The Worlds of Elias Canetti

The Worlds of Elias Canetti Centenary Essays

Edited by

William Collins Donahue and Julian Preece

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

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

To our children: Gabriel, Marianne, Molly and Olivia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... ix Note on quotation and translation............................................................... x Introduction ............................................................................................... xi Chapter One Die Blendung 1935-2005 Gerald Stieg................................................................................................ 1 Chapter Two Dwarf helicopters that land on bald heads: Literary Nonsense in Canetti Sven Hanuschek ....................................................................................... 11 Chapter Three The Opaque Voice: Canettis Foreign Tongues Kata 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 Canettis Experience of Exile Dagmar C. G. Lorenz ............................................................................... 63 Chapter Six Elias Canetti in Red Vienna Deborah Holmes....................................................................................... 83 Chapter Seven Viennese Endings: Echoes of Die Blendung in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Klavierspielerin Julian Preece .................................................................................................. 107

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Chapter Eight Social Disintegration and Chinese Culture: The Reception of China in Die 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 Blendung and Masse und Macht Anne Peiter ............................................................................................. 171 Chapter Eleven Destructive Satires: Canetti and Benjamins Search for the Murderous 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

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 to thank 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

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 translation is cited in full in the essay. The Hanser volumes appeared between 1992 and 2005 and are numbered as follows: I II III IV V Die Blendung (Auto-da-F) Dramen: Hochzeit, Komdie der Eitelkeit, Die Befristeten; Der Ohrenzeuge: Fnfzig Charaktere (Plays: Wedding, Comedy of Vanity, The Numbered; The Ear-Witness: Fifty Characters) Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) Aufzeichnungen 1942-1985: Die Provinz des Menschen; Das Geheimherz der Uhr (Jottings 1942-1985: The Human Province; The Secret Heart of the Clock) 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) 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) Die gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend (The Tongue set Free: Story of my Youth) Die Fackel im Ohr. Lebensgeschichte 1921-1931 (The Torch in My Ear: Life Story, 1921-1931) Das Augenspiel. Lebensgeschichte 1931-1937 (The Play of the Eyes: Life Story, 1931-1937) Aufstze. Reden. Gesprche (Essays. Speeches. Interviews)

VI VII VIII IX: X

INTRODUCTION CANETTIS MANY (AFTER-) LIVES WILLIAM COLLINS DONAHUE

Not content merely to lead a double-life, Elias Canetti, we now know, conducted for many years what his biographer has cleverly dubbed eine Tripelehe (a triple marriage).1 From the early 1960s, when he re-launched a literary career that had been interrupted by the Nazi annexation of Austria, until very late in life, Canetti dedicated each of his published works to his beloved wife, Veza. Every additional book that bore her name seemed to testify to her husbands unwavering devotion. Beyond a small circle of cognoscenti, few suspected that this ostentatious show of marital fealtywhich, by the way, Sven Hanuschek insists was in its own way quite genuinealso cloaked an intriguingly mercurial figure. It is surely not the purpose of this book to pursue Canettis romantic liaisons any further: too much ink has already been spilled voicing idle speculation, foregone conclusions, and pure invention. Rather, I take these revelations as a titillating metaphor for the many Canettis we never really knew, and the many that continue to evolve and emerge in the work of writers and scholars who have been influenced, perplexed, and challenged by him. Throughout his lifeand despite his own efforts at creating a more consistent self-portrait in his published work2Canetti exhibited the refreshing trait he cherished in one of his favorite school teachers: he remained unfertig (unfinished), a mystery unto himself, not quite sure of the creative and intellectual paths he was about to take. This book is dedicated to the proposition that the worlds of Elias Canettithose unknown, forgotten, or suppressed narratives of his past, as well as those that are unfolding into the presentcall out for further exploration. Surely nothing would have pleased him more than to know that even in death he continues to evolve as a social thinker, critic, and
1 2

Sven Hanuschek, Elias Canetti. Biographie (Munich: Hanser, 2005), 371. Ibid., 371-2.

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writer. This rabbi of our word (as William Gass has styled him) wanted above 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 largely eluded 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 and Power 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, farflung, 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 this manner, 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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But how else can we avoid, in our own scholarship, fulfilling the wicked caricature of academic over-specialization that he immortalized in the protagonist of his 1935 modernist novel Die 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 Power would 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 gone before 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 in Die Blendung. Nevertheless, we should concede that neither was he entirely wrong 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 directly misled 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 A Companion to the Work of Elias Canetti, ed. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 25-41.

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protests throughout his work that he is no philosopher, kein Begriffsmensch. 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 Canettis philosophical 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 of Canetti 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 Canettis who 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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follows, I will introduce more explicitly each of the chapters in the order they 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 republication of Die Blendung. For Stieg and many of his generation this is a pivotal moment. It is no coincidence that he concludes his chapter with the famous 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 of the 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 notable cultural 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 first encounter 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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Just as Stieg reveals a new facet of Canettithe way in which the monumental 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 the wayward 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 Canettis acclaimed 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 these autobiographical 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 which language is experienced as pure sonorous material. Reflecting on Canettis persistent fascination with unverstandene Worte (words that
9

10

Hanuschek, 15. Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), 18-27.

