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A Literary Life: The Textuality of Elias Canetti's Autobiography

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SOURCE: Darby, David. “A Literary Life: The Textuality of Elias Canetti's Autobiography.” Modern Austrian Literature 25, no. 2 (1992): 37-49.

[In the following essay, Darby examines Canetti's apparent awareness in the narrative of his autobiography of the difficulty of writing an autobiographical work.]

I propose a reading of Elias Canetti's three volumes of autobiography against the grain.1 Unlike the author's other extended prose narrative, Die Blendung, which exploits overtly complex narrative strategies to disrupt the ease of the reader's task, these texts have generally been received as works of a reassuring structural order and simplicity. This essay offers a study of the inconsistencies of the narrative and thereby an exploration of one aspect of the formal artifice which characterizes the narration of Canetti's literary life. By reading “against the grain,” I mean that I will focus my attention on the frequent passages in the text which reveal in the narration an awareness of the problems inherent in writing a literary life. These are points where the mimetic illusion enunciated by the discreet third-person past-tense narrator is suspended as a result of an interruption by a present-tense consciousness in the narration. My reading will not approach Canetti's autobiography as a document of an age and a world gone by, in the sense that I will not emphasize its historical truth-function over aspects of its textuality. Neither do I intend to participate in a debate concerned with the veracity or fictionality of the story it tells.2 Rather, I will concentrate on the tension evident in these texts between the mimetic, retrospective function of autobiography and the self-conscious, present-tense reference which is essential to the teleological project of these texts.

The most thorough and incisive structural examination of these three volumes is presented in the second chapter of Friederike Eigler's 1988 monograph on Canetti's autobiographical writings.3 My observations are to a considerable extent complementary to Eigler's view of the autobiography as a consciously constructed narrative text. My reading differs from hers in that I see the tensions of the relationship between the respective fictional (?) intelligences of narrating subject and narrated subject as imposing an essentially disruptive intrusion into a generally discreetly or harmoniously structured text. I propose to continue Eigler's general project of reading the life of Canetti as a textual construct, and so to participate in that kind of reading of the autobiography which moves beyond a vision of the easy seduction of the reader through the apparent formal and stylistic naivety of the narration of an indisputably fascinating life-story.

The difference between narrating and narrated subject is logically essential to any narrative text, although Lejeune's famous “pacte autobiographique” involves a stabilization and at least a partial, apparent deproblematization of this relationship as it pertains to autobiography in terms of the “identité de nom entre l'auteur … le narrateur et le personnage dont on parle.”4 In Canetti's autobiography this nominal identity is established early and clearly. Nevertheless, it is logically indisputable that this pact, along with its referential implications, is a conventional textual strategy identifying beings living in entirely separate ontological spheres of existence. Their true relationship is more than simply temporal: it is determined essentially by a potentially very complex act of conscious and deliberate reconstruction.

The process of remembering is explicitly emphasized as a central concern in Canetti's texts, as it is of course in any traditional autobiographical narrative, and its thematization is to some degree both conventional and necessary to the organization of the narrative-communicative situation of such texts. However, where Canetti's autobiography becomes especially interesting in this respect is in its foregrounding of the inconsistencies and failures in the narrator's capacity to remember. On the one hand there is the precision, intensity, and authority with which the narrating Canetti recalls, for example, his earliest visual memory at the beginning of Die gerettete Zunge in order patently to consolidate the terms of the “pacte autobiographique”; similar statements of the power of his audile memory are frequent, especially in the first volume, such as his comment on an accusation made by his maternal grandfather: “‘Fálsu!’—‘Falscher!’ … ich habe es im Ohr, als wäre ich gestern bei ihm zu Besuch gewesen” (GZ [Die gerettete Zunge] 31). On the other hand, and in distinct contrast to such authenticating claims, stand passages which throw into doubt the traditional idea of the narrator, autobiographical or otherwise, as what Patrick O'Neill calls the “gnarus, a knowing one … master of the communicative situation … an authority who narrates what he knows.”5

