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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.