Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

        Wordslut is such a fun book. Despite this being my first exposure to Amanda Montell, I can’t help but feel that her voice shines beautifully throughout the work. Her writing is lively, conversational, both-serious-and-not. There’s a real levity to her analysis that makes the book a truly entertaining read. It probably helps that she herself reads the audiobook and is really able to sell the tone.

At a glance, a number of the chapters come across as being silly. Consider, for example, the first chapter: “Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults I Hate (But Also Kind of Love?)”. Another chapter is “Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald-Headed Bastard (And 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia)” and another is called “Fuck it: An Ode to Cursing While Female”. While these chapter titles give the impression of a crass-for-fun approach, there’s something more powerful happening throughout Wordslut.

The book is a sociolinguistic exploration of sex and gender. It’s told in such an approachable, personal way that it is a beautiful entry point for people thinking about language or gender studies. It’s corrective without being accusatory. It’s informative without being pedantic. One example is when Montell breaks down the class and race-based use of “y’all” and critiques the haters of this second person plural that makes language more clear than saying “you” to multiple people or “you guys” to people that don’t all identify as boys and men.

The book touches on a number of ideas around the misogyny embedded in language. Some of the ground has been covered before (for instance, doing a statistical analysis of how many derogatory words there are for women as opposed to men), but it is always done with a fresh set of eyes and empathy for the language users most often criticized (i.e. women, people of colour, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks).

To give a few examples, Montell discusses differences in communication between socialized women and men. She discusses phenomena like hedging the conversation, affirming comments, and so on, among women. Even the phrase “like,” disproportionately (and erroneously) attributed to valley girls, serves a valuable linguistic function. Montell even goes into detail on why “the gay voice” is a phenomenon. The book is progressive and, at every turn, Montell makes a case against prescriptive linguistics and for embracing the linguistic shifts that happen naturally as the English language develops.

A number of the specifics are fascinating, but it’s a little beyond my capacity to summarize all of the specific details. All I can really do is encourage you to read the book—and better yet, listen to the audiobook so that you can hear all the fun percussive curses that come from Montell’s mouth.

Happy reading!

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

It’s a little ironic that I’m here as a mediocre White man commenting on a book about the failings of the group of which I’m a part. Consider it an exercise in self-identification through reading. Ijeoma Oluo’s book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America essentially offers an overview how catering to the mediocrity of White men in America has led to disastrous consequences for everyone else and that all of the problems we face are actually the system working according to design.

The book starts off with an engaging, and somewhat surprising description of cowboys in early America. The discourse is rooted firmly in a critique of colonialism that walks through the way that American men took charge through violence, though not through any superiority in ideas of governance. There’s a compelling account of how White men failed to engage in authentic understanding with America’s Indigenous people and Black populations, which led to offensive, reductive depictions of these cultural “Others”, which then justified widespread genocidal practices (like killing off the buffalo to ensure that food sources for Indigenous people dried up). It isn’t where I expected the book to start, and giving that angle was a refreshing way of setting the groundwork for a work of cultural studies.

The second chapter also offers a really interesting perspective about the way White men co-opt social justice movements and take the glory for themselves and the third chapter depicts how White men systematically discredit and dismantle the education system because it benefits the population that is not White men. Incidentally, Oluo points out how even the Republicans who talk about how “woke” colleges are ruining America still send their children to the most prestigious schools they can. Oluo, though, also dismantles the notion that Leftists and Liberals are smarter than their right-wing counterparts and how that mindset is demeaning, replicating our existing biases rather than moving us forward. It’s not a matter of intelligence or education. It’s a matter of empathy.

In this regard, it’s pretty interesting and controversial to take a look at one of Oluo’s key case studies. Donald Trump is an easy target. He’s mediocre in every sense. What’s most interesting to me, though, is the way that people who otherwise would have been Bernie Sanders voters moved over to Trump out of spite. They were people who wanted somebody—anybody—to shake things up, regardless of politics. At the same time, White men were still not willing to vote for a “shrill” woman (Hillary Clinton) or a woman of colour (claiming that Democrats make “too much” of race—and therefore lose). Oluo points out that Sanders’ accomplishments in the realm of social justice are still not truly representative of constituents and that he, along with other politicians, get credit for socially progressive stances while people of colour who offer the same policies are criticized for them. It’s a complex issue to navigate.

