Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 17.34 (Fall - Winter / automne - hiver, 2000) 406-9
David Darby, ed., Critical Essays on Elias Canetti.
London: G K Hall (Critical Essays on World Literature Series), 2000; pp.;
ISBN: 0783804555 (hbk.); LC call no.: PT2605.A58Z645;US$49
In the almost two decades since Elias Canetti won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, German language scholarship has belatedly
reversed what up until that point had been limited consideration of the author.
Unfortunately, English language scholarship did not keep pace with this
development. With the collection Critical Essays on Elias Canetti,
editor David Darby delivers a splendid volume which makes available some of the
seminal texts of Canetti criticism translated from the German, as well as
provides new essays in English on neglected aspects of Canetti’s work. This
volume will no doubt prove to be an invaluable source work in instigating new
impulses in English-language Canetti studies.
Darby’s introduction presents an overview of the complicated
reception history of Canetti’s work, defines the most important concepts of
his thought, and deline[end of page 406]ates the two opposed streams
of interpretation in Canetti scholarship. The original emphasis largely remained
within the interpretative framework established by the author in Crowds
and Power (Masse und Macht, 1960), focusing on the central themes
of Verwandlung (metamorphosis, transformation) and Todfeindschaft
(Canetti’s very personal enmity towards death). By the mid 1980’s scholarship
highly critical of Canetti’s self-appointed position as the enemy of death
sought to establish him as the symbolic ruler over the figures in his texts.
Unwilling to tip his hand, Darby has selected contributions from both sides,
while making room for those analyses which are able to either bridge or overcome
the dichotomies.
Dagmar Barnouw’s essay on
the author’s life and works emphasizes Canetti’s notion of human transformation
not as utopian but rather ameliorative in its intent, in the process offering
those unfamiliar with the author solid footing for a first venture into the
field of Canetti scholarship.
The five pieces on Canetti’s first and only novel, Auto-da-Fé
(Die Blendung) cover a gamut of sources and perspectives. From Hermann
Hesse’s short ambivalent review to the even more critical contribution of
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, with the latter’s characterization of the novel
as “a work of research undertaken with the means of the imagination” (40),
the texts demonstrate the attraction and repulsion engendered by this work.
The 1976 interview with Manfred Durzak sheds light on Canetti’s own views
on influence, exile, and, more specifically, the linguistic influence of Vienna
through the figure of Karl Kraus and his public readings of Nestroy. These
linguistic influences are then related the notion of the acoustic mask, the
basis of Canetti’s drama, which is in turn connected to Canetti’s understanding
of his own work: “I [Canetti] believe, at its core, that everything I do is
dramatic in nature” (109).
Patrick O’Neill’s reading of misreading in Auto-da-Fé
is among the best articles in the volume. Demonstrating how all the characters
of the novel live within their own delusional constructs and thus display
“facets of a postmodern consciousness in its [the novel’s] parodic play with
hermeneutic indeterminacy and the structuration of meaning” (71), O’Neill
convincingly presents the case for reading this text as one which posits misreading
“as the perpetual possibility of Blendung” (71).
Harriet Murphy’s study of parody in Auto-da-Fé
attempts to read into the novel an attitude of “facetiousness,” but succeeds
only in instrumentalizing Canetti for an attack on “leftist” secular cultural
politics – a questionable endeavour.
The section on Canetti’s dramatic work opens with a
1975 interview wherein the author presents his theory of drama and its relation
to Aristotelian, Brechtian, and Kabuki theatre, before commenting on anthropological
influences. Peter Laemmle’s solid essay hinges on the difference he establishes
between Canetti’s acoustic mask and Karl Kraus’ satirical “acoustic quotation”
(113). Laemmle con[end of page 407]vincingly presents this difference,
i.e., the lack of obvious moral intent in the former, as resulting from Canetti’s
reading of Büchner. In addition, Laemmle gives an overview of the controversy
surrounding the 1965 Braunschweig premiere of The Wedding (Hochzeit)
and The Comedy of the Vanities (Komödie der Eitelkeit). Dagmar
Barnouw’s second essay in this volume approaches Canetti’s dramatic work through
a discussion of utopian and dystopian thought, including a more lengthy discussion
of The Numbered (Die Befristeten). Barnouw presents the author
as one who dissents from the “utopias of the status quo” (133).
