SOURCE: Maia, Rousiley C. M. “Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé: From the Antithesis of the Crowd-Man to the Madness of Power.” Thesis Eleven, no. 45 (1996): 28-38.

[In the following essay, Maia explores Canetti's crowd theory as it appears in his novel Auto da Fé.]

Auto-da-Fe represents a new style of novel about the crowd, which incorporates aesthetically many of Canetti's theoretical concerns with crowd phenomena. In his highly introspective novel, the most interesting crowd is never the physical throng and there are just a few examples of the human crowd, in the obvious sense. However, Auto-da-Fe is full of crowd symbolism, which is comprehensible only in relation to the complex typology and theory of crowds Canetti develops in Crowds and Power. Canetti ranges very widely in Crowds and Power to challenge the evolutionary-atavist tradition underpinning classical crowd theory of the Le Bon type and to provide a complete crowd theory of a new type. Auto-da-Fe also provides new insights into many familiar and puzzling aspects of crowd psychology, as well as its relationship with power, in an essentially original way.

A central thematic equation between Auto-da-Fe, is given by the comparison between Kien, the protagonist of Auto-da-Fe, with Daniel Paul Schreber whose book Memoirs of My Nervous Illnesses provides Canetti with the model case of the psychopathology of power, with which Crowds and Power concludes. It is possible to relate the protagonist of Auto-da-Fe with Paul Schreber in two ways. First, Kien is the model of the last surviving rational individual, who despises the crowd in all its representations and fiercely struggles to keep himself apart from it. Peter Kien's isolation from society, his desire to keep his ego autonomous and his ambition to impose a total control over the surrounding world, are carried to such an extreme that becomes indistinguishable from the model case of the paranoid. Secondly, Kien's frame of mind can be compared to the mind of a paranoiac ruler. Kien's notions of greatness and exclusiveness, just as Schreber's, reveal an unbridled will-to-power and a radical intolerance of others. Kien, as the prototype of a paranoiac ruler, offers the pathological example of the psychology and structure of authority and many aspects of power present in Crowds and Power.

Peter Kien is the very antithesis of the crowd-man. He strives to keep the boundaries of his ego intact, autonomous and permanently structured according to his self-determining will. He shields himself against any kind of influence that would invade and devour his individuality. “Distances”, in the sense Canetti discusses in Crowds and Power, determine the protagonist's entire life. The starting point of Crowds and Power is the assertion of the fear of contact, “the fear of being touched”, “the fear of the unknown” that characterizes the individual. “All life, so far as he knows it, is laid out in distances—the house in which he shuts himself in his property, the position he holds, the rank he desires—all these serve to create distance, to confirm and extend them” (CP [Crowds and Power] 18). The boundaries of man's personality are, in this sense, guaranteed by distance—distinctions of class, status, authority. “Men as individuals are always conscious of these distinctions they weigh heavily on them and they keep them firmly apart from one another” (CP 17).¹

In Auto-da-Fe, the first boundary which separates the protagonist from the hurried movement of the world is established by his flat, whose door is carefully protected by the tyrannical eye of the caretaker, Pfaff. To guarantee the privacy of Kien's space, a second borderline had been drawn inside the flat to divide the rooms converted into a library, a realm destined for the scholar, from the domains of the maid, Therese. No one can gain access to Kien's windowless library. With the walls lined with books, it represents a self-contained cosmos that provides a desperately defended immutable order against the chaos of outside reality. The scholar obstinately keeps his distance from other people and retreats from all kinds of human interactions, the boundaries of the self especially guaranteed by the avoidance of conversation. Kien often refuses to answer when a question is addressed to him, and, when he speaks, his words are rarely understood. He hates noise, particularly human voices. In his morning walks, he keeps his eyes cast upwards to prevent him from seeing the few passers-by, “since he felt not the slightest desire to notice anyone, he kept his eyes lowered or raised above their heads” (ADF [Auto-da-Fe] 13).²

Seeking an absolute supremacy for his intellect, the protagonist also strives to separate his mind from his body. Kien does all he can to minimize the attention devoted to the necessities of his physical existence and contemplates with detachment the actions of his own body—he takes his meals at his desk and sleeps in a divan placed in his library. His physical hygiene requirements are reduced to fifteen minutes per day. Women and sex are not just neglected but considered particularly disgusting. Everything emotional, intuitive and compulsive—irrational and thus uncontrollable—is excluded. Careless about money and badly dressed, the protagonist despises all that is material. He does not even know his physical features: “If you had character it determined your outward appearance … He knew his face only casually from its reflection in bookshop windows. He had no mirror in his house, there was no room for it among the books” (ADF 13).

