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Elias Canetti (1905-1994) |
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Bulgarian-born German novelist, essayist, sociologist, and playwright, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Elias Canetti's best-known works is Crowds and Power (1960), an imaginative study of mass movements, death and disordered society which drew on history, folklore, myth, and literature. The book was inspired by the burning of the Palace on Justice in Vienna in 1927. Canetti started publishing in the 1930s but it was not until the 1960s and especially after the Nobel price that his work started to gain sustained critical attention. Most of his life he was resident in London, but he did not actively associate with English writers or German language colleagues. "Die charaktervollsten gelehrten sein um Bücher willen schon zu Verbrechern geworden. Wie gross sei die Versuchung erst für einen intelligenten und bildungshungrigen Menschen, die zum erstenmal Bücher mit all ihren Reizen drückten!" (from Die Blendung, 1935) Elias Canetti was born in Ruse (Ruschuk), a small port in Bulgaria
on the river Danube, into a Sephardic Jewish family. The family were
well-to-do merchants, who spoke old Spanish. Canetti's father, Jacques,
was a businessman. Mathilde Arditti, his mother, was especially proud
of her backgound. "Although the literatures of the civilized languages
she knew became the true substance of her life," Canetti recalled in The Togue Set Free (1977), "she never felt any contradiction between this passionate
universality and the haughty family pride that she never stopped
nourishing." German was the fourth language Canetti acquired – after Ladino, an archaic Spanish dialect, Bulgarian, and English. He eventually chose to write in German and retained a lasting love of German culture. The role model of his youth was the Austrian satirist and poet Karl Kraus, who once said, that "The German language is the deepest. German speech is the shallowest." When Canetti was six, his family moved to Manchester, England. After the sudden death of his father, his mother took the family to Vienna, where he learned German. From 1916 to 1921 Canetti studied in Zürich, and produced his first literary work, Junius Brutus,
a verse play. During a visit to Berlin in 1928 he met Bertolt Brecht,
Isaak Babel, and George Grosz, and started to plan a series of novels on the
subject of human madness. The idea resulted in the novel Die Blendung
(translations into English in 1947 and 1964), considered to have been
ahead of its time. The book was well received after WW II among others
by Thomas Mann and the English novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch.
Canetti had an affair with Murdoch in the 1950s, but his portrayal of
her in Party im Blitz: Die englischen Jahre
(2003) is remarkably negative: "You could call Iris Murdoch the
bubbling Oxford stewpot. Everything I despise about English life is in
her. You could imagine her speaking incessantly, as a tutor, and
incessantly listening:
in the pub, in bed, in conversation with her male of female lovers." The British journalist David Aaronovitch has claimed that
Canetti's
wife would sometimes be in the flat when her husband made love to
Murdoch; she even prepared the couple a meal afterwards. The character
of the enigmativc Mischa Fox in Murdoch's The Flight from Enchanter (1956) was partly based on Canetti, to whom the book is dedicated. Murdoch wrote and published the book during the affair. Canetti graduated in 1929 with a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Vienna. He
translated works by the American writer Upton Sinclair and wrote two plays, Die Hochzeit (The Wedding), a comedy of manners, and Komödie der Eitelkeit (Comedy of Vanity) forerunners of the theater of the absurd. While in Austria he had
an experience that would affect all his future work: angry protesters burned down the Palace of Justice and
the author was caught up in the crowd, later describing how he felt himself becoming part of the mob. In 1934 Canetti married Veza Taubner-Calderón, a writer and translator; she died in 1963, completely forgotten as a novelist. However, in the 1980s Canetti started to edit and publish her works. Canetti's second marriage was with Hera Buschor; they had one daughter. Hera Buschor, who worked at the Kunsthaus in Zürich, was Canetti's old friend from the 1950s. The third part of Canetti's autobiography was dedicated to her. She died from cancer in 1988. To escape the systematic persecution of Jews, Canetti fled to Paris in 1938 and next year he immigrated to England, where he mostly lived for the rest of his life. From the 1970s Canetti also maintained a home in Zürich. Canetti spent there his last years with his daughter. Canetti's breakthrough work, Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fé), came out in 1935. It was banned by the Nazis, but beside this dubious acknowledgment Canetti did not gain much attention as a writer before the 1960s when the book was reprinted. The protagonist is Peter Klein, a forty-year-old philologist and sinologist, who lives in an unnamed Middle-European city based on Vienna. He knows much of ancient languages but is unable to decipher contemporary voices. "He himself was the owner of the most important private library in the whole of this great city. He carried a minute portion of it with him wherever he went. His passion for it, the only one which he had permitted himself during a life of austere and exacting study, moved him to take special precautions. Books, even bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase. Fortunately the great