1Despite the ancient aspect of its narrative world, An Imaginary Life is directly rooted in the imperial and postcolonial contexts of Australia. Being focused on the “re-evaluation and re-imagining of national mythologies” (Nettlebeck 102), the novel is, indeed, a “quest myth for a new culture” (Wearne 155) and a nationalist urge to re-conceptualise communal modes of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. While he reconfigures Ovid’s situation of exile, Malouf focuses on language and psyche in a metonymic study of communal memory. What first appears as a journey to the edges of geography triggers the psychic mood for a journey to the edges of human consciousness in a critical attempt to question western fundamentals of division and boundary in the conception of knowledge and identity. The exploration of inner consciousness rather than national topographies and the privileging of fantasy over fact are, indeed, the literary strategies of Malouf’s critique of persistent Australian filiations to Europe and the grounds of his alternative vision. In what follows, I propose to study the evolution of Malouf’s protagonist in An Imaginary Life in the light of the Lacanian theory of ego formation, and examine its implications for a postcolonial critique of imperial legacies in Australia. The novel polarises adulthood and childhood, language and silence, the cultured and the innate consciousnesses; its tropological grounds seem to ally the unboundedness of the Lacanian ‘imaginary’ with a conception of the natural and indigenous ‘horizon’ in the white Australian maps of settlement. The first part moves on from a consideration of Malouf’s reworking of the theme of colonial exile and cartography to a study of Ovid’s psychic and linguistic evolution. The second part explains the way Malouf’s illumination of the linguistic and psychic dynamics of individual consciousness reinforces a radical critique of imperial epistemology. The essay concludes by evaluating Malouf’s postcolonial interventions by questioning his project of transcendence and metamorphosis in the light of the novel’s provisional and inconclusive ending.

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2The re-thinking of the notion of exile is at the heart of Malouf’s critique of Australian myths of exploration and settlement. By unveiling the way those myths reinforce the divorce of human consciousness from the spirit of the landscape, he transfers the affective bonds of exile from the realm of culture to that of nature. Ovid allegorises the ‘cultured’ consciousness of individuals and communities; his experience goes beyond a confirmation of the pains of cultural loss towards the discovery of a more fundamental exile from the spirit of nature. In this context, Heather Wearne argues that Malouf reverses the discourse of colonial exile by creating a vision of harmony between Man and the natural landscape (Wearne 154). However, the strategy of reversal operates in An Imaginary Life as a means of de-mystification and a trigger of transformation; it has, in this sense, to be dissociated from romantic mythologies of noble savagery and paradisiac simplicity. Malouf presents a far deeper vision than that which frames the discourses of imperial ‘condescension’ and assimilation since the process of ‘awakening’ that his protagonist goes through serves to debunk and transcend such mythologies. Indeed, An imaginary Life operates inside conventional frameworks, but its logic and teleology strains towards a realm outside or beyond them: the figure of Ovid builds up the allegory of a settler colonial experience of alienation since his feeling of physical and cultural displacement is pitted against a landscape of colonial emptiness and primitivism, yet the allegorical set of the story gradually breaks down as the internal world of Ovid’s dreams and visions takes over. In other words, conventional images of antagonism, danger, and alienation that define settler relationship to space are rejected in favour of images of harmony, interfusion and communion; Malouf refurbishes an “aesthetics of romanticism” as a symbolic means “to put to rest that very colonial history of violence and exclusion; to move beyond a culture of division and to gesture towards tolerance and reconciliation” (Nettlebeck 103). Malouf’s literary insight in An Imaginary Life goes, therefore, beyond a simple contestation of received cartographic mythologies; his focus on linguistic consciousness is made the catalyst for a more radical move in the novel: that of transformation and transcendence.

