An imaginary life, by David

Malouf
History and culture of the English speaking countries I

Jasmina Ballesp Paella Nria Mina Riera

David Maloufs biography

Born in 1934 in Brisbane, Australia Has lectured at different universities (e.g. Universities of Queenslnad and Sydney) Novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and composer Has received several literary awards (e.g. Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, 1998 or elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 2008)

David Maloufs works

Novels: Johno (1975) An Imaginary Life (1978) Fly Away Peter (1982) Age Book of the Year fiction prize The Great World (1990) Commonwealth Writers Prize and French Prix Femina tranger Remembering Babylon international IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

David Maloufs works

Short Story Collections: Every Move You Make (2006) Age Book of the Year Award The Complete Stories (2007) AustraliaAsia Literary Award Poetry: Selected Poems 1959-1989 (1994)

David Maloufs works

Plays (only 1): Blood Relations (1988)

Libretti: Baa Baa Black Sheep (1993)

Summary of the plot

Chapter I:
Presentation of Tomis. Ovids feelings (loneliness, melancholy) Introduction of Ovid (real person) as narrator

Chapter II:
Ovids life among the headmans family Discovery of a wild boy Ovid wild boy = the Child Attack of the Dacians Capture of the Child

Summary of the plot

Chapter III:
Ovid takes care of the child Ovid teaches the child to speak (Getaes lang) The Child teaches Ovid animal sounds

Chapter IV:
The Child has a fever utters 1st word Lullo has a fever the Childs demon has stolen his soul

Summary of the plot

Chapter IV:
After Lullos recovery, Ryzak falls ill Ryzak dies Elopement of Ovid and the Child They cross the river Ister and walk in the direction of the steppes

Summary of the plot

Chapter V:
The Child feeds Ovid with fruits and roots Ovid finds his own self in Nature Ovid dies

An imaginary life
Time 5 years Century I AD (Emperor Augustus) Setting Tomis and the river Ister Main characters Ovid, the Child, Ryzak, Lullo, the old woman, the young woman Title An imaginary life = a life in perfect communion with Nature

MAIN THEMES
1. Metaphor: the Child Australian aborigines 2. References to history, biography and works by Ovid 3. Rome vs. Tomis 4. Language
a) Language power b) Language self-identity c) The L2 learning process

5. The importance of imagination dreams, magic (rites), transformations 6. The importance of Nature

The Child-Australian aborigines

An imaginary life (1978) 1966 End of the White Australia Policy

Questioning treatment of aborigines In the novel: the Childs capture by Ovid who tries to teach him his language and codes of behaviour the stolen generations

The Child-Australian aborigines

He brings me birds eggs [...] He gives me seeds to eat, and straws to munch on. He finds roots that are sweet, and tubers, digging them up with his nails (page 143) It is these grasses and their parasites, the worms, the grubs, the small winged grasshoppers, that provide us with nourishment [] Each day early, the Child hunts, feeding me now out of his world as I once fed him out of ours. (Page 149)

QUOTATIONS on OVIDS BIOGRAPHY

I know what it is we are looking for. It is the grave of the poet Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso, Roman of the equestrian order, poet. In all this desolation, no one knows where he lies. (Page 10)

QUOTATIONS on Ovids biography

Dead brother Riding out into the sunlight I find myself thinking, for perhaps the first time in thirty years, of the brother who died when I was a young man, and whose place I took as my fathers heir [] He is angry with me [] because I know what he is thinking: that of the two of us it is my brother who should have survived. (Page 38)

QUOTATIONS on Ovids biography

Ovids adulthood [] my father remained disappointed in me [] for my failure to become a man of affairs. He married again and had another family [] end of my second marriage. (Page 78)

QUOTATIONS on Ovids biography

Ovid in the exile No doubt I will go on writing to my wife and my attorney. I shall even go on addressing Augustus, begging him to forgive my crimes and recall me. (Page 90)