Very early in the autobiography the narrator emphasizes the structuring function of memory, as historical circumstances are thrown into question, here concerning the comet he sees as a child: “Vielleicht hat er sich in meiner Erinnerung verlängert, vielleicht nahm er nicht den halben, sondern einen kleineren Teil des Himmels ein” (GZ 34). This kind of uncertainty of proportion appears, on a first reading, to be a natural and innocent characteristic of one's recollections of childhood; the point is, however, that in textual terms the comet has been stretched from a brief sighting to the length of half a chapter of narrative, and thus the present-tense utterance reveals itself as a self-referential strategy whereby the text explicitly discusses the compromising of its own mimetic, representational axis. The admission of an analogous distortion of spatial-temporal relationships is found in Die Fackel im Ohr with regard to the chapter devoted to Isak Babel: “Einen großen Raum in meiner Erinnerung an die Berliner Zeit nimmt Isaak Babel ein. … Ich denke, er war gegen Ende September da und blieb in Wirklichkeit nicht länger als zwei Wochen” (FO [Die Fackel im Ohr] 317-318).

A marked, literally traductive effect of the process of remembering is foregrounded in another passage early in the Rustschuk section of the autobiography: “Alle Ereignisse jener ersten Jahre spielten sich auf spanisch oder bulgarisch ab. Sie haben sich mir später zum größten Teil ins Deutsche übersetzt. … [D]as meiste, und ganz besonders alles Bulgarische … trage ich deutsch im Kopf” (GZ 18-19). Again, this traduction—“diese geheimnisvolle Übertragung” (GZ 18)—is perhaps a necessary event in a life whose critical developmental phases have been experienced in a series of different languages of which Ladino, Bulgarian and German represent only a small number. But such a statement is, for all that, no less of an indication of a severe strain in the relationship of identity between the various textual subjects essential to autobiography. By foregrounding the problematic function of memory in these terms several pages into the text, the narrator calls into question the literal veracity of memories—recounted in German and including direct-speech quotations in German—for whose literal precision he has previously vouched. This is not, however, the only possible reading of Canetti's confession of the mediated condition of his recollections: taking an alternative perspective, one can reasonably view this commentary on the traductive aspect of memory and writing as a narrative strategy of damage control. By conceding the questionable status of the textual manifestations of only a limited quantity of early experience, the narrative proceeds to consolidate the illusion of the unmediated authenticity of the whole of the remaining body of experience whose translation into a linear narrative text is implicit, silent, and—where the narrator insists on the absolute immediacy of the events recounted—even denied.

During the narration of the childhood years, the narrating voice points at intervals to holes in its knowledge and authority. These lacunae are sometimes filled by the report of data obtained from other sources (for example: “Alles was von diesem Augenblick an geschah, ist mir nur aus Erzählungen bekannt” [GZ 49]), in which case the character of the narrative is determined by a surrender of the authority of memory and by a superimposition of other informational sources. Other gaps are left open, with statements of the narrative impotence of the gnarus Canetti: “Ich kann mich nicht erinnern …” (GZ 70); “Ich habe kaum eine Erinnerung ans erste Wiener Jahr …” (GZ 116); “An die letzten Tage in Wien kann ich mich nicht erinnern. Ich weiß nicht mehr. … Ich habe auch keine Erinnerung an die Reise. Ich sehe uns erst in Reichenhall wieder” (GZ 177); “Ich habe nur drei Zimmer in Erinnerung, in denen wir uns bewegten; aber es muß auch ein schmäleres, viertes Zimmer gegeben haben …” (GZ 197).

These quotations are all drawn from the first volume of the autobiography, Die gerettete Zunge, which covers the first sixteen years of Canetti's life. Given that fact, it is perhaps not surprising that such lacunae are to be found in an account published by a mature author sixty or so years after the events narrated. However, such narrative phenomena are not restricted solely to this volume. Indeed, their occurrence in the subsequent volumes is no less frequent. In Die Fackel im Ohr, covering the next ten years, the narrating Canetti is at various points unable to remember events clearly: “Ich kann mich … nicht erinnern. Ich weiß nicht … Ich sehe mich nicht gut an diesem Tag …” (FO 277). Names are often forgotten (FO 200, 209, 336, 357) as well as the details of incidents and conversations; for example: “Keinen Satz, keine Silbe dieser Wortgeplätscher könnte ich wiederholen …” (FO 164, cf. 321). In the third volume, Das Augenspiel, there are further instances of the forgetting of conversations, but here another, non-audible mode of memory becomes dominant: “Ich weiß nicht, was dann gesagt wurde. Ich habe mich bemüht, die ersten Worte, ihre wie meine, wiederzufinden. Sie sind untergegangen. … Ich habe die erste Begegnung mit ihr [Anna Mahler] bewahrt, indem ich sie von allen Worten befreit habe …” (A [Das Augenspiel] 81); and similarly with Fritz Wotruba: “[V]on diesem ersten Gespräch habe ich nur den einen Satz, mit dem es begann, in Erinnerung behalten. Wohl aber sehe ich ihn vor mir. … Vielleicht habe ich darum das Gespräch vergessen” (A 103-105). Further lapses of audile memory are found in connection with Dr. Sonne (A 148) and Robert Musil (A 183, 211).

