Malouf / Camus

· In the novel it reveals that in exile Ovid achieves a form of spiritual reconciliation.

· Ovid discovers the wild boy who eventually leads him deeper into the wilderness but paradoxically out of exile

· Exile can be viewed as a creative rupture. It involves the relinquishing of the safe, but largely unconscious world of ‘home’. It is a challenge to reach a fuller sense of belonging. At first exile is experienced with feelings of desolation, homesickness and a yearning to go back to this original sense of belonging.

· The novel parallels Psyche’s initiation into the deeper sense of awareness.

· In the novel, Roman Law is not the highest known authority; running parallel to this patriarchal power is the world of Nature, the mythic realm of the Great Mother.

· The transformation of Ovid from the sophisticated Roman poet who is cynical, world-weary and contemptuous of anything that is not of this world, takes place in the novel in four stages:

1. Thrown into a world where he no longer has status or the power of words (death-like to the poet) he is child-like. It is his imagination (in psychological terms the depth imagination) that needs to be awakened. The conventional gods and patriarchal values and culture are rejected yet dreams of ‘horseman’ and other gods still active but he is unconscious of these. When these dreams come to be articulated in consciousness then a development and a transformation occurs. The mythic and imaginative capacity of the psyche has been activated.

Shown when the flowers burst out - Ovid finds new names: ‘I am Flora, Persephone.’ Ovid renounces previous life: ‘Life has been frivolous’ (40)

2. Ovid then frees himself of his personal family and of its domination of his psyche. Recalls the rejection of his father for his brother (47).
The wild child can signify the birth of the ‘other self’ or ‘inner man’. This links the boy to the child of his earlier dreams.

3. Ovid accepts his country of exile

4. Connection with the Child and the greater forces in Nature. Finds release by letting go of all his preconceived notions of self. He finds the ‘immensity, the emptiness’ of it all, which once frightened him (p. 96) now ‘feeds the spirit’ (141)

An Imaginary Life

metamorphic imagery 29, 81, 90-98, 116, 129 (Ryzak)
symbolic journey: journey across a vast landscape represents a journey of interior discovery
myth, dream, ritual
theme of transformation
wolf imagery, 18, 150
image of circle
exile
women 100, 128

The novel shows that Ovid’s present life (and the reader?) must revolve around the satisfaction of primal needs. The exercise of the mind must take second place to the need to eat, to find warmth, shelter, protection - in a word, to survive.
theme of loss - family, country and language

Cut off from the self, Ovid must learn to make his self anew.

After acknowledging the full force of society, language and culture as determinants of the self, the novel suggests some other power, beyond all these, from where a natural derives and to which it in the end returns.

Language: 10, 21, 30-31, 65, 90, 94-98, 118, 145

wolf in dream 61, 77

Language

The novel explores the way language constructs our view of the world. Language is not a transparent medium in which we simply name and describe reality, but is influential in constructing our attitudes to the world. Embedded in language are assumptions, hierarchical relationships and values to everything we observe or fail to see.

In An Imaginary Life the narrator is the famous Roman poet, Ovid, a master of language who is exiled into a land where he can no longer communicate through his language. He laments this loss initially, constantly referring to the innate superiority and civilisation within his own language, Latin. The language of the Getae is shown as ‘barbarous, and my own soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken...’ (21). However, he learns that he must be willing to change and be transformed. It is this transformation and self-discovery that is at the core of the novel, and it is language that is the catalyst for his initial change. Moreover it is his exile in a land where he can no longer accept the world on his own terms that has made him re-see the world and evidenced when he sees the scarlet poppy: ‘Poppy, you have saved me.... All my life till now has been wasted. I had to enter the silence to find a password that would release me from my own life. (32)