QUOTATIONS on Ovids time HISTORY OF ROME

Some poets, Vergil for example, have an ear perfect in every way. (Page 18) After a century of war in which whole families had destroyed one another in the name of patriotism, we were at peace. (Page 18) [...] when we all seemed to have broken out of bounds at last into an enlightenment so great that there was no longer any need for believe. (Page 18)

References to Ovids works

someone tonight is being fucked; because in a poem once I made it happen (page 20) Ars amatoria Having conceived in our sleep the idea of a further being, our bodies find, slowly, painfully, the physical process that will allow them to break their own bounds and leap up to it. (Page 22) Metamorphoses

References to Ovids works

Now I too must be transformed. (Page 26) Metamorphoses I have invented nothing like it in my poems, that were full of strange creatures caught between man and some higher or lower creature, in a moment of painful transformation. (Page 43)Metamorphoses

QUOTATIONS on OVID as a poet

I was discovering for my generation a new national style [...] My world was strictly personal [...] I too have created an age [...] It is gay, anarchic, ephemeral and it is fun. He hates me for it. (Page 19) My little flowerpots are as subversive here as my poems were in Rome. (Page 62)

Ovid as a poet
I have invented nothing like it [the stare of the Child] in my poems, that were full of strange creatures caught between man and some higher or lower creature, in a moment of painful transformation. (Page 43) I am the last poet of our age, existing still, working still, even out here, beyond the limits of our speech, even in silence. (Page134)

QUOTATIONS on the EXILE

We are at the ends of the earth (page 7) [...] the old man, for all that he is a barbarian [...] (page 8) In all the known world, where the emperor rules [...] (pages 8 and 9) [...] beyond this last outpost is the unknown (page 9)

QUOTATIONS on the EXILE

[...] the edge of our world [...] (page 10) [they] have not entered what we call society and become Romans under the law (page 13) the Scythian steppes (page 15) But the earth goes on. Even beyond Ister. There is another world out there. (Page 137)

QUOTATION on Tomis
There is nothing to be said of our village except that it has a hundred or so huts [...] Naked children come out after the rain to sit in pools with the geese, or they chase the pigs between the houses, their squeals and the squealing of the piglets, to my ears, indistinguishable. (Page 15)

QUOTATIONS on life among the Getae

DIET We have eaten our supper out here: soup made out of nettles, a goats milk cheese flavoured with herbs (page 30) CLOTHES (Hunters) wearing strapped leggings, shirts laced open across the chest, and carrying bows [] dark whiskers and long hair (page 33)

QUOTATIONS on life among the Getae

LIFESTYLE Everything else about us exists purely for use. The women wear no ornaments. (Page 61) For these people it is a new concept, play [...] to play is to be free. Free is not a concept that exists, I think, in their language. Nothing here is free of its own nature, its own law. (Page 62)

Quotations on Language power

In all the known world, where the emperor rules, I have no official existence (page 8) My days in this place, my nights, are terrible beyond description. All day I wonder in a dream, as isolated from the world of men as if I belonged to another species (page 9)

Quotations on language - selfidentity

I am afraid we may already have killed something in him. I have a terrible fear that he may die that what we have brought here is some animal part of him that can be housed and fed for a while, and kept with us by force, but only till it realizes that the spirit is already gone. (page 68)

 All this world is alive for him. [] Only for him it is a visible world he can walk trough, that has its weathers and its seasons, its cycle of lives. He leads me into his consciousness and it is there underfoot and all about me. How can I ever lead him into mine? (page 89-90) Our winter dream begins. [] The Child meanwhile has fallen into a state of apathy in which he sits for hours simply staring in to the gloom, his elbows round his knees and his chin sunk on his clenched fists. (page 107,109)

Quotations on L2 learning
I listen to them talk. The sounds are barbarous,
and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile. I listen, and what moves me most is that I recognize the tunes. This one, I know, is tenderness; this regret and this anger. (page 13)

