INVENTING (UN)TRANSLATABLE PALIMPSESTS OF EXILIC IDENTITY IN DAVID MALOUF'S AN IMAGINARY LIFE

ALEXANDRU DRAGOS IVANA

 

This essay was conceived to be a "not-so-straight" textual analysis of Malouf's novel, but, as the title points out, a palimpsestic reading of Australia supported by critical theory.

I understand the term 'palimpsest'[1] as an equivalent of metaphor ('to carry beyond'), as an imaginary kind of writing or thinking in an exilic space, and as a process of becoming impregnated with a hybridised identity after long attempts to mentally design and mould the landscape of the Other.

I shall also dwell on the idea of the palimpsest-child (both with small and capital c) as the embodiment both of the exiled narrator Ovid and the Australian mindscape permanently constructed on its counterpart with small c. This goes hand in hand with Malouf's extraordinary style which, in a very postmodern way of writing fiction, is suffused with fragments of interior monologue, on the one hand, (constructing identity) and, on the other, with the literary (fictional) facts as such in the given context (the small village with one hundred huts). Both create a double-layered reading in which the flow of events trigger Ovid's obsession with the Child in a mirroring effect or by means of the téchnique fondue that discloses the Latin poet's persona ("I might be three or four years old"[2]) and/or original identity and the presence of the Child by means of whom remembrance, prelapsarian language, communication and exilic identity come into being.

An Imaginary Life starts as an untranslatable palimpsest. The child, symbol of the Other nation, i.e. Australia as well as Ovid's native country, best expresses the condition of an exiled poet who carries with him the mysterious, unknown language the Getae cannot decode. "Playing under the olives at the edge of our farm" subtly sends to the new blank land Noah reaches after the Deluge. It is, in Derridean terms, the supplement, which changes continuously, shaped according to the poet's instability when he thinks of the wild Child he finally comes across in the woods. It is the hypotext[3] (the genuine child Ovid who meets Child-Australia) taken for hypertext (Ovid's remembrances of his brother and father and of Rome in the world of the Getae where the headman may pass for his adoptive father) understood as unheimlich in the end (the familiar and the unfamiliar, at the same time), when the poet learns the Getae's language, assimilates the landscape within his soul, tames it (the Child) and inscribes its identity through writing. In the long run, when everything has been translated in his own mind, included in the uncanny scenery, he cannot grasp the real meaning of the Child. That is why supplements must fill the gaps:

Sometime when my own body began to change and I discovered the first signs of manhood upon me, the child left and did not reappear, though I dreamt of him often enough in those early years, and have done so since. I have forgotten the language we used, and if he were to reappear, perhaps we could no longer communicate. Did he have some message for me then? If so, he failed to deliver it. Or did so and it has slipped my mind. Or the language he used on whatever occasion has already passed my understanding and could not be translated into daily speech.[4]

The "un-translated" palimpsest ("could not be translated into daily speech") actually translates Ovid's exile in the antipodean land. It is a cultural and symbolic perspective that tries to transcend what is typical in order to grasp what is arche-typical. Exiled in Tomis and rendered "dumb"[5], Ovid speaks and writes to restore his identity, seeking recognition of his own sense of the self in the mirror image of the Child and thereby providing imaginary unity and continuity to an inherently alienated self. All writing/speaking is in this sense "autobiographic": a writing/speaking of the self. But we also speak/write because we suffer from desire, seeking plenitude and presence; for the potentially endless movement from one signifier to another (the palimpsest) is desire resulting from lack, words that mean only by virtue of the absence of the words and the absence of the Real objects that signs designate.[6]

It is desire that lures Ovid to "fill his mind with perspectives" traced back to his Roman nation, but the dark barbaric land hinders him from deciphering the concrete signifiers and then palimpsestic imagination turns up:

At night I discover in sleep what the simple daylight blinds me to: that the dark side of every object here, and even more, the landscape itself when night shadows flow over it, is a vast page whose signs I am unable to decipher, whose message to me I am unable to interpret.[7]

The private language, in Lacanian terms, isolates the subject from the Real, restricting it forever to the realm of imagination. When he passes through the "defiles" of signification, it is reduced to the status of a signifier in the field of the Other. The previous passage stands for the unconscious, the discourse of the Other in another land. Ovid's desires are those of an already constituted social order, namely the Roman one, with laws, patriotism and civic virtues. If there are not any in the new land, their construction on an imaginary, though ex-realistic, Roman basis is possible:

We are free at last to believe in ourselves. Since there are no rules, we must take some. Let them be absurd! Since there are no more restrictions, we invent them. May they be perverse![8]

The pretext of the poet's exile condition is again a home dangerous palimpsest. At the same time when Augustus created his "solemn, orderly, monumental, dull" age[9], Ovid forged his own too, "coterminus with his", having its existence "in the lives and loves of its subjects. It is gay, anarchic, ephemeral and it is fun. He hates me for it."[10] It is the poet's palimpsest charged with the parody of the Augustan regime as a means of escape which turns into exile right home. His 'age' is nothing but an ironic gay repetition of the denial of the original text. In Tomis, the no longer "ephemeral" state of things will become a painful and utopian quest of identity by evoking the child (his projection) within the Child (new land) in an effort to reconstruct the past according to the aim of the present. Thus, the transparent palimpsest appears in Tomis when Ovid digs to discover and translate his original being, the archetype of Jesus who wrote in the sand, as the desire for identity is badly needed:

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 to me 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.

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.[11]

The hypothetical choice of being compared to the one of meaning forces the subject to disappear, fade, to fall into non-meaning, to take up a place outside and beyond the Symbolic Order, which is no place at all.[12] Hence, identity is being constantly reconstructed; it is a moment in a process forever subjected to fragmentation. Always alienated and constrained, identity is "articulated" through discourse. The alienated subject is repressed through the very process by which, in receiving a name and its substitution rules (possibly the status of a child with small c), is transformed into a representation of itself. In this regard, Ovid speaks to the unknown reader from another century in written form, more exactly in an apocryphal letter whose meaning must be revealed by the latter, tries to listen to the spiders' language in which he wants to write The New Metamorphoses of the Poet Ovid in his Exile, in the Spiders' Tongue.

It is the persona of the poet who, in the great chain of being, a palimpsest of creatures with man on top, lowers down his condition to be part of the left supplemented places the spider's web embodies. Moreover, it is the perfect example of innocent, unwritten code of childhood that Ovid wants to adopt, a palimpsest in stricto sensu whose first black ink becomes a blank one:

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.

Must it all be like this from now on? Will I have to learn everything all over again like a child? Discovering the world as a small child does, through the senses, but with all things deprived of the special magic of their names in my own tongue?[13]

In the blank desolate land, the poet's shout plays the role of an echo effect, which translates the desperate palimpsest of his origins. He lies "at the end of the earth"[14], where "Nothing begins" [15] and shouting becomes the purest way of oral expression rather than the written one, of representing and creating the landscape, the space of renovatio placed over this land of damnation in which one can achieve the position of the Nietzschean Overman, populating it imaginatively and turning it into an earthly Paradise imbued with pantheism.

The Romantic view prefigured in the end of Part I by the presence of the scarlet poppy, "flower of my far-off childhood" is an instance of translating the original landscape into exile according to the Romantic poietic mind that creates the world through words. The poppy celebrates Ovid's sense of anamnesis and ecstasis, a palimpsest of recollections, reflections and representation in this "unmade earth" where "Nothing happens"[16]:

Poppy, you have saved me, you have recovered the earth for me. I know how to work the spring.[17]

The second stage of the process of inventing and acquiring a new identity, otherwise the most substantial, dwells on the Child’s presence which carries the two meanings already mentioned.  The well-known story told by the old man sounds similar to what the poet had heard in his childhood. "It is the tune that I recognize"[18], a homophony emerging from the obsession of the Child caught in the woods during a hunting party led by the headman. The prints of his feet inscribed in the earth represent an excellent proof, together with the previous one, of a castrated memory revitalised by the shaman's rituals, the legends and fables of Rome whose marks of national identity are illustrated by Romulus and Remus, hypotexts of the wild boy who succours Ovid to be part of the exilic space.

