘There are a few women here and there in the picture, but mostly it is men, men fighting, endless battle scenes, men torn apart, men disemboweled, bridges torn down, walls torn down, slaughter’ (p. 24). And even those women who do appear become lost again all too quickly, forgotten even, it would seem, by those who loved them the most. Lavinia is naturally eager to find out about Aeneas’ former loves, and longs to hear that he and his first wife, Creusa, achieved some kind of reunion. Virgil, however, is forced to admit how Creusa became overlooked against the backdrop of imperial imperatives: ‘But later on—you said he went down to the underworld, and talked to the shadows of the dead there later on. Did he meet his wife again there?’ The poet was silent and then said, ‘No.’ ‘He couldn’t find her among so many,’ I said, trying to imagine the dead. ‘He didn’t look for her.’

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‘I don’t understand.’ ‘Neither do I. And I doubt that I’ll know any more when I get there. We each have to endure our own afterlife . . . He had lost her. In the fire, in the slaughter, in the streets. Lost her forever. He couldn’t look back. He had his people to look after. (pp. 52–3)

Even as Aeneas was confronting the ghosts from his past in the Underworld, it never occurred to him to look for the shade of Creusa, and, until Lavinia confronts him, the shabby treatment of Creusa does not appear to have crossed Virgil’s mind either. Virgil appears to be more taken with Camilla, perhaps because she displays more of the manly qualities that grant her acceptance within the heroic world of the Aeneid: After a while I said, ‘Perhaps it’s just as well that women don’t learn to shoot arrows.’ ‘Camilla did. You know of her?’ ‘A woman archer.’ ‘A woman warrior, beautiful, invincible. From Volscia.’ I shook my head. All I knew of the Volscians was what my father had said: savage fighters, faithless allies. ‘Well,’ the wraith said, ‘I suppose I did invent her. But I liked her.’ ‘Invent her?’ ‘I am a poet, Lavinia.’ (p. 43)

By choosing to create Camilla, and by betraying a secret preference for her, Virgil reveals his attraction to the blood-stained world of war that represents the ‘imperial’ voice of glory in the Aeneid.9 To some extent Dido, too, shared in this world through the status she enjoyed prior to meeting Aeneas as leader of her country. Lavinia, on the other hand, adopts the ‘other’ voice, the melancholy voice filled with pain at the cost of war. When she asks Virgil: ‘Why must there be war?’ (p. 87), she is expressing the viewpoint of other women within the text, who experience the horror of loss, but whose voices are barely heard, such as Euryalus’ mother grieving for the loss of her son in the war in Aeneid 9, or the Trojan women in Aeneid 5. With an

9 In a seminal essay, Adam Parry (1963) explores the competing claims of the Aeneid to be read as a triumphant poem glorifying Augustus’ regime, or alternatively as a poem of loss, haunted by the terrible costs entailed by the founding of empire.

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edge of exasperation Virgil replies: ‘Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is! Because men are men’ (p. 87).10 But the sense of shame evident at his treatment of Lavinia within the Aeneid indicates an afterlife spent listening to the voice of sorrow: ‘“O Lavinia,” he said, “you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it”’ (p. 44). When Lavinia conjures Aeneas’ image to her mind’s eye, she sees him shining and shimmering, as the light darts and reflects off his armour in a manner that allows Le Guin to revive the ancient epic trope of armies streaming over the battlefields like the waves of the ocean: ‘I have seen Aeneas wear the armor several times, the helmet, cuirass, greaves, with the long sword and the round shield, all of bronze: he shines as the sea glances and dazzles under the sun’ (p. 23). Aeneas’ shield contains the history of his past, which is why it is covered with the endless battlefields where women occupy so small a space. But, of course, it is a magical shield chased with the histories of his future, and of the future of his race also, so that Virgil offers an infinity of potential stories yet to be unfolded. Tilt the shield a little in a different direction, look at it through a different prism, and a whole new vista and future for the poem will be opened up. This endless capacity for reinvention adds a literary dimension to Jupiter’s assertion in the Aeneid that ‘imperium sine fine dedi’ (I have given an empire without end) (Aen. 1. 279) and redeems Virgil’s anxieties about the fact that his poem is unfinished. Again and again Lavinia returns to the question of where the end is, not just because of a natural impulse to hear the end of the story, but because her own future is bound up with Aeneas’ future and the future of Rome. As a young woman Lavinia thought she had witnessed the end of the story when she saw Aeneas slay Turnus: But it was the sound of the end. The war was over. Turnus was dead. The poem was finished. No, But it was left unfinished. Didn’t you tell me that, my poet? here in the sacred place, where the stinking sulfur water comes up from the earth to make pools on the earth, and the stars shine between the leaves? Once you said it was not complete and should be burned. 10 The moment is echoed a little later in the book: ‘Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a women’s question that is’ (p. 132).

