LITERARY PROJECTION OF PANDEMIC IN MARLEN HAUSHOFER’S NOVEL «THE WALL»

Abstract

The context of a historical period may provoke unexpected interpretation of this or that book because of its parallels with current social phenomena. The plot of M. Haushofer’s novel has such distinct similarities to the present reality, that it makes scientists reinterpret it. Though this literary work was published in German in 1963, it was translated into Ukrainian in 2020, that explains a small number of studies, devoted to its analysis. The number of the reviews on this novel has recently grown in English-language literary sources, emphasizing the need of reinterpretation of the novel in the context of the spread of coronavirus infection, that proves topicality of the theme of the article. The purpose of the study is to examine the specificity of a literary projection of pandemic in M. Haushofer’s novel «The Wall», identifying and analyzing literary versions of mythoscenarios in it.

Yu. Vyshnytska’s concept described in her monograph «Mythological scenarios in the modern literary and publicist discourse» was chosen as a theoretical foundation of the research. The following methods of literary analysis – intertextual, semiological, psychoanalytical and poetological – were used in the course of the research. At the beginning of the novel «The Wall» there are elements of the mythoscenario of the end, based on eschatological plots. This mythoscenario in M. Haushofer’s work is a part of a dualistic model together with the mythoscenario of the beginning which is a universal worldview model. The dystopia «The Wall» can be considered an original literary projection of pandemic that is visible most distinctly in the plot of isolation, in articulation of the basic archaic opposition «life–death». The work of the Austrian author vividly visualizes it in the mythoscenarios of the beginning, the end and initiation which show diffusion of the structural contours and transgenic features – the ability of one mythoscenario to merge with another. Interpretation of these mythoscenarios allows identifying the analyzed novel as an example of neomythological literature. M. Haushofer’s dystopia opens space for literary studies of different aspects, in particular, prospects of further research can be seen in psychoanalytical investigation of the character-narrator’s state caused by isolation.