The Worlds of Elias Canetti

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The Worlds of Elias Canetti


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti

Centenary Essays

Edited by

William Collins Donahue and Julian Preece

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays, edited by William Collins Donahue and Julian Preece

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2007 by William Collins Donahue and Julian Preece and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-84718-352-2; ISBN 13: 9781847183521


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To our children: Gabriel, Marianne, Molly and Olivia


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments..................................................................................... ix

Note on quotation and translation............................................................... x

Introduction ............................................................................................... xi

Chapter One

Die Blendung1935-2005Gerald Stieg................................................................................................ 1

Chapter Two

Dwarf helicopters that land on bald heads: Literary Nonsensein Canetti

Sven Hanuschek ....................................................................................... 11

Chapter Three

The Opaque Voice: Canettis Foreign TonguesKata Gellen............................................................................................... 23

Chapter Four

Canetti on Safari: The Self-Reflexive Moment of

Die Stimmen von Marrakesch

William Collins Donahue......................................................................... 47

Chapter Five

The Milburns and the Toogoods: Elias and Veza CanettisExperience of Exile

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz ............................................................................... 63

Chapter Six

Elias Canetti in Red Vienna

Deborah Holmes....................................................................................... 83

Chapter Seven

Viennese Endings: Echoes ofDie Blendungin Ingeborg Bachmann'sMalina and Elfriede Jelinek'sDie Klavierspielerin

Julian Preece .................................................................................................. 107


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Table of Contentsviii

Chapter EightSocial Disintegration and Chinese Culture: The Reception

of China inDie Blendung

Chunjie Zhang ........................................................................................ 127

Chapter Nine

Elias and Veza Canetti: German Writing, Sephardic Heritage

Lisa Silverman........................................................................................ 151

Chapter Ten

Comic Citation as Subversion: Intertextuality in

Die BlendungandMasse und Macht

Anne Peiter ............................................................................................. 171

Chapter Eleven

Destructive Satires: Canetti and Benjamins Search for theMurderous Substance of Satire

Kai Evers ................................................................................................ 187

Chapter Twelve

Canetti and Violence

Ritchie Robertson................................................................................... 211

Chapter Thirteen

Modes of Restitution: Schreber as Countermodel for Sebald

Arthur Williams...................................................................................... 225

Chapter Fourteen

Canetti, Schreber, and the Nervous Voice

Erik Butler .............................................................................................. 247

Chapter Fifteen

Breathing in the Eternal: Canetti and Spinoza

Knox Peden ............................................................................................ 259

Notes on the Contributors....................................................................... 277

Index....................................................................................................... 281


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of the chapters in this volume began as papers delivered at a

conference held at the University of Kent, Canterbury in July of 2005, the

centenary of Elias Canettis birth. The editors wish to express their

gratitude to the British Academy, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and the

Dean of Humanities at Rutgers University (New Brunswick) for their

generous support of that international conference. We furthermore wish tothank our editorial assistant, Harrison Williams, without whose

intelligence, patience, and attention to detail, this book would not have

been possible.

William Collins Donahue and Julian Preece


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NOTE ON QUOTATION AND TRANSLATION

We have followed Sven Hanuscheks example in his biography of

Elias Canetti by referring to the ten-volume Hanser edition of Canettis

works. Volume and page numbers follow the German quotations. Each

time there is a translation into English: some of our contributors have

translated Canettis original German themselves, however, while some

have used published translations. In the latter cases the relevant translationis cited in full in the essay.

The Hanser volumes appeared between 1992 and 2005 and are

numbered as follows:

I Die Blendung(Auto-da-F)

II Dramen: Hochzeit, Komdie der Eitelkeit, Die Befristeten; Der

Ohrenzeuge: Fnfzig Charaktere (Plays: Wedding, Comedy of

Vanity, The Numbered; The Ear-Witness: Fifty Characters)

III Masse und Macht(Crowds and Power)IV Aufzeichnungen 1942-1985: Die Provinz des Menschen; Das

Geheimherz der Uhr (Jottings 1942-1985: The Human

Province; The Secret Heart of the Clock)

V Aufzeichnungen 1954-1993: Die Fliegenpein; Nachtrge aus

Hampstead. Postum verffentlichte Aufzeichnungen (Jottings

1954-1993: The Pain of the Flies; Notes from Hampstead.

Posthumously published Jottings)

VI Die Stimmen von Marrakesch. Aufzeichnungen nach einer Reise.

Das Gewissen der Worte. Essays. (The Voices of Marrakesh:Record of a Journey; The Conscience of Words: Essays)

VII Die gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend (The Tongue set

Free: Story of my Youth)

VIII Die Fackel im Ohr. Lebensgeschichte 1921-1931 (The Torch in

My Ear: Life Story, 1921-1931)

IX: Das Augenspiel. Lebensgeschichte 1931-1937 (The Play of theEyes: Life Story, 1931-1937)

X Aufstze. Reden. Gesprche (Essays. Speeches. Interviews)


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Introductionxii

writer. This rabbi of our word (as William Gass has styled him) wantedabove all to propagate the good news of transformation (Verwandlung),

and in this way rescue us from the clutches of death and power. It

should not surprise us, then, that an author of such startling ambition

should attract the attention of writers and thinkers from broadly divergent

fields of inquiry.

In the introduction to his seminal study, The Austrian Mind: An

Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938, William M. Johnston bemoans

the fact that the splintering of scholarship through specialization has

made polymaths seem obsolete, especially in the United States. Today

Freud, Neurath, or even Wittgenstein would be patronized as

unprofessional, so dazzling was their versatility. Constricted by training

and by criteria for advancement, scholars who do examine these men

cannot help but interpret them from a parochial point of view. . . More

than anything else, a lost breadth of knowledge separates these men from

ourselves.3 Canetti is such a polymath who for similar reasons has largelyeluded our grasp. This volume represents our effort to rectify that

situationto reclaim some of that lost breadth of knowledge that

illuminates Canettis contributions to diverse areas of thought and

literature.

