David Malouf: An Imaginary Life

Publius Ovidius Naso born March 20th, 43 BC – died AD 17 or 18), known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrativeand for collections of love poetry Amores and Ars Amatoria. The Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology.

He enjoyed enormous popularity, but in one of the mysteries of literary history he was sent by Augustus into exile in a remote province on the Black Sea where he remained until his death. Ovid himself attributes his exile to carmen et error, "a poem and a mistake", but his discretion in discussing the causes has resulted in much speculation among scholars.

In David Maloufs An Imaginary Life, the Roman poet Ovid, exiled to the barren fringes of the Empire for a minor (probably political) crime, joins a family band of the “savage” Getae.

  Initially appalled by their barbarous ways, he gradually

comes to appreciate the benefits of their culture, which is much closer to nature than the one he left behind.

  While living with the Getae, Ovid encounters a wild 'wolf-

child', who is eerily reminiscent of an imaginary childhood playmate whom the poet had abandoned and forgotten in the process of becoming a man.

  He actively attempts to tame this wild boy and teach him the

ways of civilization, but in doing so awakens a long-dormant, child- or animal-like part of himself.

This rediscovery of his dormant nature enables him to achieve a kind of transcendent union with the universe as a whole at the end of the novel.

  This doubleness and reciprocity recall other of Maloufs

works in which double male characters appear: Johnno (1975), Child's Play (1982), Fly Away Peter (1982), Harland's Half Acre (1985) and several stories in the Antipodes (1985) collection.

  In all of these works, a close relationship between two men

who seem unalike in many ways produces a transformation in one or both

Language that powerful force  In An Imaginary Life, however, the particular agency of

the communication and subsequent transformation is language.

  As one of the great poets of the Augustan Age, Malouf’s

Ovid (as well as, of course, the historical one) is a competent user of a sophisticated language: he has totally mastered Latin.

  Exiled in Tomis, however, he finds himself totally helpless

and vulnerable. His situation is almost that of a small child.

Upon arriving in Tomis, Ovid has an inner life but he cannot share it with anybody except the hypothetical future reader to whom he is addressing the memoirs.

Being around the Getae is no help, because he is cut off from shared communication with them, even though they are his fellow human beings.

 'It is as if I had suddenly slipped back a step in the order of things, or been transformed, by a witch's curse, into one of the lower species” 13  As he is wandering about in his early linguistic exile, he sees some women grinding grain.  He observes a variety of seed types but, since he does not remember their Latin names, he does not really know one from another.

Ovid knows seed-names in Latin, but he only knows the sound. He has used the names as beautiful words in his poems, but the sound is not connected at all to the objects which they signify.

 One of the women gives him a seed and teaches him the Getic word for it.

He puts the seed on his tongue and absorbs something of its essence by tasting it.  He has learned his first Getic word and rhapsodizes on the wonder of the connection between the sound of the word and the actual experience of the taste of the seed (p. 26).

For him, it now has an essence. Imposing such order on the world, his mind transforms the world.

 

After spending a certain amount of time in Tomis, however, he gradually acquires the language of the Getae as a child would, by imitating speakers adept in the language and by learning to apply Getic names to objects in the surrounding world.

  As he begins to learn more and more of the language, he

finds that Getic offers a whole new way of apprehending the world, and is in many ways superior to that of his urbane Latin.

When Ovid learns enough to be able to communicate with Ryzak, the leader of the small band, 'seems nobler and more, gentle than any Roman I have known'

By learning Getic and changing his relationship with his environment and the other human beings in it, Ovid becomes a different person.

  The author of The Metamorphoses experiences a

metamorphosis. By learning another language, "the changes' begins, as Malouf tells us in the 'Afterword:

  A Note on Sources', to 'live out in reality what had been,

in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display' (p. 154).

Learning another language enables him to grow and develop, for knowing the world linguistically involves a reciprocal relationship: we transform the world and we let it transform us.

The Other transforms us  Ovid's personal and linguistic exile makes him vulnerable,

for the first time since he reached manhood, to personal, psychological, and spiritual change.

  He begins to dream of a new level of existence. But the real

acceleration begins when Ovid encounters a wild 'wolf-child', who reminds him of an imaginary childhood playmate.

