Malouf's An Imaginary Life
Evasive Precision:
Problems of Historicity in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life
Ten years ago Harry Heseltine asked a critical question about David Malouf's An Imaginary Life (1978): 'How much is Malouf's hero the representation of an historical figure who lived in the Roman world of two thousand years ago, and how much a response to the conditions of life in Australia in the 1970s?' (26). Heseltine argued that he is both. In fact, though, only the second half of his rhetorical question has been taken up in the decade since. Everyone agrees that the novel is allegorical and just as much - more, indeed - about Australia than it is about Ovid on the Black Sea, even though colonised Australia itself, nearly eighteen centuries below the curve of the temporal horizon, is literally the unspeakable. We may concede at once that, in this respect, An Imaginary Life has ambitions, and unquestionably is successful, beyond the ambit of any realistic historical fiction. Its ability to offer a mischievous interplay between the exiled sophisticated poet with his values ('gay, anarchic, ephemeral and . . . fun') and the mood of Augustan Rome/Australia of the late Seventies ('solemn, orderly, monumental, dull' [Malouf 26]) has been much admired and discussed. So has the way Malouf finds deep possibilities in the theme of exile - there are the obvious allusions to the convict experience, but also to the way in which the fate of the exiled poet, torn between Rome and Tomis, becomes a powerful analogy for the complex fate of an antipodean writer of 'European' reflexes and ancestry to feel exiled wherever he happens to be: equally in Australia or from Australia. "Ovid's" nostalgic lectures about the Italian countryside and how these new alien vistas of the edge must be seized, possessed and mythologised by the imagination, has an equally obvious relevance: Malouf is truly an Australian postmodern Romantic, not least in his implicit promotion of an attitude to a 'new' Tomian/Australian landscape which, as Hills has put it, 'requires the dissolution of the European self in order to establish a new self' (16). No wonder that within a decade of publication An Imaginary Life was being spoken of as one of the classics of Australian literature, and the continual critical attention it has received since then has confirmed its high reputation.
A clever, sustained allegory, yes; and it is a testament to the richness of this text that interpretations of the central themes and concerns of An Imaginary Life have been extremely varied. Everyone starts from Malouf's own assertion that he is indifferent to the historicity of Ovid the man: 'the fate I have allotted him . . . is one that would have surprised the real poet' since it makes him 'live out in reality [sic] what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display' (154). Malouf is clearly referring to the Metamorphoses. He means the two-way process of metamorphosis charted in the novel: the movement of "Ovid" the 'glib fabulist' away from the studied cynicism of his Roman life into 'the last reality' (141) of a mystical absorption into nature on the endless grassy steppes north of the Danube, and the Child's opposing movement into humanity via his attainment of language. So much is agreed. Beyond that, we have had a Hindu reading (Brady) and a Jungian one (Bishop); it has been read as an existential drama in which the hero chooses his being, with the Child as Proppian Helper (Neilsen); or as charting the double, opposing movement of "Ovid" and the Child through the Lacanian stages (Nettelbeck 1993, 1995). It has been read as a 'declaration of homosexual desire' (Indyk 18); as a 'post-colonial' discourse whose dreamy illogicalities serve to break down Eurocentric binary polarities (Griffiths 61); as a disruptive, aggressively anti-colonial discourse (Wearne), or, more placidly, as a Green, serene 'allegory of the relationship between humanity and nature as it might be, ideally, in Australia or elsewhere' (McDonald 53).
Despite this variety of interpretation of what is universally agreed to be a strange and complex work, almost no one has spent any time on the first half of Heseltine's question. Most critics have either ignored or briefly dismissed the issue: McDonald, for instance, goes so far as to say that 'that the text itself as an imaginary life of Ovid is, however, the least significant reading of the title' (45). Malouf himself has given no encouragement to those who may want to secure the novel as an adjunct to classical studies. His very title - certainly a phrase of echoing subtlety - implicitly disdains any such readerly quest. In his 'Afterword' Malouf attempts to pre-empt any such consideration by defining his novel as 'neither historical fiction nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event [sic]' (153). And elsewhere he has been equally dismissive, almost flippant: 'one of the attractions to me was that nothing was known about the society that Ovid went into, so I could make it all up. I could be a kind of anthropologist of something that didn't previously exist' (Tipping 497).
