What does the novel, An Imaginary Life, have to do with a classical foundations of literature class?
Where do I begin? How about broadly? In the beginning of the course there were a number of themes and conflicts, Steiner’s, we discussed. The past possesses the present. All literature is displaced myth. Women and misogyny. Mythology is the truth, history is the facts. These themes permeate Malouf’s short, intricate little novel but are not necessarily easy to identify.
As I was choosing passages and quotes to use in this reflection, I had to choose quickly in order to let a fellow student borrow the book. Because time was limited I chose a number of quotes from the beginning and end of the book. These portions seemed the most psychological and philosophical, which makes them rather hard to digest. The center of the book is the main story, the adventure. After I examined the beginning for quotes, I thought Malouf did a fantastic job foreshadowing the meaning of his novel, what he was trying to capture, share.
The book is littered with references to dreams, reality, the surreal, language, remembrance, gods, animals, the weather, seasons, and the natural world. These help give it its mythological feeling, a timeless, cyclical sense and motion.
We talked a lot about music in the first part of the class. Music, tones, and tunes were how Ovid was able to make any sense of his new world in exile, an exile to a land of barbarians and witchcraft. “I listen and what moves me most is that I recognize the tunes” (21). He doesn’t even have to know the language to understand the basic meaning, feeling, or emotion of the speaker.
A major aspect of classical literature, especially recently, has been gods, gods of many different emotions and abilities. In An Imaginary Life Ovid describes an interesting dream with ‘men on horses, the centaurs, from the world of fables,’ which he mentions are ‘What I don’t believe in’ (23). He says the centaurs from his dream are gods, ‘In whom I also do not believe.’ (24). He continues this discussion of gods, which seems to me to foreshadow the rest of the book.
If the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of your soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine. … It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it. (28)
This passage reflects the end quite well. The last line, ‘I am there,’ could easily be argued that Ovid is there, a god; at the last moments of his life he has finally reached the understanding that the landscape is always complete. We need only to recognize it’s completeness to reach the status and consciousness that we are the gods roaming, destroying, discussing, the earth and its inhabitants. Realizing his destiny Ovid does not repent but accepts it, “I shall settle deep into the earth, deeper than I do in sleep, and will not be lost. We are continuous with earth in all particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce” (147). Sure, this is the more or less quintessential ‘hippy’ viewpoint, but it sure does look good on paper. Ha, I wonder if Malouf envisioned his Ovid character as a hippy?
What I found captivating is how the Ovid in the novel fluctuates between worlds. On the hunting trips he is mesmerized with the child, at home in the rugged wilderness. During the couple years while he plans to trap the child, he can’t stop thinking about the boy, about the world of the boy, how the boy interprets the world. He unconsciously seems to desire the boy’s world even though his civilized, manipulated mind tells him otherwise. When they finally capture the child, Ovid tries unbelievably hard to prescribe civilization onto the boy, teaching him language, forcing him to live in doors and to eat lightly processed foods. Through all this I was practically screaming at my book for Ovid to give up, let the boy be. He tries all this to get closer to the child, to understand the child by prescribed language. Because humans have prescribed language to the natural world in order to try and make sense of it, we have only detached ourselves father from nature.
Once the Child and Ovid run away their real connection begins. “And yet for all this closeness, he seems more and more to belong to a world that lies utterly beyond me, and beyond my human imagining” (149). Only after Ovid has submerged himself into the Child’s world does he begin to understand it, and the Child. It’s also interesting to note one of Steiner’s conflicts here: age and youth. At first, older Ovid tries to connect with the young child by prescription; however in the end of the book, the child nurses Ovid. And unknowingly to both of them, the child is the one who connects them to an anagogic degree. (Is it bad or ironic that I had to tell Microsoft Word to add the word anagogic to its database? Maybe both.) I can’t remember where the line was, maybe during one of the hunting trips where they worship the dead warriors, but there were also transformations in the book. The passage I noted reads, “We have all been transformed, the whole group of us, and become part of the woods.” The entire book seems to transform the child, and Ovid, into gods.
Similar to A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud, Ovid experiences the power of love, even unto simple subjects. The color scarlet, and the poppy, “I Love this poppy.” By beginning small it becomes possible to think big.
It is this love that leads Ovid, eventually, to discover his love for the boy as he is, uncivilized, which in turn leads to Ovid’s love for the earth and world from a god’s perspective. At one point I even remember Ovid describing the scene of the boy and him trudging across the landscape from the level of the stars, the level of a god. Which brings me back to a quote in the beginning, “it is like trying to remember something you have forgotten, that glows at the very edge of your mind but refuses to reveal itself” (20). Ovid knew all this to begin with; it just took an amazing adventure with a Child to remember it.
The label ‘classic’ is given to something that is judged, after a lengthy period of time, to be of the highest possible quality or value of its kind (any dictionary). So maybe to answer the question, ‘what does An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf, have to do with Classical Foundations of Literature?’ I could say everything, anything, and all of the above; but isn’t that usually the easy route?