Once again, these forgotten details may be seen to function as a trope of psychological realism in the composition of the identity of the narrating Canetti as the subject of the enunciation, and may be read as contributing to a function of verisimilitude. So far, this function is entirely consistent with Lejeune's “pacte référentiel,” which, as it applies to autobiography, legitimizes a compromised version of absolute biographical or historical truth. Lejeune discusses this pact as “une preuve supplémentaire d'honnêteté,” a restriction of the autobiographical project “au possible (la vérité telle qu'elle m'apparaît, dans la mesure où je puis la connaître, etc., faisant la part des inévitables oublis, erreurs, déformations involontaires, etc.).”6 What must be borne in mind is the lack of hesitation with which Canetti is prepared—elsewhere in the autobiography—to abandon this problematic of psychological verisimilitude and thereby irretrievably to compromise Lejeune's “pacte référentiel.” This happens most notably in the reproduction, allegedly word for word, of dialogues recollected after a period of over fifty years, whose citing, almost completely uninterrupted by the narrator's commentary, stretches over several pages elsewhere in the text (for example, GZ 366-371). There is nothing new or surprising in pointing out that memory is selective. The point here, however, is that the narrative is tacitly suggesting the deliberateness (or, at least, the consciousness) of the act of selection. An even less innocent conception of other acts of forgetting is suggested by Gerhard Melzer's discussion of Canetti's “Rhetorik der Entwertung,” as part of which “das Vergessen … das Schweigen bzw. Verschweigen und das Wegsehen” all function as strategies of power, suppression, and survival.7 Waltraud Wiethölter similarly writes of “der völlig ungebrochene Herrschaftsgestus, mit dem Canetti das autobiographische Material verwaltet.”8

A more visual mode of remembering becomes dominant in the later sections, and the lacunae frequently become quite sense-specific. In the earlier sections a quasi-cinematographic technique is exploited in order to resume interrupted narrative sequences with expressions such as “Ich sehe uns erst in Reichenhall wieder” (GZ 177). Later, the visual sequences, such as those cited above which refer to Anna Mahler and Fritz Wotruba, are so durable that they cannot, the text states, be interrupted by the ostensibly unwanted lacunae caused by failures of audile memory.

However, as Eigler indicates, it is not inevitable that the overt manifestions of a polytropic narrator's operations will have the effect of suspending or, at the very least, distracting from the texts' mimetic function; rather, they may serve conversely to emphasize the density of textual organization and the logic of the story told.9 The frequency of analeptic and proleptic reference to points both within and beyond the narrated time-frame of these three volumes (1905-1937) serves to give the sense of a conscious teleological structure and self-understanding to the narrative. This autobiography reads as a kind of Entwicklungsroman, a constructed portrait of the author of a very specific group of works as a young man. Of these works, the development of the writer toward the authorship of Masse und Macht (published in 1960, twenty-three years after the end of the period covered in the autobiography) is especially stressed. In fact, the anticipation of that book is a principal focus of the second and third volumes, Die Fackel im Ohr and Das Augenspiel, and eclipses even the attention paid to those other texts—Die Blendung, Hochzeit, and the Komödie der Eitelkeit—whose writing falls within the narrated time-scale of the autobiography. (My perception of the teleological focus of the autobiography differs here in detail from that of Gerald Stieg's categorization of the first two volumes of Canetti's autobiography “als Prähistorie, als Archäologie der Blendung,” a view accepted by Sigurd Paul Scheichl.10 While the composition of the novel represents the obvious climax of Die Fackel im Ohr, my argument is based both on the repeated references throughout the three extant volumes to Canetti's work on Masse und Macht, and to the overall subordination in the autobiography of Die Blendung to the later theoretical work.)

