Lines and Circles: On Marlen Haushofer’s “The Wall” and Esther Kinsky’s “Grove”

AN OLD STORY tells of a hypothetical traveler lost in a forest who must decide what to do next. The narrator opines that such a person “should not wander about turning this way and that, nor, worse still, stop in one place, but should always walk in as straight a line as they can.” By doing so, the storyteller says, “even if [the wayward traveler is] not going exactly where they wish, at least they will eventually arrive somewhere where they will probably be better off than in the middle of a forest.”

As it turns out, our storyteller is a philosopher—the first “modern” one, by many accounts—named René Descartes, and his story is really an analogy from his 1637 text Discourse on Method. In fact, as Jacques Derrida, Robert Pogue Harrison, and others have explored, it’s the analogy he chooses for “method” itself—a word that is as much concerned with what to do as with how to decide what to do in the first place. It’s a word that comes from two Greek ones, meta and hodos, which together mean to be “on a path.” It is fitting that a natural wilderness is Descartes’s chosen metaphor for the necessity of deciding upon “next steps,” and it’s probably not pure coincidence that two works of modern German fiction have taken up a similar metaphorical framework to tell stories that, in many respects, begin where Descartes’s leaves off.

The novels in question are masterfully narrated from the perspectives of unnamed female protagonists who, in different but interestingly resonant ways, suddenly find themselves on the outside of an old, familiar world and inside a new one. This is literally the case in The Wall [Die Wand], penned by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer in the 1960s and published last year by New Directions press in an English translation by Shaun Whiteside. The story begins when the narrator, while visiting her cousin in the mountains of Upper Austria, awakens to discover that an invisible, impenetrable barrier has inexplicably appeared overnight in a random configuration around the surrounding landscape, confining her to a new environment that she must gradually make into a home. All signs of other human life have vanished, and, with the exception of several animals that become her closest companions (above all, her cousin’s dog Lynx), the woman—possibly the very last human being on earth—must relearn everything modern society has forgotten: how to live off the land, grow and harvest food, make shelter, and so forth.

By comparison, in Grove: A Field Novel [Hain: Geländeroman] by Esther Kinsky, first published in German in 2018 and released by Transit Books in 2020 in a lithe English translation by Caroline Schmidt, the world, in a literal sense, continues to exist as it always has. And yet, for the protagonist, it has also, existentially speaking, vanished—or at least ceased to be the world it once was. Here, too, we are guided through the mind and experiences of an unnamed narrator who suddenly finds herself in a terrain comprised of numerous thresholds. Her partner has recently died, and at the beginning of a new year, she decides to relocate to a small village in Italy. She lives in a house on a hill perched between the town and a cemetery and develops a daily routine of visiting each of these sites.

In both novels, the hinge between the old and new worlds is the disappearance of other people. In Haushofer’s story, this is literalized in the protagonist’s sudden isolation following a mysterious event that seemingly removes all traces of human life. In Kinsky’s, meanwhile, the issue is the death of an other—a beloved whose loss has dismantled the coordinates of meaning that gave the world its unique shape and substance. Both Haushofer’s and Kinsky’s protagonists must forge paths through depeopled “wildernesses” that stand in place of the worlds they once knew, paths that ultimately adumbrate “methods”: first, the difficult work of mourning, followed by the even more difficult work of figuring out what to do with love in light of the inevitability of loss.

Since The Wall’s plot both concerns and plays out within the natural environment, its contours are immediate and dramatic. Kinsky takes a distinct yet related approach in Grove, which is also about the familiar world becoming suddenly strange from the inside—an uncanny world (the German term is unheimlich, literally “unhomely”) to which the narrator must reorient herself if she is to become newly “at home” within it. As in The Wall, it is largely nature that serves not just as an external mirror but also as an actual vehicle for this experience as it unfolds. Several key events, as signaled by the book’s title, take place among the olive groves that grow between the village and the cemetery. Trees are a central aspect of the narrator’s temporary home away from home, and in a very practical sense, they structure her psychic as well as physical encounters with the town and the graveyard: “In the early mornings I would walk the same route every day. Up the hillside, between olive trees, curving around the cemetery to the small birch grove. […] In the afternoon I visited the graves.” These routine—one might even say ritual—walks along the tree-lined path externalize the psychological process of mourning and, in doing so, also imply that this process consists of a procession back and forth between the domains of the living and the dead, the polis and the necropolis.