  In a brief prologue to the Life, Ovid presents us with an

account of his early life with the imaginary child.   He says that they spoke 'to one another, but in a tongue of

our own devising' (p. 9). But as he grew to manhood:

the child left and did not reappear, though I have dreamt of him often enough in those early years, and have done so since. I have forgotten the language we used, and if he were to reappear, perhaps we could no longer communicate. Did he have some message for me then? If so, he failed to deliver it. Or did so and it has slipped my mind. Or the language he used on whatever occasion it was had already passed my understanding and could not be translated into speech. (p. 3)

  After the metamorphosis caused by the suffering of his

physical isolation in Tomis and the discipline of learning another language and a new way of looking at the world, Ovid begins to dream again of the childhood double, of a separate but similar otherness out in the external world.

In a lyrical, poetic passage he describes a semi-dream state in which he sees “something that belongs to another order of being, and which I come out of the depths of myself to meet as at the surface of a glass. Is it the child in me?' (p. 55).

  This dreaming of another self is followed by the

appearance of the real wolf-boy.

Shortly after he sees the boy, he is fascinated and begins to think about him all the time, both when he is asleep and when he is awake.

  When he first begins to teach the wolf-boy how to speak

(in the Getic language p. 90), Ovid makes the mistake of assuming that the relationship would be only one way.

He finds instead that it is reciprocal: he is transformed as he transforms the wolf boy, struggling to develop the child's inherent humanity.

  But as Ovid teaches the child, the world comes alive for

him in a new way also.   The wolf-boy, is the real world manifestation of the poet's

childhood playmate or double.   In the real child Ovid recognizes a part of himself. He

sees the child he once was and, perhaps, the child-like part of him underlying the urbane overlay of his education and adult achievements.

The shared experience with the real wolf-boy causes his childhood to come flooding back into his consciousness. But these memories have been transformed:

I have come to realize that this place is the true destination I have been seeking, and that my life here, however painful, is my fate, the one I have spent my whole existence trying to escape. We barely recognize the annunciation when it comes, declaring:

Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be. (p. 90-91)

So I admit openly to myself what I have long known in my heart. I belong to this place now. I have made it mine. I am entering the dimensions of myself. (p 91)

  So it is that my childhood has begun to return to me. Not as

I had previously remembered it, but in some clearer form, as it really was; which is why my past, as I recall it now, continually astonishes me. It is as if it had happened to someone else, and I were being handled a new past, that leads, as I follow it out, to a present in which I appear out of my old body as a new and other self. (p. 91)

 

The reciprocal relationship with the wolf-boy has caused Ovid to break out of his personal and spiritual isolation:

There are times when it comes strongly upon me that he is the teacher, and whatever comes new to the occasion is being led slowly, painfully, out of me.”

This forging of communication with another is a kind of metaphor for (or a preliminary step to) the forging of communication with the outside world.

  And Ovid's personal and spiritual evolution has enabled

him continually to expand more and more into the outer world:

His self (the child) is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, among leaves, water, grasses, clouds, thunder –whose existence he can be at home in because the hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit. He has no notion of the otherness of things.

I try (Ovid) to participate myself into his consciousness of the world, his consciousness of me, but I fail. My mind cannot contain him. I try to imagine the sky with all its constellations, the Dog, the Bear, the Dragon and so on, as an extension of myself, as part of my further being. But my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky. It rains and I say, it rains. It thunders and I say, it thunders. The Child is otherwise.

I try to think he must: I am raining, I am thundering, and I am immediately struck with panic as if, in losing hold of my separate and individual soul, in shaking the last of it off from the tip of my little finger, I might find myself lost out there in the multiplicity of things, and never get back. (p. 92)

  What else should our lives be but a continual series of

beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours. (p. 134)

  But the Danube River is the boundary of the known

world. Its name in Latin, Is-ter, has for Ovid always been a Romantic idea because it represents these limits.

Transcendence of the world, the releasing of the self into the universe as a whole, involves going beyond the Is-ter.

  Ovid repeats the name (p. 135) of the river over and over

as a kind of incantation.

And it appears before him, 'born of my breath, frozen solid, and waiting, in these last days before it breaks up and flows again, to be crossed' (p. 136).

The Ovid who crosses the Is-ter at the end of An Imaginary Life and has come a long way from the one at the beginning of the novel.

The man who was isolated from the world and totally concerned with the 'here' (that is, what is present within his own consciousness and relates to what concerns him personally) has, through communication, established connection with other consciousnesses quite unlike his own, existing outside himself.

  Ovid establishes a human connection with the world, like

breathing, is a constant reciprocal process-putting ourselves out into the world but also taking in the world so that it can become part of ourselves.

  Crossing this boundary suggests crossing the ultimate

boundary, from the 'hereness' of this life to the 'thereness' of the next: “We have come to the shores, and prepare to enter” (137)

It is summer. It is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am sic.

I am there. (153) END