Another specific kind of prolepsis which is found throughout all three volumes of Canetti's autobiography both interrupts the mimetic axis of the text and offers further evidence of the careful artifice characteristic of the construction of the writer's own life. This concerns the author's gaining in later years of a mature understanding of his own youthful experiences. These reflexive references to the process of narrative structuration (distributed evenly through the three volumes, and by no means more common with respect to childhood events) make the narrating subject explicit in two distinct ways: the understanding may be stated to have been gained either at the point of narration or at some intermediate point in the years separating the narrated world from the act of narration. The differentiation of perspectives is a characteristic feature of these texts, and its interpretative function stands in conflict with the sense of unmediated memory toward which most critical readings have tended. Such distinctions are generally made in the form of a variety of narrative tags, of which the following list represents only a small selection: “Als Kind hatte ich keinen Überblick …” (GZ 10); “Ich wußte damals noch nicht …” (GZ 90); “Wenn ich es heute bedenke …” (GZ 95); “Erst später begriff ich …” (GZ 102); “Erst jetzt, da ich diese Dinge ein wenig bedenke, begreife ich …” (GZ 301); “Ich wußte damals nichts …” (FO 20); “Ich begriff erst viel später …” (FO 166); “erst heute, nach 50 Jahren, erkenne ich an ihr wie an mir alle Zeichen der Verliebtheit …” (FO 212); “Es war, so sehe ich es heute, ein guter Instinkt …” (FO 284); “Sein Schweigen fiel mir erst später mehr und mehr auf …” (A 41); “aber das denke ich mir erst heute …” (A 90); “das wird mir jetzt erst klar …” (A 110); “das habe ich aber erst später erkannt …” (A 250); “Jahre danach, im Krieg, ich war in England, fiel es mir wie Schuppen von den Augen …” (A 322).

These points are of interest since they represent one of the most explicit manifestations of the disparity between subjects on different ontological levels in the narration. It is in them that the tense equilibrium between the two axes essential to autobiographical—and, in general, to all realistic—narrative is exposed. The first of these is the mimetic, that is, the illusion of a natural, authentic, and verisimilar representation of a series of reconstituted earlier experiences; the second axis is the artificial activity of narration, in which the earlier experiences are organized in a teleologically determined pattern, and thereby structured into a linear narrative. Die gerettete Zunge, Die Fackel im Ohr, and Das Augenspiel all foreground this latter function by means of the several modes of present-tense reference already discussed: the thematization of memory, personal or gnomic commentaries, analeptic or proleptic reference, differentiation between present and past knowledge or comprehension, accreditation of sources of knowledge other than the personal-empirical, intertextual reference in terms either of discreet structural parallels to individual texts (Robert Gould, for example, sees Dichtung und Wahrheit here as an applicable intertext)11 or of overtly explanatory comparisons in the text of the autobiography to a vast range of both verbal and visual texts, or with various mythic traditions. Obviously, the more explicitly these texts emphasize this aspect of their construction, the more radically they compromise the transparency of their mimetic function.

It is in moments either where memory fails (partially or completely) or where memory is superceded—or, at least, supplemented—by other sources of textual data that the relationship of these two axes is shown to be a complex and delicate balancing act. The illusion of the teleologically structured literary life is maintained exclusively by virtue of the organizational activities of the narrating textual intelligence, and conversely by virtue also of that intelligence's willingness to conceal the narrative strategies it exploits in order to produce and discourse a realistic story. These points where the narrating voice indicates the unreliability or inadequacy of memory make unmistakably clear even to the most determinedly mimesis-oriented reader that the story the reader is receiving is not (and could not possibly be) the same as that experienced by the young Canetti. By exposing the illusory nature of Philippe Lejeune's “identité de nom,” they necessarily disrupt the terms of the pact deliberately established at the opening of Die gerettete Zunge.

