Imaginary Exile

‘Imaginary Exile’ wanders through the experience of reading and life reflection and traces the narrative journey of the poet Ovid in David Malouf's influential novella An Imaginary Life, which serves as both anchor and disruption to an attachment to exile. The essay follows the forced corporeal movement of the author from virginal Australian bush, into inner urban landscapes and finally the abstraction of the Law. Exile is revealed as a utopic colonial fantasy in conflict with the author's intention to engage with contemporary realities. The writer's desire to hold onto Aristotelian form is confronted by the appearance of a memory that refuses to succumb to the writers demand for craft, and thus shreds her expectations of lineal narrative. This experience of a collision between two worlds, two laws, that occurred in 1998 in a Broome courtroom, challenges romantic attachments to a language prior to law or one that can escape ‘the world’ but also challenges the capacity of the writer to incorporate into text visceral experiences that conflict with received inheritances. The images and thought behind the memoir are heavily influenced by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and his notion of ‘the contemporary,’ but while the author finds solace in retreat, questions of how to engage with the contemporary world linger and are passed on

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• The Human Condition

  Hannah Arendt, Margaret Canovan•Human Condition•1998

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