Part of the blame, as Johnston suggests, clearly lies within ourselves.

Iris Murdoch put it best: She begins her 1962 review of Crowds andPower by stating unequivocally that she is simply no match for the

polymath author of this quirky and unprecedented study.4 How could she

fully appreciatelet alone critically evaluatesuch an ambitious, far-

flung, and erudite work, she wonders. Murdochs dilemma remains our

own. Yet over time, and by way of crucially interdisciplinary exchanges

(such as the one that gave birth to this book), we have come to appreciate

Canettis importance to fields of inquiry far beyond our own training or

specialty. Or at least we have made palpable progress in that direction.

One of the great benefits of Canetti scholarship, when conducted in thismanner, is that it asks us not only to plunge ourselves into the great

unknown, but also to pull ourselves back, at regular intervals, to the

domain of the much despised generalist. To be sure, both directions

contain their own quantity of humility and hubris, as Canetti well knew.

3 William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History

1848-1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 6-7.4 I am not the polymath who would be the ideal reviewer of this remarkable

book, she says in the opening sentence of her review. See Iris Murdoch, Mass,Might and Myth, in Critical Essays on Elias Canetti, ed. David Darby (New

York: G.K. Hall & Co., 2000), 154-7.


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays xiii

But how else can we avoid, in our own scholarship, fulfilling the wickedcaricature of academic over-specialization that he immortalized in the

protagonist of his 1935 modernist novelDie Blendung?

And yet Canetti, too, must share some blame for his heretofore

somewhat parochial reception. He wrongly, and some would say

arrogantly, imagined readers exclusively like himselfcultured readers

deeply familiar with and curious about a broad array of European

literature and scholarship. He assumed, for example, that readers of

Crowds and Powerwould of course know of Freuds (and before that Le

Bons) earlier study of crowd phenomena and thus immediately grasp the

innovative quality of hisCanettiswork. Such is simply part and parcel

of the educated persons intellectual portfolio. Canettis not infrequent

refusal to name and engage with his intellectual forebears is not entirely

attributable to egotism, as some have claimed, but clearly also to an urgent

need to get on with things: he felt no academic compulsion (as we would)

to retrace the scholarly genealogy, or to tip his hat to those who had gonebefore him.5 He left academia immediately after receiving his Ph.D. in

Chemistry in part to shed this practice of (to him) tediously respectful and

narrowly conceived scholarship. In this respectin projecting his own

exceptional status onto the rich diversity of real-world readershe can be

said to recapitulate the very subjectivist error he satirizes so brutally inDie

Blendung. Nevertheless, we should concede that neither was he entirelywrong in imagining such a readership. A number of prominent readers,

such as Gilles Deleueze and W.G. Sebald (as we will discover further in

this volume), as well as Peter Sloterdijk and Klaus Theweleit, were indeed

able to appreciate Canettis distinctive contributions without the

ministrations of specialist academic studies. Furthermore, Canettis noted

feuilleton style of writing (learned, but not encumbered by an academic

apparatus), which is particularly evident in Crowds and Power, was

precisely the factor that endeared him to a certain readership after all.6

In other ways, though, Canetti can be seen to have more directlymisled us, to have covered over his own tracks, and thus to have obscured

(or even distorted) some of his own relevance and importance for today.

How deeplyto take one examplewas he engaged with philosophy? He

5 A less charitable view of Canettis omissions can be found in Axel Honneths

The Perpetuation of the State of Nature: On the Cognitive Content of Elias

Canettis Crowds and Power, Thesis Eleven 45(Elias Canettis Counter Image of

Society) (1996): 69-85.6 On this, see my Good-Bye to All That: Elias Canettis Obituaries, in ACompanion to the Work of Elias Canetti, ed. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz (Rochester,

NY: Camden House, 2004), 25-41.


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Introductionxiv

protests throughout his work that he is no philosopher, keinBegriffsmensch. Indeed, he seems sometimes to celebrate this fact. Yet

the very phrase he chooses is noticeably polemical. For years many of us

followed too closely the leads and cues offered in the autobiography, and

this claim about his alleged distance from philosophy is no exception.

Now, thanks to the work of his first critical biographer, Sven Hanuschek,

as well as the contributions in this volume by Ritchie Robertson and Knox

Peden, it appears rather clear that Canetti was richly and crucially in

dialogue with ancient Eastern as well as modern European philosophy.7

Chunjie Zhang goes so far in her contribution to argue that without an

understanding of Canettis adept appropriation of Confucius and Lau-Tse

much of the critique contained in Die Blendung is simply lost on us.

Though we have perhaps long suspected that Canetti was being a bit too

coy about his philosophical prowessparticularly insofar as he mentions

a formal study of ancient Chinese philosophy he had undertaken and then

abruptly interruptedwe now possess substantial evidence of Canettisphilosophical interventions.

The sameor something similarcould be said of his suppression of

his radical past. The acclaimed three volume autobiography is oddly silent

on his affiliation with Red Vienna of the 1920s and early 1930s. The

Communist Ernst Fischer and others questioned Canettis re-writing of his

past; but for many years these remained isolated voices on the margin ofCanetti scholarship. In her contribution to this volume, Deborah Holmes

unearths new data that document Canettis affiliation with Socialist

Vienna and leftist radical politics more generally. Her contribution adds

not only to our understanding of Canetti the man, but the author as well.

She is explicitly concerned to show how the historical evidence she

marshals creates a new interpretive context for the novel and the early

plays of this period. This exemplifies an overriding concern of the present

book. Ours is not an antiquarian interest. Rather, we are guided by a desire

to understand Canettis multifarious afterlivesthe many Canettiswho persist into the cultural present of our own day. To this end, The

Worlds of Elias Canetti contains a broad selection of studies that range

from Canettis influence on recent and contemporary authors (e.g.

Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, and W. G. Sebald) to his

contribution to the anthropological debate on violence (Ritchie Robertson)to his provocative conception of Jewish identity (Lisa Silverman). In what

7 Regarding Canettis engagement with philosophy and philosophers, see

Hanuschek, 116, 175-6, 191, 238, 329, 450, 622, 624.


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays xv

follows, I will introduce more explicitly each of the chapters in the orderthey appear below.

In chapter one, Gerald Stieg, long-time friend of Canetti, makes public

a very private reminiscence. This is the story of how Stieg (b. 1941) laid

down one set of authoritarian beliefs (he confesses here that he was a

convinced Nazi until about 1954 and harbored residual belief in National

Socialism through his early twenties) only to take up another. He portrays

his short-lived resolve to immerse himself in Catholicismindeed to

become a Jesuit priestas part of a process of dissolving his connection to

Nazism. (The eerie propinquity of Nazism to Catholicism in his

biographyand perhaps within postwar Austria more generally

speakingis in fact strongly reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard,8 whom he

references at the outset of this chapter.) Canetti enters the pictureas he

did for so many postwar readers of German literaturewith the 1963 re-

publication ofDie Blendung. For Stieg and many of his generation this is a

pivotal moment. It is no coincidence that he concludes his chapter with thefamous motto from St. Augustines Confessions: tolle lege, for he gleans

from his encounter with this perplexing modernist novel the same sense of

powerful conversionalbeit not one toward Christianity. In the wake of

National Socialism, Stieg and his cohort of younger Austrian intellectuals

found themselves confronted with the task of forging a new kind of

secularized cultural faith: I had not a moments doubt about the value ofthe culture to which I dedicated myself. This faith differed from my earlier

faith and from all others by its manifestly polytheistic nature and the

absence of dogmatically binding authorities. Yet this third dispensation

(after Nazism and Catholicism) also came under firefrom Canetti. One

of the mysteries of this novel is the manner in which it appears to

diagnose multiple historical periods and diverse readerships. As Stieg

describes it, it was his ongoing confrontation with Die Blendung, and in

particular with its merciless satire of a worshipful approach to high

culture, that kept him and his contemporaries, at a moment of notablecultural vulnerability, from signing on to simple or sentimental notions of

cultural piety. Poignant in its personal narrative, Stiegs essay

simultaneously offers valuable perspectives on Die Blendungdrawn

from over forty years of reading and teaching this novelthat transcend

the particular postwar Austrian setting that just happened to frame his firstencounter with Canetti.

8 See especially his Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag,1975), in which Bernhard polemically and repeatedly juxtaposes the Nazi

schoolmaster Grnkranz with the priest Onkel Franz.


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Introductionxvi

Just as Stieg reveals a new facet of Canettithe way in which themonumental interwar novel speaks powerfully to a specific postwar

mindset (and beyond)so too does Sven Hanuschek disclose in his

chapter, Dwarf helicopters that land on bald heads, an aspect of the

author that has until now remained virtually unknown. Author of the

authoritative Canetti biography, Hanuschek is probably more familiar than

anyone with the surprisingly rich contents of the Nachlass, Canettis

unpublished literary testament that is housed in the Zurich Public Library.

In conducting his research for that book, Hanuschek uncovered a corpus of

literature that has no real counterpart in Canettis published work. Given

his self-imposed task in that study of depicting above all else with the

help of the gigantic quantity of material in his estate the inside story of the

history of his publications, which itself is largely well known,9 he was

unable to treat there what we have the good fortune to present here: a

compelling documentation of Canettis fascination with literary Unsinn

(nonsense). This is a side of the author that even those familiar with thewayward genre of the Aufzeichnungen (perhaps rendered best in

English as jottings) have not yet seen. Here we witness Canetti at play,

unencumbered with the strain of argumentation and proof, toying with the

texture and sound of language that is very much on the margin (and in

some cases well beyond the pale) of semantic meaning.

Literary nonsense would seem to be worlds apart from Canettisacclaimed autobiography, which some academic critics have criticized for

its apparently traditional narrative form. In her handbook on the theory of

autobiography, Linda Anderson cites Augustines Confessions as the great

counter-example for any self-respecting modernist writer. God is to his

creation, she argues, as Augustine is (or would like us to believe he is) to

his autobiography.10 Such epistemological effrontery, she insists, would be

impossible for writers of today. Yet, Canetti asserts no less a degree of

sovereignty over his life story, and this has caused consternation among

critics who try to reconcile the great modernist with the author of theseautobiographical works. Into this fray, though perhaps not quite

intentionally, steps Kata Gellen with her analysis of the autobiography as a

privileged site and source of Canettis opaque voice. Far from a

specimen of unreflective realism, she argues, Canettis auto-biographical

writings return again and again to scenes of non-understanding, in whichlanguage is experienced as pure sonorous material. Reflecting on

Canettis persistent fascination with unverstandene Worte (words that

9 Hanuschek, 15.10 Linda Anderson,Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), 18-27.


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays xvii

elude comprehension), she suggests that this phenomenon, preciselybecause it represents an irreducible, untranslatable part of language,

enforces a kind of listening that both thwarts writing and gives it new

urgency. In her discussion of the pivotal Kannitverstan episode from

Die gerettete Zunge, for example, Gellen shows how Canettis narrative is

shot through with foundational moments of incomprehension and semantic

exclusion or opacity. Indeed, in his insistence on the materiality,

otherness, and agency of language, and in his bizarre practice of

subordinating himself to the acoustic masks of othershe often

committed to memory (and then later performed) whole monologues he

picked up in public placesCanetti emerges here not as some formally

retrograde autobiographer, but rather as an exponent of poststructuralist

poetics.