These assertions are questionable. Putting aside all the scholarship on the ethnology of Romania in antiquity, is there truly a disjunction between what Malouf calls 'historical fiction' on the one hand, and 'fiction with its roots in possible event' on the other? Surely not: historical fiction is fiction which is sufficiently firmly rooted in past events to make the necessary extrapolations plausible. To take just one element in An Imaginary Life, the genesis of the feral Child: If Ovid did capture and rear a wild child at Tomis then he forgot to mention it; but feral children were known in classical times (Herodotus mentions them), so the situation is conceivable enough. It had only to be made plausible. Malouf based his feral boy on the Aveyron case, c.1800. But that boy was not raised by animals. The best-attested case of a wolf child, an Indian girl discovered in 1920, makes even less promising fictional material: it took six years of training before she could walk or be weaned off a diet of rotting carrion. Neither case, nor any other, has much resemblance to the fey, homoerotic child-of-nature of the novel. So when Malouf says he wished to 'break into a field of more open possibilities' (154) and that he had 'verified' his description (153), this must mean in practice that he conflated cases, jettisoned the intractable factual details that did not serve his vision, and invented ones that did. In other words, he behaved like an historical novelist - as he does in other particulars.
And what are we to make of his 'nothing was known . . . so I could make it all up'? In fact, the poetic persona which we label Ovid is known to us in verse letters - the fifty Tristia (Lamentations) and the forty-six Epistulae ex Ponto (Black Sea Letters) to named recipients, which do claim to chronicle the whole period covered by An Imaginary Life. They are fascinating psychological documents charting Ovid's swings of mood, from jaunty defiance to the near-suicidal, as the realisation of his true position hits home. Even if they are dramatised to enlist the sympathy of the recipients in Rome, these elegies do give us many details of Ovid's exile whose truthfulness he repeatedly defends against potential skeptics; for example at Tristia 3.10:
vix equidem credar, sed, cum sint praemia falsi
nulla, ratam debet testis habere fidem.
[I scarcely hope to be believed; but when there is no reward for lying, the witness ought to be believed]
Although the factuality of the exilic poems has come under severe attack in recent years, the consensus among classicists is still that, despite their literary window-dressing and conscious artistry, Ovid does tell us (some) things which are consonant with the historical and archaeological record.
An Imaginary Life's relationship with this rich material is intriguing and raises questions which have never been explored properly. Curiously, although they do not regard the fact as particularly interesting, most critics do seem to tacitly accept that, apart from the caveats noted by Malouf himself which they take at face value, the novel does follow Ovid's years at Tomis, insofar as a chronology can be extracted from the exilic poetry. The actual position is more complicated and more interesting. An Imaginary Life's engagement with history is more tangential, more deliberately contrived and more dissimulating than has been appreciated. Certainly it can be readily demonstrated that Malouf does not 'make it all up'. He does not ignore or sidestep historical biography; he transforms it and plays with it elaborately. I shall try to show what artistic purpose is served by the text's simultaneous acceptance and rejection of historicity, and I shall argue that even in this Malouf is building on and exploiting ambiguities to be found in the Ovidian texts themselves.
2.
We start with the proposition that even if An Imaginary Life is an imaginary life, giving full weight to all possible shades of implication of the adjective, it cannot avoid engaging with history and biography. It has more solidity of specification - more apparent solidity, I should say - than Malouf's own disavowals and the subjective, lyrical and static texture of the narrative may first suggest. He did not choose, after all, to make his narrator just a fictional poet in exile. Nor is he even an anonymous Roman poet exiled to the edge of the known world. On the contrary, he is quite unambiguously a representation of that Publius Ovidius Naso who, according to his own account (and there is no other), was relegated by Augustus from Rome to Tomis on the Black Sea coast towards the end of the year AD8; who arrived there late in AD9; who lived there in exile for some years and who died there in AD17 or 18.