3Malouf’s novel can be studied as the powerful, though problematic, synthesis of his projects of ‘return’ and ‘metamorphosis’. Ovid’s experience is the realisation of Malouf’s pattern of “encircling return to the beginnings” (Nettlebeck 109) through a metaphorical recuperation of childhood and a blissful re-incorporation within the natural order of the elements. The logic of his development, in addition, highlights a desired process of transformation and transcendence based on a radical transgression of boundaries. An Imaginary Life is a push against all limits (of language, selfhood, imagination, geography and knowledge) in an attempt to interfuse “with that something ‘other’ which, made concrete in the Child, is extrinsic to all the societal, linguistic, and learned elements of our humanity” (Heseltine 39). In the light of the Lacanian theory of ego formation, and in the context of those two central processes, the development of Ovid’s linguistic consciousness can be studied as the axis of the novel’s revisions and re-orientations. The narrative can be broken into two seemingly symmetrical parts: in the first part, Ovid progresses from a morbid silence imposed by his linguistic exile to the retrieval of speech or utterance through which the landscape of home is recreated. In the second part, Ovid regresses from speech to silence, or from the leaden form of existence arrested by language to a whole and originary silence in which the world is freed from the word and being is one with nature. In this pattern, the Child moves into the plot of Ovid’s emotional and linguistic development both as an object of his colonial impulses and the agent of return and transformation. It is at the point where the Child appears in the narrative that Ovid’s development is reversed: instead of recuperating home, he wakes to a more fundamental exile from the natural world, from the mystery of ‘uncreated space’. His consciousness will henceforth take a divorce from language as a form of liberation that is far-reaching in its implications: Ovid’s liberation is an effect of his return to a primal form of consciousness that is one and continuous with the universe, to an order of existence that is completely free of the imperial impress. The Lacanian framework forms an interesting symbolic matrix endorsing Malouf’s postcolonial revisions: it symbolically reinforces the view of (imperial) linguistic consciousness as the real barrier against an order of being that is continuous with nature and indigeneity. It is also in line with Malouf’s topography of the psyche, which is “more concerned with inner and outer than with upper and lower” levels of consciousness (Leer 1985, 4). Such a topography reinforces his project of reconciliation as the powerful abolition of divisions and boundaries in the embrace of colonial horizons.

4In the first half of the narrative, Ovid’s evolution consists of a movement from an exile of silence to a brief homing that is the result of linguistic recuperation. After dwelling on the dislocatory effects of cultural and linguistic loss, Ovid recuperates home through the processes of linguistic re-creation. We first see Ovid in the grips of a morbid silence: for the Roman poet, exile is equally physical and linguistic; the material sophistication of Roman civilisation is paralleled to the figural sophistication of Latin: “I listen to them talk. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue” (Malouf 21). Linguistic loss and exposure to a foreign tongue is, hence, the main source of estrangement from Tomis and the Getae people. Ovid’s silence is a form of exile that is the result of the self’s divorce from a worldview secured by language: “[w]ill 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” (Malouf 22)? Indeed, during this stage, Malouf enacts the Lacanian paradigm while reversing its emotional content: somehow, Ovid moves from the silence of the Imaginary to the linguistic plenitude of the Symbolic, yet it is the Imaginary that ironically marks the divorce of selfhood from the unity of language and existence. In line with this pattern of emotional development, access to the Symbolic paradoxically provides the ordering principle with which Ovid recreates his world of exile while the sense of rupture occurs in the realm of the Imaginary, of the silence, not of primal speechlessness, but of linguistic dispossession.

5Ovid’s recuperative tendencies, however, underscore the novel’s basic message: the role of language and linguistic perception in determining cultural (self-)images. By virtue of his re-articulation of Latin, Ovid recuperates his lost cultural panorama and thereby enacts the drama of colonial mapping and settlement, which is based on ‘transportation’ rather than a more interactive and provisional process of ‘translation’. The concept of a ‘Europe translated’ rather than ‘transported’ into Australia has been suggested by Malouf as a way to resist the full impact of European legacies on the process of Australian becoming. As Leer explains, such a “linguistic metaphor turns our attention to the constant dualistic tension between idea and environment, conceptualisation and statement – for no word has an exact equivalent in another language” (Leer 1982, 7). Ovid’s first linguistic awakening highlights the exclusive strategies of ‘transportation’ on which colonial settlement is based: instead of domesticating another linguistic and cultural order through the dynamics of translation, he discovers the capacity of linguistic articulation to conjure up his lost home. Speech is miraculously endowed with creative powers as signs conjure up objects rather than simply act as their verbal shadows.

