Narrating Silence: Gerhard Roth's Am Abgrund

Gerhard Roth's novel from 1986, Am Abgrund , stands at the center of hismonumental and multi‐genre cycle, Die Archive des Schweigens . On one level, the novel can be read as an allegory of modern Austria, which Roth has called a “Reich des Schweigens.” Its main protagonists—the mute, ostensibly insane Lindner and the law student‐cum‐murderer Jenner—could represent the twinned dimensions of post‐war Austrian silence: guilt and trauma. More broadly, Am Abgrund enacts a post‐rational subjectivity that is dispersed over a ground of multivalent and supremely powerful silence. Narrative agency, scattered among multiple figures, is attenuated to the point of nearly disappearing. Roth has said “das Untersuchen ist eine Krankheitvon mir,” an illness he shares with the novel's third protagonist, the magistrate Sonnenberg. But through this pathologically tinged compulsion, Roth's fiction ultimately makes present a mute reality that can only be traced and silhouetted, but never penetrated, by language.