In The Wall, relatedly, the protagonist sets about finding a way forward for herself and the animals in her care—a lost cow and cat soon come into the picture, forming (along with Lynx) a small menagerie. This new path begins as she reacquaints herself with the foundational cultural practices of agriculture, growing, harvesting, and hunting. Here, it’s worth quoting one of Haushofer’s contemporaries, Hannah Arendt, from her 1958 text The Human Condition:

If nature and the earth generally constitute the condition of human life, then the world and the things of the world constitute the condition under which this specifically human life can be at home on earth. […] But without being at home in the midst of things whose durability makes them fit for use and for erecting a world whose very permanence stands in direct contrast to life, this life would never be human.

If, as Arendt suggests, being alive in a human way means making a home on earth via the pragmatic as well as existential exercises of dwelling, then Haushofer’s protagonist presents the limit case. After all, as possibly the last living human, she must necessarily face up to the unprecedented likelihood that none of these practices of dwelling will outlive her. Interestingly, along with cultivating food, the practice that she most assiduously maintains is that of burying her animal companions when they die. Can it be mere coincidence that both of the fundamental human habits she keeps up—gardening and burial—are literally grounded in the earth? Over time, these practices of seeding futurity and interring memory gradually get uncoupled from a larger human context and become invested instead in the nonhuman forms of life that structure her new world and the home she makes of it.

Still, if the question of the future is essentially an uncertain—or, at the very least, an open—one for Haushofer’s protagonist, it remains more concrete for Kinsky’s—though only insofar as she comes to terms with her past and her beloved’s passing. Throughout Grove, the natural environment serves as a catalyst for memory that allows the narrator to continue her work of mourning. One of the most pivotal such sequences occurs towards the very end of the novel. As she is packing her things in preparation to leave, she discovers a long-lost set of photographic negatives in a coat pocket, in which she immediately recognizes her deceased partner standing in front of an indistinct landscape. As she looks more closely at the image, she “recognize[s] delicate webs of empty trees, white in the distant background,” upon which she remarks, “I ultimately read the trees as rows of poplars and was gripped by a peculiar horror: for a few seconds, I thought I recognized the local landscape.” In a flash, the trees open up a portal in time—even as the narrator realizes that the poplars in the negatives and on the horizon before her are in fact located hundreds of miles apart, they nonetheless seem to converge as she plunges into the memory contained within the translucent image: “As soon as I held the negatives up to the field and farmhouse, surrounded by poplar-webs in thin fog, I recalled the day that I had taken these pictures. […] I saw the row of poplars before me, which on this late afternoon stood black and sharp against a red-orange sky.”

In both novels, the protagonists gradually discover that the reinheritance of the past that allows them to move forward into the future is rooted in the linked practices of memorial: burial as well as remembrance. Being brought back to the earth in this starkly literal way is only one part of their shared realization that the earth knows things we don’t as yet—or that we have forgotten. In Grove, the local landscape has its own modes of communication that don’t correspond with ours: “The rustling of the palm, the whispering of the dry reed stalks, the birdcalls—all this was a new language, which wanted to be learned.” This thought has ancient roots. The Roman poet Virgil, for instance, believed it was possible to see the state of human history reflected in the natural world, if one knew how and where to look. In this way, the farmer could become a sort of soothsayer by virtue of having an intimate knowledge of the land and its patterns. As the sun presents signs to viewers, he writes in the Georgics, “[w]ho dare say the Sun is false? Nay, he oft warns us that dark uprisings threaten, that treachery and hidden wars are upswelling.” (The ecological implications of this are plain: just as interhuman violence can be recognized by the wounds it leaves, so too do the marks we’ve made on nature become signs with stories to tell.)

Similar to the as-yet-unlearned language of the landscape in Grove, the mountains and forests of The Wall are saturated, not just with significance but with actual signification. The narrator recalls spotting a fox drinking from a brook one winter day, and remarks how,

[w]henever I think “winter,” I always see the white, frost-covered fox standing by the snow-covered stream. A lonely adult animal going his predetermined way. Then it seems that this image means something important to me, as if it is only a sign for something else, but I can’t get to the meaning of it.

