Fractal Histories: Constructing Psychoanalytic Truth in Gerhard Roth's The Lake

In a sketch of the seven-text cycle Orkus, the Austrian author Gerhard Roth likened the realm of silence—often a guilty silence—he explored in his works to the underworld, an "invisible 'other world' that is probed, and not really understood or 'explained'…in psychoanalysis." Examining the cycle's inaugural novel, The Lake, this essay argues that a multi-theoretical psychoanalysis is indeed able to help readers craft a nuanced understanding of the counter-world of Roth's characters, and that in turn the novel illuminates aspects of psychoanalytic thinking. Its fractal structure engages with chaos not by trying to master it, but by allowing its order to emerge; its temporal unfolding is only comprehensible after the fact; and the subjectivity that emerges from its traumatic core is in touch, precariously, with a truth that defies simple explanation.