A more straightforward example of White male mediocrity crushing social justice movements is in the case of Colin Kaepernick and other football players who knelt during the national anthem. The White owners of football teams—including college teams—took measures to ensure that protest was not possible without repercussion. For instance, at the college football level, students could be removed from the team and school for one instance of protest and the inordinate fines on players and teams offered financial disincentives to speaking truth to power. I found the entire chapter really compelling in its account of injustice. 

Perhaps of all the specific examples, what stands out most to me is actually something from an early chapter. Oluo writes about how White men are allowed to be mediocre because their actions require no risk. Myself included: I could, theoretically, write something passable and get attention. Meanwhile, poc and women have to “take bigger swings” in order to make an impact. I find that idea so interesting: the idea of lack of risk leading to mediocrity could be productively explored in so many realms. 

Oluo’s text is a clear, informed argument against the continued leadership of mediocre White men. I suspect that it will ruffle a number of feathers (in the same way her book So You Want To Talk About Race? would ruffle some feathers). For that reason alone it’s worth reading. It’s challenging. It will force you to confront some difficult truths in American history and contemporary society—or, if you’re not a White man, it will affirm what you already know and provide you with the language to confront the institutions that are harming you. 

This review might not be that great. It is an act of generosity to have sticking with me so long.

Happy reading!

Two Bowls of Milk by Stephanie Bolster

  I invite you to share in a memory of mine from my younger years. I’m in Verona at an art gallery, carrying a notebook in which I write fragments of poems and miscellany thoughts. After milling about for a few hours, I find my way into the modern art section, and come across a striking painting of a man with what I remember as a bloodied eye, looking anguished. The painting arrests me. When I look at the title, it is Waiting for Godot—a play with a similarly arresting power. I sit down on the floor of the gallery, examining the painting from a safe distance and writing in my notebook while Italian security guards snicker at this strange, floored, Canadian. There’s me: writing a poem in response to a painting in response to a play.

I mention the anecdote because poetry-ifying visual arts was one of my main tactics as a budding writer and in Stephanie Bolster’s Two Bowls of Milk, we see the practice playing out by a similar, albeit more capable hand. Two Bowls of Milk is a collection of poetry that, like many collections, comes in multiple parts. The first section of the collection is more rooted in experience, particularly rural experiences, while the back half of the collection is in direct response to artworks, which are cited under the titles of poems. 

Bolster maintains a lush descriptiveness that feels philosophically resonant, exploring the idea of perspective. She starts early with untitled the poem opening the section “Come to the Edge”, in which she invites the reader: “Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there, / you see things defining themselves, the hoofprints left by sheep, / the slope of the roof, each feather against each feather on each goose. / You see the stake with the flap of orange plastic that marks // the beginning of real” (3). I appreciate this early invitation from the haze into something more defined, and the positioning of realness as the precise details. Important to note is that the things define “themselves,” giving agency to the inanimate. The poem continues with a rationale for the reality”: “I’m showing you this because / I’m suck of the way you clutch the darkness with your hands, / seek invisible fenceposts for guidance, accost spectres” (3). The poem has a grounding effect in the material rather than the abstract, while still providing that hint of a sort of “great beyond” of inspiration. It makes me think of an engraving I once saw of someone, bent over, looking “beyond the veil,” which to me looked like someone awaiting the sting of the guillotine. This trip into the real is not without its need for caution, as the poem’s speaker notes: “I’m coming with you because I fear you’ll trip // over the string that marks the beginning, you’ll lie across the border / and with that view — fields of intricate grain and chiselled mountains, / cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm—you’ll forget your feet, / numb in straw and indefinite dung, and be unable to rise, to walk farther” (3). There guide has a gentleness that I quite appreciate, noting the danger but offering the guidance to avoid it. The poem weaves together the philosophical project: bringing the abstract into realness while also maintaining the allusiveness to something more significant and resonant. The poem ends with the following stanzas:

My fingers weave so close between yours because I’ve been there
before, I know the relief of everything, how it eases the mind to learn
shapes it hasn’t made, how it eases the feet to know the ground
will persist. See those two bowls of milk, just there,

on the other side of the property line, they’re for the cats
that sometimes cross over and are seized by a thirst, they’re
to wash your hands in. Lick each finger afterwards. That will be
your first taste, and my finger tracing your lips will be the second. (3)

There’s a suggestiveness in the final lines, pairing this idea of revealing the real with a charged intimacy. What I like best, though, is the line about “how it eases the mind to learn / shapes it hasn’t made” (3). I feel as though that’s critical to Bolster’s project here. There’s an attentiveness to the details, a commitment to learning things that did not originate with us. I once wrote an essay about the ethics of attention posited in the short works of Samuel Beckett—funny how that motif returns to me again.

