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Tres buenas mujeres
âA menudo se reniega de los maestros supremos; se rebela uno contra ellos; se enumeran sus defectos; se los acusa de ser aburridos, de una obra demasiado extensa, de extravagancia, de mal gusto, al tiempo que se los saquea, engalanĂĄndose con plumas ajenas; pero en vano nos debatimos bajo su yugo. Todo se tiñe de sus colores; por doquier encontramos sus huellas; inventan palabras y nombres que van a enriquecer el vocabulario general de los pueblos; sus expresiones se convierten en proverbiales, sus personajes ficticios se truecan en personajes reales, que tienen herederos y linaje. Abren horizontes de donde brotan haces de luz; siembran ideas, gĂ©rmenes de otras mil; proporcionan motivos de inspiraciĂłn, temas, estilos a todas las artes: sus obras son las minas o las entrañas del espĂritu humanoâ (François de Chateaubriand: Memorias de ultratumba, libro XII, capĂtulo I, 1822). 
"Allowing it to speak out of him": The Heterobiographies of David Malouf, Antonio Tabucchi and Marguerite Yourcenar
Under true pretences
We know very little about the life of Ovid, and it is this absence of fact that has made him useful as the central figure of my narrative and allowed me the liberty of free invention, since what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event.
Thus starts the Afterword of David Maloufâs An Imaginary Life, a novel in which the poet Ovid, exiled from Rome, narrates his experience in the border outpost of Tomis, near the delta of the Danube on the Black Sea. âRelegatedâ among the Getae at the edges of the Empire and âexpelled form the confines of [the] Latin tongueâ (IL 26), this glittering and cynical poet undergoes a series of changes or metamorphoses. Initially pining for Rome and its sophisticated, complex language, he learns to overcome his hostility towards the barbarous people and their language, but when he discovers a wild Child that had been raised by the wolves in the forest and captures him with the intention of teaching him to speak and to be human, he soon realises that he himself has to learn from the Child another language, based not on symbolization and arbitrary convention but on an intuitive identity with things, on becoming the things signified in silence. After the death of the villageâs elderly chief, which the villagers blame on the childâs demonic powers, the poet and the Child escape north across the frozen river. Ovidâs death is the poetâs final transformation, perhaps a literal metamorphosis like the ones described in Ovidâs great poem. Maloufâs Afterword concludes:
My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of âthe changesâ live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display. (IL 154)
Is Maloufâs novel then a fantasy inspired by âmereâ literary dazzle or, as âa fiction with its roots in possible eventâ, is it a work that, while not claiming to the factual accuracy of biography or the broad reliability of the historical background of a historical novel, can however still claim to be rooted in verisimilitude, in events that, although not documented, are nevertheless possible, as would be the case with a realist novel, or in Aristotelian poetics? The Afterword thematizes a tension between the desire to anchor the novel to history and the desire to free Ovid from historical necessity. How can Ovid live out âin realityâ the metamorphoses to which he is subjected, if metamorphoses are but the occasion for âliterary displayâ?
This tension also defines, more widely, the large number of novels written as if they were the autobiographies of historical personages, novels that gesture towards historical factuality and literary fictionality, towards âtruthâ and invention, and exist under the sign of an essential structural displacement (the âautobiographyâ is written by another) that brings to the foreground structural, narrative, and ethical issues also central to autobiography itself.
(First paragraphs of submitted version
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