The enlightening conversation between Theodor Adorno
and Canetti, broadcast in 1962, serves as the introduction to Crowds and
Power, and details Canetti’s opposition to Freud, as well as the relation
between power, the individual, and the “sting” of commands. A short laudatory
text by Iris Murdoch praises Canetti’s ability to create a synthesis in his
study of human nature.
Ritchie Robertson’s “Canetti as Anthropologist” is an
invaluable study of Canetti’s use of anthropological sources and methods, for
instance the technique of “thick description” popularized by Clifford Geertz.
Robertson thus delivers a highly useful example of possible new avenues for the
interpretation of Crowds and Power. Hansjakob Werlen characterizes, in
the context of the continuing influence of this work, Canetti’s use of
ethnography as “an instrumentalization of other cultures through their
translation into Canetti theorems” (183). Despite criticizing Canetti’s
“monocausal” explanation of power, Werlen nonetheless grants Canetti limited
success in “unmasking the deadly games of power” (184) through his portrayal of
the figure of the ruler (Machthaber).
Both articles on Canetti’s travel report The
Voices of Marrakesch (Die Stimmen von Marrakesch), move away from
the “fallacious innocence” (201) of Canetti praise. Gerhard Melzer’s study of
mystery as the starting point of transformation sees this work as specially
indebted to hidden symbolization, resulting in a sign language without a fixed
code which realizes Canetti’s desire, through his writing, to avoid
petrification. Anne Fuchs, using Kristeva’s theory of abjection, relates the
text to travel writing and postcolonial debates, demonstrating cogently
Canetti’s “hermeneutics of otherness based on empathy and reciprocity” (203).
Gerhard Melzer’s second contribution
to the volume, discussing the autobiography, adopts a more critical stance,
seeing in Canetti the uncontested symbolic ruler. This is followed by Bernd
Witte’s even more critical appraisal of Canetti as a Kafka-like doorkeeper,
namely a “keeper of metamorphoses” (237). Thus, Canetti’s texts with their
“formal closure” (236) are thought to limit rather than create free speech.
In the desire to produce literature and gain notoriety, Witte argues, Canetti
fails to follow the example of a power-free discourse as represented by Dr.
Sonne in the autobiography. In his contribution J.P. Stern contrasts what
he sees as the early Canetti’s negative concepts of crowd and power with the
[end of page 408] later work’s more positive
world view as expressed in the concept of transformation.
Harriet Murphy’s second
essay, dealing with Canetti’s autobiography in relation to exile studies,
convincingly sets that text in opposition to the discourse of loss in exile
literature and scholarship. Friederike Eigler offers an interesting contrastive
study of what she interprets to be the closed autobiographical text in
comparison to the open collections of aphorisms, compellingly demonstrating
Canetti’s respect for alterity in the latter. Pointing to heterogenity in
Canetti’s writing, Eigler’s piece succeeds in opening new vistas for
considering the author’s work. However, her reading of Canetti’s autobiography
relies on an interpretation which fails to demonstrate the same respect for the
alterity found in the aphorisms. Eigler also correctly notes the aphorisms’
reversion to stereotypes in respect to the portrayal, and absence of women.
Here one should also note that amidst this otherwise excellent volume the
almost complete absence of Veza Canetti is unfortunate.
In the final article of the
collection Claudio Magris portrays Canetti as an author who has successfully
endeavoured to hide himself, seeing at the centre of Canetti’s autobiography a
void which marks the place where the real Canetti rests.
The volume’s careful
selection of texts is complemented by their arrangement, and points to the
accomplishment of this volume. The greater success, of course, lies in the fine
balance achieved between presenting a solid basis for further English language
scholarship and releasing new impulses in the form of compelling recent
research in the field of Canetti scholarship.
Claude Desmarais
York University & University of Toronto