The Banished Ovid: David Malouf's Novel "An Imaginary Life"

I'm not sure what I was expecting from Australian novelist David Malouf's 1978 An Imaginary Life. I knew that the narrator was Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso born 43 BC, died in 17 or 18 AD) in his exile to Tomis (now Constanţa in southeastern Romania, a port on the Black Sea (known to the Romans as Pontus Euxinus) south of the Danube River (known to the Romans as the Ister).

Very little is known about Ovid's years of exile, including just how many of them there were, or what the reason was for Augustus exiling him without any trial or rubberstamping by the Senate, or where or when he died. Given the lack of records other than letters and poems by Ovid, some have argued that he was not exiled at all, and that the material was fiction based on the proto-ethnography of Herodotus and Strabo (though how much of Strabo's work was available before 8 BC is a question this hypothesis begs; Strabo's life span was between 63 or 64 BC and ca. 24 AD).

In his afterword, Malouf expaled: "We know very little about the life of Ovid, and it is this absence of fact that has made him useful as the central figure of my narrative and alloed me the liberty of free invention, since what I wanted to write was neithier historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible events" (emphasis added). Even had I read that explanation, I might still have expected something like Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, but much shorter (152 pages).

Malouf (who was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1934) has a fascination for civilized "fishes out of water." His 1993 novel Remembering Babylon is polyvocalic, but focuses on an English boy, Gemmy Fairley, who is shipwrecked, taken in and raised by a group of aborigines. Less fully formed than the 50-something Ovid when he was exiled to the edge of the known world, Gemmy similarly questions his identity, learns a new language and worldview amidst xenophobic, animistic people.

Malouf's fictional Ovid learns the Thracian language (presumably Dacian) and takes charge of a feral boy, remembering that twins raised by a wolf allegedly founded Rome. This one, his neighbors believe, deer raised.

The author of Metamorphoses sets out to teach the Child the local language (before that, he had been teaching Latin to the son of the chieftain who houses and otherwise protects him). The narrator reflects on his own transformation by both the barbarians with whom he lives and the nature boy (always referred to as "the Child") who teaches him some of his repertory of bird calls and shows him how to live off the land. (How the Child survived the cold winters without any clothing remains a mystery to the narrator and, thus, to the reader.)

The narrator recalls bits from his rural childhood, but pretty much nothing from his life as a very popular though scandalous poet. (One guess of Augustus's reasons for exiling him was that Ovid's poetry seemed to celebrate adultery and Augustus was pushing a natalist monogamous family policy.) He recalls the Emperor not at all, but observes the natural world around him and fortifications needed to protect the stores and animals (and people) from marauding nomads who ride across the Danube (Ister) when it freezes. Malouf also imports shamanism from the far northeast of Asia (Tungus). (The Bulgars and Magyars were not yet in Europe in the time of Caesar Augustus.)

The civilization of the Child is not very successful, and the locals regard him as having a wolf spirit that is a clear and present danger to them. The psychodynamics seem plausible to me. The increasing romanticizing of Nature strikes me as anachronistic, but the guilt and frustrations of civilization mission in forcing alienation from Nature of the feral child conforms with that of others who worked on feral children, Jean Itard's 1801 Mémoire et Rapport sur Victor de l'Aveyron, which was the basis for "L'enfant sauvage" (Wild Child) in which François Truffaut played Dr. Itard.

So, though I was expecting something much more Roman from which I would learn more about Ovid, I found An Imaginary Life interesting even though is was mostly about living among barbarians

©2010, Stephen O. Murray
(Thanks, Stef for adding this and Woman of Rome to the database at my request)