In An Imaginary Life, the narrator announces himself expressly: 'I am Ovid' (19); the place is indeed offered and named as the historical Tomis, south of the River Danube whose delta marked the north-eastern extremity of the Empire; the people he is among are the Getae, a real ethnic group of the time. The famous Tristia 4.10 is Ovid's own brief but carefully structured autobiography, addressed to a candide lector [dear reader] who is strikingly apostrophised as 'you of the future time' - a strategy that Malouf adopts too. He also took from it the account of Ovid's guilt over his brother's early death. It would be tedious to list all the details from the exilic poems which An Imaginary Life appropriates, and redundant too: Colakis has spelt some of them out. Among them are the description of the physical setting of Tomis and the climatic conditions there; the population mix; Ovid's complaints about losing contact with Latin; his relationship with the townspeople; and his new and unwelcome role as a soldier on the ramparts of the town. Even some of An Imaginary Life's most distinctive features may be traced back to the exilic poems. Readers have been unkind about the final vision, the last stage of "Ovid's" metamorphosis, which is ego-loss and death - 'I enter the first dream, almost feel it begin to happen, feel my individual pores open to the individual grains of the earth, as the interchange begins' (147), which has been called 'close to cliché' (McDonald 53-4) and even ruder things, implying that "Ovid" is rather too much of a superannuated flower child to be taken very seriously. Yet even this closure, which might be thought to betray its origins in the 1970s, surely finds its inspiration in the extraordinary slippage, or 'wavering' of identity (Claassen 1990 116) which the persona suffers in the loose collection of poems making up the final Book 4 of the Epistulae. There Ovid speaks of wobbling between life and death, heading for oblivion and immortal fame, surrendering his personality for the status of a natural object.
At first sight, then, An Imaginary Life seems to be a novel set squarely in a mimetic frame set up on historical foundations. The first pages leave the reader in no doubt about what kind of narrative is being offered. It is a fictive autobiography. If the subject is historical, as it is here, the reader expects to find an acceptable, consistent illusion of a voice from the past. A difficult feat in itself, the difficulties are multiplied when the subject is a writer with an extant body of work to which invidious comparisons can be made; they are multiplied again where extant autobiographical documents exist as well. In all such cases, fictive autobiography stands or falls by the quality of its ventriloquism. Malouf, who is himself a skilled autobiographer, does not flinch from this problem. It is true that "Ovid's" idiolect, and his concerns, sound nothing like those of any surviving first-century, first-person Latin narrative. This is hardly surprising, since the first surviving prose autobiography, St Augustine's Confessions, lay four centuries in the future. Rather, it is constructed from a type of discourse - self-absorbed, self-punitive, confessional - which arose only in the later 17th century, along with the modern autobiographical form itself. Nevertheless, Malouf supplies a voice that is both dignified and timeless. There are no Latinisms; no attempt at all, in fact, to signal that this is to be thought of as a translation. An occasional colloquialism might grate on some ears - 'I have become sturdy and strong again and have stopped mooning about and regretting my fate' (63) is perhaps one - but they are rare. Malouf's task was made easier because he eschews dialogue altogether and An Imaginary Life, like much of his fiction, substitutes a solitary, lyrical, meditative narrative voice for dramatic interaction.
'I speak to you, reader, as one who lives in another century,' you who 'sit[s] in a lighted room whose furnishings I do not recognise . . . translating this - with what difficulty? - into your own tongue' (18-19). The reader is soothed and reassured by the immediate appearance of this familiar trope of autobiography, prosopopeia, the voice from beyond the grave. We seem to be on firm ground: the past is greeting the future, and we are it. For the implied reader is not just any future reader, the one whom Ovid addresses hopefully in the Tristia, but surely us. Taken at face value, 'lighted room' is an oddly inconsequential detail - Roman rooms, after all, were artificially lit; why should that be worth mentioning? It is effective only when read as a vision of our electrical lighting. We are being addressed. And when "Ovid" asks 'Have you heard my name? . . . Am I still known? . . . Have I survived?' (19) our sympathy is readily enlisted.
