Elias Canetti

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The Power of Elias Canetti

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SOURCE: Goodheart, Eugene. “The Power of Elias Canetti.” Partisan Review LXVII, no. 4 (fall 2000): 613-21.

[In the following essay, Goodheart provides an overview of themes in Canetti's works and finds that Canetti was above all a great observer of the human condition.]

I met Elias Canetti in a café in Hampstead in 1965 while on a fellowship in London. The photo on the book jacket of a recent edition of his memoirs brings him back to me with a fidelity you rarely expect from photographs. He was stocky with a round well-fed face, a full head of hair, and a mustache. In the photo he is dressed in a three-piece suit and is seated behind a desk upon which lies a manuscript. He stares at the reader with what seems an attentive skepticism, the very picture of a cultivated European. At some point during our acquaintance, he presented me with a copy of his masterwork, Crowds and Power (1962), Masse und Macht (1960) in its original German version, the product of a thirty-five-year devotion. I dipped into the book, but never read it through until now. His other famous book is Auto-da-fé (1935) in which the library of its bibliophile hero, the paranoid sinologist Peter Kien, goes up in flames. Canetti would have appreciated the fate of my copy of Crowds and Power. It survived a fire in my own house, its cover permanently darkened by a smoke stain.

Canetti was born in 1905 in Bulgaria, the son of Sephardic parents. The vicissitudes of his family fate brought him to Vienna, Berlin, Lausanne, Zurich, and eventually to England, where he lived until his death in 1994. Fluent in several languages, he wrote exclusively in German. In addition to Auto-da-fé and Crowds and Power, he is the author of a number of plays (Comedy of Vanity, The Numbered, and The Wedding, among others), books of what he calls “jottings” (most notably, The Human Province) and three remarkable memoirs (The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes). He has not been wanting in admirers, among whom are writers of the distinction of Iris Murdoch, John Bayley, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, and George Steiner. And he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. But he has remained a singular and diffident figure without a large following who has avoided one of the great pitfalls for intellectuals and artists, celebrity.

In The Torch in My Ear, Canetti locates the source of his lifelong obsession with crowds in “one of those not too frequent public events that seize an entire city so profoundly that it is no longer the same afterwards.” At a coffeehouse in Vienna on June 15, 1927, he reads of a “just verdict” in which a court declares those responsible for the shootings of workers in Burgenland not guilty.

The acquittal had been termed, nay, trumpeted, as “a just verdict” in the organ of the government party. It was this mockery of any sense of justice rather than the verdict itself that triggered an enormous agitation among the workers of Vienna.

When they set fire to the Palace of Justice, the mayor of the city ordered the police to shoot, causing ninety deaths. “Fifty years have passed, and the agitation of that day is still in my bones. It is the closest thing to a revolution that I have physically experienced.”

What is the effect of the event on Canetti? It is not the sense of injustice, which originally moved him, but rather the experience of the crowd in action. He descends into the streets, joins the procession, indeed “dissolves in it” and feels not “the slightest resistance to what the crowd was doing.” At the same time, he says “[I was] amazed that despite my frame of mind, I was able to grasp all the concrete individual scenes taking place before my eyes.” In Crowds and Power Canetti would provide an explanation for the irresistible attraction of the crowd. It rests on a paradox:

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. … Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can amount to panic. … It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.

The crowd is a kind of homeopathy for a universal phobia: the fear of touch.

Canetti dissolves in the crowd and yet finds that he is able to grasp all the events taking place before his eyes. This capacity for participation and detached observation is a remarkable feature of all his work. (He would be an exception to Gustave Le Bon's view in his classic study of the crowd in which participants lose themselves in it and any sense of critical objectivity.) The moral indignation that moved Canetti to join the crowd seems to evaporate in his account of its behavior. He becomes a fiercely dispassionate observer of its sensory elements: “the excitement, the advancing, and the fluency of the movement,” the dominant presence of the word fire, and then the actual fire. There is the throbbing of his head, shots fired “like whips,” the avoidance of corpses, the seeming increase of the size of the corpses in the growing excitement he feels. He notes the overwhelming presence of people and then their vanishing. “Everything yielded and invisible holes open everywhere.” Things tug and tear at him. He hears “something rhythmic in the air, an evil music” which elevates him. He experiences himself as a resonant wind. Images of water, fire, and air dominate the scene. Canetti was trained as a chemist, and he seems to combine a visionary poetic gift with a scientific passion for precise notation. In his account the crowd is an agent of neither good nor evil. It is an elemental force to be studied with the objectivity one might use to study the motions of matter, the actions of wolves, lions, and tigers.

