There is throughout Malouf’s work an ambivalence about this
transformational experience. By its very nature the experience is beyond words,
beyond language. I t is incomprehensible other than to the one who experiences it.
This being beyond language must lead to consideration of another of the great
seminal images or motifs that Malouf uses, namely, that of language or words.
I n the early part of An I maginary Life we are told that Ovid’s expertise was
the Latin language and which, initially, at Tomis he was eager to teach the Getic
boy Lullo. Ovid later comes to accept the qualities of the Getic tongue and decides
that this is the language he will teach the Child. However, Ovid becomes
increasingly aware that there is an even far superior language, a non-verbal
language of which the Child is expert:
The true language, I know now, is that speech in silence in which
we first communicated, the Child and I , in the forest, when I was
asleep. I t is the language I used with him in my childhood ... a
language my tongue almost rediscovers and which would, I
believe, reveal the secrets of the universe to me ... I t is some
earlier and more universal language ... a language whose every
syllable is a gesture of reconciliation (Malouf, 1978:97-98).
At the end of the novel Ovid is rediscovering this ‘language of the birds’ a
heavenly or angelic language, one which can only be understood by somebody who
has risen to certain spiritual levels (Chevalier & Gheerbrant, 1969:590), and which
expresses a sort of participation mystique or understanding at a primordial, but at
the same time, sacred level of awareness. This is made clear later in the novel
when Ovid says:
... who is he, this Child, who leads me deeper into the earth,
further from speech even ... he who now is inducting me into the
mysteries of a world I have never for a moment understood.... in
...a kind of conversation that needs no tongue, a perfect
interchange of perceptions, moods, questions, answers, that is as
simple as the weather, is in fact the merest shifting of cloud
shadows over a landscape or over the surface of a pool, as
thoughts melt out of one mind into another, cloud and shadow,
with none of the structures of formal speech (Malouf, 1978:145).
Ovid reveals that his transformation brings a heightened sense of unity with
earth, nature and indeed the whole world; it is surely a description of the state of
participation mystique similar to that described in:
The spirit experiences what the body does but in a different form.
I t does not move along a line with the body, northward, dividing
the grasses’ light. I t expands to become the whole landscape, as
if space itself were its dimensions; filling the whole land from