With this kind of care and attention, Bolster offers some short reflections on “Assorted Flora” and about the “Iris,” she writes,

Your spine is a secret grief.

Rooted in inconstant mud,
you managed to stand, proud

though purple marks the perfect
white of your throat.

But cut, left
alone in a vase, you will lean

away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow. (8)

The imagistic nature of the work draws on the specific details of the flower and elevates it, though I’m not sure elevates is the right word—humanizes might be more a propos. The personification of the iris with “the perfect / white of [its] throat” and the idea of shrinking away into a shadow, away from the light, gives the flower a human quality. It’s a charming observational moment of identification.

The imagistic nature of the poems reminds me of William Carlos Williams, particularly in this section of “Poems For the Flood,” a poem that is comprised of several vignettes:

Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty
and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are

is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat
and the columbines open for the same water differently.

Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,
the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red

rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.
The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings. (17)

Maybe it’s the white chickens and the redness of the barn. I appreciate what Bolster adds to the imagery by having the connections between humans and plants: “My throat / and the columbines open for the same water differently.” 

The back half of the collection is focused on responding to artworks. One poem that stands out to me in that regard is “Still Life With Braid,” which is given the subtitle for the artwork “Female Dissected Body, Seen From the Back, Gerard de Lairess, 1685. Engraving with etching.” The poem has a more narrative-driven impulse, introducing a kind of relationship between two characters: “I loved her when we washed our hands / in matching sinks at school” (55). The specificity of the moment stands out to me and then it continues with an excellent set of lines: “She feared the cubicles / where a raincoat with a man in it might stand / on a toilet’s rim awaiting us, pocket knife // tight in his fist” (55). The ominousness of the moment is finely delivered. I think what I like best is the way the line “She feared the cubicles” is given a line break that creates meaning on its own but then is doubled up with the lines which follow. The poem continues with the disappearance of the girl with the teacher reassuring the speaker that she’s just camping. Finally, the central character’s “letter slot released / a drawing of an iris, pencilled throat open, bulb / engorged beneath” (55). She continues, “Veins so intricately etched / they stung the purple in my wrists. No hand but hers // had done it” (55). The narrator flashes forward where “Time passed / until [she] visited a gallery and ticking stopped / before her adult portrait: wrists resplendent, raw / in bracelets of taut rope” (55). The narrator sees her childhood friend’s gestures replicated in the image where her posture “peeled to reveal her braided spine” (55). The final description is such a haunting one that reminds me of a philosophy book I read about the female form last year:

skin draped

her waist, was pinned aside like coy sleeves fitted
to her upper arms. The alphabet named her

crucial points but not that curl she’d tucked
behind her ear at eight. Her face averted, ashamed
at believing its body worth this spectacle of death.
Why did I not tell her she was more than this? I am

no more myself: bones pitched inside a tent of skin;
fear; one bound hand and the other binding. (55-56)

The description is so rich and evocative of their bond and seems to tell a story in just a few short, rich sentences. There’s a notion of what is invisible to others re-emerging, or at least being perceived, seemingly by nobody else. It’s a fantastic conclusion to an entire story, told within two pages.

Of course, the challenge of a collection like this is that, sometimes, without the reference images, the poems don’t really land in the same way. The challenge of responding to art with another art form is that you’re both adding and subtracting at once. You’re adding a layer of interpretation, but potentially subtracting from your own work by relying on your references. It’s a fine line to walk that has the potential to make your work shine but also to limit your audience. At the very least it places some demands on the reader to conduct additional research.

Overall, I quite liked Two Bowls of Milk. It had a lot of great poetry in it, which sounds like an odd thing to say, although I do think it encapsulates the spirit of perception that gives poetry its ethical and aesthetic force.

Happy reading!