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But then again, at the end, you said it was finished. And I know they did not burn it. I would have burned with it. (p. 173)11

Having married Aeneas, however, she herself has had plenty of time to meditate upon the stories chased upon the shield and hidden within the shifting shadows of its vast expanse. Early in the book she tells us: ‘I stand and study that shield often’ (p. 24). The more she studies it, the clearer her understanding is that its representation is false because it excludes so much, that there can be a hope of a fuller understanding of the story only if she pulls together its threads and tells it once again, this time including the voices of those who had been silenced: ‘Though all my poet sang was true and is true, yet there are small mistakes in the truth of it, and I have tried to mend those tiny rents in the great fabric as I tell my part in it’ (p. 144). Lavinia becomes a descendant of Penelope, as her identity becomes inextricably bound to the stories that are woven about her, stories that she must unpick and recreate: ‘I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner not a weaver, but I have learned to weave. (pp. 140–1)

Her growing confidence in her capacity to weave the story of her life for herself is born in part from the many hours spent contemplating the shield, the story of Rome, and her place within it. She recognizes that her clear-sightedness stems in part from being relegated to an outsider’s position. Viewing the story from the margins affords her a greater perspective than that of Aeneas, who looks at his story from the centre: It has not been difficult for me to believe in my fictionality, because it is, after all, so slight. But for him it would be very difficult. Even if he is at the moment inactive, domesticated, a contented man sitting in the sunlight talking with his wife, the poet’s passionate, commanding, anxious, danger11 Lavinia’s observation recalls Lawrence Lipking’s argument (1981: 135): ‘To burn the Aeneid would be to destroy the thousands of poems, the millions of lives, that have been built upon it—a holocaust devouring the very basis of civilization.’

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ous hero would find it hard to accept contingence, the nullity of his will and conscience might be anguish to him. (p. 119)12

Lavinia’s interest in understanding as much of the story as she can by seeing it through as many different viewpoints as she can manage ensures that her motives in shaping part of the poem’s future are not governed by a spiteful vengeance. The absence of this bitterness distinguishes her from most of the other female figures within the poem, such as her own mother, Amata, Juno,13 and, of course, Dido. As Lavinia ponders this absence of gratuitous revenge in her, she paradoxically gives herself greater agency by reflecting upon the role that she would like ultimately to play, rather than passively accepting the roles assigned to her by others: ‘I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story. Anger, in part, perhaps. But not an easy anger. I long for justice, but I do not know what justice is. It is hard to be betrayed. It is harder to know you make betrayal inevitable’ (p. 68). Lavinia’s hours of reflective contemplation and her self-awareness ultimately transform her into a sibylline character, able to perceive dimly future apocalyptic events, to see much further and much more clearly than her husband, who cannot see the horrors even when they are pointed out to him. It was, of course, this very short-sightedness that enabled him to rejoice at the end of Aeneid 8, when he raised the shield upon his shoulders, knowing that he was thereby raising aloft the future histories of his descendants. Lavinia, on the other hand, shares

12

By making Lavinia compare her plight with the story of Cassandra, Le Guin reinforces the message that Lavinia’s marginality is linked to gender, and reminds us powerfully of the politics of gender that led Christa Wolf to select Cassandra as the spokeswoman of the disenfranchised: ‘When the poet sang me the fall of Troy, his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property’ (pp. 115–16). 13 Lavinia displays a modern understanding of the function of the gods and goddesses within the Aeneid when she suggests that Juno represents an essentially female quality: ‘I pondered this. A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius: they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can’t “get into” me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman with likes and dislikes; a jealous woman’ (p. 65).