Learning the language of the Getae is the next step that helps Ovid in seeing the world differently. He acknowledges that he has changed - ‘What a different self has begun to emerge in me!’(65). He had always held himself above the Getae, believing them barbarians, but he soon realises that it is himself and his frivolous life before that lacked meaning. Latin is now seen as discriminatory, a language ‘whose endings are designed to express difference’ 65, instead the Getic language presents a new world to Ovid: ‘what it presents is the raw life and unity of things. Seeing the world through this other tongue I see if differently. It is a different world. Somehow it seems closer to the first principle of creation, closer to whatever force it is that makes things what they are ..’ (65)

It is this rawness of life and unity that Ovid mores towards in his journey. He transcends his old self, the one that was once famous and civilised, that he now realises was an ignorant, materialistic way of living life, and this could never be achieved until he is sent into exile and needs to learn the world anew, using the language of the Getae.

The title of the novel suggests it is the imagination that is essential to free oneself. ‘We are bound not by the laws of our nature but by the ways we can imagine ourselves breaking out of those laws.’(67) One of the ways of connecting with the imagination, or the spirit, is first to free ourselves from the world that is a linguistic construct, however it is just another step. Ovid needs to regain the language that he and the child spoke when he was a young boy in Sulmo. This earlier language was one that went beyond words. It is this move towards silence that the novel traces.

The novel investigates this language by exploring the way the Child communicates. His idea of the self is quite different to Ovid. The notion of the self outside the external reality is suggested to be a construct of our society and language. We see ourselves as individuals who displace air and move separately form the universe, yet in the Child’s world he seems to be a part of Nature and the universe.

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p. 67
Despite the rhetoric of freedom, the claims that we are individuals in control of our destinies, we are still controlled by all those socially constructed ways of seeing the self and the world around us. We are not free as we are living out the narratives of identity that are tied to gender, nation, race, class. Malouf is suggesting by Ovid’s comment ‘We are bound both by the laws of our nature but by the ways we can imagine ourselves breaking out of those laws’, that it is the imagination that will allow us to transcend these constructs, to find something within that is in essence the self stripped clean of these restraints.

At no time in the novel does Malouf clearly define what he means by imagination (it is a novel after all) but his beliefs are clearly predicated upon the existence of a ‘deep self’; an inner spirituality that might be lost in a world consumed by materialism yet can be woken if taken out of this world where the self is left to re-examine the very essence of their being; that social conditioning can be transcended; and the belief that Nature is a source of this awakening.

The representation of Nature is based on assumptions that privilege Nature as a life-force rather than a static setting. This representation also colludes with an ideology that constructs humans as individuals who can only find fulfilment by leaving the city and facing their fears and themselves in an environment that in itself is imbued with values that support the individual who can find meaning by being confronted with the supernatural power of Nature.

The novel acknowledges the force of scoiety, language and culture as determinants of self, yet beyond this is a natural source from which our true self derives.

Research

Ovid
Persephone
Psyche (myth)
Metamorphosis (Ovid’s book)
Exile
Myth
How does language shape reality?

Myth
How does language shape reality?
‘All my life till now has been wasted. I had to enter the silence to find a password that would release me from my own life.’ (32)

‘Our bodies are not final.’ (29)

‘We are bound not by the laws of our nature but by the ways we can imagine ourselves breaking out of those laws.’(67)

‘Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in.’ (96)

‘Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We have only to find the spring and release it.’ (64)

‘What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings ... ‘ (135)

‘what it presents is the raw life and unity of things. Seeing the world through this other tongue I see if differently. It is a different world. Somehow it seems closer to the first principle of creation, closer to whatever force it is that makes things what they are ..’ (65)

Year 11 Literature Assignment An Imaginary Life 2001

1. ‘Language is not a transparent medium in which we simply name and describe reality, but is influential in constructing our attitudes to the world.’ Discuss this idea in relation to the novel.

2. ‘What 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 ...’ Discuss what is meant by this quotation with close reference to the novel.

3.Discuss the significance of symbolism or narrative point of view or setting to your understanding of the novel.

4. It is interesting to notice the way cultural identity is constructed in the novel: the sophisticated Roman civilisation is equated with alienation, while the barbaric Getae are seen to be more in harmony with themselves and Nature.’ Discuss if you agree with this assessment of the novel by investigating the construction of cultural identity in An Imaginary Life.

