Georges Kien and the ‘Diagnosis of Delusion’ in Elias Canetti's Die Blendung
[In the following essay, Morgan examines the roles of irony and “narrative self-reflexion” in Die Blendung.]
Since the republication of Elias Canetti's Die Blendung in the early 1960s, interpreters have asked whether a resolution is posited between the extremes of “Kopf” and “Welt,” or at least whether it is possible to find a perspective in the novel on Peter Kien's crisis. The figure of Georges Kien, Peter's brother, the psychiatrist, who in the last section of the novel saves Peter from his humiliation at the hands of Therese and Pfaff, has become central to this question in the critical literature on Die Blendung. Georges dominates the third part of the novel and appears to represent—and restores sanity and order in an otherwise grotesque and senseless world. While Raymond Williams sounded an early note of warning about the extent to which the ending can be seen as a “diagnosis of delusion,”2 many critics have viewed Georges as a positive counterpart to his brother. More recent criticisms have focused on negative aspects of the characterization of Georges. In the critical discussion of Peter and Georges Kien however, little attention has been paid to aspects of irony and narrative self-reflexion in Canetti's text.
Peter Kien is the world's leading sinologist, whose life work lies in the reconstruction of ancient Asian texts (14). In books and scholarly work he finds his only point of reference to the world.
The novel opens comically, with an incident in Kien's daily walk. A young boy gains Kien's attention by interposing himself between Kien and the display window of a bookshop. After a brief conversation, the boy elicits from Kien a promise to see Kien's personal library. That Kien allows the boy to interfere with his thoughts at all is uncharacteristic. He justifies his behaviour on the basis that the boy's interest in Chinese heralds a future as a leading scholar. But later on he realises to his horror that he both wasted his time talking to a child and promised to display his precious books. Kien tries to justify the unaccustomed intrusion of everyday reality into his life, but even this justification of his behaviour shows the extent to which he is afraid of the outside world disrupting his scholarly life.
This meeting indirectly sets the story into motion: it is Therese's refusal to allow the boy into the flat which wins Kien's admiration, and indirectly leads to his proposal of marriage. Kien marries Therese in order to gain extra protection for his books and himself. The opening incident of the story indicates that Kien's defenses against the “world” are breaking down under pressure from inside as well as from outside.
While Kien has a religious respect for scholarly books, his attitude to novels is one of contempt. In gratitude at Therese's fulfilment of her duties (i.e. dusting his books and protecting him from disturbances), and in the belief that she has a genuine, if primitive, interest in learning, he promises to select a book from his library for her:
Für sie kam bloß ein Roman in Betracht. Nur wird von Romanen kein Geist fett. Den Genuß, den sie vielleicht bieten, überzahlt man sehr: sie zersetzen den besten Charakter. Man lernt sich in allerlei Menschen einfühlen. Am vielen Hin und Her gewann man Geschmack. Man löst sich in die Figuren auf, die einem gefallen. Jeder Standpunkt wird begreiflich. Willig überläßt man sich fremden Zielen und verliert für länger die eigenen aus dem Auge. Romane sind Keile, die ein schreibender Schauspieler in die geschlossene Person seiner Leser treibt. Je besser er Keil und Widerstand berechnet, um so gespaltener läßt er die Person zurück. Romane müßten von Staats wegen verboten sein.
(35)
For Peter Kien novels are a threat: in encouraging sympathy or identification with fictive characters, they penetrate the wall which he has built up around himself, breaking down his intellectual single-mindedness. For him character and learning cannot manifest themselves in understanding, sympathy or vicarious identification with the fictive characters of a novel. In seeing others' aims or desires in life, one weakens or distorts the focus of the intellect. The image of the “Keil,” the wedge driven by the “writing actor” into the “closed person” of the reader moreover, expresses Kien's fear of the subversive power of the text. The novelist undermines morals and the sense of duty, dissolves the sense of self, and fragments identity.3
This image of the novel as “wedge” relates back to the dream Kien had immediately before he awoke and remembered his promise to Therese. In the dream a sacrificial victim is attacked by two jaguars, which are Mexican priests in disguise. Finally one of the priests drives a stone wedge (“Keil”) into the victim's heart. Peter Kien, the onlooker, closes his eyes, expecting a gush of blood, but opening them again sees, to his horror, not blood, but books springing from the man's gaping chest. The blood dripping from the hammer used to drive in the wedge sets the books alight as they fall from the man's body, and Kien commands him to close his chest. The victim frees his hands and tears his chest wide open, releasing a stream of books into the fire about his feet. As Kien tries to save the books he is hindered by people clinging to his body: “Ein unbrauchbarer Mensch, wo es drauf ankommt, versagt er.” (33) This however is not the end of the dream. The voice of God proclaims from above: “Hier gibt es keine Bücher. Alles ist eitel.” (34) Realizing the truth, Kien leaps free of the burning bodies, saved and calm amidst the stink of burning flesh and twitching limbs, now that no books are in danger. Suddenly however this recognition is belied by the transformation of the burning people into books and he again plunges into the flames to rescue them. Again God's voice releases him, and again he plunges into the fire, thinking that the people have become books. This happens four times, until God maliciously and derisively tells him “Jetzt sind es Bücher!” (34). upon which he awakens.