Like Canettis three-volume autobiography, The Voices of Marrakesh

(also an autobiographical text, by the way) appears to lead a literary

double life: it appeals very broadly (if publication and sales numbers areany guide), yet also has found a niche among scholarly readers attentive to

its self-reflexive narrative strands. (An analogy might be Fassbinders

enormously popularDie Ehe der Maria Braun, which is seen as both a

staple of New German Cinema and as an accessible vehicle of mass

entertainment.) While the 2002 Hanser edition featuring photographs of

Marrakesh by Kurt-Michael Westermann (beautiful in their own way)would seem to advocate the touristic reading, I argue that contained within

the same pronominal I are both the unabashedly Orientalist tourist and

the retrospective, highly self-reflexive author. What makes this narrative

dyad even more interesting is that neither subject position is entirely

predictable or stable. I take the opening chapterone Canetti himself

seems to have privileged insofar as he recorded it separately and published

it years in advance of the longer text it now introducesas programmatic

for a reading of the book as a whole. What we witness in Begegnungen

mit Kamelen (Meetings with Camels), and mutatis mutandis in the bookas a whole, is the very process of narrative displacement. While Canetti

the tourist is adamantly fixated on fulfilling his escapist fantasy of gazing

upon enigmatic camels bathed in the dusky orange light of a North African

sunset, the retrospective author enters enough extraneous data into the

story that in the end the camels themselves transmogrify into hauntingicons ofhuman suffering. If what Helene Cixious claims is truenamely

that all narratives tell one story in place of another11then Canetti can

11 Quoted in Anderson, 1.


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Introductionxviii

be credited with showing us how it is that we sense that other storybehind or beyond the dominant narrative.

One story that Canetti would later be accused of intentionally

suppressing was that of his own wifes literary accomplishments and

ambitions. Though Julian Preece essentially absolves him of this charge

on the contrary, Canetti seems to have been quite eager to have her

succeedthis raises the fascinating question about his debt to Veza and

vice versa.12 How did they influence (or perhaps complement) each other?

Can we consider their workwhich formally is so strikingly differentin

some crucial manner as in dialogue? Dagmar Lorenz approaches the issue

by asking how each author provides a literary response to the experience

of exile in England. For a time during the bombing of London in the

Second World War, Veza and Elias Canetti lived in a country cottage as

boarders with a minister and his wife by the name of Milburn. Canetti

wrote about this in an unfinished memoir that was published

posthumously under the title Party im Blitz; it is a rough-edged,uncensored collection of reminiscences of their time in England, some

superbly realized, that Hanuschek says Canetti would never have

published in quite this unvarnished form.13 Veza Canetti fictionalized their

experience of exile in a short story, Toogoods or the Light, which was

also published posthumously. Conscious of the fundamental

incommensurability of these two forms, fiction and memoir, Lorenzsagely cautions us that neither one of the texts about the minister and his

wife provides direct information about the Canettis life in exile. The

Canettis moved in circles that included many, many refugees, and it is

clear that in fictionalizing this period, or even in selecting episodes for

narration in a memoir, perhaps neither author reflects his or her own

personal experience directly. The larger task for both is to give voice to

this traumatic, life-changing experience of banishment that is at once

historically specific and metaphoric. Though Lorenz is understandably

tempted on occasion to speculate as to what these texts might in factsuggest about the Canettis, the larger import of this chapter is to show how

Veza and her husband diverge in their depictions of exile along fairly

predictable (even stereotypical) gender lines: Veza gives far more

attention to suffering, maladjustment, and anger; whereas Eliass narrator

is markedly more resilient, adaptive and self-confident.

12 For an enlightening account of this literary relationship, see Julian Preece, The

Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband(Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2007).13 Hanuschek, 181.


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays xix

Deborah Holmes in Elias Canetti in Red Vienna essentially wants toknow why Canetti suppresses this part of his past.14 He mentions Red

Berlin as well as disturbing mass demonstrations in Frankfurt from the

Weimar period in his autobiography (Die Fackel im Ohr), but falls

mysteriously silent, except of course for his account of the 1927 burning

of the Palace of Justice, when it comes to Vienna. He had close Viennese

friends at this time who were Socialists, and in the post-World War II

period, Ernst Fischer, then serving Austria as Communist Minister for

Culture, would claim that Canetti had once held certifiably Communist

views. Holmes provides a number of compelling reasons for this lapse, but

in the end argues that Austromarxism is largely absent from his work

precisely because it was in the end too greatand too disturbingan

influence on him. On the other hand, she argues that it is after all present

in the fiction of this period. She finds intriguing traces of Red Vienna in

bothKomdie der Eitelkeitand inDie Blendung. Her approach is not at all

reductive: she argues not that these works are essentially documents of theleftist political experiment that was Vienna during part of the First

Republic, but rather that Austromarxism inevitably fed into key scenes

and images of these works. In this way, she enriches our understanding of

both these multifaceted works and their left-leaning author.

In any event Viennathough not exclusively its red aspects

remained in Canettis mind firmly associated with his Komdie derEitelkeit; this much can be gleaned from the inscription he penned into a

copy of the play he presented as a gift to the young Ingeborg Bachmann:

Fr Ingeborg Bachmann, damit sie Wien wiederkennt. In his chapter,

Viennese Endings, Julian Preece traces the influence Canetti has had on

two prominent Austrian feminist authors. While Paul Celans profound

impact on Bachmanns work has long been understood, Canettis role has

not, until now, been fully demonstrated. Preece begins by documenting

Bachmanns visit to the Canettis in London during the winter of 1950-51

and then proceeds to lay bare common literary motifs (of fire, incest, andeven chess) that suggest not only borrowings (from both Canettis, by the

way), but of course also creative re-workings and responses. Preece

acknowledges that the case for Jelinek is a bit more challenging; yet here,

too, he is able to assemble a cluster of common concerns (with violence

and incest, for example) and figures (e.g., Erikas mother from Die

Klavierspielerin as a successor figure to Therese fromDie Blendung)that

suggest a quite plausible case of literary influence. Here and in his

14 On Canettis relationship to Marxism and leftist politics more generally, see

Ibid., 168, 198, 201, 384, 522-23, 549.