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

        I picked up The Wall by Marlen Haushofer so that I could participate in my first real world book club. My friend Ryan and I attended the April book club at my favourite Toronto bookstore: Type. The employees that run the book club started with a simple question: “Did you like the book?” That question was met with about thirty heads nodding, mouths “mmhmm”ing, and smiles. There was a lone dissenter who admitted to “sort of hating” the book and leading the conversation with the hope that others could explain why they liked it.

That dissenter was not me, but I have to admit that, while I didn’t hate The Wall, it is a nearly impossibly boring book. The premise of the book is that a woman is visiting friends for a sort of cottage vacation slash hunting trip. While the others are out, a transparent wall descends between her and the rest of the world, isolating her, perhaps indefinitely. Haushofer resists the impulse to explain the wall, investigate it, make it the centerpiece. Instead, the wall serves as a device for isolating the woman. The narrator then recounts her day-to-day experiences in repairing the homestead, planting potatoes, reaping the hay, and so on. It’s a repetitive journal—and given that she explicitly states that she has limited pages from the outset, it seems to place emphasis on such strange details. It inverts our expectations of narrative; there are some moments alluded to (the death of the dog, the death of the cow, the death of the cat) but what typically counts as “big” in our lives is relegated to the background and what remains is the tedium of continuing to live.

So, as an aesthetic experience, I would say the book is banal. Bland. As an artistic vision, The Wall is finely wrought and presents a sort of philosophy of living that gave our group a lot to talk about.

To me, there are two main components that stood out most to me. First, The Wall explores fear in an interesting way. I forgot to flag the passage, but there’s something early in the book that alludes to the fear of the fear. Fear is one thing, but the narrator’s main fear is the impact fear will have on her (suppose there is nothing to fear but fear itself?). She tries to escape that fear by not thinking too deeply: banality and routine and toil become an anodyne panacea to fear, which gives the book an ominous quality. Every potato harvested, every fence mended, is a reaction to terror. Throughout the book, the idea of fear recurs consistently. In engaging with the cow, she recounts their mutual care (she stays alive to care for the pets) and she is struck by the fear of what will happen if she were to die:

Perhaps she would have liked the voice of any human being. It would have been easy for her to trample and gore me, but she licked my face and pressed her nostrils into my palm. I hope she dies before me; without me she would die miserably in winter. I no longer tie her up in the stable. If something should happen to me she will at least be able to batter down the door and have no need to die of thirst. A strong man could loosen the weak bolt, and Bella is stronger than the strongest man. I have to live with these fears; even if I resist them they constantly flow disruptively into my report. (155)

These small insights into the report, understated by necessity, receive their due gravitas and offer a reflection on the ways we resist fear in our daily lives. Referring to another character, she notes that “he had to settle for half measures which were something of a game, designed to assuage his fears a bit [...] he was a thoroughly realistic man who sometimes had quite consciously to give his dark fears something to feed on, so that he could work and live his life in peace” (81). The idea of strategizing and prioritizing fears is a pretty compelling idea. 

Throughout the book, the narrator experiences some nightmares and “realized that the composure with which [she] had adapted to [her] situation from the first day had only been a kind of anesthetic” (107). She describes the anesthetic wearing off and “reacting quite normally to [her] loss” (107). She continues, “I felt that the worries that beset me during the day, about my animals, the potatoes and the hay, were appropriate to the circumstances, and hence bearable. I knew I would overcome them, and was prepared to deal with them. The fears that gripped me at night on the other hand, struck me as entirely futile; fears of the past and dead things that I couldn’t bring back to life, which held me at their mercy in the darkness of night. I probably made things worse for myself by so stubbornly refusing to examine the past. But I didn’t yet know that” (107). I find myself drawn to that passage because much was made at our book club of her refusal to examine the phenomena around her in any sort of depth. The compulsion to understand and hence control is nearly absent from the text. 