Year 11 Literature Cross Level An Imaginary Life

1. ‘Our further selves are contained withiin us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree.’ Discuss the novel in the light of this quotation.

or

2. The novel is a symbolic journey from the constricting world of comfort and knowledge to the wonder and freedom of shedding everything.’ Discuss An Imaginary Life in the light of this comment.

Year 11 Literature Cross Level An Imaginary Life 2001

1. ‘From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity’ (Edvard Munch). Discuss the novel in the light of this quotation.

or

2. An Imaginary Life is a novel that traces Ovid’s passage from alienated Roman poet in exile to spiritual and psychological wholeness. Discuss with close reference to the novel.

Year 11 Literature Cross Level An Imaginary Life 2002

‘It it only those who get lost in the forest or walk in heat haze of desert who learn who they are, who learn that the wilderness is not separate.’ Discuss this quotation in relation to the main ideas explored in An Imaginary Life.

Year 11 Literature Assignment An Imaginary Life 2002

1. Discuss how the narrative point of view or symbolism or setting contributes to a reader’s understanding of many of the central concerns in An Imaginary Life.

2. ‘Language is never neutral but carries within it, within the cultural meanings embedded, a way of seeing the world.’ Discuss this statement with close reference to the novel.

3. The novel is yet another self-discovery narrative where the protagonist comes to a greater understanding of his place in the world. Do you agree that it should be dismissed as lightly as this or does the novel achieve something greater? Discuss with close reference to the novel.

4. ‘We are free to transcend ourselves. If we have the imagination for it.’ Discuss the novel main ideas in reference to this quotation.

‘Meursault is a monster’. Discuss.

Some critics may believe that Meursault’s callous indifference to the lives around him make him inhuman and, in turn, a monster. The shooting of another human being and showing no sign of remorse may also be seen as evidence of his monstrous nature, yet the novel clearly shows that this man is honest in all his dealings with the world. The novel also goes to great lengths to reveal the hypocrisy that exist in society, showing that people act more out of appearances and what society expects to act than ever being true to themselves.

It is true that Meursault is guilty of murder and if this makes a monster then Meursault can be classified as a monster. However, the society that condemns him as a monster do so not for this act, but because he fails to behave within the socially prescribed roles of grieved son at his mother’s funeral, obeying a period of mourning and not taking out a girl to a comedy and having sex the following day, and for his general refusal to ‘play the game’. This last point entails showing respect for authority, showing remorse for actions that society deems bad, and in believing in God, or at least saying you believe.

The Outsider

The Outsider questions the attitudes and assumptions of Western morality systems. In particular it explores and in turn undermines Western notions of love, God, honesty, judicial systems and truth.

Meursault is sentenced to death more for his unwillingness to show remorse for the killing, for not crying at his mother’s funeral, for watching a Fernandel film and sleeping with a girl on the day following his mother’s death, for not believing in God and failing to make up excuses for the shooting. In short he is condemned for not ‘playing the game’. Camus clearly criticises the hypocritical and duplicitious nature of society by revealing the absurd logic upon which the law court operates while apparently presuming its procedures rational, logical and fair. The ‘game’ in one way is not seen as a game by many people. It is their system of ethics, beliefs and ways of behaving and understanding the world. This can also be explained as the ideology operating in Western society, where people have internalised these beliefs so that they are natural and right.

It is this very value system which is criticised as Camus foregrounds the assumptions underlying these beliefs. Honesty and truth are espoused as cornerstones of Christianity and the law courts, yet it is shown that total honesty is not valued. It is easy to put across a facade of concern, sympathy and regret and it is this outer image that determines how a person is judged. Meursault refuses to do it, not for any ethical or philosophical reason but because that is how he feels and act. Meursault is not consciously being an existentialist, he would probably refute acting according to any philosophy, however he is used by Camus to put across the existentialist view.