At the beginning of the novel, Kien appears as a kind of a thinker who rejects the everyday world, with its obvious uncertainties and delusions, for a supposed more real and more certain world of permanencies. Aspiring to transcend material existence and live platonically in the realm of ideas, the sinologist devotes himself to a routine of exacting and austere study—a rigid daily ritual that protects his solitary and silent encapsulation. His object of study—the reconstruction of ancient Chinese manuscripts—given its remoteness in historical and geographical terms, is also ideal for removing him from the present. Kien becomes a disembodied “head without a world”, as the novel labels him, a living allegory of the pure intellect.

The scholar's complete unresponsiveness to environmental demands and physiological stimuli can be seen as a desire to be a truly independent individual. To forge his apparently stable individuality and preserve his “pure self-identity”, Kien has to armour himself and erect impassable barriers between himself and the rest of the world and also pay the price of instinctual renunciation. Holding himself aloft from the moods of social anguish and ignoring the pressure to accept and conform to the collective model, Kien supposed that he could keep himself apart from the crowd. Kien insists in acting individually, minimizing his social needs and biological drives and maximizing his control over them. In other words, he tries to shift the control of his behaviour from external stimuli to internal cognitive controls. “His ambition was to persist stubbornly in the same manner of existence. Not for a mere month, not for a year, but for the whole of his life, he would be true to himself” (ADF 13).

It is possible to say that Kien, as the last rational individual, perceives the duty to preserve his “character” in a caricature of Kantianism.³ In order to live as a moral being, to progress from the state of “nature”, in which man lives as a mere mechanism in an undifferentiated state, to one of “culture” in which man could be free and autonomous, Kien must obey the rational law of his own making, so that enlightened thought can overwhelm natural impulses and morality can become strong enough to be a “second nature”. Kien supposed that thinking and believing alone, independent of society, could gain him total freedom from the behavioural prescriptions imposed by history, culture, and society. But Kien's project of self is just a caricature of Kantianism. Reason, the ability to grasp the world in rational terms, comes together with the notion of will, volition and acceptance of personal commitment, in order to form the model of the rational Kantian individual. However, instead of encountering the world with the fresh joy and courage of discovery, the audacity to know, the protagonist fearfully retreats from the world. From the outset, Kien suppresses his senses and deliberately prefers self-delusion. Kien demonstrates, in this sense, an awareness of the weakness of his self against the forces of the surrounding world, what implicitly justifies his absurd self-encapsulation. In other words, the strenuous effort to self-preservation comes from the fear of losing his “I”, the fear of death and destruction.

Canetti shows in his novel the paradoxical process of individuation. The domination of man over himself and the very act of self-preservation implies a huge sacrifice of the self. Only through a constant struggle to keep the boundaries of the self intact does Kien survive. Struggle is his survival. For most of the novel, the protagonist is struggling to protect the distances which give him a sense of autonomy and support his illusion of power, but at the same time he is drawn into a terrible isolation and helpless anxiety. The struggle of Kien with the symbolic representations of the crowd which intrude into his library and progressively attack the dividing borderlines in his apartment, finally expelling him from his realm, has been analyzed.⁴ While the crowd of the outside world can be watched and controlled, the crowd inside the protagonist is hidden and insidious. Kien insists in rationalizing all his drives, so that nothing poses a threat to the eyes of his mind. The rationalization of drives, represented by the transformation of instincts into reflection, does result indeed in a kind of mastery by the rational will. But this mastery is brought at the price of a crescendo of denial and prohibition on transformations. For, as becomes increasingly clear, the self that fights for external and internal security and stability cannot be safe and stable against the resistance of nature. The process through which one erects distance from inner nature through control—which enables the identity of the self—is a repeated source of fear in relation to nature, and such a fear must be controlled through the reinforcement of control, needing to dissimulate its origin in fear. The process of increasing domination by the rational subject is achieved at the price of a progressive inflation of the “second nature”, the “armour” of the rational will.