Dreams, then, become the source of fear. I suspect this is so because it’s something that cannot be controlled or managed. It cannot be systematized and one cannot ‘work’ on a dream. Dreams permeate the barriers of our consciousness and have the singular power to penetrate the wall. Later on in the journal, the narrator describes her reaction to daydreams:

That was reality. Because I have seen and felt all that, it’s difficult for me to dream in the daytime. I have a violent resistance to daydreams, and I feel that hope has died in me. It frightens me. I don’t know whether I will be able to bear living with reality alone. Sometimes I try to treat myself like a robot: do this and go there and don’t forget to do that. But it works only for a short time. I’m a bad robot; I’m still a human being who thinks and feels, and I shall not be able to shake either habit. That’s why I’m sitting here writing down everything that’s happened, and I’m not worried about whether the mice will eat my notebooks or not. Writing is all that matters, and as there are no other conversations left, I have to keep the endless conversation with myself alive. It will be the only report that I shall ever write, for when it is written there won’t be a single piece of paper left to write on in the house. Even now the moment when I shall have to go to bed makes me tremble. Then I shall lie with my eyes open until the cat comes home, and her warm proximity will give me the sleep I long for. Even then I’m not safe. If I’m defenseless, dreams can assail me, black dreams of night. (176)

I find that passage compelling for a few reasons. First, the description of being “defenseless” against dreams. The wall around her physically almost stands in as a positive—nothing can permeate the wall, so she has a natural defence—that is, to everything except herself. Her self-characterization as a robot also stands out as being an existential reflection that exists juxtaposed to a more euphoric vision of herself as an all-encompassing being (more on that later). Finally, she makes use of the phrase “endless conversation” and I cannot help but hear an echo of Blanchot’s use of the phrase “the infinite conversation.” Again, more on that later.  Before moving on, I just wanted to linger on the idea of dreams for a moment. Specifically, the narrator discusses the relationship between affection and understanding and says,

In my dreams I bring children into the world, and they aren’t only human children; there are cats among them, dogs, calves, bears and quite peculiar furry creatures. But they emerge from me, and there is nothing about them that could frighten or repel me. It only looks off-putting when I write it down, in human writing and human words. Perhaps I should draw these dreams with pebbles on green moss, or scratch them in the snow with a stick. But I can’t do that yet. I probably won’t live long enough to be so transformed. Perhaps a genius could do it, but I’m only a simple person who has lost her world and is on the way to finding a new one. That way is a painful one, and still far from over. (196)

This grotesque image of animals emerging from her is given no judgement. It’s interesting, though, that dreams parallel her conflicted relationship with (terror of?) attachment to other beings. I also appreciate the echoes of becoming animal that Deleuze and Guattari voice and the implications she explores with respect to forming a new language that decenters human language is a great passing remark loaded with implications.

Of course, I’m a sucker for philosophizing about time, and towards the end of the book, the narrator offers a compelling meditation on the concept. She considers “its indifference and omnipresence.” She explains in a wonderfully poetic phrase how it “extends into infinity like an enormous spider’s web. Billions of tiny cocoons hang woven into its threads, a lizard lying in the sun, a burning house, a dying soldier, everything dead and everything living” (198). The most beautiful, haunting turn of phrase follows: “Time is big, yet it has room for new cocoons” (198). It is “ A gray and relentless net, in which every second of my life is captured. Perhaps that’s why it seems so terrible to me, because it stores everything up and never really allows anything to end” (198). Talk about terror. That framing of time is nothing short of incredible. The narrator then goes on to reflect on what happens to time if she dies: “But if time exists only in my head, and I’m the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I’m owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time” (198). I think this idea of murdering time with your own death is a troubling murder-suicide. 

This reflection on time is immediately followed by a reflection on its meaninglessness. As T.S. Elliot suggested, things would end with a whimper, not a bang. When and if she murders time, it is not something that will receive fanfare: “Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for a meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself” (198). This line serves as a ‘key’ for what appears to be such a surface novel. Searching for the meaning of the wall is beside the point. The point is just the wall. The outlook of “things just happen” (which infuriated some of our book clubbers) is necessary, because it parallels what happens to other creatures and the distinction between humans and animals seems to erode and she continues as follows:

If I casually stand on a beetle, it will not see this event, tragic for the beetle, as a mysterious concatenation of universal significance. [...] we’re condemned to chase after a meaning that cannot exist. I don’t know whether I will ever come to terms with that knowledge. It’s difficult to shake off an ancient, deep-rooted megalomania. I pity animals, and I pity people, because they’re thrown into this life without being consulted. Maybe people are more deserving of pity, because they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things. It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable. All the same, life could have been lived differently. There is no impulse more rational than love. (198)

This passage has so much to talk about and offers what I view as the core philosophy of the book. I see an echo to Martin Heidegger in the passage, too, particularly through the phrase “thrown into this life without being consulted.” Heidegger’s concept of “thrownness”---that humans are thrown into the world and then are forged by their environment—seems too clear to ignore. It also supports the idea of the fundamental unknowability of the world around us. Hence why the ending of the novel—a climactic interaction with another human being—is given almost no discussion. The characters do not interact except through violence. No words articulate them to one another; we end no closer to an explanation than we had at the start. Like a beetle.