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Introductionxx

recently published book, The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti,Preece suggests that influence does not always manifest itself as approval.

He references, for example, the posthumous controversy Canetti provoked

among some Austrian feminists for his alleged suppression of Vezas

literary career. This too functions as a kind of barometer for Canettis

cultural importance: for one doesnt bother to respondand certainly not

with this level of vehemenceto authors who have not at some point

struck a deep nerve, as the case of Anna Mitgutsch appears to confirm.15

Canettis identity as a specifically Jewish author has captured the

attention of a number of critics, particularly in the last ten years or so as

Jewish Studies has moved more to the fore within German Studies.

Though the term is no longer quitesalonfhig, assimilationist is in many

respects exactly what Canetti recognized himself and his family to be.

Paradoxically, and as in the case of Schnitzler, one gets the sense from

Canetti that his practice of rigorously secular erudition is precisely the

most treasured part of his Jewish legacy. Lisa Silvermans contributionto this discussion is her treatment of the specifically Sephardic component

of this legacy and her careful attention to its aesthetic depiction in a

number of works. Like the famous purloined letter, it was always there for

us to discover, but few noticed it, and none has handled it with this much

finesse. She locates crucial evidence of the Sephardic emphasis in

Canettis portrayal of Veza (in the autobiography); in his idealizedrenderings of North African Jews (in Die Stimmen von Marrakesch); and

in the often overlooked fact that Ladinothe specifically Sephardic

linguistic testament that his forebears took with them when they were

expelled from Spainwas for him not simply the language of his

childhood, but one he later used with Veza. Silvermans approach to the

question of Jewishness and Jewish identity furthermore causes us to

rethink the apparent antisemitism of Canettis mother, Mathilde. For a

long time, it was simply assumed that such was the ungenerous response

of better off and better educated Viennese Jews toward the greatunwashed coreligionists from the eastthe so-called Ostjuden. While

this may still in part be the case, Silvermans contribution asks us to be

attuned to the ongoing tensions between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews

that persisted well into pre-World War II Europe. Moreover, she shows

that this very emphasis on his Sephardic roots and affiliations may also

15 Mitgutsch, who as Preece points out was one of the more outspoken critics of

Canetti in this regard, told me (in a conversation we had in November of 1996 at

Lafayette College) that she admired Canettis accomplishment in Die Blendungand was particularly impressed by Die Stimmen von Marrakesch. She emphasized

the poetic beauty, light touch, and readability of the latter work.


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays xxi

and paradoxicallyconstitute a manner of erasing or eliding conventionalnotions of Jewishness that might otherwise be imputed to Canetti.

Chunjie Zhang pursues a different kind of identity question in her

chapter, Social Disintegration and Chinese Culture, but one to which a

fully adequate answer has been no less elusive. For years scholars have

dutifully acknowledged the importance of the novels Chinese elements,

and a few have ventured some useful insights. Over fifteen years ago,

Eduard Timms issued a mandate that a colleague with sufficient

knowledge of Chinese language, culture and philosophy take up this

question more definitively. In her contribution to this volume, Zhang

answers that call with a thesis arguing that Kiens identity as a sinologist

(the worlds very best, if we can believe the narrator) matters a great

deal. He is not simply the alienated intellectual per se, as some postwar

existentialist interpreters tended to see him, but an academic within a

specific field of study that projected a complex (and in part contradictory)

valence of cultural meanings since its founding during the EuropeanEnlightenment. In her careful sifting of Kiens fraudulent and highly

selective quotations of Confucius, Zhang wields a brand of good

philology against the great sinologists corrupted version. Kiens

reputation as a usurper of scholarship, an abuser of objective academic

procedure while actually placing his own sentiments (and bigotry) into the

mouth of scholarly authorities thus places him squarely in league with thebrutishHausbesorger, Benedikt Pfaff, who perpetrates a not dissimilar act

of linguistic violence upon his daughter. Zhangs broader achievement,

however, is not to merely illustrate where the fictional Kien went wrong in

his willful misappropriation of China (because, as she rightly admits,

many readers will never fully grasp this), but how western intellectuals

may have been ventriloquizing the East for centuries. This is Canettis

critique of Orientalism before Said gave us the term.

By placing Anne Peiters Comic Citation as Subversion, alongside

Kai Evers Destructive Satires, the editors hope to draw out a productiveanxiety that goes to the heart of Canettis allegedly satirical method. Is

Canetti reliably critical? Or does his work also play into the very bigotry

he so shockingly and relentlessly cites? As her title indicates, Peiter is

relatively more assured of Canettis critical impetus. Her study carefully

traces Canettis literary appropriation of elements of Balzacs Le Cousin

Pons for hisDie Blendung. Her argumentwhich she extends briefly and

intriguingly to Masse und Machtholds that despite his unnerving

technique of engineering a readerly identification with a given prejudice (a

process she dubs hineinkriechen, or creeping inside the benightedsubjectivity of a given narrative voice), readers ultimately do tend to


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Introductionxxii

achieve a critical distance once they recognize the respective vice (sayFischerles antisemitism or Pfaffs misogyny) as a quotation from

Balzac. She does not appear to mean this in a strictly narrow sensei.e.,

that everything depends on recognizing the specific French intertext.