Peter Kien's dual role as onlooker and actor suggests a conflict between the desire to act and the fear of being dragged down into a world of unreason. The image of the orgy of clinging bodies has sexual connotations (“Da hat sich ihm schon einer an den Mund geworfen und hält sich an den zusammengepreßten Lippen fest,” 33). Peter Kien fears the irruption of feelings and desires as incompatible with knowledge, enlightenment or reason.
The dream indicates the psychological dimension of Kien's repression of feelings for the sake of knowledge. Knowledge has become laden with repressed feeling—and vice versa, feeling is laden with the guilt of squandered knowledge. In manifesting the ambivalence of “Kopf” and “Welt” in the image of books and people (the transformation from the one to the other), the dream reveals Kien's deep fear of losing his ability to distinguish between the two—i.e. his ability to maintain the purity of knowledge. Hence the imagery of eyesight and blindness (“Blendung”) in the dream. “Blendung” is not simply “blinding,” it is also “bedazzlement,” the result of too much light, or bright images superimposed over one another. It is an image of the inability to see, distinguish and define clearly. Peter Kien's fear of blindness throughout the novel, his fear of no longer having access to books, masks the deeper fear of “Blendung,” of no longer being able to distinguish between books and people, knowledge and life. As a result of this fear, he attempts to reinforce the barriers against the “world” first by marrying Therese, and then by bribing the brutal concierge, Pfaff. However these strategies undermine rather than reinforce his security. The dream at the beginning of the novel preempts the “auto da fé” of the end.
Through the image of the wedge (“Keil”) driven into the victim's heart, Kien's dream is linked to his contempt for the novel which cleaves and fragments the identity of the reader. Novels split the reader, forcing open his closed identity, leading to the situation where he can no longer distinguish between knowledge (the books of the dream) and feelings (the people clinging to his mouth and limbs); and the writer has become a cynical God revealing not one, but several contradictory and confusing truths.
On the morning after his dream, in response to Therese's reminder, Kien selects for her his oldest, grimiest, most battered book, Willibald Alexis' Die Hosen des Herrn von Bredow. However her solicitous reverence for even this miserable volume incites surprise and then guilt and gratitude in Kien, leading to his proposal of marriage, and ultimately to the expulsion from his library-paradise and his wanderings in the underworld of part two of the novel.
Returning to his library after the marriage ceremony, and wondering what would follow, Peter Kien wishes for the help of brother Georges. Georges is a gynaecologist turned psychiatrist, who moved to Paris and became famous and wealthy as a doctor and socialite (43). At the end of part two of the novel, after Peter has been hounded from his home by Therese and Pfaff, Georges is called to Vienna by the dwarf, Fischerle, in a telegram in the name of Peter Kien. After Peter's wanderings in the grotesque, nightmarish and brutal underworld of Vienna, the arrival of Georges seems to promise the restoration of order.
Georges Kien has been seen mostly positively as an antithesis to Peter. Manfred Durzak interprets the third part of the novel as a resolution through synthesis of the alienated values of the first two parts, of “Kopf” and “Welt” respectively. For Durzak, Georges Kien is an authorial figure, an alter-ego of Canetti himself, who thereby brings the other characters of the novel into perspective.4 Likewise, Auer, Dissinger, Suchy and others see Georges and/or his psychiatric patients positively in comparison to Peter Kien and the “world” of the novel.5 David Roberts however rejects this interpretation. While he interprets Georges as an antithetical character to Peter, he sees the final section, “Welt im Kopf,” as a “negative dialectic.” Georges, the embodiment of “Welt” in contrast to Peter, stands outside—and provides a perspective on—the world of Die Blendung, in the theoretical recognition of “die Macht der Masse im Menschen.” Although he recognizes the negative aspects of Georges, Roberts nevertheless gives him a privileged position of authorial approval in terms of the theories Canetti later expounded in Masse und Macht.6 Barnouw in 1977, summing up interpretative attitudes to Georges, regards Roberts' interpretation as a turning point from unquestioningly positive, to more critical approaches.7 Certainly, with the exception of Krumme most recently,8 interpretations of Georges since Roberts' study have been more and more negative, with Meili in 1985 condemning him as manipulative, power-hungry and protofascist.9
After a chance meeting with the Gorilla, a madman in gorilla-costume, Georges rejected his life as socialite, womanizer and gynaecologist, to become a psychiatrist. This meeting provides a key to Georges' role in the novel. Roberts considers it:
… eine Begegnung von existentieller Bedeutung: die Erfahrung, die der Gorilla vermittelt, nachdem er sich leidenschaftlich auf den Boden geworfen hat, erschüttert Georges im Innersten seines Wesens … Die Schuppen fallen ihm von den Augen: sein Leben mit seinem Erfolg, seiner Eleganz, Geschliffenheit, Feinfühligkeit, wird in all seinem Ungenügen als das eines ‘Halbmenschen’ … Das erstickende Gefängnis von Konvention und Sicherheit zerbricht unter dem Eindruck dieser neuen Dimension des Seins.10
The Gorilla is the brother of a wealthy banker, who keeps him sequestered in his villa. The Gorilla answers the door, and greets Georges in a strange language:
Ein angek leideter Gorilla trat vor, streckte die langen Arme aus, legte sie auf die Schultern des Arztes und begrüßte ihn in einer fremden Sprache. … An einem runden Tisch hieß er sie Platz nehmen. Seine Gebärden waren roh, aber verständlich und einladend. Über die Sprache zerbrach sich der Arzt den Kopf. Am ehesten erinnerte sie ihn noch an einen Negerdialekt.