If the narrator recognizes some mysterious connection, perhaps even kinship, with the winter fox on its “predetermined way” (vorgezeichneten Weg), it is perhaps not only because she finds herself on a path of her own (an equally possible translation of the German Weg) but also because it, too, is a predetermined one of sorts. We’re told that it may well have been this same fox that killed the narrator’s cat earlier in the novel; she promptly buries the cat, but when its mother subsequently gives birth to new kittens, she makes a vain attempt at stoicism: “I resolved not to grow fond of them, but I could foresee that I would be unable to keep my resolution.” She cannot help but care for living things that cross her path.

This becomes especially poignant when a white crow appears one day towards the end of the story. Shunned by the other members of its species, it has had to fend for itself before the narrator starts caring for it: “Every day I wait for the white crow and call to it, and it looks at me attentively with its reddish eyes. […] Perhaps my scraps are prolonging a life that shouldn’t be prolonged. But I want the white crow to live.” Unlike the fox or the crow, whose paths in a certain sense were set by biological scripts long before their birth, the narrator comes to realize that her own path is, paradoxically, being continuously foredrawn (vorgezeichnet) out of the future—determined in advance, that is, by the certainty of living in orientation around other lives: “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.”

I think it would be a mistake to read this line as melodramatic, since it suggests a connection between loving and living that’s deeper than mere metaphor. If we take her to mean by “love” simply a feeling of affection, then it wouldn’t necessarily make sense for her life to stop along with it. But her statement does make sense if we read it in line with how, according to Arendt, St. Augustine glossed the relationship in the formula “amo: volo ut sis” (“I love you: I want for you to be”). If love is indeed predicated on being, then for the narrator of The Wall, it has perhaps become equally true that being is predicated on love; if one ceases, it doesn’t mean the other will but that it already has.

This, then, might be another way to read the omnipresence of path imagery in the text, which above all connotes a movement forward. Yet in both texts, the protagonists make their way forward in part by returning to the past, as when the narrator of Grove stands by the window with the film strip and, in a physical performance of the magic act of remembrance, repeats the conjuration:

Again and again I held the negative up to the light, reading the white, thin scrawl of this row of trees in England, deciphering moments of the past, till this winter script—the burgeoning tree branches, evoking feathers from a distance—stood as a symbol above this short chapter of my life with M., which opened here once more.

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The footfalls of Descartes’s lost traveler blazing his methodical trail echo through the forests of The Wall and Grove as well, whose protagonists likewise find themselves on journeys along literal paths that inspire the discovery of new figurative paths for thinking and being. Though they are fellow travelers in the wilderness, however, their tracks do not cross Descartes’s rectilinear trajectory but instead follow the trail of a more recent philosopher, Walter Benjamin. In the prologue to his 1928 study of the Baroque “mourning play” (Trauerspiel), Benjamin casts an admonishing glance at the scientistic postures of modern (i.e., post-Cartesian) philosophy, against which he contrasts the genre of the medieval treatise, whose underlying movement is not a line but a circle: “Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation.” Both protagonists find their respective paths in ways one can imagine Benjamin approving of, for although they are led forward into the new and unprecedented, they only arrive there by way of return to the past—whether that of cultural memory (as in The Wall) or personal memories (as in Grove). And we cannot doubt that they both continually pause for breath on their respective journeys; in fact, one gets the feeling that it is from such pauses that both narratives have been generated.

These two remarkable novels demonstrate that the many turns and returns of memory can become part of a “path” to “be on”—that, in other words, it is possible to move ahead precisely by circling back, to learn how to sow by remembering how to bury, and vice versa—and in this they have an invaluable lesson to teach about possible “methods” for navigating our ever less certain future. If we could take that lesson to heart here in our current moment of environmental crisis, then, like good farmers, we might be in a position to get our hands dirty with the necessary work of the present. All signs suggest that now is the time for that labor to begin, and as Virgil pointed out, “Who dare say the Sun is false?”

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Alexander Sorenson teaches German and comparative literature at Binghamton University. His book, The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice and Submergence in German Realism, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2024.