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the dread and chill of Broch’s Virgil, as she gazes into the shield and sees the future wars that her husband will not live to witness: Now an immense round cloud of destruction rises up over the sea at the end of the world. I say to Aeneas in horror, ‘Look! look!’ But he cannot see what I see in the shield. He will not live to see it. He must die after only three years and widow me. Only I, who met the poet in the woods of Albunea, can keep looking through the bronze of my husband’s shield to see all the wars he will not fight. (p. 25)

She is not only able to intimate future events, but can also perceive the weight of the past as he hangs on Aeneas’ memory and conscience. He carries with him the ghosts of Troy, and the visions of the horrors he witnessed, depicted in Aeneid 2, are imprinted upon his eyes: ‘He looked at me with eyes that had seen his city burn, that had seen the world of the dead’ (p. 198).14 But Aeneas also looks at Lavinia with eyes that carry a terrible guilt, heavy with the impossibility of forgetting his behaviour in the closing lines of the Aeneid: ille, oculis postquam saevi monimenta doloris exuviasque hausit, furiis accensus et ira terribilis: ‘tune hinc spoliis indute meorum eripiare mihi? Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit.’ hoc dicens ferrum adverso sub pectore condit fervidus; ast illi solvuntur frigore membra vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. (Aen. 12. 945–52) As his eyes drink in these mementoes of savage Pain, these so bitter spoils, Aeneas grows fearsome in anger, Burning with the fire of the Furies. ‘You, dressed in the spoils of my dearest, Think that you could escape me? Pallas gives you this death-stroke, yes Pallas Makes you the sacrifice, spills your criminal blood in atonement!’ And, as he speaks, he buries the steel in the heart that confronts him, Boiling with rage. Cold shivers send Turnus’ limbs into spasm. Life flutters off on a groan, under protest, down among shadows.

By highlighting the problematic end of the Aeneid, the fact that the epic ends before the founding of Rome and the fact that it closes 14

See also: ‘His eyes are full of fire, smoke and fire, because he saw his city burn’ (p. 146).

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abruptly on a moment of personal and bitter vengeance, Le Guin both opens up the story to allow Lavinia a future within it and also emphasizes the fact that, of all the characters from the epic, it is Lavinia who has the greatest perspective and who can offer the clearest understanding. As Aeneas’ wife, she observed: ‘Only I could know how the death of Turnus weighed on his soul’ (p. 217), having already explained: ‘He saw it as murder. He saw himself as a murderer. He had withheld his sword, giving Turnus time to surrender himself fully and courageously, and yet after that dismissing the obligation to spare the helpless and pardon the conquered, in a fury of vengeance he had killed him. He had done nefas, unspeakable wrong’ (p. 187). On this reading, the Aeneid is the story of catastrophic failure—the story of defeat told by Parry’s second voice, trailing a catalogue of personal devastations in its wake, from Dido to Pallas to Turnus. Even long after the event Aeneas professes himself to be confused and damaged by what happened: ‘I cannot make it out,’ Aeneas said in his quiet voice. ‘I thought what a man knew he ought to do was what he must do. But what if they’re not the same? Then, to win a victory is to be defeated. To uphold order is to cause disorder, ruin, death. Virtue and piety destroy each other. I cannot make it out.’ (p. 217)

It becomes clear that Virgil can offer no clear understanding to his hero. He, too, feels himself to be as insubstantial as a fluttering dream, and recognizes that, in an extraordinary twist of afterlife he is now dependent upon Lavinia, whose embryonic promise and potential have flowered so that she is in a position to change the end of the Aeneid, offering hope to its creator that his version has not stagnated into an immutable and destructive force: ‘Because I did see him [Aeneas]. And not you. You’re almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido’s. But it’s there, that life ungiven, there, in you. So now, at the end, when it’s too late, you have to give it to me. My life. My earth of Italy, my hope of Rome, my hope.’ (p. 63)

