Actually, Oswald Egger’s latest work “Either I only dreamed the trip on the Mississippi, or I’m dreaming now” is a book of the hour. Because in the Corona years 2020 and 2021, all of our mobility was extremely restricted. Traveling so often only took place within your own four walls, namely in your head. This is exactly the starting point of Egger’s book, which also travels the titular Mississippi only in thought:
“The Book of the Mississippi begins in my room. Skiny, smudged shadows, the cloudy flow of brushes and little strokes in aquatic rhythm, so that the curved lines intertwine, like clouds coppering up or down, and dabs that intertwine: Hazy has the Line dunked, mumbled from the horizon, swaying with watery contours: I’ve been going to sea like this for years.”
Poetically charged art prose
Typical of Egger’s poetically charged art prose is its concentration, its flow from within: the words seem to form one upon the other, really like a river, the Mississippi. And right at the beginning of the text, Egger reveals that his language actually arises like this, as a stream of consciousness, almost automatically, a dream in words: “When I read, blue ink flows from the left across the paper, the words drift upwards, like flowers in wind-blown pinwheels : new ones are constantly scrawling up, brimming with tangles, which, as often as I have swam at them, become increasingly blurred and twisted into vortex threads and streamlines.”
Egger has tremendous language skills. Among this season’s books, his is likely to have by far the largest vocabulary. The author borrows his vocabulary from distant contexts. Often there are geological or botanical terms, sometimes medieval plant names. Egger often creates new morphemes. Sometimes they’re completely made up, sometimes they’re not. A word like “gravity” actually exists. There are also “sand lenses” – but not in the context in which they appear here. Because with Egger it becomes “sand lens folds”, which, like “block rubble hood floors”, might also be technical terms for soil properties. In fact, however, these are free word formation effects of Egger’s language fantasy.
Rampant word roots
This rampant root work, exuberant, widely ramified and lush, is forced into a strict formal corset – like water into a river bed: apart from a short intro and an outro, the book consists of 386 numbered individual texts, always two per page with exactly 17 lines. The language resembles what it describes, the wild growth, the unstoppable, pushing force of nature:
“I jump like a web between the bay and the shore, and I sew them up. I dug sludge sponges out of the clay with my paw and beat them in twos, both floors: the trickle sand swung in lanes like a vibrating sieve. And such scours deepen.”
A world of the elemental
It is a world of the elementary, the abstract, the I that sometimes appears is formless. It is true that the experiences of Austrian emigrants to America from the years 1880 to 1919 are interwoven in a way that can hardly be deciphered, but in reality the focus is on the language, with its associations and richness of sound.
“But now, stone on stone, I alone experience the untrue stillness: how layers of nodular marl, nodular limestone and fissured limestone slate interspersed and the limbed figurines are innumerably cracked, istered, crumble and unmixed often splintered into angular crumbs, all siliceous-skinned sickly, into jagged ones , ring-shaped pieces.”
Such elementary poetry is known in German literature only from authors such as Arno Holz, his “Phantasus”, or Otto Nebel with his “Rune Fugues”. Readers can’t expect an immediate understanding from the reading, but have to surrender to the “mainstream” of the language, the mental Mississippi. Its historical river courses form the basis for the very beautiful watercolors that Egger painted for the book. The author reveals that they were of great importance for the working process, they carried him while he was writing. So everything comes together in the book, language, image, form – a real work of art.
Oswald Egger: “Either I only dreamed the trip on the Mississippi, or I’m dreaming now”, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 280 pages, 28 euros