Poppy, scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood to set you blowing in the wind. Scarlet. Magic word on the tongue to flash again on the eye. Scarlet. And with it all the other colors come flooding back, as magic syllables, and the earth explodes with them, they flash about me. I am making the spring. (Malouf 31)

6As the mediating role of language reaches the point of creation, physical presence paradoxically becomes an effect of linguistic utterance, and for Ovid, “the saying [becomes] almost a greater miracle than the seeing” (Malouf 31). Ovid’s recuperation of speech, therefore, sheds light on the constitutive aspect of language. By rendering the linguistic sign primal and essential, Ovid reverses the natural order by which reality precedes language and exists as substantial origin for its verbal shadow. Speech offsets sight; words prefigure things; language creates and secures our identitarian categories: “Poppy, you have saved me, you have recovered the earth for me. I know how to work the spring” (Malouf 32). At this stage, Malouf not only unveils the role of the settler colonial’s linguistic universe in deepening his/her exile from the Otherness of space and Aborigine; he also points out a particular strategy of colonial exploration and naming by which identitarian categories are transported rather than re-moulded.

7There is, however, a second dimension to Ovid’s character and experience since linguistic figurability is, at this stage, associated with the faculty of the imagination. As an extreme form of poetic drying-up, Ovid’s crisis of silence readily corresponds to his internal loss of imaginative powers. From the beginning, Ovid can see that his barren perception of his world of exile is an effect of an internal rather than external emptiness. The landscape is “empty as far as the eye can see or the mind imagine,” but Ovid is “describing a state of mind, no place” (Malouf 16). The loss and recuperation of language parallels the loss and refurbishing of the creative imagination. However, Malouf represents Ovid’s imaginative evolution as a movement from the use of the imagination as ‘mere recollection’ to its use as ‘pure creation’. By focusing on poetic imaginative depth, Malouf seems to valorise imagination as the obverse side of memory, of what is simply received and reiterated in the life of culture. His characterisation of the Roman bard sets store on a particular imaginative wealth, whose main function is to animate “the challenge by what can be imagined to what is historically known” (Heseltine 31). There is a clear link between imaginative creation and the process of coming-to-terms with the landscape of exile. Such a link is first sustained through the recurrent reference to Ovid’s dreams: throughout the first stage of his psychic and linguistic displacement, the impoverishment of Ovid’s imagination is compensated on the level of dream. Imaginative incapacitation is alleviated by moments of illumination and half-revelations supplied by the unconscious exercise of dream: “At night I discover in sleep what the simple daylight blinds me to: that the dark side of every object here …is a vast page whose tongue I am unable to decipher, whose message to me I am unable to interpret” (Malouf 17). Ovid’s dreams supply brief moments of illumination; his deep exile from the landscape is first suggested and the final liberation of his creative imagination first hinted at in the process of dreaming – the (un-)conscious exercise of the imagination. Ovid’s transformation through the agency of the Child consists of a final breaking of the fetters of his poetic imagination, an exceeding of the last boundary that is physically the river Is-ter, but also, poetically, the linguistic bonds of human imagining. In this sense, Ovid’s transformation can be read as an attempt to free his imaginative powers from the rigidity of linguistic reference. Ovid progresses from a state where the imagination needs the medium of language to work through creation – “I have only to name the flowers … and they burst into bud, they click open, they spread their fragrance in my mind” (Malouf 32) – to a state where the imagination needs to do away with the word in order to embrace the world.

8Within these physical and psychic maps of Ovid’s journey, the Child moves in to suggest a number of meanings. First and in so far as Ovid reaches a middle position between the imperial Centre and the colonial outpost, which is the cultural position of the settler colonial, the Child offers himself to Ovid’s imagination as a special possibility – an object of his colonial impulses and a prey of his imaginative powers of re-creation and replication. Bill Ashcroft reads this particular development of Ovid’s settler experience as a demonstration of the rhizomic operation of colonial power (Ashcroft 1999, 117). The episode of the hunt and taming of the Child enacts the drama of colonial violence and subjugation: reference to the footprint (Malouf 47) conjures up an image of the archetypal Friday while the Child’s loss of his essential being evokes the process of cultural loss inherent in the imperialist action of appropriating the native. Presumably saving the Child from his beastly dumbness and isolation, Ovid effaces whatever prior form of existence he has been at home in: his unity with nature is negatively construed as an “exile [from] his inheritance, [from] the society of his own kind” (Malouf 81). The play on the word exile confirms the working of Ovid’s imperial self at this stage. By teaching the Child language, Ovid symbolically dispossesses him of his savage identity, which is the basis of his harmony with the natural world, and presumably retrieves his ‘lost’ humanity. The Child’s violent illness is a statement about the unhinging effects of such internal dispossession; he is the prototypical colonised subject, who “needs to be brought into human existence by learning the language” (Ashcroft 1999, 118); he is the medium through which Ovid could re-assert his imperial self at the margin. The whole process underlines the self-alienating character of imperial settlement and the violating process of appropriating the Aborigine “to a white discourse, history”; Paul Carter rejects the persistent imperialist supposition that “the Aborigines moved in the same historical space as Europeans …. that Aboriginal history can be treated as a subset of white history, as a history within history” (Carter 325). Through Ovid’s first move, Malouf aims to demonstrate the rhizomic and self-perpetuating aspect of imperialism, which reads colonial space within the ‘hermeneutics’ of a white culture and appropriates the native to the teleology of white history.