Paradoxically, it is through Virgil’s very uncertainty, his ambivalence and insistence on allowing the two opposing voices to counterpoint each other, that he is able to rise out of the pages of the Aeneid to become a fictional character in later works. His melancholy appears

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to diminish his control within the Aeneid; instead of closing with a rousing scene of glory and triumph, it ends with a savage killing that haunts Aeneas ever after and ensures that terrible and unending grief will visit Turnus’ mother. Virgil’s inability to offer meaning or comfort to such a scene appears to diminish his authority within Lavinia. His life and voice become as shrunken as all the other shades that he himself has depicted, until Lavinia re-enacts Aeneas’ desperation to clasp hold of the ghosts of his loved ones who slip from between his arms like a breeze: He seemed to nod, but I could hardly see him, a tall shadow in shadows. ‘Don’t go yet.’ ‘I must go, my glory. I am gone. I join the crowd, return to darkness.’ I cried out his name, went forward, reaching out my arms to hold him, to keep him from death, but it was like holding a breath of the night wind. Nothing was there. (p. 90)

But it is Virgil’s very adoption of the melancholy figure, who is unable to redeem the poem’s many losses with a final and immutable vision of glory, that ensures his afterlife in the works of Dante, Wilder, Broch, and Le Guin. The text’s lack of closure enables both its author and its characters to grow out from it, to achieve an afterlife beyond and outside of it. At the end of the book Lavinia suggests that her own afterlife has, if anything, been facilitated by Virgil’s lack of finality. Had she been depicted as a more rounded, coherent figure, it would have been far more difficult for her to have grown into her modern, female voice: But I will not die. I cannot. I will never go down among the shadows under Albunea to see Aeneas tall among the warriors, gleaming in bronze. I will not speak to Creusa of Troy, as I once thought I might, or Dido of Carthage, proud and silent, still bearing the great sword wound in her breast. They lived and died as women do and as the poet sang them. But he did not sing me enough life to die. He only gave me immortality. (p. 271)

At the very beginning of her story, Lavinia meditates upon the miracle of reception and marvels that she can have her own story, which transcends nationality, time, and the cultural barriers established by languages:

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Do we know all the languages? That can be true only of the dead, whose land lies under all the other lands. How is it that you understand me, who lived twenty five or thirty centuries ago? Do you know Latin? But then I think no, it has nothing to do with being dead, it’s not death that allows us to understand one another, but poetry. (p. 5)

Once more Le Guin confounds our sense of time, as Lavinia expresses surprise that a figure from the far distant past should be able to understand her native Latin. However, in the hands of an author who is so anxious about the loss of Latin from the schools and the consequent weakening of the links between the twenty-first century and the ancient world, it is clear that the question is also addressed to today’s reader. How is it that we understand Lavinia, that we recognize her? The answer lies in part in Le Guin’s replication of Virgil’s ‘timeless’ moments, those episodes where intimations of the future give a fuller meaning to the experiences of the present. The Lavinia of the twenty-first century shares the sense of exclusion and of marginality voiced by the other writers studied in this volume. Like them, she experiences the need to ‘unpick’ the Aeneid, to gather up the loose threads so that it can be woven (‘textum’) into a new shape that has far more room for its female characters. Contemporary Lavinia travels back through the Virgilian receptions of Dante, Wilder, and Broch to find her shadowy forebear hidden in the lines of the Aeneid and to escort her into a new story. And, of course, the female receptions encourage us to read the Aeneid through a different prism, to turn it into a different light, which falls upon the figures of the female characters and highlights their presence. Viewed in this new light, they appear as sibylline figures, gazing towards a future that will help them make sense of the slights and exclusions of the past, looking to the words of contemporary women writers to extend and give new meaning to their imperfect appearances and truncated utterances.