Noteworthy on the subject of this identity of name linking intelligences on two ontologically distinct planes is the differentiation between, on the one hand, references to Canetti's younger brother Georg in the autobiography and, on the other, the paratextual dedication of the first volume to Georges Canetti (the name assumed by the adult Georg Canetti following his emigration to Paris). In this case the text uses different nominal signifiers to distinguish between the brother of the narrated Canetti and the brother of the narrating Canetti. By doing so it moves the relationship of these two subjects beyond the merely temporal. The importance of this is that by inverse analogy this logically exposes the shifting quality of reference essential to—but at first glance invisible in—pronominal signifiers as characterized by the autobiographer's “ich.”

A further kind of informational lacuna is made explicit, which, while by no means threatening the implicit identification of the narrating Canetti with the narrated Canetti, does not sit very comfortably with the picture of the former as the teleologically conscious, structuring gnarus of these three volumes. This concerns the extraordinary frequency of expressions of uncertainty and ignorance of the motivations of various narrated-world figures throughout all three volumes. Canetti's autobiography is riddled with instances of such confessions, the starkly simple and confessional words “vielleicht” and “ich weiß nicht” occurring with a quite remarkable regularity in such contexts. This in some ways reinforces the “pacte autobiographique,” since these uncertainties and areas of negligence are apparently not acquired in the time span between experience and narration but rather preserved intact as informational gaps from narrated youth to narrating maturity. However, it is obviously not customary in realist, readerly narratives for the narrator to draw attention to things of which he or she is ignorant, and certainly not with the frequency evident in these texts. By mentioning them, the narrating Canetti on the one hand lends a sense of modest naivety to his activity, and on the other he conversely throws into doubt his implicit authority to determine and organize the events of the story he is discoursing in such a way that they make sense of the life of the author.

The present-time reference of the narration, as I suggested above, is most explicit at points in the text where the immediacy—and (the text implies) therefore the veracity—of memories is being stressed, or where authoritative narrative commentary on earlier events is evident in the text. There are two types of present-tense usage in this autobiography: one I will refer to as the personal present, the other as the gnomic present.

The personal present tense is found in two distinct contexts. These are: firstly, in expressions of judgment with reference to the narrative present, such as: “Ich wundere mich nicht, daß es zur Katastrophe kam” (GZ 45); “dieses Buch … das mir vom ersten Wort an widerstrebte und das mir heute, 55 Jahre danach, nicht weniger widerstrebt …” (FO 168); “[ein] Hochgefühl, wie ich es seither nie wieder gekannt habe” (FO 402); and secondly, in reflexive, metanarrative commentaries which arrest the mimetic illusion of the autobiography: “Ich kann es—sehr unzulänglich—nur ein Leben der Besessenheit nennen” (GZ 362); “Ich will nicht sagen, daß es ein Vergnügen war” (FO 57); “ich habe seither nie von ihm gesprochen und es fällt mir schwer, ihn zu schildern” (FO 155); “Nicht leichten Herzens befasse ich mich mit Broch, denn ich weiß nicht, wie ich ihm gerecht werden soll” (A 28).

The gnomic present is noticeably less common in these texts, but the instances of its deployment in the narrative are of considerable interest, since they usually involve the inception of an explicitly self-referential focus in the writing. The first such passage occurs two hundred pages into Die gerettete Zunge, with reference to Canetti's schooling in Zürich. The passage is over one page long, and one part of it proposes a typology of teachers as a frame for the structural ordering and reading of a life: “Es wäre nicht schwierig und vielleicht auch reizvoll, ein späteres Leben danach zu durchforschen, welchen und wievielen dieser Lehrer man unter anderen Namen wiederbegegnet ist …” (GZ 211). While this suggestion is not actively pursued in Canetti's autobiography, the goal it implies—a unified principle for writing a life—is of course of central importance in both biography and autobiography. In Die Fackel im Ohr, the narrating voice notes, again in the gnomic mode: “Es ist nichts unwiderstehlicher als die Lockung, den inneren Raum eines Menschen zu betreten” (FO 184). Here the narrator is providing at least the illusion of such a temptation, but this gnomic commentary serves the double function of inviting the reader's complicity in the mimetic project of the autobiography, while conversely pointing directly toward the very self-consciousness of narrating which highlights the constructed textuality of the figure whose inner space is under exploration.