That brings me back to the other philosophical underpinning of the text: Maurice Blanchot and the book Writing the Disaster. Blanchot discusses how a disaster has the power to disrupt reality such that the disaster cannot even be talked about: it destroys narrative, it destroys time. It cannot be articulated. That’s the wall. It is there but it can only ever be talked around. Returning to the idea of not examining the past, this ‘disaster’ of the wall produces some new possibilities for existence. In the start of the book, she discusses how the experience limits her and how she has missed her chance—time has passed her by and she will never become the person she would hope to be:

Never again shall I have the opportunity to make up for these losses, for even if I manage to find the many books stacked up in the lifeless houses, I will never be able to retain what I read. When I was born I had a chance, but neither my parents, my teacher nor myself was able to spot it. It’s too late now. I shall die without having used the chance that I had. In my first life I was a dilettante, and here in the forest, too, I shall never be anything else (67).  

Similarly, she discusses and dismisses her connection to others. There’s a motif of not speaking. When she reflects on speaking to others in the pre-wall world, she writes, “That’s probably how it was for everybody else, too. It’s something we never talked about, when we used to talk. I don’t think I shall have the opportunity to talk to other people about it again now. So I shall have to presume it was so” (49). One of my core frustrations as a reader of the book is that the ‘human’ drama is absent from the book. She is not talking to others, not really in conflict with anyone, not negotiating meaning, or engaging in all the other kinds of social behaviours that I find so compelling in fiction and in life—even her “infinite conversation” is an “endless conversation” with herself. Instead, this lack of connection becomes a vaguely liberatory, if dark, reality. Around the midpoint of the book, she provides the following passage: “I often look forward to a time when there won’t be anything left to grow attached to. I’m tired of everything being taken away from me. Yet there’s no escape, for as long as there’s something for me to love in the forest, I shall love it; and if some day there is nothing, I shall stop living.” It’s a near comic dread that she continually finds animals that require her care. A dog, a cat, another cat, kittens, a cow, a potential calf, a calf. Even her manuscript she frames as an exercise in feeding the mice. It’s an interesting idea that she is liberated from obligations to others and yet she continues to grow attached to other living beings and they continue to burden her with an ongoing existence: “Loving and looking after another creature is a very troublesome business, and much harder than killing and destruction. It takes twenty years to bring up a child, and ten seconds to kill it. It took the bull a year to grow big and strong, and a few strokes of an ax were enough to dispatch him.”

These reflections connect to a reconceptualization of identity that emerges as a motif in the text. There’s a pretty beautiful passage where the narrator reflects on her old self and her new self: “Back then, in the second summer, I hadn’t reached that point. The demarcation lines were still rigidly drawn up. I find it hard to separate my old self from my new self, and I’m not sure that my new self isn’t gradually being absorbed into something larger that thinks of itself as ‘We’” (153). She reflects on the Alm and how impossible it is under “the buzzing stillness of the meadow, beneath the big sky, to remain a single and separate Self, a little, blind, independent life that didn’t want to fit in with a greater Being” (153). It’s a nearly posthumanist take, where her identity is subsumed as both unique and its opposite. She’s literally the last person, as far as she knows, on Earth, and yet here she is becoming Other. She’s a bad robot and an all-embodying We.

This knowledge of the self and its blurred lines also speaks to the disconnect between experiencing and believing. Despite knowing that her former life was over, the narrator provides the following reflection:

it still hadn’t quite dawned on me that my former life had come to a sudden end; I knew it, that is, but only in my head, so I didn’t believe it. It’s only when knowledge about something slowly spreads to the whole body that you truly know. I know that I, like every living thing, will have to die some day, but my hands, my feet and my guts still don’t know it, which is why death seems so unreal. Time has passed since that June day, and gradually I’m beginning to understand that I can never go back. (49)