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13 Conclusion The figure of a Lavinia who has managed to survive outside of the pages of the Aeneid, whose voice is that of a contemporary woman gazing back through the vistas of history to the child-wife Lavinia silenced within Virgil’s lines, offers a potent reflection of the central concerns pervading this study. Virgil leads us into personal underworlds, offers us an access to our former selves. I began this volume by arguing that the act of reading Virgil was so formative to the imaginations of these women writers that again and again we see them return in their writing to their schoolgirl selves, poring over his lines in order to translate them, feeling his words singing in their blood, before realizing that there appeared to be no space in the Virgilian narrative for their own stories. The very tradition shaping their imaginations was the same one that largely excluded their voices, and the voices of their mothers and grandmothers also. The act of extending the Virgilian narrative, of reshaping his words to make them speak of female anxieties, of exclusion and of being silenced, becomes an act of daughterly pietas. At the turning point of the third millennium, women writers pay homage not only to their ‘literary mothers’—the Sibyl, Cassandra, Eurydice, and, on occasion, Dido—but through them to their own direct female ancestors, both known and unknown. While Wolf and Wittig both call explicitly for a history of Western literature that is retold through dominant female literary voices and figures, Boland movingly re-members, pieces together the history of a grandmother she never knew, while struggling with the fact that there appeared to be no room within the Irish male poetic tradition for her name and her story. Roberts superimposes the characteristics of the Sibyl onto the features of her

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grandmothers and her mother, at times acerbic and fierce, at times gentled by concern and wisdom; Drabble writes of entering a version of the Underworld in order to explore the complexity of her emotions at her mother’s death, while Fainlight vividly depicts her own sense of the ageing process, a personal metamorphosis into the Sibyl, even as she invokes Virgil to articulate her grief at her parents’ deaths. It is, perhaps, Fainlight who most explicitly invokes Virgil in order to analyse her astonishment at the growing distance between her self and the youthful woman whom she still feels herself to be at heart. Virgil voices the grief of an older woman looking for the evidence of her former loveliness, adding a new dimension to Virgil’s afterlife and reminding us that even the Sibyl, one of the most powerful female figures within the Aeneid, has a personal past, a grief, that is unacknowledged within Virgil’s lines. It is a grief that forms part of the female condition. Drabble’s ‘sisters’, Candida and Julia, look back to their hopeful schoolgirl selves before comparing their present condition to that of the husks of sea urchins scuttling about after death; Byatt’s demented Mado projects her wish to die into a reincarnation of herself as a striking, vibrant young woman; Le Guin’s Lavinia voices the terror of an endlessly bleak and thin existence separating her from the young girl and wife whom she had once been. The grief is coupled with a fear of being tiresomely useless, of becoming repellent, an anxiety voiced by Drabble’s Candida, Roberts’s Forsaken Sibyl, Fanthorpe in her poem ‘I Do Know How Awful I Am’, and Fainlight describing ‘Aeneas’ Meeting with the Sibyl’ as a meeting with a wheedling old woman whose neck is mole-strewn and stringy. Through the works of these women writers Virgil is drawn into the female psyche, beset with insecurities about appearances, and unable to shake off maternal anxieties. Wittig depicts the inability to detach oneself from one’s children as being in itself an infernal condition. The most explicitly sibylline figure, Drabble’s Mrs Jerrold, offers advice about parenting from her own mistakes and regrets, while Boland depicts a female hell as being one that is full of the cries of lost children, those whom their mothers failed to keep safe. Rowena Fowler argues that the most helpful model to use when examining the relationship of Virgil with later writers is that these

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writers are in conversation with him.1 It is striking how often in the works discussed in this volume it is through conversation with a figure hailing from the classical world that epiphanies and turning points come to the characters: Boland converses with Sappho in ‘The Journey’; Wolf ’s Cassandra converses with Aeneas; Byatt’s Mado metamorphoses into Dido in order to converse once more with her husband; ‘Wittig’ converses with Manastabal; Drabble’s Candida converses with the sibylline Mrs Jerrold, while Le Guin’s Lavinia has several conversations with Virgil himself. It is largely on account of this intimate mode of relationship that Virgil gains access to the domestic world of women, that the Father of the West learns to speak in female tones. But the importance of this phenomenon of women reworking the lines of Virgil, reshaping the Western tradition so that it can accommodate their experiences also, is not solely that Virgil should voice the experiences of the female excluded, but that a new set of dimensions is added to his afterlife. Through the voices of contemporary women writers Virgil’s presence continues to grow and to extend. It expands, however, from the places it had already established for itself within each national tradition. The Virgils inherited by these women are mediated through canonical writers who have shaped their own country’s literature while themselves conversing with the works of Virgil. We have seen how T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land haunts the literary landscapes of Fanthorpe, Roberts, Drabble, and Byatt, how Proust’s response both to loss and to homosexuality is expressed through Virgil and inherited by Roberts and Wittig, how Cather’s Virgilian vision of rural America shines through the lines of Lembke and Le Guin. And Virgil continues to speak of both individual and universal histories at one and the same time. The private stories of exclusion and loneliness, of social deprivation and silence, are embedded within the wider 1 Fowler (2009: 240): ‘Of the many ways in which one text may relate to another or a source may be understood to be at play within a text, I have worked here with the idea of various encounters between the Aeneid, the contemporary poet, and the reader, avoiding more explicitly ideological or agonistic models. The concept of “appropriation” is too peremptory, of “assimilation” too inert. Of the various metaphors—translation, migration, metamorphosis, necromancy—which have been applied to the reception of classical writers, the one most apt for Virgil is conversation.’

