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‘Allowing it to speak out of him’: The Heterobiographies of David Malouf, Antonio Tabucchi and Marguerite Yourcenar

2004; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/ccs.2004.1.3.243

1750-0109

Lucia Boldrini,

Travel Writing and Literature

    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 allowed me the liberty of free invention, since what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event. 1 Thus starts the Afterword of David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, a novel in which the poet Ovid, exiled from Rome, narrates his experience in the border outpost of Tomis, near the delta of the Danube on the Black Sea.'Relegated' among the Getae at the edges of the Empire and 'expelled from the confines of [the] Latin tongue' (IL p. 26), this glittering and cynical poet undergoes a series of changes or metamorphoses.Initially pining for Rome and its sophisticated, complex language, he learns to overcome his hostility towards the barbarous people and their tongue, but when he discovers a wild Child that had been raised by the wolves in the forest and captures him with the intention of teaching him to speak and to be human, he soon realises that he himself has to learn from the Child another language, based not on symbolization and arbitrary convention but on an intuitive identity with things, on becoming the things signified in silence: 'In imitating the birds, he is not, like our mimics, copying something that is outside him [...].He is being the bird.He is allowing it to speak out of him' (IL p. 92); 'my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history prevents my being the sky.It rains and I say, it rains.It thunders and I say, it thunders.The Child is otherwise.I try to think as he must: I am raining, I am thundering' (IL p. 96).After the death of the village's elderly chief, which the villagers blame on the child's