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elude comprehension), she suggests that this phenomenon, precisely because 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 are any guide), yet also has found a niche among scholarly readers attentive to its self-reflexive narrative strands. (An analogy might be Fassbinders enormously popular Die 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 book as 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 haunting icons of human 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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be credited with showing us how it is that we sense that other story behind 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, Lorenz sagely 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 fact suggest 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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Deborah Holmes in Elias Canetti in Red Vienna essentially wants to know 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 both Komdie der Eitelkeit and in Die Blendung. Her approach is not at all reductive: she argues not that these works are essentially documents of the leftist 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 der Eitelkeit; 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, and even 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 from Die 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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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 quite salonfhig, 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 contribution to 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 idealized renderings 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 great unwashed 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 Blendung and 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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and paradoxicallyconstitute a manner of erasing or eliding conventional notions 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 European Enlightenment. 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 the brutish Hausbesorger, 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 productive anxiety 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 his Die 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 benighted subjectivity of a given narrative voice), readers ultimately do tend to

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achieve a critical distance once they recognize the respective vice (say Fischerles 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 little assistance. 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 the destructive 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, he says, 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 of Die Blendung. Evers maintains that I (and my ilk) protect the novel from fully exerting its destructive force by too quickly reading stereotypes as productive of epistemic structure rather than fully appreciating their seductive and pernicious downward pull. Rather than
16

See her forthcoming study Komik und Gewalt. Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Ersten und dem Zweiten Weltkrieg in den Werken von Karl Kraus, Veza CalderonCanetti, Elias Canetti und Victor Klemperer (Cologne: Bhlau Verlag, 2007).

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skipping the impact of the insidious deployment of these stereotypes on the 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 of the text. What about the violence in the text or, more precisely, in the wider oeuvre? 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 all Masse und Macht, he first outlines two broad traditionswhat he calls the culturalist and the genetic or biological 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 with Canetti (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 and his 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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Introduction

the biological side of the ledger; this dismissive attitude probably discouraged 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 determinism per 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 of Masse und Macht in attempting to combine the two. Masse und Macht has 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 republished several 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 of Masse und Macht as 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 in Sebald 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 of Masse und Machtrepresents a kind of phantom that at once haunts and energizes Sebalds prose. If only as an heuristic interpretive construct, this proposition proves its value as Williams takes
On this point see also Robertsons Canetti and Nietzsche: An Introduction to Masse und Macht, in A Companion to the Works of Elias Canetti, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ed. (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 201-16.
18

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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 of Masse 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 personal pathology, he explains, whereas for Canetti Schreber is of interest exclusively as an avatar of cultural pathology. Eric Santer pursues this latter kind of reading of Schreber (in his 1996 book My 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 the Denkwrdigkeiten. Butler is most original, however, in arguing that Schrebers real attraction for Canetti can not lie only in his function as the ultimate proof text 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 between worlds. 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 together scattered fragmentsthe metaphor is apt, if one considers his many

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Introduction

aphorismsand transforms them into more durable insights, harbors a wish 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 his contribution, 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 fact he 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 the mythical 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 conclude that 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 argumentation continues to render Canetti a formidable challenge precisely because he

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can not be made to fit within the established narratives of twentiethcentury 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 and work 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 deaththe only thing that really matters).20 The contributors to this volume suggest that Canettis hope was not in vain.

19 20

Hanuschek, 307. Quoted in Ibid., 590.

CHAPTER ONE DIE BLENDUNG 1935-2005 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 exempted Die Blendung from his vengeful onslaught twice over: the new prize-winner, he wrote, had about forty 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 appearance forty 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 wondered whether 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 Frost was written under the influence of Die Blendung: Er hat die Isolierung der
Thomas Bernhard, Letter to the editor, Die Zeit, 27 February 1976, 55. Sptlingsvater. Editors note: This derogatory expressionliterally a belated fatherrefers mean-spiritedly also to Canettis becoming a father late in life to Johanna Canetti.
2 1

Chapter One

Figuren begriffen, die das Eigentliche der Blendung ist; sie entsprachen seiner eigenen Isolierung von frh auf.3 (He has understood the isolation of the characters that is the essence of Die Blendung; they matched the isolation he had experienced 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 preeminent 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 of Die Blendung, that first book whose status nowadays is no longer disputed, however much the wounded vanity of famous critics (Reich-Ranicki, George Steiner) may question the quality of even this work. And in league tables of most important works too, Die Blendung is 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 Canettis friendship with Claudio Magris.5 I will begin my consideration of Die Blendung here with a very private reminiscence: it is almost exactly forty years since, as an Assistent in the German Department at Innsbruck University, I stumbled upon the first paperback edition of Die Blendung (Fischer, 1965). Seduced by the unfamiliar name and title, I started reading, became oblivious to my work and surroundings, and greedily devoured the 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 and shattered, 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. 5 Ibid., 618.