Crowds and Power is an idiosyncratic work. Its extensive bibliography makes no reference to Le Bon's work, nor is there any reference to Marx or Freud, though there is a section on the paranoid Dr. Schreber, whom Freud analyzed. Canetti's typology is his own invention. Crowds can be opened or closed; they can be invisible, baiting, prohibition, reversal and feast crowds, each having its own dynamic. They are a development of the “pack,” an older unit, whose main characteristic is that it cannot grow, though its “fiercest wish is to be more.” Like the crowd, the pack is prolific in the forms it assumes: hunting, war, lamenting, increase. Much of the exposition has the air of apodictic assertion, which the reader can trust or resist, depending on his or her disposition to the work. An example:

Of the four essential attributes of the crowd which we have come to know, two are only fictitious as far as the pack is concerned, though these are the two which are most strenuously desired and enacted. Hence the other two must be all the more strangely present in actuality. Growth and density are only acted; equality and direction really exist. The first thing that strikes one about the pack is its direction; equality is expressed in the fact that all are obsessed by the same goal, the sight of an animal perhaps, which they want to kill.

It is asserted, not demonstrated, that growth and density are only acted. Why is it that the pack cannot grow? And if it cannot grow, what does an increase pack mean? The lucidity of Canetti's prose doesn't always throw light on the motives of his thought.

In the section “On the Psychology of Eating,” he writes that “the person who eats alone renounces the prestige which the process would bring him in the eyes of others.” And what is the prestige of eating in public? “But when people eat together they can see other's mouths opening. Everyone can watch everyone else's teeth while his own are in action at the same time. To be without teeth is contemptible.” The turn of mind here is peculiar to Canetti. I can think of more obvious reasons for eating together: the pleasures of company and conversation. It would be strange, at least for those in advanced societies, to concentrate on the masticating habits of others while eating—though one appreciates a description of those habits by a writer like Canetti or Naipaul. There are numerous passages that are idiosyncratic, if not perverse, in this manner. There are also passages that tell us what we already know without the shock of recognition.

Crowds and Power contains no thesis or doctrine. It is a work of observation and speculation from which one can infer a view of the human condition. For Canetti crowds appear everywhere and in myriad forms and are the source of power, the other major theme of the book. Power has force and violence as it cognates and is invariably destructive. Unlike Hannah Arendt, who distinguished between power as benign and force as malign, Canetti conceives of force as the actualization of power. If there is a moral bias in the work, it is against power. Much of the book is given over to ethnographic accounts of massacres of tribes by other tribes. As a nonreligious, non-Christian writer, Canetti does not believe that man has fallen from grace to a condition of sin. Violence is aboriginally human and has no significant history. Canetti's anthropological perspective creates the impression of endless cycles of destruction, human and non-human. He does not share the Enlightenment view that human nature is malleable and susceptible to the influences of society, for good or evil. Destruction seems to issue from the biology that human beings share with all animal life. At times Canetti reads like a zoologist whose main subject happens to be the human species. His survey of anthropological literature only confirms the conviction that the world wars that have marked our past century were manifestations on a grand scale of what has always been true of human life everywhere. Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone would find their place in a revised edition of Crowds and Power. They are the normal, not exceptional, events in the story that Canetti tells about human life.

World War I haunts Canetti's imagination of human destructiveness as it did his idol, Karl Kraus, the influential author of The Last Days of Mankind and innumerable polemics against the decadence that brought Europe to catastrophe. Canetti tells in his memoirs of the tremendous effect Kraus's lectures (he attended more than a hundred) had on him. And yet the influence of a catastrophic “moment” in history does not translate into a historical perspective on the subject. Although the emergence of democracy in the past two hundred years has focused our minds on crowds and has affected the forms they have taken and their significance, Canetti writes as if crowds have no history.

