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Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, and their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Edward Said claims that exiles feel "an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives" (177) and that "much of the exile's life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule" (181). According to Said, exile is a condition of terminal loss, "an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home," which involves "the crippling sorrow of estrangement" (173). He declares that exiles choose "to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people" (177). By "triumphant ideology," he means nationalism in the sense that the exiled persons relegate complete truth and superiority to themselves and deceit and inferiority to outsiders. The only way out of exile is a retreat into the nostalgic notion of a formerly reassuring sense of heredity, place, culture, and identity. Said also argues that "the crucial thing is that a state of exile free from this triumphant ideology-designed to reassemble an exile's broken history into a new whole-is virtually unbearable, and virtually impossible in today's world" (177).
On the surface, Said's theory of triumphant ideology seems to apply to David Malouf s ideology of exile reflected through Ovid in An Imaginary Life (1993). The narrative of An Imaginary Life, written in five parts, takes the form of a letter by Ovid, the Roman poet of the Tristia, to an unidentified reader in the future. In the novel, Ovid is banished from his own culture and language beyond the limits of the known world. Metaphors of stuntedness, barrenness, and emptiness indicate Ovid's melancholy at being in exile from Roman society without feeling any communion with nature. His exile causes him not only material loss but also a negative frame of mind, raising questions of dislocation and unsettlement in him. Initially, in his attempt to overcome his exile, Ovid denies the privileges of other villagers and their culture because he considers his culture as being superior. However, Malouf has a very different view from Said of what the relations between colonizer and colonized are like,...