 She is listening to the old man, who is telling the boy a story []. I too listen. I am the only one here who is idle, and I let the strange words fill my head, understanding nothing, but fascinated nonetheless to hear the old man assume some other voice than his own, dipper , gruffer. (page 30) On one occasion the youngest of them laughed and said a word: Korschka. I looked at the seed and she nodded, as if I were a child, and said again, ounding her lips in an exaggerated fashion, Korschka! [] So I know the word for this seed now, and its taste, and its shape and color, but cannot translate it back into my own experience (page14)

 I have spoken to the old man about a search party (I have enough of their language now to make the most pressing of my wants known to people).(page 50) I understand all that is said to me now in this rude tongue, by this plain and kindly people. [] Listening to the old man now, telling his stories in our little yard, I know what the different voices signify. (page 52)

 I am teaching the child to speak. It is a difficult process. I have long since discovered on our expeditions together that he can imitate any of the birds or animals we come across. [] Observing how he makes these sounds, and the sounds of frogs, cicadas, rabbits, the low growl of wolves and their fearful baying, I get some clue at last to how he may be taught to speak. (pages 85, 86)
For this reason, I make the sounds I want him to imitate [ ] I place his fingers on my throat so that he can hear the buzzing of my voice there, I lay his fingertips to my lips so he can feel the shape of them, the flow of breath. Gradually. One sound at a time, we are finding human speech in him. (page 87)

 His tongue lolls and saliva rolls from the corner of his mouth. His lips move. And suddenly, so clearly that we all hear it [] clearly, from his lips, among all the growling and whines of animal pain, comes a word, one of the words I have been trying all these weeks to teach him. [] His tongue has discovered how to produce it [] In his delirium he has discovered the human speech. (page 114)

Quotations on DREAMS
In dream after dream I venture out beyond the stubbled fields into the grasslands beyond the edge of our world [] I fall to my knees and begin digging with my long nails in the earth. Sometimes wolves come, and they claw at the earth beside me. Howling. We dig together, and they pay no more attention than they would to a ghost. But I know that whatever it is they are scratching after, I must discover before them, or I am lost. So, I dig harder, faster, sweating with the moonlight greasy upon me. Unable to tell myself: this is a dream. (page 10)

 I know what it is we are looking for. It is the grave of the poet Ovid Publius Ovidius Naso, Roman of the equestrian order, poet. In all this desolation, no one knows where he lies. (page 10)

 I dreamt, one night lately, that I walked out in the moonlight, [] Suddenly, not out of the dust of the plain but out of the swirling sky, a horde of forms came thundering towards me men, yes, horses, yes and I thought of what I do not believe in and know belongs only to our world of fables, which is were I found myself: the centaurs. But these were not tamed creatures of our pastoral myths. They were gigantic [] These, I knew, were gods. (p 16)

 I stood silent in the center of the plain and they began to wheel in great circles about me, uttering cries not of malice, I though, but of mourning. Let us into your world they seemed to be saying. Let us cross the river into your empire. Let us into your lives. Believe in us. Believe. (page 17)

 Meanwhile, night after night, I hunt the Child in my sleep. I warm him with my breast.[] He is the wild boy of my childhood. I know it now. Who has come back to me. He is The Child. (page 48)

 I fall asleep almost immediately, and dream. [] I am a pool of water. [] And as darkness passes over me I begin to be afraid. [] I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. [] Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished. [] What if a wolf came, I suddenly ask myself? What if the next tongue that touched me were the wolfs tongue, rough, greedy, drinking me down to the last drop and leaving me dry? (page 55-56)

 I think, strangely, of the wolf in my dream that threatened to consume the whole pool of my being, and begin to be afraid. (page 72)

Quotations on magic (rites)