Rather, she argues that the very process of lifting blinkered figures and

attitudes from other contextsbe they Balzacian or of another

provenanceand then displaying them in a new context provides a

countervailing force to the pressure of hineinkriechen. If readers

necessarily creep into vile mindsets, they are also given an opportunity

to pull themselves out by means of recognizing the comic citation that

Peiter argues Canetti learned from Karl Kraus.16

Yet Peiter seems herself a bit uncertain of the outcome. Canettis

attempt to lure [readers] into the realm of violence and horror is

accompanied by the unspoken hope that a recognition of the true nature of

what at first had attracted them partly through its sheer familiarity may

lead them decisively to reject it. The author, though, offers them very littleassistance. Her argument indeed seems at times rather dependent on this

unspoken hope, and precisely this is where she parts ways with Kai

Evers, who takes a much darker view of this matter. His Destructive

Satires places Canetti within a genealogy of satire that begins with the

classical idealist form (the one that affirms moral principles by way of

their very negation) and culminates during the Weimar period in thedestructive version we find in Walter Benjamin and, somewhat

differently, in Canetti: Canettis practice of satire, Evers contends, is

more subversive, extremely focused, but also strangely aimless.

Buttressed by a careful reading of the pivotal Mutstrasse episode,

Evers argues that we have tamed Canettis novels in two ways, both of

which tend to exculpate the reader: either we blame Canetti himself for the

novels unsavory views, or we quickly take refuge in what Evers views as

an obsolete and (for this novel at least) irrelevant construction of satire

the idealist, consoling variety noted above. To put it more drastically, hesays, Canetti turned to satirical writing, but he killed off the traditional

satirist. It is perhaps uncharitable of me to have juxtaposed his chapter

with Peiters, since his chief criticism is in fact reserved for my own 2001

study ofDie Blendung. Evers maintains that I (and my ilk) protect the

novel from fully exerting its destructive force by too quickly readingstereotypes as productive of epistemic structure rather than fully

appreciating their seductive and pernicious downward pull. Rather than

16 See her forthcoming studyKomik und Gewalt. Die Auseinandersetzung mit demErsten und dem Zweiten Weltkrieg in den Werken von Karl Kraus, Veza Calderon-

Canetti, Elias Canetti und Victor Klemperer(Cologne: Bhlau Verlag, 2007).


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays xxiii

skipping the impact of the insidious deployment of these stereotypes onthe reader, he cautions, one needs to recognize them as part of the

destructive game that Canetti plays with his readership. He may well be

right. Certainly Canetti was haunted all his lifeHanuscheks biography

documents this point particularly wellby precisely this fear. Does the

novel recruit us to bigotry at a fundamentally hermeneutic level? Does it

render destruction, decadence, and even hatred in some sense pleasurable?

Certainly Arthur Waley, who heralded the novel for its delightful

misogyny, thought so.17 Evers chapter is rigorous and refreshing, yet it

raises a number of questions as well. For once we recognize this technique

precisely as a destructive game, are we not almost back on Peiters

territory? I think Canettis work is complex and diverse enough to sponsor

both viewsas well as a vigorous debate on particularly vexing

passageswithout, however, merely splitting the difference in a

conciliatory gesture that would be truly alien to Canettis work.

Such, we might say, constitutes the violence ofthe text. What about theviolence in the text or, more precisely, in the wideroeuvre? Though surely

related, the two phenomena are not, as Ritchie Robertson argues, precisely

the same. In his contribution, Robertson places Canetti within the ongoing

debate on the nature and source of human violence. Drawing on the

autobiography, the novel, and above allMasse und Macht, he first outlines

two broad traditionswhat he calls the culturalist and the genetic orbiological view of violenceand situates Canetti at the crossroads. A

plausible study of human life needs to examine the interplay between

nature and culture, he argues, between the inherited predispositions that

link us with our fellow animals and the world of cultural meanings that

makes us human. I should like to suggest that Masse und Macht is a

landmark on the road towards such a unified study.

Two factors may have obstructed our view of Canettis contribution to

this fundamental debate thus far: The first is the primacy of the culturalist

view within those departments of the academy most likely to engage withCanetti (i.e., those imbued with the cultural studies paradigm). Those of us

raised on a diet of Freud and Foucault (to name just two of the thinkers

Robertson associates with this view) may simply assume their correctness

on the question of violence and therefore miss Canettis intervention

entirely: Canetti is challenging partly, he says, because his ideas andhis imagination run counter to the culturalist social theory which Freud

helped to create. The second relevant factor is perhaps Canettis own

often articulated aversion toward Nietzschewhom Robertson places on

17 See Hanuschek, 405.


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Introductionxxiv

the biological side of the ledger; this dismissive attitude probablydiscouraged readers up until now from considering Nietzsche the essential

intellectual interlocutor Robertson demonstrates him to be.18

The embrace of the culturalist view, Robertson suggests, has

encouraged a highly questionable kind of primitivism that celebrates a

return to pre-cultural violence. Against this tendency, which he sees

inscribed in a number of literary figures within German modernism,

Canetti confronts us with stark figures and images of violence shorn of

any sentimentalism whatsoever. Canettis espousal of an aggressive

instinct is therefore not meant to suggest a reductive determinismper se

as much as to uncover and restore the irreducible horror and reality of

violence: Violence in Canetti is drastic, impossible to explain away, hard

to assimilate into a theory, and certainly not amenable to one single

theory. To understand it, Robertson concludes, we need to draw on both

culturalist and biological models, and follow the Canetti ofMasse und

Machtin attempting to combine the two.Masse und Machthas proven to be a powerful influence not only upon

social thinkers, but upon writers of fiction as well, as Arthur Williams

demonstrates in his case study of W. G. Sebald, Modes of Restitution.

Canettis importance for Sebald is hardly a matter of conjecture, but one,

rather, that is well documented in the latters 1983 Summa Scientiae:

System und System Kritik in Elias Canetti, an essay he republishedseveral times and, as Williams emphasizes, placed prominently in his 1985

volume Die Beschreibung des Unglcks. Sebalds Canetti is richly

paradoxical: a systematizer who nevertheless clearly recognizes the limits

of system building. Countering a view that has exerted a tenacious hold

upon scholars, Sebald celebrates the open-ended, digressive, and

fragmentary nature ofMasse und Machtas that works distinctive feature.