For Canetti, the process of individuation, related to man's fundamental sense of isolation—in his individual body, mind and personality—induces the desire to break these limits and expand the self into a seemingly prior condition of limitless. “Man petrifies and darkens in the distances he has created. He drags at the burden of them, but cannot move. He forgets that it is self-inflicted and longs for liberation. But how, alone, can he free himself? Whatever he does, and however determined he is he will always find himself amongst others who thwart his efforts. So long as they hold their distances, he can never come any nearer to them” (CP 18). Social life is formulated in terms of distances and the exercise of power in all situations presupposes distinctions, hierarchy and inequality. Aware of the uncertain character of contemporary moral experience, Canetti recognizes that the affirmation of oneself in the social power struggle becomes the denial of others, and, both options of commanding or obeying leave a profound irritation in the self, which isolates the individual or annuls his autonomy. Canetti maintains that “only together can man free themselves from their burdens of distances; and this precisely, is what happens in a crowd” (CP 18). In the crowd, the hierarchical devices of social life—distinctions of class, race, rank, status, that is, patterns of authority and justifications of power—are annihiliated. All individuals feel equal, and there is the possibility of unity, of being together, without domination. In the crowd, Canetti claims, there is the reversal of the fear of being touched, directing the individuals toward a compact unification of bodies, dissolving the weight of individuality and the resentments of power. “In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd” (CP 18).

In Auto-da-Fe Canetti pushes the paradox of the individual's intoxication with power and the resentment caused by it to its extreme and shows the deadly end to which it can lead. The protagonist of Auto-da-Fe tries to represent his identity as an a priori structure of the human reason, remaining faithfully loyal to his determination to “be true to himself” and persist “in the same manner of existence … for the whole of his life” (ADF 13). Obsession with identity, self-preservation and distinction culminates in the will to power. What needs to be stressed here for the development of our argument is that, behind the armoured, self-preserving and rationalizing self of the protagonist, Canetti delineates a prototype of the totalitarian self. Many of Kien's attitudes recall what Canetti calls the “illness of power” and can be analyzed in the light of some aspects and elements of power discussed in Crowds and Power such as “judgment and condemnation”, “secrecy and silence”, “the prohibition of transformation”, “the survivor”.

First, the protagonist's sense of greatness can be related to the “ivory tower” mentality commonly attributed to the scholar. He sees himself removed from the everyday world, where those illiterate barbarians, as he calls all others, live. Secluded in his library, he preserves for himself the power of “judgment and condemnation” (CP 296) and shows in various disguised ways a kind of pleasure in “exalting himself by abasing others”, and “relegating others to a group inferior to which he himself decided he belonged” (CP 296). For example, it was Kien's custom to look through the windows of every bookshop in his morning walks, “to be able to assure himself, with a kind of pleasure, that smut and trash were daily gaining ground” (ADF 8), while “he, himself, was the only person in his great town who possessed a library that could be taken at all seriously” (ADF 10).

Kien's existence is surrounded by secrecy and silence (CP 284-296). Kien almost never shows himself in public, he refuses to teach and never appears at celebrations or conferences, leaving his academic fellows in constant expectation. Such a voluntary withdrawal from normal scholarly relationships makes Kien's person mysterious and inaccessible, as if he were a “guardian of a treasure which is inside himself” (CP 294). However, Kien makes sure to send a paper “of the most estimable value for science” to every conference, ensuring that he remains a “much discussed person” (ADF 15-17). Kien certainly fears the subversive power of communicative interactions because of the danger they pose to the autonomous self (CP 375). As Canetti argues in Crowds and Power, questioning is an expression of power and “a forcible intrusion” into other individuals' freedom. “A man who maintains a deliberate silence does not allow others to see through him”, while he “who is answering a question is forced to reveal more of himself” (CP 285). However, by pushing the inner armour against questioning to its extreme and remaining a silent observer, unapproachable and aloof when his existence requires a concern with everyday matters, Kien becomes a kind of paranoiac ruler, the one “who uses every means to keep danger away from his person” (CP 231). Invulnerability of this kind cannot be sustained without ingenious despotism: “instead of challenging and confronting it [danger] and abiding the issue of a fight which may go against him, he seeks by circumspection and cunning to block its approach to him. He creates an empty space all round him which he can survey, and he observes and assesses every sight of approaching danger” (CP 231-2).