9Second, the Child offers a different potential in the course of Ovid’s evolution towards transcendence and transformation: in so far as Ovid crosses over to the final horizon beyond both imperial Centre and colonial margin, which is the desired step of the settler colonial, the Child hovers on the edge of his imagination to suggest the lure and freedom of being beyond the limit. While he is first forced to move from “a dimensionless silence beyond language into the realm of imperial discourse,” the Child also acts as the “agent of a radically different conception of the world” (Ashcroft 2001, 54). In line with the psychic contexts of the narrative, he moves in two main symbolical dimensions: in relation to Ovid’s poiesis, he stands for a certain promise at the edge of the poet’s creative imagination: “It exceeds my imagining, that sharp little face with its black stare, and I think how poorly my poetry, with its elegant fables and pretty, explainable miracles, compares with the accidental reality of this creature” (Malouf 50). The arrest of the imagination wrought by Ovid’s exile from the Latin tongue is brought to an end by the miraculous appearance of the Child, who curiously occupies a middle position between fact and fancy. In this sense, he comes to stir the dormant powers of the imagination that will bring Ovid’s existence into a new light. Besides, through his immediate suggestion of the speechlessness of Childhood, he inhabits another symbolical realm in the narrative. In one sense, he is the projection of the child in Ovid, a deep and primal self buried under layers of experience. In this context, Ovid’s second journey can be read as his return to a childhood that is “lost until now, or rejected; certainly long forgotten” (Malouf 82). The unfathomable difference of the Child, therefore, highlights the remoteness of childhood from the adults we are forced to become. In another sense, The Child evokes some form of Lacanian pre-symbolic consciousness in Ovid: he clearly points to the imaginary stage when the self is still wrapped in a blissful unity and possessing that primal gift of speech-in-silence. Speaking about the visionary wild boy of early childhood, Ovid intimates that they not only shared an unseen company, but also a secret language: “[w]e speak to one another, but in a tongue of our own devising” (Malouf 9). This early intimation foreshadows Ovid’s final evolution and his movement out of speech in the company of the Child. It is also echoed by another moment of epiphany for both characters: as they first find and face one another in the forest, they share a pivotal moment of telepathy: “[s]omething, as we face one another in the darkness, has passed between us. We have spoken. I know it. In a language beyond tongues” (Malouf 63). However, this epiphanic moment evokes the secret powers of self-reflection: we partly witness the Child’s first identification in Ovid’s reflective presence; the whole episode of the taming can be read as an uncongenial allegory of the ego’s transference from the imaginary to the symbolic order: as they sit studying one another in the hut, Ovid watches the Child “move slowly out of himself” (Malouf 82). By teaching the Child language, Ovid not only brings him to the realm of imperial culture, but also, and more fundamentally, forces him into the symbolic order, thus causing his inexorable and painful divorce from Mother Nature. However, the Child’s character is far from remaining untouchable: the epiphanic moment of confrontation sets out a process of mutual influence in the interplay between Ovid and the Child. Ultimately, the latter evades all influence and will only act as a catalyst for Ovid’s own transformation.