Williamss examination of Sebald in light of Canetti exceeds the strictures

of a traditional influence study by showing how the former is in constant

dialogue with his admired predecessor; the Canettian tropes that appear inSebald are thus not derivative borrowings but partake, rather, in a dynamic

intertextual exchange of images, motifs, and ideas.

The guiding hypothesis in this chapter is the notion that Canettis

rendering of Daniel Paul Schreberwhich of course constitutes the final

two chapters ofMasse und Machtrepresents a kind of phantom that atonce haunts and energizes Sebalds prose. If only as an heuristic

interpretive construct, this proposition proves its value as Williams takes

18 On this point see also Robertsons Canetti and Nietzsche: An Introduction toMasse und Macht, inA Companion to the Works of Elias Canetti, Dagmar C. G.

Lorenz, ed. (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 201-16.


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays xxv

us through a number of Canettian motifs that Sebald picks up, examines,adapts, and often enough inverts. In the end, Williams argues that Sebalds

project is fundamentally one of restitution: The message that the souls

of those who were the victims of history could not be totally obliterated by

the events that swallowed them up can be traced in various forms

throughout Sebalds work until it reaches its ultimate expression in

Austerlitz. This restorative impulse may in the end represent the

strongest link to Canetti, who in 1972 famously defined the writers task

in terms that amount to nothing less than a form of secular soteriology.

Clearly, Canettis Schreber continues to fascinate and provoke. In his

chapter, Canetti, Schreber, and the Nervous Voice, Erik Butler proposes

that the final two chapters ofMasse und Macht tell us far more about

Canetti than he himself could ever have imagined. Butler begins by laying

out the various Schrebers we have been given over time: Freud and Lacan

discuss him as a case study in personalpathology, he explains, whereas

for Canetti Schreber is of interest exclusively as an avatar of culturalpathology. Eric Santer pursues this latter kind of reading of Schreber (in

his 1996 bookMy Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schrebers Secret

History of Modernity), but misunderstands him, Butler contends, when he

interprets Schrebers identification with Jews as a successful avoidance

of the totalitarian temptation. Canetti, Butler suggests, was much more

attuned to his subjects tactical maneuver that was only intended,ultimately, to enhance his power even more. In his openness to the

incomprehensible noise of foreign cultures, Canetti seems to style

himself an anti-Schreber, as one who embraces alterity rather than as a

semiotic megalomaniac who perceives all auditory experience as

intelligible language. In his own autobiographical writings, Butler

shows, Canetti describes himself as actively seeking out precisely what

he observes Schreber fleeing in theDenkwrdigkeiten.

Butler is most original, however, in arguing that Schrebers real

attraction for Canetti can not lie only in his function as the ultimate prooftext for the paranoid potentate. On the contrary, his interest for Canetti

and perhaps for us as welllies in his role as purveyor of polymorphous

voices. Schreber fascinated Canetti because heCanettiwas interested

in the role played by other voices, be they embedded speech or written

discourse, as apertures between individuals and as openings betweenworlds. With this, Butler begins to move Schreber and Canetti ever more

closely together as intellectual or even spiritual alliesas astonishing as

this may at first sound: Canetti was too sane to entertain the fantasies that

Schreber really had, but his sprawling oeuvre, which stitches togetherscattered fragmentsthe metaphor is apt, if one considers his many


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Introductionxxvi

aphorismsand transforms them into more durable insights, harbors awish for absolute truths such as those Schreber claimed to possess. It is

precisely the allure of the nervous voice, Butler eloquently concludes,

that unites Schreber and Canetti.

We close the book with an additional intellectual alliancethat of

Canetti and Spinoza. There is a remarkable similarity in their general cast

of mind: both were perceived as outsiders; both consciously eschew

philosophical closure (even while sharing an evident axiomatic

ambition); they reject the homogenizing master narratives of

modernity; and both nevertheless espouse undeniably normative and

ethical aspirations. But was Spinoza a particularly pronounced influence in

Canettis intellectual biography? For many yearsespecially in light of

his oft cited protestations regarding his distrust of philosophythis would

have seemed an unlikely question. Lately, and again thanks to the work of

Hanuschek, we have come to appreciate Canettis fairly extensive (if

idiosyncratic) reading in philosophy. Yet Knox Peden assures us in hiscontribution, Breathing in the Eternal: Canetti and Spinoza, that the

question of historical influence does not really matter. For the heuristic

juxtaposition of these thinkers is itself richly productive, offering the

intellectual historian the opportunity to position the idiosyncratic Canetti

among the myriad strands and impulses of modern European thought.

Adorno at any rate clearly associated Canetti with Spinozismin facthe seems to be accusing him of just that in their 1962 radio conversation

regarding the recently published Masse und Macht. In providing the

Spinozist background to this seminal controversy regarding the reality

of images, Peden explicates a key debate that I for one had never

adequately understood until now. Their truth content (i.e. that of

images), he explains, lies not in their correspondence to some material,

empirically verifiable reality, but rather in their empirical presence as real

images that possess affective force. Often in Masse und Macht the

argument is not supported by an appeal to historical fact, but by themythical and metaphorical weight of the image itself, which remains

purely suggestive. Peden demonstrates further intellectual affinities

between these two thinkerstheir rejection of teleology, their distrust of

history (as an academic discipline and master cultural narrative), and the

paratactic quality of their respective argumentnot in order to concludethat Canetti is Spinozas devoted disciple, but rather to illuminate his

unorthodox approach and to supply a suitable context for evaluating his

achievementthe context that, as I noted above, has been up until now

lacking in Canetti scholarship. The eccentricity of his argumentationcontinues to render Canetti a formidable challenge precisely because he


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The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays xxvii

can not be made to fit within the established narratives of twentieth-century intellectual history. As Peden remarks, Canettis idiosyncratic

work has a critical contrarianism at its core, and it presents itself against

what Canetti perceived to be the dominant forms of writing and

thought Ironically, it is by means of this pairing with an intellectual

kindred spiritan heretical Jewish philosopher of the seventeenth

centurythat we come to see Canettis own enterprise more clearly.