Kien is proud of his absolute unchangeableness and the faithful perseverance of his character. However, to preserve his character, Kien has to stop the endless flux of metamorphosis that occurs in the chaotic reality of the inner and outer world. As discussed in Crowds and Power, the psychopathological aspect of the “distances” that each man creates to protect his self and to keep apart from others, is that of immobility. Silence, immobility and isolation inhibit self-transformation:

A man who will not speak can dissemble, but only in a rigid way, he can wear a mask, but he has to keep a firm hold of it. The fluidity of transformations is denied to him … People become silent when they fear transformation. Silence prevents them responding to occasions of transformation … Silence is motionless.

(CP 294)

Kien's face, described as a mask, is completely fixed. “The mask is only known from outside … it reveals nothing of what is behind it” (CP 376). To maintain the stability of his world-order, and feel an absolute control and command over it, Kien needs to perpetuate a dichotomy between a permanently structured self and a rigidly patterned world. In this sense, the mechanical regularity of Kien's daily habits can be understood as a paranoid desire to reduce the world to a constant sameness, making it understandable, manageable and safer. The meticulous routine and his exaggerated emphasis on order serve to reduce the threatening multiplicity of existence to a structured uniformity, which accords with the designs of his omnipotent will. “A ruler wages continuous warfare against spontaneous and uncontrolled transformations” (CP 370-3).

The ruler's sense of power, Canetti argues, depends not only on suppressing transformations in himself but also in controlling transformations in others. The “I” becomes so important to itself that everything that is external, “other” in relation to oneself acquires a negative value: the other is seen as hostile, dangerous, needing to be dominated. Only by banishing everybody from his life and ruling out any deviation in his hermetic library, is Kien left free to conceive himself as a “pure self”; his subjectivity can be perceived as unlimited; his reason can be elevated to the conception of the absolute. Denial of others is reaffirmation of oneself; but it is soon obvious that if it is carried to an extreme, it becomes a quest for inflexible sovereignty.

For Canetti, the exposure of the “entrails of power” reveals the hidden mechanisms of domination. Kien's sense of greatness and distinction, related to his great scholarly erudition, can be disclosed through an examination of the scholar's complex relationship with his books, according to Canetti's idea of self-consumption and self-increase, analyzed in Crowds and Power (CP 107-11).⁵ Since his only passion is collecting books, Kien strives to increase their number as much as possible. “Books, even the bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase” (ADF 8-9; 125-6). The increase in books not only corroborates his feelings of superiority but also gives him a sense of protection. The twenty-five thousand volumes of his library, roughly of equal size and similar appearance, uniformly lined up in endless rows, obeying a rigid organization, represent in Kien's mind a kind of loyal army that forms a wall around him, safe-guarding the lucidity of his mind, giving him confidence, power and a sense of ontological security. Beyond the obsession to possess books, Kien seeks to “incorporate” the books into himself.⁶ Wherever the scholar goes, he carries a minute portion of his library with him in his briefcase. It is as if he wished literally to insert the books into his body:

He clasped it [the briefcase full of books] tightly to him in a very particular manner which assured that the greatest possible area of his body was always in contact with it. Even his rib could feel its presence through his cheap, thin suit. His upper arm covered the whole side of elevation, it fitted exactly. The lower portion of his arm supported the case from below. His outstretched fingers splayed out over every part of the flat surface to which they yearned.

(ADF 9)

Kien privately excuses this excess of care because of the value of the books' contents. There is nothing more precious than his priceless volumes, by possessing their contents he can be endowed with their value as well. Because of his remarkable memory, we are assured that Kien has “absorbed” thousands of books in his head. The scholar has in his mind “a library as well provided and reliable as his actual one”. “He could sit at his writing desk and sketch out a treatise down to the minutest detail without turning over a single page, except in his mind” (ADF 17). “Incorporation” obviously furnishes Kien with power. Once the substance of each individual book of his library is “absorbed”, Kien becomes a kind of living library, containing within him all the forces and potentialities that were dispersed (CP 413-474). Precisely because he is isolated, he can see himself as superior. His value is the value of what he contains and it is his duty not to allow it to escape. At this point Canetti's analysis of power and the crowd meet. Canetti's analysis of the leader's exploitative attitudes towards crowds in Crowds and Power is already evident in Auto-da-Fe, supporting the view that power feeds on crowds.⁷

The role of Kien as a despotic ruler, using his books as an army (for Canetti, a “closed crowd”) in order to increase the scope of his power and to extend his dominion over others, becomes increasingly clear as his library is progressively invaded. One of the best examples occurs in the scene in which the troubled scholar transforms himself into a commander-in-chief and mobilizes his imaginary army of books into a state of war against Therese. He climbs a ladder, “his head touched the ceiling, his extended legs reached the ground, and his eyes embraced the whole united extent of the library” (ADF 81). Explicitly in terms of a military operation, he commands:

Since the invasion of an alien power into our life, I have been labouring with the idea of placing our relationship on a firm foundation. Your survival is granted by treaty, but we are, I take it, sage enough not to deceive ourselves as to the danger by which, in defiance of a legal treaty, you are threatened.

