AustLit

This article examines David Malouf 's An Imaginary Life through the lens of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language. Confined for the rest of his life at Tomis, a distant and foreign outpost on the eastern border of the Roman Empire, the main character of Malouf's book, the Latin poet Ovid, endeavours to master a silent language. In doing so, Ovid overcomes the lack of correspondence between word and object. His efforts of learning a language made of 'silence', I argue, are an example of Benjamin's notion of Ursprache (primeval language), the primordial essence or 'the kinship' of language, a pivotal element of Benjamin's philosophy of language.