Historical anomalies do soon arise, though some of them fall into the mundane category of plot imperatives. The Tomis of the first century was a thriving stone-built port with an agora and Greek amenities; it certainly was not 'a hundred huts made of woven branches and mud' (16) housing 300 people. But making it so points up "Ovid's" isolation on the edge. Nor is it likely to trouble us that it was about 100km from Tomis to the banks of the Danube - a long winter hike for a old and ailing man across hostile country, even for one who is sustained on water-snails en route. Nor is the fact that, as late as the third year of his exile (ie AD 11-12), Ovid claims he is still communicating in gestures (Tristia 5.10), whereas his fictional counterpart boasts that 'I understand all that is said to me now' (58) after the same length of time, especially since we recognise that the first is probably no less of a fictional device than the second.
But more centrally puzzling is this, for instance:
I cast this letter upon the centuries, uncertain in what landscape of unfamiliar objects it may come to light, and with what eyes you will read it. Is Latin still known to you? I bury it deep in the ice, in one of the tumulus graves whose rocks are sealed with ice that never melts and where no one from our Roman world has ever ventured. Only after a thousand years, when the empire has fallen and no longer has the power of silence over us, will this letter come safely to your hands. (19)
At first sight this looks to be the fictive autobiography's traditional attempt to create a provenance for the manuscript. We are being invited to think of the five sections of An Imaginary Life as verse-letters in the manner of the Epistulae, composed after the event and buried in the ice as completed. However, we are confronted from the outset with the use of the historic present: 'I cast this letter'; 'I bury it deep in the ice'. Even if we think of the sections of An Imaginary Life as being separate 'letters' written and buried one after the other, when are they being buried; indeed, when are they being written? Indeed, taken literally, these statements are nonsensical at the outset. By definition, autobiography is written from a point within the life. When is the last letter, with its particulars of "Ovid's" own advancing death, written? And, as the writer evaporates into history and legend, who buries that last one in its icy time capsule? The use of the historic present tense is persistent throughout and is deliberately unsettling: it confers an immediacy which is quite at odds with the retrospective narrative of autobiography. It also foregrounds the fictive autobiography's queasy relationship with 'real' biographical history. Why set up such a pretence of authenticity if, as happens later, your Roman narrator is going to allude to Tennyson?
There are further problems with the dating. Again, the messages are mixed. Certainly there are numerous hints that it is psychological time, connecting past and present, reverie and dream, not chronological or historical time that is important in An Imaginary Life: the parallel phrasing which encloses the entire text insists on this: 'I am three or four years old. It is late summer. It is spring. I am six. I am eight. The child is always the same age' (9) and finally 'I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six' (152). On the other hand, if we ask the simple question, When is the novel taking place? the text yields some clear dates - at first sight. Some readers (eg Nettelbeck) take the starting point to be AD8, which Ovid gives as the year of the relegation edict. But if the chronology of the elegies is being followed, it cannot be: it is AD10. Ovid learnt of his relegation while on Elba in the year 8 - probably late in the year, and certainly after March, when he was fifty. He left Rome in December. He delayed en route to Tomis and arrived there only in the late summer or autumn of the following year, AD9. (The fullest and most careful account is still Thibault 11-13).
When the novel opens the time is late spring or early summer, but there is a brief backward look at the winter that has just passed; the first winter of "Ovid's" exile and therefore corresponding to the exilic winter of AD9-10. In that case, the early summer of the opening is that of AD10, and this squares with "Ovid's" early statement (17) that 'for nearly a year now' he has heard no Latin. That could be a fair comment, with a little pardonable exaggeration, if he arrived in, say, the September of AD9. The biographies of both Ovids are in step here, and they continue to be so in many details. The passage of time is cued by seasonal markers ('another spring'; 'it is winter again'). This imitates the method Ovid himself uses; for example, 'I feel the snow melted by the spring sun' (Tristia 3.12) and 'I am fighting with cold, arrows and my own fate in a wearying fourth winter' (Epistulae 1.2) Despite the dreamlike tone and recourse to flashbacks strict temporal sequence is maintained. For example, the winter incursion of the fera gens across the frozen Danube appears to be synchronous with Ovid's account, which is datable to the second winter of exile, the close of AD10. The capture of the Child occurs in the autumn of AD13 and his slow education continues over the summer of the following year. No time is elided - four complete years pass after "Ovid's" arrival and he dies in the spring of the fifth year, corresponding to AD14; that is, about the time of the historical Ovid's 56th birthday.
