Reading David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life through Lacanian Concepts

Abstract

The novella An Imaginary Life is David Malouf’s fictional retelling of the last stages of the
Roman poet Ovid’s life, which he had to live out in exile for reasons not completely known to
us and which can only be speculated upon since Ovid himself offers no clarification on this
point nor does any historian or chronicler of the times thus offering a writer like Malouf “the
liberty of free invention, since what (he) wanted to write was neither historical novel or
biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event” (153). Something in the “absence of
fact” (Malouf 153) and details about this last stage of Ovid’s life presents Malouf with the most
suitable material to explicate his philosophy of unity of all things, natural and man-made alike,
and present his worldview, which is marked by a sense of harmony between the human and the
natural world, to his readers. In the process of (un)learning that Ovid goes through in his state
of exile in Tomis, at the edge of the known world, he finally learns the truth(s) about human
existence and the ideal which corresponds with it, as Malouf sees it