I adore stories that follow the phrase from Never Let Me Go that we are both told and not told. Haushofer seems to take this approach to its epistemological core: we know but don’t know until we actually feel it. It also helps to explain why so much of the text is focused on the purely external, the purely bodily. In another passage, she describes how since her childhood she “had forgotten how to see things with [her] own eyes” and “had forgotten that the world had once been young untouched and very beautiful and terrible” (175). She continues, “I couldn’t find my way back there since I was no longer a child and no longer capable of experiencing things as a child, but loneliness led me, in moments free of memory and consciousness, to see the great brilliance of life again” (175). There’s an inaccessibility to knowledge based on experience, and she establishes a contrast between past/present, studied/experienced, human/animal knowledge. She explains, “Perhaps animals spend their whole lives in a world of terror and delight. They cannot escape, and have to bear reality until they have ceased to be. Even their death is without solace and hope, a real death. Like all human beings, I was forever in hurried flight; forever trapped in daydreams” (175).

One thing that didn’t come up much, if at all, in our book club discussion, is some of its most fundamental symbolism. We talked a lot about how the narrator is able to pick up skills, make repairs, and so on. Yet, she consistently downplays her abilities. One thing that she can’t seem to do—and which she promises she will learn to do in the final pages—is fix a door for Bella, the cow: “For two and a half years I have suffered from the fact that this woman was so ill-armed for real life. I still can’t hammer a nail in properly to this very day, and the idea of the doorway I want to break open for Bella sends shivers down my spine Of course nobody had anticipated that I would have to make a doorway” (67). I think it’s interesting that the one thing she can’t do is make a literal door, given that she is surrounded by a wall in which she cannot make a door for herself. Yet, she seems to want to create openings for others. There’s a kind of selflessness there, even if she can’t quite achieve it.

I suspect that part of the book is addressing gender (though she does describe herself as feeling genderless). There’s a motif of male figures appearing as aggressive or as looming terrors (cf. Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken”). She considers what would happen if a man were stranded with her in the wall. She dreads the male calf in its own way. There’s a tom cat that is out there somewhere. In some ways, The Wall is a survival story, appropriated from a traditionally male genre and spun anew. At one point, the narrator completes a “colossal task” that had lain before her “for months like an enormous mountain.” She reflects on how much satisfaction it brought her and how the last time she felt that was when her children were little. She thinks about herself as being happy and a good mother but that “once they grew bigger and went to school [she] failed them” (168). She describes being increasingly insecure with them and “still looked after them as well as [she] could, but only very rarely was [she] happy around them” (168). She discusses becoming more dependent on her husband again: “he seemed to need me more than they did” (168), the construction of the phrase suggesting that she is dependent on his need for her. Yet, as her children slowly fade from her “everything changed in a wretched way, and [she] stopped really living” (168).

The idea of needing others to rely on her comes up repeatedly and it gives way to some interesting discussion around animals and animality. In one moment, she recounts a scene of a cat playing with a dead mouse: “She must have just killed the little creature. What I saw that time convinced me that she saw the mouse as a favorite toy. She lay down on her back, pressed the lifeless thing to her breast and tenderly licked it. Then she carefully put it down and gave it an almost loving shove, licked it again and finally turned to me with piteous little cries. I was supposed to make her toy move again. Not a trace of cruelty or malice” (88). I find it such a sad scene, this idea of a cat not knowing its own capacity for violence or to inflict death. She then meditates on the idea of guilt and innocence:

I have never seen eyes more innocent than those of my cat when she had just tortured a little mouse to death. She had no idea that she had caused the little thing pain. A favorite toy had stopped moving, and the cat was lamenting the fact. I shivered in the bright sunshine, and something akin to hatred moved within me. I stroked the cat quite absently and felt the hatred growing. There was nothing and nobody that I could hate for this. I knew I would never understand, and I didn’t want to understand, either. I was afraid. I’m still afraid, because I know that I can live only if I fail to understand certain things. That was, incidentally, the only time that I happened upon the cat with a mouse. (88)

I find the passage compelling for several reasons. It sets out a moral guideline for the universe wherein things just are. Guilt cannot be attributed without intent. Yet, there’s an ongoing hatred. This contradiction is a challenge to our typical conception of intentionality and I find it an interesting perspective to put forth that can be done most easily because she lives in isolation from other people.

Speaking of isolation, I’ve been holed up not writing book reviews or finishing books. I’ve been saving this review and my hope is that, now that it’s out there in the world and not destined to be mouse food, I’ll have some more thoughts and more books on the way.

All the best and happy reading!