But for all that, the mimetic frame shows gaps at the joints when we look closer. There are difficulties with "Ovid's" unambiguous statement that 'I am not yet fifty' (39) at a point which is still clearly the later summer of the first year of his arrival, corresponding to AD10. We infer that he is forty-nine, in fact, because of his further assertion during the winter of the same year, 10-11, that 'here I was, aged fifty' (55) standing guard during the Dacian raids. If these remarks are taken literally, then "Ovid's" birthday cannot correspond to the historical Ovid's, since that fell in March. What is more, since Ovid's birth date was 20 March 43BC, he was rather older than Malouf's "Ovid": fifty-two in his first summer of exile at Tomis and approaching fifty-three at the end of the winter of the raids. Even if we take another tack and put aside the recognised exilic dates, and assume only "Ovid's" birth date as being historical (remembering that Malouf specifically cites this as one of the few things known for sure) then if his hero is 'not yet fifty', the first summer of exile must correspond to mid-AD7, and the action runs on until the spring of AD12 in an alternative, entirely fictional, universe. Yet even in an imaginary world (unless it is an imaginary antipodean world!) a man born in March cannot be 'not yet fifty' in the summer and 'aged fifty' in the winter of the same year. Nor, of course, did Ovid's life end like his fictional counterpart's in the spring of AD14. He lived on for another three years or so; certainly past the winter of AD15-16, since the last poems were not written earlier than that. There is no way of resolving these various statements. We conclude that Malouf has deliberately blurred the dates to produce an effect of being brightly historical and allegorical at the same time. The intent must be to invoke a state of uncertainty in the reader. An Imaginary Life neither respects the chronology of its sources, nor lodges its fiction within the interstices of Ovid's biographical record, nor abandons history altogether. It remains simply undecidable. It is evasively precise and precisely evasive.
3.
Can there be an aesthetic justification for these discomfiting departures from apparently historical sources? Or is this an example of what the novelist Maggie Gee has referred to as a propensity among post-modern novelists for 'briefly sucking on the fruit of history, and then throwing it away'; that is, for practicing the 'fictional asset-stripping of real life' because they are too idle to make things up any more? (10) Surely not. Gareth Griffiths was the first to notice some of the surreal and ahistorical features in An Imaginary Life: his explanation is that it is a 'post-colonial' work breaking down the 'space-time coordinates of a contemporary European physics' (140). I suggest that there is no need to invoke physics, of a 'European' brand, whatever that may be, or any other. Rather, Malouf has exploited some of the intrinsic features of the fictive autobiography itself - a mode, we can now see more clearly, encompasses both An Imaginary Life and Ovid's poems.
In an important way, informed readers cannot read the same An Imaginary Life today as they did twenty years ago. For in between has come a mass of scholarship stressing the fictiveness, the dissimulation and the inexpugnable literariness of Ovid's last poetry. Some historians and editors do continue to insist that Ovid supplies trustworthy, detailed information about life on the edge of the Empire and indeed was a good foreign correspondent to Rome (Batty, Syme, Green); but at the other extreme Fitton Brown has made a spirited case for Ovid's exile being only a fictional contrivance. It is part of such radical skepticism to urge the futility of trying to read out biography from the exilic poems, Ovid having vanished irrecoverably into the texts. Over the same period, fresh insights into the nature of autobiography have tended in the same direction, stemming from de Man's seminal paper (published just one year after Malouf, interestingly) that 'autobiography, then, is not a genre or mode, but a figure of reading . . . all texts are autobiographical . . . [yet] none of them is or can be. . . . The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge - it does not - but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalisation . . . of all textual systems' (921-2). Insights like this have been applied with devastating effect to the exilic poems, especially by Claassen in 1988, who closed her paper with these words: He has converted the exile of a Roman aristocrat . . . into an heroic state. . . . The myth of exile must be accepted in its entirety, as a more lasting reality than mere historic 'fact'. . . . The myth consists of a series of mutually exclusive but equally valid paradoxes, all part of a world where everything is possible, except the ending of exile.' (168)
She speaks of Ovid, of course; but how well they refer to Malouf's creation! Since then, Gareth Williams has so thoroughly deconstructed the apparently realistic details of life in Tomis, finding that they are assembled from a set of literary allusions and large pathetic fallacies, that there is nothing left over at all. Indeed, Williams probably would not cavil at the extreme formulation that Malouf's "Ovid" is not a whit more, or less, real than the persona Ovid is. Their epistemological status is identical.