(355)
The narration of this section is highly ironic, playing off Georges' refinement against the Gorilla's primitive behaviour. The juxtaposition of the polite tone and the crude happenings is grotesquely comic in the style of Kafka and other central European novelists11: “Der Gorilla hielt den männlichen Besuch fest, er hatte ihm wohl viel zu erklären.” The genteel expression, “männlichen Besuch,” contrasts ironically with both the Gorilla's appearance, and Georges' racist assumption that he is speaking a “Negerdialekt.”
The Gorilla's behaviour toward his female companion moreover mirrors Georges' carefully disguised contempt for women:
Unwillkürlich ging er (Georges) mit den Damen um, als liebte er sie. Jede gab seinem Geschmack recht und zog die Konsequenzen daraus. Bei den Äffchen verbreitete sich die Sitte des Krankseins.
(354)
It is ironically appropriate that the francophile Georges, who refers to his French women patients as “Äffchen” (354), should become obsessed by a Gorilla, who hates the French language.
Er (der Gorilla) sprach stärker, mehr aus der Tiefe, hinter seinen Lauten lauerten Affekte. Sie (die “Sekretärin”) warf manchmal ein französisches Wort hin, vielleicht um anzudeuten, was gemeint sei. ‘Sprechen Sie nicht Französisch?’ fragte Georges. ‘Aber natürlich … Ich bin Pariserin!’ Sie überschüttete ihn mit einem eiligen Schwall von Worten, die schlecht ausgesprochen und noch schlechter zusammengefügt waren, wie wenn sie die Sprache halb verlernt hätte. Der gorilla brüllte sie an, sofort schwieg sie. … ‘Er haßt die französische Sprache,’ flüsterte sie zum Besuch. ‘Er arbeitet schon seit Jahren an einer eigenen. Er ist noch nicht ganz fertig.’
(355-6)
Georges becomes captivated by the Gorilla's self-created language of primitive emotions. Durzak views this admiration positively as a sign of Georges' breaking out of a life of superficiality and convention.12 However Georges' fascination is a measure of his intellectual and emotional alienation, and lack of sense of purpose, rather than proof of the naive genius of the Gorilla. It is described as intellectual mystification, not enlightened understanding:
In wenigen gewaltigen Worten, die wie abgeschnittene lebende Baumstämme ins Zimmer geschleudert wurden, vernahm Georges ein mythisches Liebesabenteuer, das ihn bis zum tiefsten Zweifel an sich selbst erschütterte. Er sah sich als Wanze neben einem Menschen. … Welche Anmaßung, mit einem solchen Geschöpf an einem Tisch zu sitzen, gesittet, gönnerhaft, an allen Poren der Seele von Fett und täglich frischem Fett verstopft, ein Halbmensch für den praktischen Gebrauch, ohne den Mut zum Sein, weil Sein in unserer Welt ein Anders-Sein bedeutet, eine Schablone für sich, eine aufgezogene Schneiderreklame, durch einen gnädigen Zufall in Bewegung oder in Ruhestand versetzt, je nach dem Zufall eben, ohne den leisesten Einfluß, ohne einen Funken Macht, immer dieselben leeren Sätze leiernd, immer aus gleicher Entfernung verstanden.
(356-7)
This mixture of cultural pessimism, primitivism and vitalism parodies the types of philosophical-mystical constructs of popular thinkers such as Spengler and Weininger, which were influential between the wars in Europe.
The women with whom Georges used to associate are now considered the pathetic, painted dolls of an over-refined civilisation, whereas the secretary has become something of an “Übermensch” under the influence of the Gorilla's will:
Die Frauen, die Georges mit Liebe bestürmen und ihm zuliebe ihr Leben hergäben, besonders wenn er sie gerade umarmt, sind … glattgepflegte Hauttierchen, mit Kosmetik oder Männern beschäftigt. Diese Sekretärin aber, von Haus aus ein gewöhnliches Weib, nicht anders als andere, ist unter dem mächtigen Willen des Gorillas zu einem eigenartigen Wesen geworden: stärker, erregter, hingebender.