In a study of power, we expect an attention to its sublimations in politics. We learn of power relationships between chiefs and their tribes, but not of how a knowledge of those relationships can be transferred to an understanding of political behavior in advanced societies. Canetti brings Hobbes to mind in his vision of men at war with one another in the state of nature, but unlike Hobbes he has only the rudiments of a political imagination of possible solutions. He writes of parliamentary factions as double crowds, but the translation of one term to another seems little more than a tautology. We are told little of the dynamics of factional life in parliamentary democracies. In this respect, Canetti resembles Foucault, a writer of an altogether different character, for whom power is also pervasive and oppressive. Both writers pay little attention to its political expression and are pessimistic on the question of whether power can be resisted.

In an epilogue, Canetti suggests that the obsession with productivity in both capitalist and socialist countries might be understood as an antidote to war. “Production cannot but be peaceful. War and destruction mean decrease and thus, by definition, harm it. Here capitalism and socialism are at one, twin rivals in the same faith. For both of them production is the apple of their eye and their main concern.” This ignores the “creative destruction” (Schumpeter's phrase) that characterizes advanced capitalism or for that matter war itself. Canetti here expresses the faith (not necessarily his own) in our global economy decades before its appearance. He sees parliaments “in its peaceful and regular rotation of power” as another recourse against war and destruction, anticipating current wisdom that there is an affinity between democracy and peace. And he turns to ancient Rome as an example of how “sport can replace war as a crowd phenomenon.” (What would he have made of the behavior of soccer fans in his own adopted country, England?)

Canetti devotes a section to the role of the survivor as an agent of power. We should not confuse Canetti's survivor with how we commonly understand the survivor nowadays. In his exemplary embodiment, he is the person who has survived the concentration camps. He may have done so at the expense of others, but he does not pride himself on having outlived his fellow inmates. On the contrary, for the rest of his life he will bear a burden of guilt. Canetti's survivor seems close to Darwin's conscienceless victor in the struggle for existence, though Darwin is never mentioned in the book. He desires nothing less than to outlive the rest of the world. Ruler or paranoid, often both at the same time, he seeks the extermination of his subjects. Paranoia in this perspective is not so much a pathology as it is the very condition of rule and command. In Sophocles's Antigone, Creon's son Haimon warns his father that if he puts Antigone to death he will rule a desert. Haimon reflects the wisdom of the play that to rule one must have subjects. The ruler who remains alone on the earth ceases to be a ruler. Not so for Canetti, for whom the very idea of rule entails destruction. The survivor is not only its embodiment, he is “mankind's worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom.” Canetti wonders whether it is “possible for us to escape him, even now at its last moment.” The concluding sentence of his book is a call to the disarmament of power. “If we would master power we must face command openly and boldly, and search for means to deprive it of its sting.”

What then is the alternative to power? In one of his most eloquent essays, “Kafka's Other Trial,” Canetti finds a recourse against power in Kafka's vulnerability to his father, his lovers—indeed, to every aspect of his world. His account of Kafka's tormented relationship with Felice Bauer is so compelling and so moving that it may overcome a reader's resistance to its affirmation of powerlessness. Would we care to read The Metamorphosis or The Trial if its author had not transformed the pathos of his existence into a powerful art? Does power need always to be invidious? Shakespeare's answer is in the opening line of sonnet 132: “They that have the power to hurt and will do none.” No one desires vulnerability and weakness. What we all desire—I hate to use what has become a cant word—is empowerment. Canetti admits as much when in a “jotting” in The Human Province he notes: “I have never heard of a person attacking power without wanting it, and the religious novelists are the worst in this respect.” Hannah Arendt had a different sense of power when she understood its absence as a source of violence. Terrorism, for example, is the action of the weak, not of the strong.

Canetti's declared hostility to power may be misleading, for he is clearly attracted to it as a subject for his imagination. When he finds power in art, he admires it without reservation. Here is what he has to say about his friend, the sculptor Felix Wortruba:

He was interested in two things and in them alone: the power of stone and the power of words, in both cases power, but in so unusual a combination of its elements that one took it as a force of nature, no more open to criticism than a storm.

It may be that when Canetti writes of stone and words, he is not thinking of power in the negative conceptual sense that informs his thinking in Crowds and Power.