When the day of the Parilia comes I go out heavyhearted as the twilight gathers to do the duty that is his []. I walk through all this, feeling the grass heads brush my bare legs, and arrive at the field where my father is waiting. He has already made his course and is drying his body with a cloth. [] I sip from the pail of milk. Take in my hand the beanstalk and the ashes of the calf. My father lips a laurel branch in water and sprinkles me with it. He is weeping. My chest, my brow. I blink under the shower of little drops. (page 82,83)

 We gather in a circle and fall silent. [] The boy who is in the center of all this looks nervous. His eyes move about the yard, from the fire to the bench, looking for the creature whose interest for this moment in concentrated on him, on his cupped hands with their mixture of all the grains and weeds of the local fields, aware that he is, for the brief period of the ceremony, no longer himself [] but a conductor of dark forces []. The shaman begins to sing and is joined by the rest. [] The chanting ceases. We stand quiet. [] He turns stiffly , and we watch him, very carefully now, bearing his cupped hands before him, walk slowly back to the pot and spill the remains of the gruel on the fire. [] All the signs, it seems are propitious. We can go.. (page 33-34)

 The old woman watches from across the room. I know what she is thinking. There is no ordinary fever. The Child is wrestling with his demon, the animal spirit who protected him out there in the forest, and is fighting now to get back. [] For two whole days the young woman refuses to come near us. She watches the child, she watches her son, she keeps the boy as far from our corner of the room as possible, while the old woman whispers and flaps about between us. (page 112)

 Burial of horsemen

[] it is a great circle of funerary mounds, a hundred of them perhaps, all made of broken stone and many of them still surmounted by the skeleton of a horse and rider, impaled on a pole, which is the proper burial for a horseman. (p. 36)

 At the first full moon she will sacrifice in the womans grove outside the village, in thanksgiving for the boys life. Ryzak goes out alone to bring back the victim, a wild puppy, whose entrails will be burned on an altar of turf and offered up to the triple Hecate. (page 123)

 Upstairs in the house some final ceremony is being performed that we are not permitted to see [] I know what it is. The elders of the village are taking Ryzaks life by force, beating and shaking the last breath out of his tough old boy so that he will die fighting. (page 130)

Quotations on transformations
Do you think of Italy or whatever land it is you now inhabit- as a place given you by the gods, ready-made in all its placed beauty? It is not. It is a created place. If the gods are with you there, []it is because you have discovered them there [] I know how far we have come because I have been back to the beginnings. I have seen the unmade earth. [] Now I too must be transformed. (pages 21, 23, 26)

 It is as if we are all, for a moment, charmed. As if time had stopped. And I feel that if we could sit like this long enough, cross-legged on the leaves, so that we seemed like another part of the woods; if we let our spirits out, shaking them loose, and became wood , leaf mold, lichen he would come to us. (page 53) I have begun to understand him. In imitating the birds, he is not, like our mimics, copying something that is outside him []. He is being the bird. (page 88)

 But I know now that this is the way. Slowly I began the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back []. They will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them the plants []. Then we shall begin to take back into ourselves, the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains, its forested crags with their leaps of snow. Then little by little, the firmament. The spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole. (page 92)

 The spirit experiences what the body does but in a different form. [] It expands to become the whole landscape []. The earth, now that I am about to leave it, seems so close at last. I wake, and there, so enormous in their proximity to my eyeball that I might be staring trough tree trunks into an unknown forest [] Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce. (page 142, 146,147)

Quotations on Nature
It is the desolateness of this place that they after day fills my mind with its perspectives. A line of cliffs, oblique against the sky, and the sea leaden beyond. To the west and south, mountains, heaped under cloud. To the north, beyond the marshy river mouth, empty grasslands, rolling level to the pole.(page 7) Here the immensity, the emptiness, feeds the spirit, and leaves it with no hunger for anything but more space, more light as if one had suddenly glimpsed the largeness , the emptiness of one owns soul, and come to terms with it, glorying at last in its open freedom. (page 141)