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historical catastrophes of the Second World War (Fanthorpe, Balmer, Boland, Drabble, Byatt) and the Holocaust (Wittig, Bachmann, Oates); the cold war (Wolf), and 9/11 (Oates). Perhaps the most silently threatening historical catastrophe of our time is the destruction of the earth through global warming, the effects of which we can still only begin to guess at. Here, too, Virgil is enabled to speak of this impending disaster through the work of Lembke, Oates, Drabble, and Le Guin. Even though the writers discussed belong to their own distinctive national traditions, they each contribute to the shaping of a twenty-first-century Virgil whose concerns are global, transcending nationhood. The very fact that the current aetas Virgiliana is dominated by women in itself represents a significant political shift. In Chapter 1 I outlined the confluence of specific cultural and historical factors that had enabled women to occupy a significant literary platform, allowing them not only to engage directly with Virgil but also to comment on the politics shaping their nations and their futures. In Object Lessons Boland argues that a history of a literary tradition could be established by examining the emergences and disappearances of writers from the ‘political poem’: I continued to believe that a reading of the energy and virtue of any tradition can be made by looking at the political poem in its time. At who writes it and why. At who can speak in the half-light between event and perception without their voices becoming shadows as Aeneas’ rivals did in the underworld of the Sixth Book. In that winter twilight, seeing the large, unruly horse scrape the crocus bulbs up in his hooves, making my own connections between power and order, I had ventured on my first political poem. I had seen my first political image. I had even understood the difficulties of writing it. What I had not realized was that I myself was a politic within the Irish poem: a young woman who had left the assured identity of a city and its poetic customs and who had started on a life which had no place in them.2

Once more, Boland turns to Virgil to evoke this feeling of helplessness at possessing no more than the ghost of a voice. But it is this very awareness of the centuries of silence that has prompted a 2

Boland (1995: 178–9).

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response. And the fact that the women writers studied in this volume, from Ireland, from Britain, from France, Germany, and the United States, independently turn to the same passages and figures from Virgil, is indicative of the construction of a ‘female’ Virgil. Images of the power of speech and the helplessness of silence dominate the Virgilian presences uncovered in this volume. The strangled, unspoken cry of the terrified Greeks from Aeneid 6 haunts the female imagination, as does the plight of Cassandra doomed never to be listened to, and the fate of Creusa left behind in the burning city of Troy, and left out of her husband’s future. And, even as contemporary women turn to the power of the Sibyl, guardian of millennia of wise words and prophecies, they are all too aware of her bleak and marginal existence, and her fear that her life too has missed its mark. It is no accident that the sibylline warning they most often heed is of the dangers of finding themselves in a hell from which there is no escape. And yet, what marks out these Virgilian women is their isolation, their separation, not just from male-dominated history, but from each other. The emergence from private hell is facilitated by recognition of these characters by later women calling to them, shining the light of day onto their stories. Cixous calls to her sisters-in-arms; Roberts sends her writing sibyls off on an ark of mutual discovery; on her own emergence from hell ‘Wittig’ discovers that paradise is to be found in a communion of voices. If we adopt Steiner’s view that the works of Homer and Virgil serve as a mirror in which each generation, each society, can find its preoccupations and anxieties reflected,3 then at the beginning of the twenty-first century these concerns are addressed in the works of the Father of the West by a chorus of female voices, calling out to each other across temporal and geographical boundaries in a refashioning and re-creation of the Western tradition. 3

Steiner (1990: 10).