His struggle against power is also a struggle against death, for the two are inextricably bound together in his mind. He desires immortality or longevity, if immortality is unavailable, because of an insatiable curiosity about life. “The highly concrete and serious, the admitted goal of my life is to achieve immortality for men.” Here he sets himself against the philosopher's creed that wisdom lies in the graceful acceptance of death. For Rilke, a poet with a philosophical gift, death is the fulfillment of life and only those with unlived lines in their bodies—and they are legion—fear it. Canetti might have accepted death if he were guaranteed the time to satisfy his desire to fully know the world. Most people don't want to die. If given a choice with the full knowledge of the prospect, few would want to live forever, especially if the promise of immortality was not accompanied by eternal youth. In his beautiful poem “Tithonus,” Tennyson evokes the pathos of the goddess Aurora's lover, whom she granted immortal life, but not eternal youth.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms …

But would eternal youth be sufficient? Wouldn't the boredom of a several-hundred-year existence become unbearable? Moreover, what of its consequences for new birth and new life? The virtue of a Christian conception of an afterlife is that it satisfies a desire for immortality that doesn't threaten future life on earth. And how does Canetti reconcile his view of the survivor as “mankind's worst evil” with his own desire for immortality? Although I do not share his immortal longings, I find something admirable in his stubborn refusal to submit to conventional wisdom. Risking death is a familiar experience. The risks of longevity might be worth taking, but they require a person of singular capacities.

In the memoir The Play of the Eyes, Canetti reproduces an exchange he had with his friend, the novelist Herman Broch. He had given Broch a copy of his manuscript, Kant Catches Fire, the original title of Auto-da-fé. Broch was struck, even scandalized by the grotesqueness of the characters in the novel. Canetti admitted that he was influenced by Gogol: “I wanted the most extreme characters at once ludicrous and horrible. I wanted the ludicrous and the horrible to be indistinguishable.” And he conceded that he had a desire to terrify people, because he found everything around him terrifying. One of the terrifying characters is the protagonist, Peter Kien, a bibliophile of monstrous proportions—perhaps a parodic version of Canetti himself. The memoirs create the impression of an extremely bookish person. Like D. H. Lawrence, Canetti in his youth and young manhood was completely absorbed by his mother with whom he shared a passion for books. She had three sons, of whom Elias was the eldest, and never remarried. Whenever a suitor came on the scene and threatened the family romance, Elias made it clear to her that remarriage was out of the question. He would not allow it. His own fidelity to her turned out to be less reliable than hers to him. When women came into his life, he concealed their presence. Eventually he broke the hold that mother and son had on each other and married. His younger brother Georg took over the role of the utterly devoted son. But the bookish bond between mother and son was a permanent legacy and contributed to the kind of writer he became. One might be tempted to say that his sense of reality has been skewed by his bookishness, if it were not that he seems to be aware of the danger of living in books. The novel ends in a book burning: Canetti knows their dangerous combustible power.

There is violence enough everywhere around him, but what of the violence in Canetti himself? In his childhood, when he was not yet literate, he had tried to murder his older cousin Laurica with an ax, because she would not let him see her notebooks. The family assembled to discuss “the homicidal child.”

I could plead all I liked that Laurica tortured me bloody; the fact that I, at the age of five, had reached for the ax to kill her—indeed, the very fact that I had been able to carry the heavy ax in front of me—was incomprehensible to everyone. I think they understood that the “writing,” “the script,” had been so important to me; they were Jews, and “Scripture” meant a great deal to all of them, but there had to be something very bad and dangerous in me to the point of wanting to murder my playmate.

When Canetti told Broch that his lifework would be crowds, Broch responded that there was nothing to learn from a study of mass behavior. “You can't discover [its laws], because there aren't any. You'd be wasting your time. Better stick to your plays. You're a writer.” Canetti had no answer, but he stuck to his guns, because it was in crowds that he could best express the violence that he found in life, in books, and in himself.

His claim to distinction does not rest on a set of original or compelling ideas. He is not a master of a particular genre, though he was the author of many plays, essays, “jottings,” and a singular (in more than one sense) novel. Crowds and Power eludes generic definition and lacks the intellectual or scholarly substance of other works on the subject. (A recent scholarly introduction to Le Bon's work provides an extensive list of books and articles on crowds but makes no mention of Canetti's book.) His is an achievement of sensibility, which has its fulfillment in the memoirs. He is an obsessively patient observer and listener, always at an odd angle to events, alert to what is strange, weird, and frightening in his and our experience.

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