The third volume shows considerably more evidence of such gnomic reflexive commentary, in part because of its discussion of other writings by Canetti, firstly of Die Blendung, and in part because of its breadth of focus on the lives and works of a range of writers and artists in Vienna in the 1930s. One comment in particular is of interest: over eight hundred pages into his autobiography, and twenty-six years into his narrated life, and with—at that stage—the hindsight of another fifty-four years which have not (or, perhaps, not yet) been included in the autobiographical project, one reads: “Es ist überwältigend zu erleben, wieviel man über sich zu sagen hat” (A 36). Given the comprehensive humorlessness—indeed even pomposity—of Canetti's autobiography, it is extremely difficult to read this comment as ironic. The implication, that to avoid being overwhelmed by the experiences of which one wishes to tell a degree of selection and structure is necessary, is reinforced by a subsequent passage of gnomic present tense. Here, the dangers of unstructured knowledge are discussed in terms of the “amorphe Sucht der Vielwisserei, des Ausgreifens in diese und jene Richtung, des Wiederfahrenlassens eines erst Berührten, kaum noch Ergriffenen … diese Neugier, die gewiß mehr als Neugier ist, denn sie hat keine Absicht und endet in nichts … dieses Zucken und Ziehen nach allen Seiten …” (A 149). The self-referentiality of this commentary is readily apparent: the passage stands persuasively as a statement of Canetti's rationale for his careful teleological structuring of his own literary life. The problem is how to reconcile this kind of commentary with such personal present-tense confessions as that found near the end of Die gerettete Zunge, where Canetti cites Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's couplet: “Ich bin kein ausgeklügelt Buch, ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch” (GZ 340). He then goes on to reflect on his creative situation: “Heute, da ich gestaltete Geschichte nicht mehr ertrage, da ich nur die Quellen selbst, naive Berichte oder harte Gedanken zu ihnen suche …” (GZ 341). The narrating Canetti wants, it seems, to have his teleological cake and eat it too, to insist on the immediacy, vibrancy, and veracity of his narrated world—and his narrated subject—while presenting that world as an ordered (and therefore necessarily mediated) narrative structure.

There are, then, several consciousnesses in play in these texts: that of the young narrated-world actant Canetti, that of the Canetti of the years between the end of the story of the autobiography in 1937 and the present time of the autobiographer, and that of the narrating Canetti. I propose that none of these alone represents the single, indivisible subject of the three volumes of this autobiography. In a passage in Die Fackel im Ohr discussing the textual transformation of “der amorphe Knäuel”12 of his experiences in Berlin during the summer of 1928 into the fictional world of the novel Die Blendung, Canetti states: “Nun wäre es gar kein Unglück gewesen, daß nichts von den Berliner Wochen versickert war, daß man alles bewahrt hatte. Es hätte sich aufschreiben lassen und es wäre ein farbiger und vielleicht gar nicht uninteressanter Bericht geworden. Es ließe sich heute noch schreiben, so lange hat es sich erhalten. Aber ein Bericht hätte das Wesentliche daran nie erfaßt. … Denn der eine, einheitliche Mensch, der es aufgefaßt hatte und nun scheinbar alles in sich enthielt, war ein Truggebilde” (FO 350).

In terms of fiction, a structural model has been developed which differentiates such a fictional textual subject from both the empirical author and the narrator. It is obviously quite impossible to achieve the complete and integrated reconstruction of a human life and consciousness—fictional or otherwise—in linear, narrative form, even in a retrospective, autobiographical context. However, a reconstruction of this “Truggebilde” as an implicit authorial presence as part of the textual communication act—that is, an authority whose identity can be deduced exclusively from textual data—is clearly feasible as a task for a reader. This kind of model is equally appropriate to the analysis of traditional autobiographical texts, since the teleological intention of such texts projects a clearly ordered, ideal picture. Since, as Friederike Eigler's study of the autobiography indicates, the reader has no objective yardstick for establishing the precise degree of historical authenticity, the ideal picture assumes its illusion of historical and biographical authenticity by default once Lejeune's pact of nominal identity is sealed. The empirical author remains hidden behind the blind of the image he constructs of himself. The principle which finally distinguishes autobiographical texts from others is that the very act of authorial concealment flaunts itself deceitfully in the guise of a generous and sensitive act of personal confession.