Taking care of the child and narrativising every detail of his self metamorphosis in his journal, Ovid gradually starts to become aware of the Getae's language and environment. Here we have a blunt indication of a palimpsest, namely the parchment written in blank ink. Writing is the means which unites the poet and the Child. The latter becomes civilised according to a Barthesian statement that written cultures are the civilised ones. Now Australia may be read as a real civilised space that receives the quality of a signifier, accounting for the very translated palimpsest whose writing has been put down on Ovid's roll by the Child's [(m)other] tongue:

Yesterday, while I was out of the room briefly, he must have touched my writing materials. The ink was spilled. I sopped it up without giving any indication that I knew he had been tampering with things; refilled the pot; found my place in the roll. And almost burst out laughing to see that his tongue was blue.[19]

To speak in Lacanian terms, the notion of childhood "ideology" presupposes imagination because it gives the subject an unconscious desire for coherence, an image that allows the subject to be constructed through identification (i.e. with the Child). The permanent play between absence and presence constitutes Ovid (cf. Cameron) as a desiring object and text as a structure of desire. Hence, the possible extrapolation of what I call a reversed palimpsest, from the Child to child Ovid:

For some reason, in these long hours of sitting with the Child, watching him move slowly out of himself, trying to imagine myself into his skin so that I will discover how it is I must lead him into his lost childhood, I have found myself more and more often slipping back into my own childhood.[20] (…)

And where is he leading me, since I know at last that it is he who is the leader, he now who is inducting me into the mysteries of a world I have never for a moment understood.[21]

Narrativising the past is in fact a repetition, the result of a previous interpretation, the work of the repressed unconscious brought to light by the Child, what Freud called the dream work that, having already taken place, has produced the representation of a dream thought: "I know where I was born".[22] This time the palimpsest is an entirely translated one and the past remains forgotten and unseen:

The language I shall teach the Child is the language of these people I have come among, and not after all my own.[23]

Ovid's hybridised identity and the Child's genuine one are depicted in a mise-en-abîme paragraph that professes the neverending beginning of the superior creatures in the great chain of being that build incessantly a multi-layered constitution of their existence, briefly a(n) (un)translated palimpsestic one:

 What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours…[24]

In the end, we witness Ovid's metamorphosis into landscape itself. Imagination points out once more the human being's capacity as an exile to find shelter in the heart of the very uncanny place he was forced to settle. It is an indication of metaphysical accomplishment, on the one hand, whereas on the other, a sign of Ovid's palimpsest as a human being newly deposited on the surface of the blank land now invested with meaning. It is the reiteration of the myth of eternal return to the beginnings, to the innocent age in a foreign place discovered by means of traces of his living in Rome.

Part of the ugly uncongenial Tomis at first, metaphor of the Australian land at the same time, Ovid can pass away in tranquility. He is buried in an empty land which finally acquires an existential translatable meaning. Ovid leaves the continent of antipodes and ascends to the infinite sky in order to find his immortal essence as a god who created the poetic geographic and cultural place in his mind, governing it from above, as it happened in the legendary, fabulous, mythological times of the Ur-world translated by narratives and supplements of cultural identity.

 

PALIMPSESTE (IN)TRADUCTIBILE ALE IDENTITATII DOBÂNDITE

ÎN EXIL ÎN DAVID MALOUF, AN IMAGINARY LIFE

Rezumat 

Articolul de fata propune o lectura în palimpsest a tarâmului de la antipozi, perceput ca impregnat de o identitate hibrida, dobândita în urma unor încercari de reprezentare mentala si de modelare a Celuilalt. 

Lucrarea pune problema copilului-palimpsest, înteles atât ca narrator exilat, Ovidiu, cât si ca tipar de gândire a spatiului australian, permanent suprapus peste omologul sau, scris cu „c” mic. Totodata, analiza pune în discutie si stilul, tipic postmodern, adoptat de David Malouf, întesat de fragmente de monolog interior, pe de o parte (constructia identitatii) si, pe de alta, de fapte literare (fictionale) petrecute într-un context dat, i.e. micul sat cu o suta de colibe. Ambele duc la o dubla lectura, în palimpsest, în care sirul evenimentelor declanseaza obsesia lui Ovidiu fata de Copil (Australia), prin intermediul asa-numitei téchnique fondue, care dezvaluie persona poetului latin si/sau identitatea originala, precum si prezenta Copilului care face posibila rememorarea, limba „primordiala”, comunicarea si identitatea dobândita în exil. 

REFERENCES

1.  CAMERON, BARRY, "Lacan: Implications of Psychoanalysis and Canadian Discourse", in Future Indicative. Literary Theory and Canadian Literature, John Moss (ed.), University of Ottawa Press, 1984.

2.  EASTHOPE, ANTHONY, The Unconscious, London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

3.  GENETTE, GERARD, Palimpsestes, Paris: Seuil, 1982.

4.  MALOUF, DAVID, An Imaginary Life, Sydney: Picador, 1978.