(357)
Georges rejects his earlier life of empty relationships and “Höflichkeit”—the world of the French novels he used to read—for a re-education in terms of primitive emotions:
Mit unendlicher Mühe erlernte er seine (i.e. the Gorilla's) Sprache. … Hier waren die Beziehungen das Ursprüngliche, beide Zimmer und was sie enthielten lösten sich in ein Kraftfeld von Affekten auf.
(357)
And the Gorilla has become a romantic messiah:
Er bevölkerte zwei Zimmer mit einer ganzen Welt. Er schuf, was er brauchte, und fand sich nach seinen sechs Tagen am siebenten darin zurecht. Statt zu ruhen, schenkte er der Schöpfung eine Sprache.
(358)
The Gorilla in his two rooms with their dirt-covered floors and his scantily-clad “secretary” is a reverse image of Peter in his immaculate library with his housekeeper-wife, Therese, encased in her blue skirt. However the Gorilla's vitalism is not posited as an alternative to Peter's crisis of reason. On the contrary, the Gorilla episode parodies the types of irrationalism which have been used since Rousseau as defence against what is seen as an all-encompassing, dehumanising rationalism.
Through his contact with the Gorilla, Georges returns to his childhood and learns a language of emotions, denied to him as a child. This process of relearning of language amounts to the rejection of his past, which is so dominated by his older brother Peter, and of the ideals of civilisation and enlightenment (“eine überwundene, blasse Zeit,” 358) for a primitivist philosophy.
George's fascination with the Gorilla is the result of his inability to come to terms with reason and emotion (“Kopf” and “Welt”). Through his apprenticeship to the Gorilla and rejection of the traditional psychiatry of his predecessor, he tries to reform his past and Peter's influence, by opting for an ideology of loss of “self” and release of primal instincts:
Von der viel tieferen und eigentlichsten Triebkraft der Geschichte, dem Drang der Menschen, in eine höhere Tiergattung, die Masse, aufzugehen und sich darin so vollkommen zu verlieren, als hätte es nie einen Menschen gegeben, ahnten sie nichts. Denn sie waren gebildet und Bildung ist ein Festungsgürtel des Individuums gegen die Masse in sich selbst.
(365)
Georges soon makes use of his discovery. As a disciple of the Gorilla he becomes a prophet to the common people.
Georges war Gelehrter genug, um eine Abhandlung über die Sprache dieses Irren zu veröffentlichen. … (Er) ging zur Psychiatrie über, aus Bewunderung für die Großartigkeit der Irren, … mit dem festen Vorsatz, von ihnen zu lernen und keinen zu heilen. Von der schönen Literatur hatte er genug.
(358)
Given his adulation of the Gorilla, it is not surprising that Georges takes an immediate liking to Pfaff when he arrives in Vienna. The brutal and sadistic Pfaff suggests an alternative possibility for the realization of the teachings of the Gorilla in the world.
Georges' utopian vision of the future “allgemeine Weltrepublik” of the insane and of his own role as “Volkskommissar für Irre” (367) finds symbolic expression in his vision of the termites' nest, an image of organic community and individual subservience and sacrifice which has clear similarities to fascist ideologies of the period. Half fascinated, half horrified, Georges later suggests to Peter the possibility of a human collective freed from the burden of individual sexual drives, finding release in mass-executions/suicides for the sake of the group:
Im Schwarm, bei dem Tausende und Abertausende von Tieren scheinbar sinnlos zugrunde gehen, sehe ich eine Befreiung von der gespeicherten Geschlechtlichkeit des Stockes. Sie opfern einen kleinen Teil ihrer Masse, um den größeren von Liebeswirrungen freizuhalten. Der Stock würde an Liebe, wäre sie einmal erlaubt, zugrunde gehen. Ich weiß keine großartigere Vorstellung als die einer Orgie im Termitenstock. Die Tiere vergessen … was sie sind, blinde Zellen eines fanatischen Ganzen. … Eine plötzliche Verkehrung des Sinnreichsten ins Sinnloseste.
(384-5)
Georges links this image of the loss of individual identity to the situation of Peter setting fire to his books. He later regrets having made the comparison, but by then it is too late. The image will be realized in Peter's suicide.
At the time of the action, Georges has been director of an asylum for two years and is married to the wife of the previous director. Even before this however, Georges had effectively run the asylum and had been “der gute Engel eines teuflischen Vorgesetzten” (351). His predecessor was close in type to Peter Kien. As a traditional and conservative psychiatrist he had represented “die offizielle Psychiatrie mit der Hartnäckigkeit eines Irren” (351):
Er hielt es für seine eigentliche Lebensaufgabe, das riesige Material, über welches er verfügte, als Stütze für gangbare Bezeichnungen zu verwenden. … Er hing an der Fertigkeit des Systems und haßte Zweifler. Menschen, besonders Geisteskranke und Verbrecher, waren ihm gleichgültig.