number of the book shops did not open until after eight o'clock." Klein feels safe with his 40 000 characters of the Chinese alphabet and 25 000 books. He fears social and physical contacts, and his inhumane view of the world contradicts his learning. However, he allows himself to get into the clutches of his ignorant and grasping housekeeper Therese Krummholz, nearing 60, whom he marries, and who robs him of everything. In this she is helped by Benedikt Pfaff, the proto-fascist caretaker of the apartment block. Klein descends to the lower, surrealistic depths of society. His brother Georges, who is a psychiatrist, tries in vain to cure him. Doomed Klein dies in apocalyptic self-destruction amidst his books. It has been argued that family life slowed down Canetti's writing career. Crowds and Power (1960) was not completed until twenty-five years after marrying Veza. This attempt to "seize the century" brought together material from many disciples, but avoided such thinkers as Marx or Freud, who is mentioned briefly in a note concerning paranoia. Canetti disliked Nietzsche, his name appears two times.The name of Jesus pops up five times. The book opens with the claim that "There is nothing that man
fears more than the touch of the unknown." Man can become free of this
fear only in a crowd. According to Canetti, crowd instinct is
as fundamental as the passion to survive. "The lowest form of survival
is killing." The first half of Crowds and Power analyses the
dynamics of different types of
crowds and of "packs." The second part focuses on the question how and
why crowds obey rulers. "Canetti has done what philosophers ought to
do, and what they used to do: he has provided us with new concepts,"
said Murdoch is her review. (The Spectator, September 1962) Canetti presented Hitler as the paranoiac ruler
of crowds, fascinated by the size of the crowds he commands. The
persecution of the Jews is onnected with the German experience of
inflation – they needed to pass this humiliation on to something else
which would be reduced to worthlessness. "Our most pressing need, as
Canetti very movingly and convincingly argues at the end, is to control
the 'survivor mania' of our rulers, and the key to this is 'the
humanisation of command'. But how is command to be humanised? Canetti
has not given us a psychology with which to picture the humanisation of
command." (Iris Murdoch, in The Spectator, September 1962) Canetti
himself did not see the Palace of Justice being set on fire but he was
in the crowd on 15 July, 1927, he felt the fire, ran with others, and
heard the gunfire everywhere. Canetti has said that it was the most
crucial day of his life after his father's death. Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice (1969) examined
Kafka's struggle between comfortable middle-class life and individual
isolation. The drama Die Befristeten,
produced in Vienna in 1967, asked the question what happens if one
knows the exact date of ones death. It was translated into English by
Gitta Honegger and published together with Komödie der Eitelkeit as Comedy of Vanity & Life-Terms (1983). As an essayist Canetti became known with The Conscience of Words (1976).
With one exception, these essays date from the 1960s and 1970s and deal
mostly with literary topics. Canetti sees that writers are responsible
of the preservation, revivification, and invention of the
life-sustaining myths and their meaning. Tolstoy is rejected as a model
for having "struck a kind of pact with death" in his late turn to
religion, and Kafka emerges "among all writers as the greatest expert
on power." Canetti has a very acute ear for colloquialisms and the banalities of everyday speech, creating what he term as "acoustic mask" for each figure, a core vocabulary of a few hundred words that marks out a character's habits of thoughts and behavior. Canetti's penetration of his various social representative's linguistic habits is quite remarkably sustained, creating a world of complete self-absorption, vanity, and personal and public insanity." (Anna.Marie Taylor, in Contemporary World Writers, edited by Tracy Chevalier, 1993) Before the Nobel Prize made Canetti world- famous, he lived modestly in Hampstead. For most of his career, he remained hidden from the public eye. The German literature critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki met him for the first time in the mid-1960s and already noted his charisma and his greats skills as a conversationalist. (Mein Leben by Marcel Reich-Ranicki. 1999). Canetti admitted that he did not have patience to listen to others. He had written most of his diary in cipher so that intrusive critics would not understand it. When Reich-Ranicki asked him to write a short essay on Heinrich Böll, Canetti refused. Reich-Ranicki's impression was that Canetti did not place much value on Böll's books. Among Canetti's several awards were Foreign Book Prize (1949, France), Vienna Prize (1966), Critics Prize (1967, Germany), Great Austrian State Prize (1967), Bavarien Academy of Fine Arts Prize (1969), Bühner Prize (1972), Nelly Sachs Prize (1975), Order of Merit (1979, Germany), Europa Prato Prize (1980, Italy), Hebbel Prize (1980), Kafka Prize (1981), Great Service Cross (1983, Germany). He had also honorary degrees from two universities. Canetti died on August 13, 1994 in Zürich. His autobiographical works include Die gerettete Zunge (1980), in which the author returned to the traumatic experience of his father's death, Die Fackel im Ohr (1982), and Das Augenspiel (1985). Die Stimmen von Marrakesch (1967), a travel book, dealt also with death.
Selected works:
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