(ADF 81)

Do not overestimate the strength of the enemy, my people! Between the letters of your pages you will crush him to death, each line is a club to batter out his brain; each letter a leaden weight to burden his feet; each binding a suit of armour to defend you from him! A thousand decoys are yours to lead him astray, a thousand nets to entangle his feet, a thousand thunderbolts to burst him asunder, O you my people, the strength, the grandeur, the wisdom of the centuries.

(ADF 85)

The more the process of self-preservation is effected the more it increases self-alienation and domination of the self by outside people and things. When Kien is thrown out of his library his first and sole preoccupation is to acquire all the books he can. He explores every bookshop in the city and then sets out to obtain the books held in the national pawnshop, the Theresianum. However, instead of buying the books, he simply stores the titles in his mind. Carrying a new imaginary library in his head, he can nourish the illusion that he is still guarded by books. What seemed just a metaphorical expression regarding the phenomenal memory of the scholar comes to be taken by Kien as a concrete reality. Every night he has to unpack the books, remove them from his head and lay them on the floor of his hotel room, before sleeping.

Engulfed in the agitated, chaotic life of the outside world, a world that is without the structuring power of the intellect, the desperate need for protection becomes more rigid and grotesque. Like Schreber's paranoia, discussed in Crowds and Power (CP 434-48), the protagonist of Auto-da-Fe sees threats everywhere, and becomes convinced that everything is intended to confuse his reason and destroy him. Kien interprets the world around him from his own isolated perspective, void of any empirical mechanism or verificatory interaction with external reality. Unable to make contact with anything external to the circle of his own universe, Kien becomes increasingly susceptible to the power of delusions and his persecution mania grows at the same rate. It ends up in a paranoiac process that drives him to destroy everything that he supposes is challenging his sovereignty: “The greatness they [the paranoiacs] imagine is always under attack and their notions tend also to become more and more rigid … When the hostile crowd gets the upper hand, these turn into delusions of persecution” (CP 407).

When a desire of power is carried to this extreme, Canetti implies that the dialectic between self and world is obliterated by the self acquiring absolute supremacy. The supreme subject no longer promotes a dialogue between his inner and the changing outer world but rather tries to subjugate the world by the reinforcement of his fixed ideas. The paranoiac ruler perceives his self as the centre of everything and becomes the god-like creator of a world that is nothing but the projection of his will. Behind all the multiplicity of appearances he detects only the presence of the enemy that challenges his omnipotence. The urge to unmask appearances and discover enemies “becomes a kind of tyranny”: “He waits for the right moment ‘to tear the mask from their faces’; behind it he finds the malevolence he knows so well in himself” (CP 377-8). As meticulously unraveled in Crowds and Power, the process of acquiring and maintaining power induces anxiety. The ruler's ability to issue commands allows him to surpass others (CP 303-5). However, the ruler, in his position of power is left with the threat of recoil, growing into what Canetti calls the “anxiety of command”, the fear that the subordinate will one day take his revenge. “The despot lives to command and he needs to dissemble his anxiety, as he already dissembles his ‘inner malevolence’” (CP 377). But after a lifetime of power, it can suddenly manifest itself as madness, as with certain Roman emperors (CP 309). Despite Kien's supposed love and sympathy for books, Kien represents a real threat to them. Throughout the novel the books are forced to serve Kien, either to enforce his notions of greatness or to defend him against the hostile crowd and “the touch of the unknown”. However, once he perceives that the books are no longer ready to respond to his commands, he does not hesitate to threaten them with death by fire. In this perspective, it is finally possible to see that all that Kien or a despotic ruler really wants it to be a survivor (CP 227-278), “standing in an immense field of corpses”. To be the last man alive, Canetti thinks, is “the deepest urge of every real seeker of power” (CP 443-4).