Meursault does not cry at his mother’s funeral and openly says that he is not distraught; the most he can say is that ‘The only thing I could say for certain was that I’d rather she hadn’t died.’ It is this type of honesty that makes him appear inhuman in the eyes of other people and the first step in being labelled a ‘monster’. Considering he was not truly close to his mother and she had lived a long life this does not seem too callous, however society demands that an individual show emotion and feel saddened by the loss of a mother. It is the values of society that constructs role that should be followed, rather than acting as you honestly feel. Meursault’s subsequent visit to a Fernandel film and his sexual liasion with Marie on the night after his mother’s death are also castigated and labelled the actions of an insensitive monster. For a society that values logic and reason in judging people this seems absurd as these events are independent to the later murder, but the law courts use this as damning evidence. Society believes that there is cause-effect relationship in every action, and that there is a motive. However, Camus clearly shows that this logic does not really govern people’s lives. The reasons for things cannot always be neatly explained. When asked for the reason for the murder Meursault cannot give a clear, logical reason as it just happened, however when forced he says it was the ‘sun’. This appears absurd to the court which demands human motives such as jealousy, hatred, self-gain or at least self-defense. Meursault could have easily pretended other attenuating circumstances and exaggerated the threat that the Arab posed, but these were not the real reasons, so he can only remember the oppressive heat of the sun and something that made him act like that at that moment. This type of honesty is unacceptable to the court and gives them more reason to label him a danger to society.

The text celebrates the actions of Meursault in regard to his refusal to conform to society’s values. The actual murder of the Arab is not supported, but it is shown as an action that may just happen if one is put in those circumstances. It is his honesty and his unwillingness to lie or pretend something that he does not truly feel that is shown as admirable. Had he broken down and said he believed in God or shown remorse and created reasons for the murder he would have been saved, however he remains firm to ‘his’ truth throughout (which is existential authenticity) till finally in an outburst caused by the chaplain he articulates his way of life.

Throughout the novel the line ‘It doesn’t really matter’ recurs numerous times. It refers to his life after his mother’s death, the idea of love and choice of life. As he says people get ‘used to anything’ and happiness can be achieved either way. This is implied throughout the novel, but in the final scene Meursault articulates this belief as a way of life. He accuses the chaplain of ‘living like a dead man’ and that his certainties meant nothing. Meursault was the one who was sure of his beliefs (‘But I wa sure of myself, sure of everything, surer than he was, sure of my life and sure of the death that was coming to me.’), and had followed his beliefs faithfully throughout his life (like the existential belief that the individual chooses their way of life and lives accordingly). His way of life was outside mainstream values but this didn’t make it less worthwhile, in fact because he lived his life fully and truly it was far better: ‘I’d lived a certain way and I could just as well have lived it in a different way. I’d done this and I hadn’t done that ... So what? ...Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew very well why.’

Meursault is in conflict with society for a numbe rof reassons. The one cnetral evemt that propels him into conflict is his killing of an Arab. However, it is the mothis act per se that results in his punishemnt - itis his values and attitudes to society. He fails to shows that he is a compliant citizen who is willing to obey its ways of behaviour, laws, moral and ethical codes; more importamtly it is his failure to play the game’, his unwillingness to shows remorse and grief. In many ways it is his innate honestly to pretned that these things matter, that there were extenuatung circumstances, psychologiccal explanbations.

Czech

The story from the newsclipping portrays the tragic irony of life - a lost son returns rich to help his family only to be killed by them. It may show the terrible things people are willing to do to be rich and the reasons may be rational: they needed the money, but in the end the whole situation had been governed by chance, an idea repeated through the novel. Meursault says that it was ‘chance’ that he was on the beach at the time, that it was chance that he held the gun, and the same things have determined the son being there, showing the money and deciding not to share his identity immediately. It also shows M’s indifference to the universe in that he says ‘that the traveller had deserved it really and that you should never play around’, as there are so many things that will go against you in life without letting chance intervene more. It also shows his insistence on being honest as the man had not been honest and the result was tragic.