In conclusion, however, one must acknowledge that the mimetic illusion of the teleological project has proved in Die gerettete Zunge, Die Fackel im Ohr, and Das Augenspiel extremely durable. These volumes have found—apparently on account of the persuasiveness of this illusion—remarkably broad critical and popular approval, according to which the tale has generally been taken to be more compelling than an analysis of its telling. The concentration on the truth-function of the texts, which has been characteristic of such readings, is seen to represent a failure to heed the narrative small-print incorporated in these texts. This is even openly suggested at one point in Die Fakkel im Ohr where Canetti offers what to all intents and purposes appears to be a disclaimer of authorial responsibility for factual truthfulness. He is at pains to absolve the act of story-telling from the possible accusation of bad faith. The position which he takes pleads for a certain amorality in the recounting of a life-story, and it radically contradicts Lejeune's definition of autobiographies as primarily referential texts whose aim “n'est pas la simple vraisemblance, mais la ressemblance au vrai. Non ‘l'effet du réel,’ mais l'image du réel.”13 Concerning his Odysseus-like activity as a young man of inventing fictional women in his life with the aim of distracting his mother from her ferocious verbal attacks on his future wife Veza, Canetti offers both a reflexive commentary on his own story-telling as a whole, and an argument which can be read as an explicit warning against a naive reading focusing exclusively on the mimetic—and even documentary—axis of the three volumes of his autobiography: “Was man gut erfand,” states the narrating Canetti's observation, “war eine Geschichte, keine Lüge …” (FO 252).

Notes

  1. Elias Canetti, Die gerettete Zunge: Geschichte einer Jugend (München: Hanser, 1977); Die Fackel im Ohr: Lebensgeschichte 1921-1931 (München: Hanser, 1980); and Das Augenspiel: Lebensgeschichte 1931-1937 (München: Hanser, 1985). References to these texts will be given in parentheses, the respective volumes being identified as GZ, FO, and A.

  2. See for example: Bernd Witte, “Der Erzähler als Tod-Feind: Zu Elias Canettis Autobiographie” in: Text und Kritik, Heft 28, third edition (September, 1982), 68-70; Gerald Stieg, “Betrachtungen zu Elias Canettis Autobiographie” in: Zu Elias Canetti, ed. Manfred Durzak (Stuttgart: Klett, 1983), p. 158; and Madeleine Salzmann, Die Kommunikationsstruktur der Autobiographie: Mit kommunikationsorientierten Analysen der Autobiographien von Max Frisch, Helga M. Novak und Elias Canetti (Bern: Lang, 1988), especially pp. 30-41.

  3. Friederike Eigler, Das autobiographische Werk von Elias Canetti: Identität—Verwandlung—Machtausübung (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1988), pp. 30-77.

  4. Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 23-24.

  5. Patrick O'Neill, The Comedy of Entropy: Humour, Narrative, Reading (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 204.

  6. Lejeune, p. 36.

  7. Gerhard Melzer, “Der einzige Satz und sein Eigentümer: Versuch über den symbolischen Machthaber Elias Canetti” in: Experte der Macht: Elias Canetti, ed. Kurt Bartsch and Gerhard Melzer (Graz: Droschl, 1985), p. 66.

  8. Waltraud Wiethölter, “Sprechen—Lesen—Schreiben: Zur Funktion von Sprache und Schrift in Canettis Autobiographie” in: Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 64 (1990), 150.

  9. Eigler, p. 58.

  10. Gerald Stieg, “Elias Canetti und Karl Kraus: Ein Versuch” in: Modern Austrian Literature, 16/3-4 (1983), 200; Sigurd Paul Scheichl, “Hörenlernen: Zur teleologischen Struktur der autobiographischen Bücher Canettis” in: Elias Canetti: Blendung als Lebensform, ed. Friedbert Aspetsberger and Gerald Stieg (Königstein/Taunus: Athenäum, 1985), pp. 73, 77.

  11. Robert Gould, “Die gerettete Zunge and Dichtung und Wahrheit: Hypertextuality in Autobiography and its Implications” in: Seminar, 21 (1985), 79-107; see also Witte, p. 66.

  12. Elias Canetti, “Das erste Buch: Die Blendung” in: Das Gewissen der Worte: Essays (München: Hanser, 1975), p. 229.

  13. Lejeune, p. 36.

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