In the last chapter, “The Red Cock”, Kien's final surrender to madness is a multiform expression of the crowd. In spite of being enclosed in his flat, he still feels persecuted by the representations of the crowd. The red tiger, the mythical animal form of the temptation to realise the basic impulses to liberate repressed nature, haunts him. A set of Canetti's crowd symbols—blood, the colour red, fire—appear insistently in a frenzied flux of metamorphosis. Kien's delusions are populated by images of victimized and persecuted crowds. He hears fire engines racing through the streets and sees from the attic window the reddish glow in the sky. He imagines that all books in the Theresianum are burning and desperately crying for his help. Kien also hears mobs of police and citizens knocking on his door to arrest him for the supposed murder of his wife. In his hallucinatory state, Kien sees red stains in the carpet and imagines that this constitutes criminal evidence against him that must be destroyed. The image of fire, the most powerful crowd symbol for Canetti—it “spreads rapidly, it is contagious and insatiable, it is multiple and … it destroys irrevocably” (CP 77)—comes obsessively into Kien's mind. Each new line of incoherent thought, each chain of associations returns inevitably to the same compelling idea: Fire! Fire, as the symbol of passion, of sex, of the excitement of the inexhaustible mob, stands for everything repressed by Kien. However, fire arises “from time to time and often inexplicably has … its own restless and violent life” (CP 77). From the stifling confines of the library, fire arises spontaneously. The crowd-drive, the individual's desire to dissolve himself into the mass and “become like fire, knowing no bounds” (CP 76) overwhelms him.

With the flames flickering before his eyes, Kien tries to return to his former peaceful world, the written world of books; but he does not manage to read a line. The letters are “dancing”. He commands them to be quiet. Animated by Kien's hallucination, the letters detach themselves from the page and assault him physically, slapping, kicking and striking. The books now act as a “reversal crowd”, “this damnable revolutionary mob” (ADF 427) are “taking their revenge on him, for the long time he has made them suffer and has gone unpunished” (CP 456-7). As the lines dance up and down, the letters jump out of their pages and the pages out of their book bindings, the “closed crowd” transforms itself into the “open crowd”, the “stagnating crowd” into a “rhythmic crowd” (CP 49-62). “The books cascade off the shelves onto the floor” (ADF 427). Order is destroyed, power is overthrown, rationality disintegrates. Ironically, it is in his library, the artifically created cosmos and the refuge Kien has used against the human masses, that the books finally reveal their real grievance and turn themselves into a crowd. It is his books, once his loyal army and spiritual resource, used as a counterpoise to the threat of the despised illiterate barbarians at the gates, that finally in reversal attack him. The excess of denial and severity of repression make the unthinkable happen: Kien sets all his books on fire, plunges into the fire and joins laughing the crowd outside him, the crowd he struggled so relentlessly to evade. Kien, who manifested the paranoiac ambition to assert the total domination of the rational intellect over the world, is finally possessed by the things of this world; the dichotomy between self and world is finally obliterated. Nevertheless, Kien's suicide, in this “auto-da-fe”, is ambiguous: as a defeated paranoiac despot he does not die alone, but takes with him all his troops, so that no one may enjoy the power of surviving him.

Notes

1. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [1960] (London, Victor Gollancz, 1962).

2. Canetti, Auto-da-Fe [1935] (London, Pan Books, 1981).

3. Canetti's first intention was to name the protagonist of Auto-da-Fe Kant, and the manuscript originally had the title “Kant catches fire”, a title Hermann Broch dissuaded the young Canetti from using.

4. W. E. Steward, “The Role of the Crowd in Elias Canetti's Novel Die Blendung” (M.A., Manchester University, 1968); R. Maia, “Crowd Theory in Some Modern Fiction: Dickens, Zola and Canetti” (PhD., Nottingham University, 1992).

5. Analyzing rites, legends and ancient myths from different cultures, Canetti claims that men symbolically grow stronger by the incorporation of animals, plants and objects that are associated with strength or power (CP 107-12).

6. By the incorporation of the word into the self, the individual is not only elevated but he is also protected: “the paranoiac retaliates against the attack of the crowd by seeking to absorb them into himself” (CP 440). For an assessment of this analysis see John S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob. From Plato to Canetti (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 293-326.

7. According to Canetti, degradation justifies power and anyone who wants to rule men soon realizes the secret of degradation: “Seizure of another body is power in the raw … Cannibals incorporate their captures to degrade them into excrement” (CP 209-10).