Silence, the ‘Virtue of Speaking’. David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language

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.