10The second stage of Ovid’s development clearly reverses his first movement from silence to linguistic recreation. The final move is an effect of Ovid’s metamorphosis and broadly consists of his transcendence of colonial culture to recuperate an original unity with the universe. Categories of both home and exile, language and silence are reformulated in the line with Ovid’s pivotal discovery – that the individual’s true exile is a form of linguistic displacement that sets him apart from the visible and natural elements of existence. His metamorphosis consists of an out-stepping of the borders of selfhood and a reclamation of silence. To begin with, language is no longer valued for its powers of creation but discarded for its alienating effects. Ovid gradually reaches a deeper understanding of human alienation as the effect of linguistic figuration and cultural perspectivism. By doing away with language, by discarding names, “the creatures will come creeping back – not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves …they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness” (Malouf 96). In this context, the Child comes to suggest a new ontology by blurring the boundary between inner and outer worlds; he “functions as an agent of ‘worrying the lines’ between the known and unknown regions within and without” (Egerer 172). He embodies, in addition, the idea of ‘borderlessness’: his state of consciousness suggests a direct exchange, almost a merging, with the visible and tangible world: “[h]is self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, among leaves, water, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them some particle of his spirit. He has no notion of the otherness of things” (Malouf 95-6). In short, he points to a mode of dwelling that is fluid and eternally migrant because it relates to a free landscape outside language. This mode of being and dwelling puts Ovid’s exile in a new light: his alienation is no longer wrought by physical displacement and linguistic loss; language rather hands him a static image of existence, and exile rather suggests his mind’s alienation from the spirit of nature.

11Secondly, the region of silence Ovid steps in is cloaked in an atmosphere of mystery and origination. It is pre-linguistic in so far as it is contrasted to the silence of Ovid’s linguistic dispossession at the beginning of the novel. The whole experience is represented with a congenial air of liberation. Ovid places special emphasis on the displacement of speech by silence. He and the Child cross to “grasslands that are silence”; they communicate in a “kind of conversation that needs no tongue” (Malouf 145). Moreover, the region of silence that Ovid reaches has nothing of the desolate air associated with linguistic loss. The atmosphere of origination prevails since the region is associated with a pre-linguistic consciousness: “[w]e knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again” (Malouf 98). Indeed, Ovid’s final movement from linguistic recuperation to silence may be read as a retrieval of the freedom of consciousness that is associated with a non-conversant childhood. The Child, who partly beckons this peculiar condition of “speech in silence” (Malouf 97), is repeatedly imaged as a part of Ovid’s self, a deeper or further being waiting to be reclaimed by his consciousness. The last stage of Ovid’s journey can, within this symbolical matrix, be read as a return to the pre-symbolic order, which pre-figures, in Lacan’s psychoanalytic terms, a whole and revealing silence and a borderless state of being.

In going beyond the reach of the imperial language, Ovid is at the same time going ‘back’ beyond the symbolic order of patriarchal reality of the Roman Empire to the imaginary phase of being in which sexuality, language, identity are in a dynamic flux of formless potentiality. It is this ‘pre-Oedipal’, ‘pre-imperial’, even ‘pre-cultural’ phase which Ovid quite determinedly seeks to enter by appropriating the experience of the Child through its language. (Ashcroft 2001, 56)

12By embodying the bliss of existence outside human speech, the Child points to the role of silence and the whole pre-linguistic order in fully homing the self within nature. The pre-symbolic order not only evokes the freedom of consciousness prior to its engagement with images but also the state of unity and harmony with the outside world: “I am growing bodiless. I am turning into the landscape. I feel myself sway and ripple. I feel myself expand upwards towards the blue roundness of the sky” (Malouf 145-6). Intercourse with the visible world is not based on the shattering process of observation, but on the unifying experience of dissolution: “I lie down to sleep, and wonder if, in the looseness of sleep, I mightn’t strike down roots along all the length of my body, and as I enter the first dream, [I] feel my individual pores open to the individual grains of the earth, as the interchange begins” (Malouf 147). The deliberate discarding of linguistic consciousness, which is the main outcome of Ovid’s transformation at the end of the narrative, embodies Malouf’s vision of ‘reconciliation’; he clearly suggests that the plight of the white settler colonial is not an uprooting from the centre of Western civilization, but an incapacity to exert one’s powers of self-regeneration in harmony with a new landscape. We have so far studied Malouf’s focus on psychic and linguistic ‘maps’ in a revision of colonial exile and exploration; We shall now examine the way such critique sustains his project of reconciliation realised as a postcolonial ‘counter-mythology’ of settlement.