(351)
His refusal to modify theory on the basis of psychiatric practice aligns him with Peter Kien as a closed character, a “Kopf ohne Welt,” who, like Peter Kien also, in the end is despatched by his wife in favour of a young, handsome lover. After the meeting with the Gorilla, and in reaction against the orthodox and autocratic attitude of the previous director, Georges rejects traditional psychiatry:
In der harten Schule seines Vorgängers hatte er sich rasch zu dessen genauem Gegenteil entwickelt. Die Kranken behandelte er als wären sie Menschen. Geduldig ließ er sich Geschichten erzählen, die er schon tausendmal gehört hatte, und zeigte über die ältesten Gefahren und Ängste immer neue Überraschung.
(352)
He treats his mentally ill patients “as though they were people,” and seeks to penetrate their minds in a way in which his predecessor could not. The subjunctive verb “wären” betrays the exploitative and functional aspects of Georges' new methods of treatment. Roberts writes of Georges' discovery of psychiatry:
… auf der Suche nach der ‘zackigen, schmerzlichen, beißenden Vielgestalt des Lebens’ läßt er auch die Leere seiner erfolgreichen Karriere hinter sich, eine Karriere, wie sie zu einem Romanhelden paßt. Er gibt diese erfolgreiche Vergangenheit für jene Dimension der Wirklichkeit und Erfahrung der Welt auf, die vom Roman versteckt, ihm den Verrückten aber enthüllt wird. Er ist die einzige Gestalt, die sich öffnen und verlieren kann. Er anerkennt die persönlichen Welten seiner Patienten und strebt so danach, die Blindheit der Sprache, den Widerspruch zwischen Verständigung und Individuation zu überwinden, der in ihren verrückten Systemen zum Äußersten getrieben wird. … Dies ist sein Weg zur Erkenntnis.13
However Georges' procedures are described as aggressive, insidious and even sinister acts:
Ein blitzschneller Blick genügte. Wo er eine leise Veränderung, einen Riß, die Möglichkeit, in die fremde Seele zu schlüpfen, gewahrte, griff er rasch zu und nahm den Betreffenden in seine Privatwohnung mit. … Da erwarb er, wenn er es noch nicht hatte, spielend das Vertrauen von Menschen, die sich jedem andern gegenüber hinter ihre Wahngebilde versteckten. … Er wurde ihr einziger Vertrauter, den sie, vom Augenblick ihrer Anerkennung ab, über die Veränderungen ihrer eigenen Bereiche auf dem laufenden hielten und um Rat angingen.
(352)
He develops into a talented actor, (“Mit der Zeit entwickelte er sich zu einem großen Schauspieler,” 352) and can even respond to the fragmented and contradictory personalities of paranoiacs and schizophrenics (352-3).
While the results of his method are astounding however, he simultaneously worships the mental illness of those whom he is “healing”:
Er lernte von ihnen mehr, als er ihnen gab. Sie bereichteren ihn um ihre einmaligen Erlebnisse: er vereinfachte sie nur, indem er sie gesund machte. Wieviel Geist und Schärfe fand er bei manchen! Sie waren die einzigen wirklichen Persönlichkeiten, von vollendeter Einseitigkeit, wahre Charaktere, von einer Geradheit und Macht des Willens, um die sie Napoleon beneidet hätte.
(353)
The question of language and identity is central to Georges' discovery of the worlds of the Gorilla and the insane. He must renounce his adopted language (French), and even the broken French of the Gorilla's secretary, in order to learn the Gorilla's language. Later, in the asylum he adopts the individual “languages” of the insane in order to penetrate their personalities. His desire to penetrate and comprehend his patients borders on the wish for self-fulfillment through their fantasies and ruptured personalities, and suggests self-abasement and weakness of character, concealed behind the charisma and patronising superiority of the professional psychiatrist. Although capable of curing the Gorilla, he refuses to do so out of admiration for his character, and on meeting patients whom he has cured, he is frustrated and disappointed to find that they have become “normal” (359).
Through his contact with the Gorilla and the insane Georges finds a means of escape from his own intellectual and emotional insecurity, which the relationship with his older brother has instilled in him since childhood. Indeed his move to Paris and name-change from “Georg” to “Georges” may be seen as an attempt to escape the past which is so dominated by Peter. The infatuation with the vitalism of the Gorilla and the worlds of the insane, that is, may be the latest in a series of attempts at establishing an identity capable of standing up to the annihilating contempt Peter shows for him (cf. pp. 380-1; 406-7). Georges' discovery of passion and, in the asylum, extremes of personality and emotion, does not represent a fulfilment and extension of his personality, but rather another attempt to free himself from his deep-seated sense of inferiority to Peter.14 In this respect he does not stand outside the novel, but is characterized in terms of the relationship with his brother.
