How to Sabotage the Mainstream
Rüdiger Görner follows in the footsteps of the uniquely imaginative poet Friederike Mayröcker

Perhaps I should start by explaining where these notes on one of the staunchest defenders of the belief in language amongst contemporary Austrian writers are being compiled. The place is called Gargellen, an Alpine hamlet and situated in the picturesque Montafon, a mountainous region at the Western fringes of Friederike Mayröcker's country. One would not expect to meet her here though; for Mayröcker is a quintessentially urban poet, deeply rooted in Vienna, even if she connects pastoral memories with the origins of her writing. As a six-year-old she was sitting at a well in the Lower Austrian village of Deinzendorf playing her harmonica; Mayröcker associates this slightly melancholic scene, or 'arch-idyll' as she put it, with the very mood that has informed her writings ever since.

No, Gargellen in winter would not be Mayröcker's place at all, with its brigades of expensively geared up skiers following each other like cattle with their Montafon key-cards, electronic tickets, dangling around their necks like symbols of soundless cow-bells, all on their way to the station of a hyper-modern cable car that leads the skiers up to the deep snow fun park and race area on an Alpine plateau, appropriately called Schafsberg, or mountain of the sheep. Or are we, by now, not already at the beginning of a Mayröcker-like sentence that shows, through its rich texture, intrinsic involvement with what happens around this author? For Mayröcker, if she were here in Gargellen, would write about this most absurd form of mass migration from the point of view of a loner, a lame one perhaps, an emphatic non-skier, an injured one or of someone, who is walking in the midst of these sport-fanatics, yet dressed as the odd one out in a long black coat with a long black scarf and a black city-bag, not to forget the French beret.

The aforementioned texture of Mayröcker's texts reminds the reader of some piece of densely woven textile with elaborate patterns but with no embroidery surrounding it. When reading these texts one is conscious of their very fabric. Mayröcker's words and sentences want to be touched by the eyes and hands of the reader. This author respects the reality of words, their presence and desire to be either autonomous or absent; she illustrates the process of linguistic formations and believes in allowing the words to gain their own momentum. Unlike Ernst Jandl with whom she shared the best part of her life, Mayröcker has never been prepared to sacrifice the comprehensibility of the word. She refused to dissolve the word and isolate its sounds as was the case in Jandl's so-called 'concrete poetry'.

Time and again, Mayröcker has emphasised that she would not be tempted to go beyond language; she accepts the limitations of language but also embraces every possibility this medium of expression offers. Her originality and mastery of (indirect) citation has often been commented on. In her texts we can find, for example, Baudelaire in the mouth cavity; and with Flaubert she will make 'notes on a camel' but not whilst travelling through Egypt but whilst meditating the desert of Vienna.

Mayröcker owes as much to Romanticism as to Surrealism and the legacy of the Wiener Gruppe with its ethos, and pathos, of a perpetual inward revolution. She seems to need the belief in being able to sabotage any mainstream and create a perfect match between innermost feelings and poetic expression. In a recent interview, Mayröcker explained that the very basis for her way of writing is sensual perception. She describes herself as a Augen-und Ohrenmensch, in other words as someone who depends entirely on visual images and aural perceptions.

If one were to look for traces of utopian thinking, at present the most damaging characteristic that can be attributed to any artist or intellectual, I would single out Mayröcker's desire to reconcile her longing for distance with her wish to settle, as she put it in one of her poems. Another such trace is undoubtedly her confidence in the unsettling quality of inner rebellion, for instance against the arrogance of state authority but also the sheer emptiness that conditions the (post-)modern individual.

Mayröcker's texts are undeniably suggestive, absorbing, if not magical. Therefore the title of her latest book Magische Blätter (magical leaves), slightly reminiscent of Schumann's musical collection Bunte Blätter, could not be more appropriate. It is difficult to resist the sensual impact of these texts. Their compelling quality makes the reader wish to re-enter them, again and again. This happened to me, too, when I first encountered Mayröcker's collection of prose pieces called Das Herzzerreißende der Dinge (the heart-rending of things) published in 1985. These texts seem to have been written in protest against the realisation that Man in modern times has become increasingly redundant. The author of these texts is aware that her efforts at the desk are futile but it is this sense of futility that incenses her and inspires her to go on with Goya, Dalí and Canetti as her virtual companions. In these texts she describes Vienna as a place that is tyrannised both by the onslaught of melodies, or 'madness of music' as Mayröcker put it, and persistent drafts everywhere. But then, there is the word 'capriccio' that intrigues her; she talks about it as part of her 'incessant dialogue with language' which has lead her to exploit all other forms of artistic expression, such as music and the visual arts, for the purpose of turning it, like anything else, into poetic narrative. That is to say, for Mayröcker a piece of music or a painting only exists for the sake of exploring its verbal potential.

Mayröcker's life-long love affair with language has enabled her though to write some of the most touching love-poetry in the modern German language. One example is her poem 'how and why I love you' (tr. Rüdiger Görner) dedicated to Ernst Jandl on his seventieth birthday:

'when it is you I am not sure whether it is me
what is threatening you is also threatening for me
the mirror which I look into every evening
offers me at once your image and mine
the secret in the darkness of my heart is not
for anyone to reveal
it attracts me most profoundly and deeply
and is probably the motif for my unfaltering love'

Her texts are mirrors of that kind, too. Reading them we recognise ourselves and the ever changing image of our most telling passion called language.

Friederike Mayröcker was born in 1924 in Vienna. Predominantly a poet, Magische Blätter I-V (Suhrkamp, 1983-1999), she also writes prose, collected in Gesammelte Prosa I-V (Eds. Klaus Reichert et al., Suhrkamp, 2001), and has often illustrated her writings. Editions of Mayröcker's work available in English: Night Train (Ariadne Press, 1992), Heiligenanstalt (Burning Deck Press, 1994), With Each Clouded Peak (Sun & Moon Press, 1998), and forthcoming Brütt oderdie seufzenden Gärten (Northwestern Press).

Rüdiger Görner is Director of the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, and Professor of German at Aston University, Birmingham.