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13Ovid’s pivotal transformation in An Imaginary Life replaces the pull towards recuperation by an irresistible need to push against the limit and find home in movement and transgression. On the one hand, the movement from language to silence is not only a regression to the pre-symbolic realm of childhood; in the colonial framework of the novel, it also suggests a transcendence of imperial divisions and an embrace of the horizon of cultural meaning symbolized by the grasslands. As Bill Ashcroft argues, “[b]eyond the opposition of centre and margin is the horizonality which accepts the boundless mystery of the marginal, the mystery of becoming” (Ashcroft 2001, 57). The action of border crossing does not foreshadow a climactic moment of arrival; it inaugurates a new culture of exploration for Ovid and the Child since it enables them to embrace the unknown in a mode of cognition that is completely free of imperial knowledge. Ovid’s first movement from the Centre to the margin is definite in both time and geography. Because he moves within the maps of Empire, his consciousness continues to move within the grids of imperial meaning. Against such colonialist paradigms, Malouf’s vision of reconciliation would rather move beyond imperial oppositions and regain a physical and epistemic territory where transformation is made possible because all (cultural) categories and hierarchies have been dissolved through a transcendental access to nature. On the other hand, the last stage of Ovid’s journey does not simply suggest a silent dissolution in the bosom of nature: even though wholeness, the “sense of abolition of boundary and division,” seems to be pre-conditioned by “the dissolution of identity at the moment of death,” (Taylor 13) the novel does not affirm the unattainability of its grounds of resolution: Ovid finally reclaims a mode of dwelling that takes the migratory spirit as its principle and driving energy. At the end, he defies the very teleology of the journey, “the notion of a destination no longer …necessary to [him]” (Malouf 144). In one sense, the Child beckons a mode of being that is at home in movement and a form of cognition that is directly rooted in the spirit of things: “His whole body strains towards some distance that I cannot grasp ...He is full of it, of some suppressed passion for the furthest reaches of what he can see (Malouf 148-9). The Child clearly embodies the principle of transgression and transformation that the settler colonial is invited to embrace if he is to ‘re-create’ home at last. Home is not recreated in the process of transplanting a European Centre of knowledge; a transformative mode of settlement is rather associated with the capacity to deploy new modes of knowing and being that are compatible with an indigenous landscape.

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14Malouf’s vision of reconciliation follows trajectories of ‘return’ and ‘transcendence’ in the attempt to revise and re-conceive white modes of settlement in Australia. The displacement of border by horizon and settler by indigene is clearly suggested by the development of Ovid’s adventure. The extent to which such displacements signal a radical privileging of cultural difference is, however, questionable. Chris Prentice sheds light on the teleological aspect of reconciliation, which, in the cultural and political contexts of postcolonial settler societies, “imply processes of settlement under the sign of the nation”; he suggests that,

there is now less of a tension between reconciliation as (national) narrative, and the politics of cultural difference, than there is between these mutually complicit terms and a notion of culture thought outside of a framework which merely absorbs difference as positivities into a teleological project of recuperated nationhood. (Prentice 168)

15In An Imaginary Life, the fluctuation between recuperation and transcendence casts doubt on the revolutionary aspect of Malouf’s quest for a new cultural identity; to assess his vision of an Australia radically ‘re-mythologised’, the following questions need to be addressed: to what extent does Malouf’s vision of reconciliation succeed in liberating (Australian) identity from the cultural closures and reifications of white national discourse? To what extent does his ‘migrant ontology’ preclude the possibility of re-confirming a white teleology of arrival?

17In An Imaginary Life, Malouf examines the possibility of a ‘counter-mythology’ of white settlement and self-making in Australia. His project is based on challenging “the centrality in Western tradition of differentiation and separation, which have defined human speech, existence and consciousness” (Kavanagh 151). Language not only hands us static images of things, but also separates our consciousness from an original unity with the spirit of the universe; in one sense, Ovid’s quest bespeaks an existential concern with the roots of human alienation from the natural world: “An Imaginary Life is a fable of return to a state of being in which the divisions and discriminations created by language are replaced by a silence which speaks of unity with the entire fabric of existing things” (Kavanagh 150). In the imperial contexts of the novel, Ovid’s liberating journey enacts a movement out of speech in order to apprehend a form of existence that is free of imperial meaning. Malouf suggests that transcendence is the most challenging gesture of resistance for the white settler colonial. It is also the most radical basis of a postcolonial rediscovery of individual and national selfhood at a profound moment of reconciliation with landscape and indigene.