If we see Malouf as echoing and bouncing one text against another text which is fundamentally like it, we are more willing to see that his method is not to copy his source, or to ignore it, but to engage in a creative interplay with it. Many of the most memorable details of An Imaginary Life result from this interplay. There is the garden, for instance, that "Ovid" starts to make at Tomis, laying claim to the soil ('I push [seeds] into the earth with a grimy forefinger and they sprout. I have begun to make, simple as it is, a garden' [64]). Clearly this echoes the verse letter to Severus (Epistulae 1.8) where Ovid laments his lack of a garden: how can he make one when he is cooped up in the town with only a wall between him and the marauders? Ovid's garden is also a metaphor for creative decay, for elsewhere he associates his poor verse with the fact that 'we are not writing in our garden, as we used to do' (Tristia 1.11). By contrast "Ovid" inverts the metaphor, making it optimistic, not despairing: his garden is a stage on the road to metamorphosis, a personally creative act: 'flower pots are as subversive here as my poems were in Rome. They are the beginning, the first of the changes' (67). It is not poems that he is making, but himself. Even the Child himself, the most daringly intrusive feature of the novel, reworks a trope Ovid uses more than once. Unlike "Ovid", who barely mentions Rome, Ovid is obsessed with mental travel. In Tristia 1.1 he fondly envisions his latest book, his child and surrogate, doing the rounds of Rome. The book is unkempt and dishevelled, because the accused in Roman courts dressed their children in mourning to silently plead for them. The Child, ugly, feral and mute, is comparable but very different. Magically, he becomes the mentor leading "Ovid" not to Rome but to enlightenment and ecstatic death.
The most surprising instance of intertextuality comes as "Ovid" plans to escape into the steppes with the Child. He reflects: 'I am going out now into the unknown . . . and am, I believe, following the clear path of my fate. Always to be pushing out like this, beyond what I know cannot be the limits - what else should a man's life be? . . . Especially an old man . . . . What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?' (135). The submerged allusion is obviously, as Indyk first noted, to Tennyson's monologue 'Ulysses' (1833), where the aged hero, an 'idle king' no longer really wanted in Ithaca, determines on one last exploration with his men 'beyond the sunset':
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
What is not so obvious is that this is far from being a random allusion. It is a rendition of the point, at Tristia 1.5, where Ovid makes an extended comparison of his own dismal late career with Ulysses'. Having listed all the ways in which his fate is even worse than Ulysses', he closes with an indignant and proud assertion of biographical reality versus fictionality:
adde, quod illius pars maxima ficta laborum,
ponitur in nostris fabula nulla malis.
[And what's more, most of his labours were fictitious; there is nothing imaginary about my troubles].
So Ovid cites Homer and "Ovid" alludes to Tennyson. Both compare themselves to Ulysses. Ovid stresses Ulysses' deeds, his heroism, but for the sole purpose of denigrating them as pars maxima ficta. Apparently his purpose is to force a space between biography and fiction - or is it an ironic tease? "Ovid's" attitude to Tennyson's Ulysses is quite different: one fictional reconstruction merges with another. We never suspect "Ovid" of irony and, after the pseudo-autobiographical opening, he never once urges the truth of his tale. Why should he? The 'truth' of the novel is the truth of deliberately contrived myth.
