Oswald Egger's poetry: salad of letters, fresh from the market in Marbach

When does life start again?

Things started a long time ago in literature, Leipzig Book Fair or not.

Literary studies are intensively concerned with the new zest for life: biographically, politically, socially.

She asks about the aesthetic tricks of autofiction and the diagnostic value of the precise description, but also about the day-to-day work of the authors and the circumstances of their writing.

Related disciplines such as sociology have taken up the impulses: there hasn't been so much life in literature for a long time.

So it's quite courageous when the German Literature Archive in Marbach is now asking about the self-reference of literature, i.e. about how signs relate to signs, how texts refer not to the world but to themselves.

Isn't the archive a good place for such reflections?

After all, the question has a long tradition: it did not come up with the avant-gardes, nor with the Age of Enlightenment.

It can be traced back to ancient poetics.

The stuff words are made of

The heyday of the sign-theoretical theoretical debates coincides with the focus of the Marbach collection.

They are in the twentieth century, when literary self-references were celebrated and explored in waves of semiotic, structural or post-structural theory.

With the current exhibition "punktpunktkommastrich" (until July 24th), the Marbach literature museums have taken up these threads.

They playfully approach the letter stuff that words are made of, for example when they show the lyric circuit diagram from Oskar Pastior's estate.

Last week, Marbach had invited the writer Oswald Egger and the literary scholar Ralf Simon to a discussion about signs and texts.

Egger, who was awarded the Oskar Pastior Prize in 2010, creates text compositions that measure linguistic spaces.

Since 2011, the author, who was born in 1963, has held a professorship for language and design at the Kiel Academy of Art.

He has repeatedly commented on poetic questions: his Munich speech on poetry in 2021 was entitled "Worlds from AZ".

In Marbach, Egger represented a tentative approach, which repeatedly contrasted fixed attributions with ambiguities and tipping points.

Egger kept coming back to “Oskar” and his lyric circuit diagram.

How does the sign become poetry?

He approached such "insidious how-questions" in an evasive maneuver when he referred to Pastior's songs and ballads from the "Crimean Gothic Fan".

"What makes the poet tick?" Is the question already answered if, like Pastior, you connect the E to the E or the S to the S in his circuit diagram?

The evening in Marbach was led by the Basel literary scholar Ralf Simon, who has been involved with language experiments from Jean Paul to Arno Schmidt to Oswald Egger for years.

A volume with intensive readings by Egger, which Simon edited with Martin Endres, has just been published by De Gruyter in the “Theory of Prose” series: “Wort für Wort” (also Open Access).

In the evening zoom universe, it was up to Simon to classify Egger's ideas from a theoretical perspective and to push them further by asking questions.

Escape the tautology in a roundabout way

Simon interprets Egger's “conceding retreat” as the task of art, which has to take cultural detours in order to defy the danger of self-referential tautologies.

Simon was particularly interested in the text surfaces in Egger's books: between geometric strictness and associative imagery.

Simon managed to elicit some production secrets from Egger's workshop.

Egger reveals how he translates the magic of mathematical models into literary text production, how he himself builds models with the help of which text worlds can be created, how he experimentally exploits this path and drives it to the plenitude of overproduction.

He talked about the many desks that were always full – Egger's texts are created on paper, not on the computer.

And he let the audience participate in the change of tables: how drawing can act as a trigger for writing for him.

Self-reference and external reference of literary sign systems: Both are represented and interwoven in the archive - this is what the Marbach exhibition, where the conversation started, wants to show.

Not just Pastior's anagram poem, which resolves the poet's drive into letter references and connects the individual letters with lines: "His wet hat kept me tacko." Is the S really just an S that refers to itself?

Or does it stand for the Securitate, the Romanian secret service for which Pastior also worked?

How dictatorship experiences affect the choice of topics and formal decisions cannot be explored by analyzing referral systems.

This requires the detour via life, which is currently the subject of specialist debates.

In view of the high degree of politicization and biography of contemporary literary studies, the Marbach discussion was a refreshing journey through time.