Fiction Series: Haushofer's The Wall (Pt. 2) (with Kristeva and Merleau-Ponty)

Hi everyone!

Please join us on January 15th to discuss the second 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 from the mid-point on page 115 of the New Directions edition to the end of the novel. If you weren't able to stop by for the first half, please feel free to join us now, we're happy to have you!

Most of us will be reading the edition above, but the Internet Archive’s PDF of the Cleiss Press edition is also available for free.

Additionally, we will be reading the two essays below. These essays were included for the first half, but they are just as relevant (if not more so) for the second, so we'll be discussing these at length.

• 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.

A couple pieces of additional supplemental reading for the especially dedicated (which should only be read after completion of the novel):

• "She Shall Be Nameless" A review of Haushofer's work from Nicholas Spice in London Review of Books.
• "The Great Schizophrenia" A review of Haushofer's work through the lens of her letters with Austrian writer Jeannie Ebner from Nikianna Dinenis in European Review of Books.

The first article has no paywall, but if anyone needs access to the second, please let me know and I can send it to you. But feel free to support your small lit mags and publishing companies!

We will be meeting on Thursday, 1/15 at Spritzenhaus33 at 7pm. If you have trouble finding us, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via message.

See you there!