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Index Adcock, Fleur 5, 6 Aeschylus 10, 153, 233 Alison Jane 11n Atwood Margaret 11, 22, 23, 50 Auden W. H. 9, 37, 70, 145 Bachmann Ingeborg 23–4 Balmer Josephine 22, 38–44, 103, 268 Barthes Roland 131 Baudelaire Charles 51, 63, 164, 165, 179 Beauvoir Simone de 182 Beckett Samuel 122, 140 Bellay Joachim du 166, 179 Berlioz Hector 134 Betjeman John 26 Boland Eavan 5, 7, 9, 10, 15n, 17, 22, 45, 66, 69–95, 103, 111, 155, 214, 252, 265–8 Bowra Maurice 143 Brent-Dyer Elinor M 4 Brittain Vera 13 Broch Hermann 134, 140n, 228, 251, 260, 262–3 Bronte¨ Charlotte 97, 111, 112 Bronte¨ Emily 138 Browne Sir Thomas 138 Browning Robert 135, 138 Burden Michael 15n Burrow Colin 16n, 87, 88n Butor Michel 118, 131n, 210 Byatt A. S. 2, 3, 7, 9, 15, 111, 135–51, 192n

Campbell Jane 151n Campbell Matthew 94 Carson Anne 11n Carter Angela 12 Cather Willa 2, 11, 244–5, 267 Catullus 40, 212 Cavafy Constantine 70 Celan Paul 24 Chateaubriand Franc¸ois Rene´ vicomte de 132, 134, 250 Chevalier Jean-Louis 135n, 138 Cle´ment Catherine 13,14 Cixous He´le`ne 13–18, 252, 269 Claudian 40 Cocteau Jean 10, 185–6, 193, 204 Coleridge Samuel Taylor 138 Connolly Cyril 143 Cooper-Clark Diana 126n Corbie`re Tristan 51 Cox Fiona 119n, 210n Cronan Rose Ellen 116, 133n Dante 9, 28, 30, 36, 60, 69, 70, 77, 80, 82, 83n, 84, 85n, 86, 140n, 141–4, 147, 155, 183–6, 190, 193–6, 200–2, 204, 233, 251, 262, 263 Day-Lewis Cecil 2, 9, 29, 127, 235–43 Delaney Tom 69 Delbo Charlotte 194–9 Dickinson Emily 138 Doherty Lilian 11n Donne John 138

282

Index

Drabble Margaret 1, 7, 9, 29, 63–4, 75, 107, 112, 115–54, 214, 221, 252, 265–8 Dryden John 9, 127, 240, 242 Duffy Carol Ann 12, 24–6, 98, 244n Duffy Jean 182n, 183n, 187, 190n, 203n Dunmore Helen 11n Eliot George 135, 138 Eliot T. S. 6, 9, 10, 28, 31, 32, 40, 41, 51, 61, 111, 119, 120, 122, 123–4, 125, 129, 143, 148, 166, 253, 267 Ellmann Richard 69 Euripides 40, 233 Fainlight Ruth 1, 7, 9, 17, 22, 34, 45, 47–67, 93, 127, 128, 266 Fallon Peter 10, 72 Fanthorpe U. A. 6, 15, 22, 26–38, 267–8 Farry Eithne 212, 213 Filkins Peter 24n Forbes Peter 36n Forest Antonia 4–5 Fowler Rowena 6, 32n, 95, 266–7 Friel Brian 10, 71, 72, 87 Gibbon Edward 250 Gide Andre´ 10, 106 Gilbert Sandra 12, 13, 172 Gillespie Carol 11n Gilpin Heidi 178 Goethe Johann Wolfgang von 10, 132, 134, 138n, 250 Graves Robert 51 Gubar Susan 13, 172 Haberstroh Patricia 80, 81n, 82n Haecker Theodore 2n

