An Imaginary Life

An Imaginary Life is a short lyrical novel by Australian writer David Malouf, published in 1978. It imagines the exile of the Roman poet Ovid at Tomis on the Black Sea, and his transforming bond with a wild Child, and is set for the HSC English Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences.

In 8 CE the emperor Augustus banished Ovid, the most celebrated poet of Rome and author of the Metamorphoses, to Tomis, a garrison town on the Black Sea at the very edge of the empire, among the Getae, a people who did not speak Latin. Malouf's 1978 novel takes the silence in the historical record and fills it with a first-person voice: not a biography but an imagining, closer to a prose poem than a conventional narrative, moving not by plot but by the slow transformation of a mind.

Ovid arrives in grief and revulsion, stripped of his city, his audience and above all his language, "rendered dumb" among people whose speech he cannot share. A single scarlet poppy, the first colour after a grey winter, jolts the deadened self awake, and he begins to attend to the place rather than to what he has lost. On a hunt he glimpses a wild boy who has grown up among the deer, beyond human society and speech. Obsessed, he has the Child captured, meaning to civilise him and make him a son - but the Child is not the blank he expected, and the teacher slowly becomes the taught.

When the village turns against them both, the two flee across the river into open country neither Roman nor Getic. There, released from every social role, Ovid stops counting the days, feels himself dissolving into earth and sky, and dies not in despair but in an ecstasy of belonging.

The novel's governing experience is change, and Malouf's boldest move is to make the poet of metamorphosis undergo one. "Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in": the imperative stages the self as something actively remade, a chosen labour rather than an accident. Transformation is redefined as the unfolding of a self already latent - "our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree" - so that a life becomes "a continual series of beginnings".

Exile, for a poet, is above all the loss of language. "I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb": the passive construction makes exile an act done to him, stripping the speech that constituted his self. Against Latin's habit of naming and controlling, the Child embodies another literacy, reading nature as "a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read". The extended metaphor reverses who is civilised, and Ovid glimpses beyond words "a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation".

Landscape carries the arc from exile to belonging. Ovid begins at the very edge of the known world, and pathetic fallacy fuses the long grey winter with his grief and resentment. The river becomes the threshold between the known self and what lies beyond, until his final sense of being at home measures the whole distance travelled from buried exile to earned belonging.

Death saturates the novel, yet Malouf empties it of terror. Asking "What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?", he makes Ovid's actual dying the opposite of a refusal: an active surrender, ending in the impossible simultaneity of "I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six. I am there."