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Ovid's An Imaginary Life

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As the Child under Ovid’s tutelage progresses towards the ordered life of the human society, he displays increasingly more “restlessness of mind, of body, that is the stirring in him of renewed life” (An Imaginary Life, p. 80) and necessary tro this transformation is Ovid’s decision to teach him language. Ovid decides so because he realizes that “Speech is essential…that will reveal to him of what kind he is.” (An Imaginary Life, p. 92). But Ovid does not teach him Latin, but the speech of the Getae. The Gaetic tongue has sharpened Ovid’s sensibility to language. After having mastered the barbaric idiom, Ovid learns to communicate in a mute language with the Child. This communication represents a step further towards Ovid’s new linguistic …show more content…

This language is experienced as ‘true’ as it is able to unveil the ‘secrets of the universe’. These passages of An Imaginary Life are reminiscent of the biblical story of the Creation, it shows that the world is created through language, and each physical thing is completely identical to its corresponding divine word of creation. Adam named things, creating the original human language, paradisiacal insofar as it is the exact translation of the mute language of things. It is not creative like God’s language, but it is certainly not arbitrary either: it is the ‘true language’. The ‘earlier and more universal language’ that Ovid speaks about is the point from which all languages stemmed. Ovid has the intuition that the Child’s language must be the greater, original language. Ovid’s silent language is the attempt to reproduce this paradisiacal linguistic condition. Even though Adam’s heavenly original language is sonorous, Ovid can only replicate its immediacy by not speaking, as language inherently carries within itself that fracture between thing and name. In other words, Ovid’s reflection suggests that just as the original and lost language was instrumental to Creation, a pure new language inspired by it must retain some sort of interpretative key to the foundation of humanity. Ovid’s speech in silence is the attempt to regain the gift of …show more content…

It is this awareness that makes Ovid take care of and take responsibility for the Child during the illness. Significantly, the only other figure to care for the Child during his illness is the mother of Ryzak's grandson, an exogamous outsider, who hails from another village. The relation of self and “Other” here is not based on the priority of being, on the self as the existential basis from which to encounter an “Other”. Instead the foundational human act is in taking responsibility for an “Other”. It is in this relation with the “other” that finally Ovid is able to understand his “I” and come out of his exile. He never returns to Rome, but in his relation to and responsibility for the “Other” he if finally able to declare “I belong to this place now.”( ibid p.

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