Hanson Claire 116, 117n, 136n Hardwick Lorna 11n, 71n Haussmann Georges Euge`ne 164 Heaney Seamus 10, 69, 70–2, 87 Herbert George 138 Hewitt Leah 69, 70, 181 Highet Gilbert 210 Homer 10, 16, 38, 40, 84, 98, 117, 147, 155, 163, 169, 212, 222n, 227, 233, 269 Hopkins Gerald Manley 9, 30, 147 Horace 116 Hugo Victor 164 Hurst Isobel 11–12, 144n Irvine Lorna 119n, 132n Jackson Knight W 9, 119, 127, 143 Josipovici Gabriel 119n, 132n Juvenal 40 Kampusch Natasha 19–21 Keats John 29, 116 Keith Alison 20n, 106n, 107 Klee Paul 134 Kleist Heinrich von 139n Kossman Nina 22n, 212 Kristeva Julia 11n Kuhn Anna 176–9 Lacan Jacques 99 Lambert Ellen 131n, 134n Larkin Philip 69, 70 Lembke Janet 111, 231–45, 247, 267–8 Le Guin Ursula 1, 8, 247–63, 266–8 Leonard Miriam 11n Lessing Gotthold Ephraim 10 Levi Primo 183n Lewis C.S. 143

Index Lipking Lawrence 258 Lowric Michele 11n Lucan 83 Mallarme´ Ste´phane 97 Mann Thomas 138 Mantel Hilary 19–21, 26, 44 McElduff Siobha´n 71n Martindale Charles 70, 71n, 123–4, 144n, 250 Matisse Henri 135 Michelangelo 50, 52 Milton John 30, 51, 84, 85n, 116, 136, 138, 147, 233 Mounic Anne 60n, 62n Murdoch Iris 138, 141n

283

Sage Lorna 211 Sappho 82–83 Sayers Dorothy L. 144n Seferis George 70 Sellers Susan 12 Shakespeare William 116, 128, 136, 236, 253 Showalter Elaine 13 Smith Ali 11n, 12 Snell Bruno 250 Sophocles 40 Stael Mme de 2 Statius 60 Steiner George 40, 144–5, 183n, 269 Stray Christopher 3 Sutherland Graham 40, 41

Noakes Jonathan 135n Oates Joyce Carol 1, 7, 8, 11, 22, 23, 111, 184, 207, 209–30, 231, 247, 268 Oliensis Ellen 14n O’Riada Sea´n 91 Ovid 21, 40, 83, 98, 108, 136, 139, 237 Parker Gillian 120 Parry Adam 256–61 Pascal Blaise 212 Piper John 40, 41 Plato 40 Porter James 178 Proust Marcel 10, 101–2, 106, 138, 149n, 155, 267 Racine Jean 138 Reagan Ronald 10, 161, 222n Rich Adrienne 12 Rilke Rainer Maria 70 Roberts Miche`le 1, 9, 12, 17, 22, 25, 45, 51, 97–112, 172, 201, 265–7

Tacitus 139n Taplin Oliver 71n Tennyson Alfred Lord 6, 9, 28, 33, 138 Terry Philip 98 Theodorakopoulos Elena 32, 55n, 79 Titian 40 Todd Janet 120 Todd Richard 135, 138 Turner J. M. W. 9, 126 Vance Norman 123 Van Gogh Vincent 135 Vianu Lidia 47n, 48, 49n, 50, 65 Virgil passim Vlastos Marion 116 Waddell Helen 144, 149 Wainwright Eddie 36n Warner Marina 12 Wilder Theodore 251, 262–3 Wilkinson L. P. 240 Winterson Jeanette 244n

284

Index

Wittig Monique 1, 8, 9, 10, 17, 22, 23, 106, 155, 181–207, 265, 266 Wolf Christa 7, 8, 10, 12, 16, 22–3, 67, 153–79, 193, 259, 265, 268 Woolf Virginia 3 Wordsworth William 70

Yeats William Butler 70 York Richard 77 Zajko Vanda 11n Ziolkowski Theodore 1, 9n, 10n, 20, 55, 71n, 119n, 134n, 138n, 143, 210, 244, 245n