So, finally, is it possible to resolve the issue of why An Imaginary Life does not cleanly cut itself off from the exilic chronology altogether? Why it is left sticking half in, and half out of history; or - if one prefers - another text? I suggest that Malouf was able to gain one great final advantage by tying the chronology of his narrative into the accepted Ovidian record. One of the most distinctive features of his hero is that he speculates constantly that he is living on the threshold of some millennial event. This is not, in itself, ahistorical, for the first century AD was the great period of the mystery religions, when the cults of Orphism, Isis and the Magna Mater flourished and blended. Malouf himself has said that he set his narrative 'in an age, the dawn of the Christian era, in which mysterious forces were felt to be at work' (154). There is no evidence that Ovid, the skeptic and professed atheist, was involved with these cults; still less that he thought of himself as living in any way on a hinge of history. For "Ovid", though, it is a different story. At several points he has chiliastic visions. Ovid calls himself vates [poet-seer], but his prophecies are usually read as ironical. "Ovid's" vatic powers, on the other hand, are much more powerful and suggestive. Mysteriously, he is somehow aware of a 'god who has begun to stir in our depths' (18). He knows that a millennium has just turned, and he is living 'between two cycles'; an old one belonging to the old gods, that 'shudders to its end' and a new one 'that will come to its crisis at some far point in the future I can barely conceive of' (19). The new cycle must be none other than the birth and rise of Christianity, and its symbolic representative is the feral Child.
We first hear of the Child by report, as 'a boy of ten or so, a wild boy, who lives with the deer' (47) and soon after "Ovid" catches a glimpse of him: 'a small boy as lean as a stick' (49) in what is, putatively, the autumn of the year 10. In the autumn of the next year as "Ovid" accompanies the deer-hunting party, there is no sighting: 'I am crazy with disappointment' (57). Just a year later, comes another sighting, and Ovid reports him as 'an ugly boy of eleven or twelve, 'standing quite still and taller after these two years' (59). He is captured in the autumn of the next year, AD13. It cannot be accidental that the Child is just of an age with the Christian era; we are reminded of another birth, and another kind of exile which has taken place at the same date, according to the conventional, pietistic dating, far to the south-east. There are plenty of hints implying the divinity of the Child. 'Is he, in fact, as the villagers thought (their view was always simpler than mine, and perhaps therefore nearer the truth) some foundling of the gods?' (150) muses "Ovid". There is the Word that "Ovid" encounters waking from his dream in his early days at Tomis:
I woke, cried out. And the word I uttered was not in my own tongue. . . . If I could recall that sound, and speak the word again, I think I would know what it is I have named, what it is that I have encountered. What it is out there that is waiting to receive me' (25).
At one level this is a precognitive vision of the Child crying out his first Getic word from the depths of his fever. It is 'quite an ordinary word, and has no significance' (118) but it opens him up to a charge of soul-stealing, and therefore to mortal danger. We are reminded inevitably of the opening pronouncement of St John's gospel, that 'In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God'. Identifying the Child with the logos, the first and ultimate creative principle, is singularly appropriate in a novel where language - language lost and found - is so central. Furthermore, the thing 'out there that is waiting to receive me' is the final vision of the Child as he appears to the dying "Ovid": 'He is walking on the water's light. And as I watch, he takes the first step off it, moving slowly away now into the deepest distance, above the earth, above the water, on air' (152). While this may be read as the last and most effective of the covert allusions to Australian landscapes - the distorting heat hazes and mirages, via a glance at Voss - it surely also merges a proleptic vision of the Gospel miracles and the Ascension as they appear in Christian iconography, with the vanishing into myth of both "Ovid" and the Child.
Of course, the symbolism is not overtly or exclusively Christian. Malouf's Child is polysemic. He is the pre-Oedipal "Ovid" himself and his imaginary playmate, the puer aeternus of Jungian archetype, a Man Friday, a Pan figure, the partner in exile, an avatar, a twin, a son, a lover. This final appeal to historicity is surely an attempt to introduce yet another layer of symbolism. Whether it is successful or not is a moot point: it does make for a rather vaguely portentous mixture of nature mysticism, transcendental humanism, Christian eschatology and apocalyptic revelation. Ultimately, though, we can see that these ploys and manipulations open up an imaginative space which Malouf fills with all those oppositions of which he is master, and which makes his work so richly rewarding: dream and reality; nature and culture; human and the nonhuman; history and myth, metamorphosis and stasis; and most of all, what can be known and what must be created by vital imaginative energy.
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