In the train on the way to Vienna Georges meets a blind man who reminds him of Peter. This meeting triggers a childhood memory of a time when he and Peter were sick with measles, and Peter was suffering temporary blindness (369 f.). On the basis of this memory, Georges assumes that Peter fears blindness and therefore has sent him the telegram calling for his help. The blind man on the train becomes an image of the Peter he hopes to find in Vienna. Georges, that is, diagnoses the fear of blindness in accordance with his fantasy of subduing Peter. By the end of the journey he is fully convinced that he will be able to establish himself as the stronger partner in the relationship, after having reduced Peter to the level of the thankful patient and raised himself to that of physician and saviour. He thereby hopes to rewrite the history of his childhood—and lifelong—subservience to Peter.
From the end of his daydream until the end of the novel, however, “Georges” becomes “Georg,” and the old relationships are re-established. Peter, despite his weakened and humiliated state in Pfaff's room, reverts to his old self (“der alte Peter,” 376) on recognising his brother. Georges uses his new skills as actor-psychiatrist to play the old Georg, denying everything that he has come to admire in the Gorilla and his patients, in order to find his way into Peter's mind:
Heile ich die Leute nicht, so verbleiben sie in ihrem barbarischen Zustand. Um ihnen den Weg zur Bildung, wenn auch einer späten, zu eröffnen, muß ich sie gesund machen.
(383)
Georges' diagnosis of Peter's problem is wrong, he makes false judgements about Therese and Pfaff, and the fantasy of coming as “deus ex machina”15 to rescue a blinded, humbled Peter crumbles as he realizes his failure, and Peter, although verging on insanity, sees through Georges' pretence to re-establish his authority:
Georg begann sich unsicher zu fühlen. Nicht ein Zehntel der besprochenen Bücher war ihm bekannt. Er verachtete dieses Wissen, das ihn erdrückte. Peters Arbeitslust regte sich gewaltig. Sie weckte in Georg die Sehnsucht nach dem Ort, wo er ein ebenso absoluter Herrscher war, wie Peter in seiner Bibliothek.
(406)
Georges' attempt at healing both himself and his brother fails—and with it his hope of overcoming his sense of inferiority to Peter. He tries to bring about a restoration of the status quo. He returns Peter's life to the state before Therese entered it: the pawned books are bought back, both Therese and Pfaff are bribed to leave the house, Peter is returned to his library, and “Georg” leaves for the asylum where he can become the “absolute ruler,” “Georges,” again. At the end of the novel, he has not only failed to save Peter, but has also failed to come to terms with the duality of “Kopf” and “Welt” in himself.
As with Peter Kien earlier, Georges' character is linked to his attitude to the novel as a literary form.16 Ever since he “discovered” madness and the insane, Georges has given up the reading of novels:
Seit er zu ihnen und ganz in ihre Gebilde aufging, verzichtete er auf schöngeistige Lektüre. In Romanen stand immer dasselbe. Früher hatte er mit Leidenschaft gelesen und an neuen Wendungen alter Sätze, die er schon für unveränderlich, farblos, abgegriffen und nichtssagend hielt, großes Vergnügen gefunden … die besten Romane waren die, in denen die Menschen am gewähltesten sprachen. Wer sich so ausdrücken konnte wie alle anderen Schreiber vor ihm, galt als ihr legitimer Nachfolger. Eines solchen Aufgabe bestand darin, die zackige, schmerzliche, beißende Vielgestalt des Lebens, das einen umgab, auf eine glatte Papierebene zu bringen, über die es sich rasch und angenehm hinweglas.
(353-4)
The literary form of the novel reduces the diversity of life to artful, trite verbal formulations. Roberts sees Georges' rejection of the novel in terms of his rejection of the superficialities and conventions of life, after having found “seinen Weg in die Wildheit” through the contact with the insane.17 Georges rejects the novel for the opposite reason to Peter. Where Peter Kien feared the novel as a form which fragments identity and shows the diversity of truth, Georges Kien sees only formalistic clichés, the reduction of diversity to uniformity:
Lesen als Streicheln, eine andere Form der Liebe, für Damen und Damenärzte, zu deren Berut feines Verständnis für die intime Lektüre der Dame gehörte. Keine verwirrenden Wendungen, keine fremden Worte, je öfter ein Geleise befahren war, um so differenzierter die Lust, die man ihm abgewann. Die gesamte Romanliteratur ein einziges Lehrbuch der Höflichkeit. Belesene Menschen wurden zwangsweise artig. Ihre Teilnahme am Leben der anderen erschöpfte sich in Gratulation und Kondolation.
(354)
Georges' perception of the function of the novel as the reduction of the jagged edges of life into the smooth literary formulation contrasts with Canetti's implicit understanding and use of novelistic form in Die Blendung. Precisely the function of the novel is to express the “zackige … Vielgestalt des Lebens” on the “glatte Papierebene,” without thereby losing the sense of individual experience or reducing life to a “handbook” of courteous and empty phrases. Georges' view of reading as “stroking” knows nothing of irony, distance, critical perspective or cutting “against the grain.” This aspect of the characterization of Georges—like that of Peter Kien analysed above—brings a critical, ironic perspective on him in this novel. The author of Die Blendung implicitly rejects both Peter's and Georges' negative, non-ironic conceptions of the novel as a form. Neither Peter nor Georges reads the novel as the novelist Canetti implies an ideal reader would. The critical attempt to view Georges as a figure outside the world of the novel, runs against Canetti's implied reading of the novel as a form which does not reduce the multi-facetted and contradictory nature of reality to a single truth. Raymond Williams' fear that Canetti, through the character of Georges in the final part of the novel, attempts to comprehend or “answer” the crisis of Austrian society in the inter-war period, is not supported by the text. Georges belongs within the world of the novel, historically as a pre-fascist intellectual, and psychologically in terms of his relationship to his brother Peter.
