Fiction Series: The Wall by Marlen Haushofer (with Merleau-Ponty and Kristeva)

Hi everyone!

Please join us on December 16th to discuss the first half of Marlen Haushofer’s speculative fiction novel The Wall.

The novel follows a middle-aged woman who is suddenly separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall, left to survive the desolate and beautiful Austrian countryside with only the companionship of a cat, a dog, and a cow. A meditation on loneliness, the nature of our humanity, and the deep terror that exists within the beautiful, The Wall is very much a novel of our time.

There are no chapter breaks whatsoever, so we will be reading to mid-point on page 115 of the New Directions edition.

Most of us will be reading the edition above, but please feel free to use Internet Archive’s PDF of the Cleiss Press edition.

Additionally, we will be reading the two essays below. Though these essays are optional, we STRONGLY recommend reading them, as the discussion will include connections between the essays and the text.

• Chapter One, “Approaching Abjection” from The Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva (only pages 1-18, ending at the sub-heading "Dostoyevsky").
• Chapter Five, “Preobjective Being: The Solipsist World” from The Visible and the Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (7 pages).

These chapters are being read standalone, so you don’t need to read the rest of either source material.

We will be meeting on Tuesday, 12/16 at Spritzenhaus33. If you have trouble finding us, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via message.

See you there!