Canetti, Elias 1905–

Canetti is a Bulgarian-born Austrian who now lives in London but continues to write in German. A talented novelist and dramatist, he is best known for his strange and eloquent novel Auto-da-fé. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 21-22.)

Elias Canetti's eccentric and difficult novel Auto da Fé has remained virtually unknown in this country and has, in the thirty-seven years since its first publication, failed to develop the international reputation it deserves. Both Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch gave generous praise when it first appeared in 1935 in German. Philip Toynbee spoke of its brilliance and boldly maintained that it "makes all the later novels of Beckett superfluous." Jacob Isaacs compared its "multitudinous intensity" to that of Ulysses and found in the work "comic invention on a grand Satanic scale." Idris Parry, however, has been the only writer to date who has discussed the novel at any length. Although he clearly regards it as a major work of fiction which needs to be studied from various standpoints, he is almost alone in this view. The neglect of Canetti's uncompromising and brilliant novel is unfortunate; now that the modern mode has veered more toward the blending of the comic and the horrible, critics ought to be studying the work which in 1935 had perhaps already carried this blending to its farthest extreme.

In its larger and more discernible features, Canetti's novel has a number of familiar elements. Like Kafka, he unites precision and fantasy and represents the extraordinary and bizarre in a nonchalant, matter-of-fact manner. On the other hand, Canetti leans toward a narrative technique which judiciously alternates a Jamesian intelligence with a number of Joycean streams. The mixture of Kafkaesque bizarreness and deceptively simple style with sophisticated interior narration accounts to some extent for the peculiarly original effect Canetti achieves.

Another essential feature of Canetti's method, giving his work a marked singularity, derives from an element much older than Kafka or Joyce, probably coming from early German satire and Germanic painting, especially that of Breughel and Bosch: the grotesque physical and mental attributes of his characters….

A final element which contributes to the total effect of the novel is Canetti's use of warped obsessiveness in his characters: precisely the mental correlative which he would need, to complement their peculiar physical qualities and to enhance the gothic tone of his work. Canetti has carried obsessiveness to an unprecedented extreme, so that it has virtually become an organizing principle of his novel. Indeed, Auto da Fé is probably the most uncompromising and obsessional portrayal of obsessive characters in all of literature. Not only is each of the four major characters driven from minute to minute by a central preoccupation and by all the speculations which radiate from it, but almost all the rogues and fools who surround them also suffer from petty and peculiar obsessions which distort their personalities.

Thus, if we are to speak of Canetti's originality, a good starting-point would be the singularity and unswerving purpose with which he has pursued his characters' warped preoccupations. His originality manifests itself more completely when we examine a special characteristic of his obsessiveness, namely, its autistic quality. By autistic, I mean extremely subjective, to the point of ignoring the verification process essential to psychic growth and sanity….

The rich comic quality of the novel rests first upon the characters' unsound and ludicrous convictions, and then upon the mutual misapprehensions to which they fall prey as a result of discrepancies between their own convictions and those of others. Canetti thus exploits—again, to an unprecedented degree—the traditional comic technique of...