The scholar and intellectual, Peter Kien, cannot maintain his existence of “Kopf ohne Welt,” and his self-immolation is a parody of the synthesis of “Kopf” and “Welt” which is implied as a necessity for human survival, but is nowhere realized in the novel.
Peter Kien's suicide mirrors the image of the burning Theresianum—an image of Austria—outside his library. Georges Kien too, far from offering a resolution of the themes of “Kopf” and “Welt,” is a problematic character: an intellectual who turns his back on reason for a proto-fascist, primitivist mythology. Georges' life has been a series of attempts to escape the overshadowing figure of his brother. His adulation of the Gorilla reflects his sense of inferiority and subservience to Peter, and as an intellectual he rejects critical, distanced objectivity for an ethos of self-dissolution and redemption through a mythology of organic unity and individual self-sacrifice. Just as Peter's fetishization of books and knowledge finds a mirror-image in Therese's attitudes toward money and sex, so too Georges' primitivist mythology finds an ironic mirror-image in the everyday brutality of the proto-Nazi, Pfaff. Georges is an alienated intellectual who, in despair at finding any form of synthesis, submerges himself in—rather than closing himself off from—the outside world. In the context of the 1930s, he must be seen in the light of the intellectuals who succumbed to the promise of redemption through proto-fascist ideologies. There is no synthesis of the symbolic opposites of “Kopf” and “Welt.” Georges' intellectualization of the “world,” the “Welt im Kopf” of the final part is not a resolution, but a renunciation of critical intellect.
Peter Kien's dream and Georges Kien's meeting with the Gorilla are two important junctures in the novel, in which the crisis of reason, the alienation of knowledge from humanity, is reflected upon, through reference to the novel as a form of communication.
Canetti's response to this crisis lies in his implicit demand for the ironic reader: the reader who can maintain an ironic, critical distance from the characters and the novel as a whole, the reader who consistently refuses to fall into the trap of mistaking the intellectual construct for the human whole. Peter Kien's single-minded adoption of Confucius' and Kant's philosophies of “Pflicht um der Pflicht willen” (380) leads directly to catastrophe, but Georges' inability to achieve critical distance from the mythologies of the Gorilla's charismatic vitalism and the collectivity of the termite-nest is also portrayed negatively. In the motif of the reader and the novel, occurring at two important points in the novel, Canetti implies the necessity of a dynamic relationship between the reader and the text, where the reader is a critical, thinking subject, and the text a self-reflexive world. Canetti's implied reader, unlike the two readers of the novel, Peter and Georges, can be “open” even where the fictional figures remain “closed.” Thus a central theme of the work is the novelist's task of enlightenment, of “opening” the reader to the danger of “closed” structures of understanding, while still maintaining coherence. Through the implied call for critical dialogue with the reader of this novel, Canetti maintains the role of enlightened intellectual which both Peter and Georges Kien have abandoned.
The fire in the Theresianum—an image of the burning of the “Justizpalast” on July 15, 192718—is reflected in the burning of the library. The fire as symbol of political upheaval is negative: the potentially revolutionary image is destructive in a society without a tradition of democratic thought and responsible—as opposed to charismatic—political leadership. It is associated with madness, the end of enlightenment (i.e. book-burning) and the irruption of unreason as the dominant force of society.
The final image of the novel is closed. The fires in the library (“Kopf”) and the Theresianum (“Welt”) reflect each other. Only the literary form of the novel itself remains as a statement of the possibility of enlightenment, of the re-establishment of meaning as a social category through the critical dialogue between author and reader.
Notes
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Page references in brackets following quotations are to Elias Canetti, Die Blendung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1979).
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Raymond Williams, “Fiction and Delusion. A note on ‘Auto-da-Fé,”’ New Left Review 15 (1962): 106.
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“Peter fürchtet die Spaltung, die Auflösung der Persönlichkeit, die Kluft, die ihn der Verteidigung beraubt.” David Roberts, Kopf und Welt. Elias Canettis Roman ‘Die Blendung’ (München: Hanser, 1975) 100.
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Manfred Durzak, “Versuch über Elias Canetti,” Akzente 17 (1970) 174.
