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!