In his assessment of Canettis peculiar theory of drama, Hanuschek

remarks that the authors thoughts make the impression, as his thoughts

on theoretical or philosophical matters frequently do, as if they were

formulated on a different planet eccentric, stimulating, not involved in

an existing context of discussion or at best on the margins of one.19 This

statement applies in large measure to a great deal of the Canetti oeuvre.

Aesthetically and intellectually, he prided himself on going his own way.

The essays gathered in this volume seek not only to restore some of that

missing context, but to identify the ways in which Canettis thought andwork continue to stimulate and challenge us today. He was not at all

modest in his goal of surviving death by remaining posthumously

relevant. Indeed, the rather belated premiere of his play Komdie der

Eitelkeit(in Vienna in 1979) gave him the assurance, as he put it, dass

mein Werk noch nach meinem Tod bestehen bleiben wirddas Einzige,

worauf es ankommt (that my work will remain alive after my deaththeonly thing that really matters).20 The contributors to this volume suggest

that Canettis hope was not in vain.

19 Hanuschek, 307.20 Quoted in Ibid., 590.


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CHAPTERONE

DIEBLENDUNG1935-2005

GERALD STIEG

When Thomas Bernhard, writing in Die Zeit in 1976,1 called Canetti a

petty Kant and small-scale Schopenhauer (Kleinkant und

Schmalschopenhauer) and derided his speech, Der Beruf des Dichters,

as an attack of acute but most assuredly galloping senility in a literary

has-been 2, he exemptedDie Blendungfrom his vengeful onslaught twice

over: the new prize-winner, he wrote, had aboutforty years ago made a

talented first appearance with a fantastical piece of dazzlement, Die

Blendung. He repeats this praise, qualified though it seems to be: this

absurd last-minute philosopher made, as I have said, a talented first

appearanceforty years ago.

This brutal public drubbing came at the end of what could very well be

interpreted as a father-son relationship between the two: Canetti himself,

at any rate, saw it in these terms, and the best explanation of Bernhards

behavior is that he was deliberately withdrawing from this filial role,

despite the closeness of their earlier association and the confidences he

had shared (he told Canetti things about his origins which are not present

in such an unvarnished form in his autobiographical writing). Certainly

Canetti wonderedwhether Bernhard was his geistlicher Sohn (spiritual

son). Indeed, he poses the question, Hat er mich so gut gelesen, dass er zu

mir geworden ist? War er immer schon wie ich? Bin ich sein wahrer

Vater, nmlich der, der ihn anerkennt? (Did he read me so well that he

became me? Was he like me from the outset? Am I his true father, the one

who recognizes him?) Canetti has no doubt that Bernhards Frostwas

written under the influence ofDie Blendung: Er hat die Isolierung der

1 Thomas Bernhard, Letter to the editor,Die Zeit, 27 February 1976, 55.

2 Sptlingsvater. Editors note: This derogatory expressionliterally abelated fatherrefers mean-spiritedly also to Canettis becoming a father late in

life to Johanna Canetti.


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Chapter One2

Figuren begriffen, die das Eigentliche der Blendung ist; sie entsprachenseiner eigenen Isolierung von frh auf.3 (He has understood the isolation

of the characters that is the essence ofDie Blendung; they matched the

isolation he hadexperienced from childhood on).

Together with himself, Canetti sees Kafka and Beckett as Bernhards

models, as authors characterized by a kind of monotony die zuerst bei

Kafka, dann bei mir und spter bei Beckett durchschlug, die bei allen

dreien eine Absage an der Literatur ihrer eigenen Zeit war (which came

out first in Kafka, then in me, and later in Beckett, and which in all three

was a renunciation of the literature of each writers own period) but is now

accepted as the vorherrschende Literatur der Zeit selbst4 (the pre-

eminent literature of the period). So there is no doubting Canettis high

regard for Thomas Bernhard and his place in modern literature,

represented by a tiny handful of distinguished names. What concerns us

here, however, is the place ofDie Blendung, that first book whose status

nowadays is no longer disputed, however much the wounded vanity offamous critics (Reich-Ranicki, George Steiner) may question the quality

of even this work. And in league tables of most important works too,

Die Blendungis acknowledged as one of the great books of the twentieth

century. In fact it has almost become the fashion in literary criticism to

prefer the novel written by the twenty-five-year-old to the old mans

autobiography, a preference which notably put an end to Canettisfriendship with Claudio Magris.5

I will beginmy consideration ofDie Blendunghere with a very privatereminiscence: it is almost exactly forty years since, as an Assistent in

the German Department at Innsbruck University, I stumbled upon the first

paperback edition ofDie Blendung (Fischer, 1965). Seduced by the

unfamiliarname and title, I started reading,became oblivious tomywork

and surroundings, andgreedily devouredthe book by night. Looking back,

I can say without exaggeration that this was one of the most significant

reading experiences of my life. I was simultaneously fascinated andshattered, incredulous that a book like this, dating from 1935, should for

thirty years have led an underground existence in the German-speaking

world. It was obvious to me that this was an absolute masterpiece of world

literature. But it was not the literary quality alone that was decisive for me

then, nor is it so today. I soon became convinced that my reaction was not

simply my own individual response, but that it reflected to a considerable

3 All these quotations are taken from Sven Hanuschek, Elias Canetti. Biographie

(Munich: Hanser, 2005), 583-7.4 Ibid., 585.

Documents

The Worlds of Elias Canetti