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Karl Markus Michel, “Der Intellektuelle und die Masse. Zu zwei Büchern von Elias Canetti,” Die Neue Rundschau 75 (1964) 311; Annemarie Auer, “Ein Genie und sein Sonderling—Elias Canetti und die Blendung,” Interpretationen zu Elias Canetti, ed. Manfred Durzak (Stuttgart: Klett, 1983) 51; Dieter Dissinger, Vereinzelung und Massenwahn. Elias Canettis Roman ‘Die Blendung,’ Studien zur Germanistik, Anglistik und Komparistik, vol. 11 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1971) 114 f.; Edward A. Thomson, “Elias Canetti's Die Blendung and the Changing Image of Madness,” German Life and Letters 26 (1972) 44; Viktor Suchy, “Exil in Permanenz. Elias Canetti und der unbedingte Primat des Lebens,” Die deutsche Exilliteratur 1933-1945, ed. Manfred Durzak (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973) 288; Walter H. Sokel, “The Ambiguity of Madness: Elias Canetti's Novel Die Blendung,” Views and Reviews of Modern German Literature. Festschrift for Adolf D. Klarmann, ed. Karl S. Weimar (München: Delp, 1974) 182-83; Roman Karst, “Elias Canetti's Die Blendung: A Study in Insanity,” Modern Austrian Literature 16 (1983) 133; Detlef Krumme, Lesemodelle. Elias Canetti, Günter Grass, Walter Höllerer (München: Carl Hanser, 1983) 82 f.
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In answering the question whether Georges represents an alternative to Peter, Roberts is unclear. On the one hand Georges stands “tatsächlich außerhalb der Welt der ‘Blendung,’ theoretisch in seiner Anerkennung der Macht der Masse im Menschen, praktisch in seiner Fähigkeit zu Mitgefühl und seinem Hunger nach den Verwandlungen des Augenblicks.” On the other hand, however, he is caught in the double-bind of having the knowledge to cure his patients, but at the same time regretting what this cure brings about—i.e. normality. Roberts uses the rather difficult term, “negativer Dialektik” to characterize the relationship of the brothers. Roberts 108.
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Dagmar Barnouw, Elias Canetti, Sammlung Metzler 180, (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979) 25, 29.
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Krumme 82 f.
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Cf. Martin Bollacher, “Elias Canetti, Die Blendung (1935/36),” Deutsche Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts. Neue Interpretationen, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Königstein: Athenäum, 1983) 243; Friedbert Aspetsberger, “Weltmeister der Verachtung. Zur Blendung,” Blendung als Lebensform. Elias Canetti, eds. Friedbert Aspetsberger and Gerald Stieg (Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1985) 118-19; Barbara Meili, Erinnerung und Vision. Der lebensgeschichtliche Hintergrund von Elias Canettis Roman ‘Die Blendung,’ Stud. z. Germanistik, Anglistik und Komparatistik, vol. 115 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985) 166 (Georges as “ethisch fragwürdig”), 177 (as power hungry), 180 (as fascist) and 194 (as “Anklage gegen die zeitgenössische Intelligenz”).
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Roberts 86-87.
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Cf. Pavel Petr, “Marxist Theories of the Comic,” Comic Relations. Studies in the Comic, Satire and Parody, eds. Pavel Petr, David Roberts, Philip Thomson (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1985) 57-66.
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See in particular Durzak, “Versuch” 173.
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Roberts 101-2.
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On the train to Vienna Georges dreams “von zwei Hähnen,” the larger of which, “rot und schwach” is Peter, and the smaller, “gepflegt und verschlagen,” himself. They are fighting cocks (“Kampfhähne”), and their “Kampf zog sich lange hin.” The end of this fight is ambiguous. The smaller (Georges himself) “gab sich zufrieden. Er hatte gesiegt …” However the larger (Peter) grows in size and strength of colour until Georges awakens and sees the rising sun through his window. (372) The ambiguity of the role relationships in the dream foreshadows the ambiguity of Georges' “victory” over Peter. Cf. Dissinger, Vereinzelung und Massenwahn 68.
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Roberts 85.
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Critics have tended to see Peter's and Georg's views of the novel in terms of their attitudes to each other. Dissinger sees the two brothers as incorporating polarized aspects of the artistic consciousness: “Peter Kien weiß um die Form, sie ist ihm bereits Inhalt. Georg kennt Inhalte, ohne ihnen gültige Form zu geben. Die ungleichen Brüder vertreten zwei Extreme, die nur zusammen den Dichter ermöglichen.” Dieter Dissinger, “Der Roman Die Blendung,” Text und Kritik 28 (1973) 37. Roberts sees the attitudes of the two brothers as reflecting the differences in their personalities: “Beide Brüder sind dem Roman gegenüber negativ eingestellt: dem einen ist der Roman zu bedrohlich, dem anderen ist er zu zahm.” Roberts 101. For Meili, both characters' rejection of the novel is indicative of their inability to cope with reality. Meili 188.
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Roberts 101.
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Cf. Gerald Stieg, “Früchte des Feuers. Der 15. Juli 1927 in der Blendung und in den Dämonen,” Aspetsberger and Stieg, Blendung als Lebensform 143-75; and Bollacher 240-41.
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