Abstracts
Sixth Annual Conference on Austrian Literature and Culture
"Visions and Visionaries in Literature and Film of Modern Austria"
October 2001

Pam Saur, Lamar University
"Gerhard Roth: A Literary Visionary"

In the "Poetics," Aristotle asserts that "any beautiful object" must possess "not only ordered arrangement but also an appropriate scale (for beauty is grounded in both size and order)." He continues:
A creature could not be beautiful if it is either too small -- for perception of it is practically instantaneous and so cannot be experienced -- or too great, for contemplation of it cannot be a single experience, and it is not possible to derive a sense of unity and wholeness from our perception of it (imagine an animal a thousand miles long). Just, therefore, as a beautiful body or creature must have some size, but one which allows it to be perceived all together, so plot-structures should be of a length which can be easily held in the memory. (Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle, translation and commentary (Chapel Hill: U of NC P. 1987, p.39))

Confronted with this passage, of course, many twentieth-century artists would take it as a challenge to explore the creative possibilities of breaking Aristotle's boundaries regarding the size of an art work. If no one has yet created an animal sculpture a thousand miles long, there have been enormous sundaes and other spectacular food displays, artistically wrapped parliament buildings, intricate miniature objects and images on grains of rice, and Karl Kraus' play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit that would take ten evenings to produce.

The contemporary writer Gerhard Roth, in addition to his experimental large, small, interrelated, overlapping and multi-layered, highly non-unified literary works, has also challenged Aristotle's views regarding visual scope. Like Goethe., Emerson, and Altenberg, all literary "Augenmenschen" in different senses, Roth explores the possibilities of the widest and narrowest narrative visions. Although his shockingly unAristotelean magnum opus Archive des Schweigens explores various dimensions of silence, voice, and speech, the visual sense is important as well.One volume of the cycle, Der stille Ozean, contains a doctor who observes an isolated society in detail and explores his environment with a microscope, and Roth's earlier work Wille zur Krankheit also contains a protagonist, this time a patient, oriented toward microbes, blood vessels, and cells; in a sense he takes impressionism's realism of the moment and fragment to another, smaller level. Another of the cycle's volumes Im tiefen Österreich violates Aristotle's rules on the boundaries of literature because it is a volume of photographs. The overlapping and complex stories in Roth's works take place within the context of Austrian history, mystery stories, exploration of secret and hidden places in Austria, as well as hallucinations and writings, some fictional, some journalistic, of fictional mental patients.

Roth goes far beyond realist Stendahl's definition of a novel as a "mirror walking along the road" to incorporate realms available not to the naked eye or the mirror but to the microscope or telescope; he also leaves the main roads to snoop around the hidden alleys, corners, and basements. His wide scope of vision has many purposes and results in various artistic achievements. At times his visions reveal the literary virtuoso; at other times he displays the zeal for truth of the detective, the historian, the scientist; or the reporter bringing to light the hidden sufferings of humble creatures, human and otherwise. Roth's wide vision opens up a vast world of story-telling and of exploring the complexities of the human psyche.

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