Reading Canetti

If you think a novel can be dark, funny and philosophical all at once, this may be the book for you. Like literary modernism in general, however, this work asks a lot of its readers. So be prepared for a book that means to try your patience, cause you to stumble, and make you self-conscious about your reading. (And don’t despair if you don’t plow through it all at once; Canetti enjoyed giving public readings of just short excerpts.)

Canetti was one of those fully acculturated German Jews who both embraced his Jewish identity and was baffled by it. He was wary of being labeled as an ethnic or niche author, that is as “merely” Jewish. In Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht) he attempted to lay out key “national” traits of a variety of groups of people, but faltered when it came to Jews, who he claimed were a people more likely to keep probing and debating their identity than to embrace an agreed-upon national symbol.

Canetti is in fact often discussed in connection with Franz Kafka and increasingly with Theodor W. Adorno. (The new Cambridge Companion to Kafka will have a chapter devoted to Canetti and Kafka.) Kafka was without a doubt Canetti’s favorite author, and he said as much when, in 1981, he essentially “shared” his Nobel Prize for Literature with Kafka (along with Jewish writers Hermann Broch and Karl Kraus). One of Canetti’s best-selling books is called The Other Trial; it is actually a two-part essay that takes Kafka’s Letters to Felice as a springboard for exploring the importance of Kafka. Canetti actually helped Kafka to achieve his status as the perhaps best known writer of the 20th century.

Absolutely, and probably in ways I am not fully aware of. Canetti lived the examined life to the hilt, recording in his daily writing (Aufzeichnungen) a rich and creative array of literary reflections: maxims, aphorisms, sketches, queries, confessions, poems, dialogues, impersonations, jokes, etc. He would typically refer to himself in the third person, creating a distance that allowed him to conduct a kind of conversation with what he called “my ferocious partner” (“der grausame Partner”).

If Auto-da-Fé continues to resonate today, it is probably because the central paradox of interpretation, something we all experience every day, is expressed, rehearsed, and illuminated in memorable, humorous, and sometimes painful ways. We don’t simply watch others (in this case, literary figures) go through this; we as readers experience the dilemma ourselves. The second great point would be the novel’s interrogation of learning, the humanities, teaching and scholarship. What are their real potential? How are they actually deployed?

I think the German title, Die Blendung (The Blinding), does a much better job of getting at the central hermeneutical thematic, the problem of interpreting when we have to rely on our own partial and prejudiced perspective. But the “English” title, the one now generally used for the English translation by C. V. Wedgwood, has some advantages too because it shifts our attention to the final conflagration. This is perhaps better discussed once we’ve actually read the novel!

Not a beach read at all! It is often demanding and sometimes outright frustrating. But funny, too, in a way that most modernism is not. Moritz Baßler describes modernist prose in general as intentionally “sperrig” (cumbrous), and this is certainly true of Canetti, whose characters will, for example, give well-worn proverbs a hilarious, nasty, or unexpected twist. But this is not gratuitous: it facilitates our own reflection on the unavoidable challenge of meaning-making. For this reason, Canetti can indeed be placed within the broader context of “wisdom literature.” But he would more likely have seen the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as his literary forebears.

I did in fact ask Canetti a series of questions, in a letter, when I was a student. And he answered me! More in person …