In this essay I shall discuss Canetti's novel Die Blendung in relation to Canetti's poetics, which in turn influenced his friend Franz Baermann Steiner's image of the poet.¹ Peter Kien—the novel's main protagonist—embodies the positivist scholar whose rationalism consists in nihilism, which mirrors fascism, rather than opposing it. Kien's skepticism opposes Steiner's and Canetti's poetics: indeed his specialism precludes any form of radicalism and as a result it also prevents the existence of a world in which death is transcended through a belief in metamorphosis. Kien figures as an anti-type of Canetti's image of the poet, who unites knowledge and social responsibility.

Canetti's poetics originates in an examination of language: according to Canetti, in poetic language knowledge and social responsibility interpenetrate.² Canetti's self-depiction as a poet points to a trust in the force of language; and indeed in an interview with Joachim Schickel Canetti speaks of his “wirklich magische Beziehung zu Namen” (magical relation to language).³ By calling himself a poet, therefore, Canetti makes it clear that he is aware of the power which his words can exert. The poet masters language, but he can also master through language. This recognition of the power of language occurs to Canetti as a young child. The first part of his autobiography Die Gerettete Zunge (The Tongue set free) opens with a threat: the threat of having the tongue cut out.⁴ Here two spheres of power confront each other; one is physical might, the other is the transcending dimension that the tongue can set free. In this way the opening of Die Gerettete Zunge can be read as a parable, a parable of Canetti as a poet who sets great store by language, and as an intellectual who, by virtue of language's transcending force, influences social thought and practice. As an intellectual Canetti has learned from his childhood experience that those who wield physical power are most keen on eliminating the power of language which might oppose them. Canetti saw the justification of his claim to public responsibility confirmed by the rise of fascism and by the Holocaust in particular. In the novel Die Blendung, whose criticism of the positivist scholar Peter Kien will be discussed below, Canetti depicts a world which foreshadows the approach of fascism and the crimes of the Nazis.⁵ Canetti emphasises that he wrote the novel under the impact of the upsurge of Nazism in an interview with Raphaël Sorin:

Je sentais que des choses terribles se préparaient. Ce pressentiment fut confirmé lors de mon séjour à Berlin en 1928 et 1929. Je vis alors les marches et les bagarres entre les nazis et les socialistes. Mon livre est donc né dans un climat d'agitation et de fureur. Il porte en lui, sans que ce soit toujours bien caché, les marques de ces circonstances tragiques.⁶

I will show how Canetti criticises an ethically non-committed type of intellectual under the impact of the approach of Nazism. Peter Kien, the scholar who deliberately seeks isolation mirrors an atomised society that drifts towards a totalitarian mass-state in which history realises horrid fantasies, and in which rationality serves irrational ends.⁷ The rationalist scholar Kien can be called a nihilist in that he devalues any form of life that has nothing to do with the abstractions of his specialist field of study. Kien's nihilism reflects the grotesque and nihilist form of representation whose signs are either empty or tend to entropy. In an important essay Robert Elbaz and Leah Hadomi show how signification in Die Blendung “hovers between being and non-being, much as the novel is caught between the representation of a senseless reality and its nullification.”⁸

In his representation of a fragmented society and in his critique of the positivist Kien Canetti develops a negative poetics: he shows what a responsible poet should not be as well as what he should work against. This poetics paves the way to a better understanding of Masse und Macht. David Darby has rightly criticised scholars who use the later work (Masse und Macht) as an explanation of the earlier one (Die Blendung). Rather Die Blendung helps to explain Canetti's social-ethical project in Masse und Macht, which is, as I have argued elsewhere, a response to the Holocaust.⁹ In Masse und Macht Canetti examines non-Western communities; as an anthropologist he stands in close proximity to Kien's scholarly discipline, sinology. Masse und Macht is a scholarly book, written by someone who spent years reading anthropological studies. Indeed, Canetti encourages his readers to do the same by offering them a huge bibliography. Yet Canetti transgresses conventional scholarship by both writing in a narrative manner and by avoiding specialisation.

Given that Canetti presents himself as quite ‘bookish,’ one might wonder why he does not employ the notion of a poeta doctus, rather than that of a Dichter. The reason he abstains from calling himself a poeta doctus or a social scientist perhaps lies in the fact that all these scholarly words might move him into a self-enclosed world as described in Die Blendung. Peter Kien represents the scholar as the anti-type of Canetti's image of the poet: if the poet is ‘der Hüter der Verwandlung’ (the guardian of metamorphosis),¹⁰ if the poet makes room in his breast for all human and spiritual voices, then Kien's hermeticism and his uncommunicative attitude preclude such openness.¹¹ In Die Blendung Canetti portrays the scholar as someone who follows the derangement of his time instead of opposing it.

When they focus on his alleged powerlessness, many critics fail to see that Kien himself exercises power over his books.¹² Following this line of thinking, Jutta Paal has recently perceived a dichotomy between Peter Kien as an ‘enlightened intellectual’ and the other protagonists of the novel who discard the humanitarian ideals of the enlightenment. I shall show that Kien's scholarship does not represent enlightenment ideals (it is far too cut off from social concerns to do so) rather it depicts the realisation of a positivist agenda. Kien is a madman in a world that has generally turned mad: no protagonist can be called sane, all are obsessed by an idée fixe.¹³

This idée fixe turns each character into an isolated world, and, as a result, they are all unable to form intimate relationships: Therese loves money which, she thinks, might be earned by marrying Peter Kien, Peter Kien, in turn only marries Therese because he is impressed by the care she apparently takes for books; Pfaff only courts his daughter and Therese in order to satisfy his sadism, and Georg Kien has nothing on his mind apart from being revered in his hospital like a god. This implies that every figure in the novel has an absolutist approach to his/her interests; they are all blind-folded by the desires for which they live; and this act of being blindfolded is well conveyed in the German title Die Blendung: which has etymological connections with the word blind.¹⁴ This act of blinding has a further connotation, as the noun ‘Blendung’ or the verb ‘blenden’ are often used in connection with the blinding force of pure light: a ‘Blendung’ can describe the process of being blinded by the sun, and indeed Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm define ‘blenden’ as ‘das Blenden der Sonne.’¹⁵ Similarly the title of Canetti's novel evokes the dazzling power of the sun. Light often functions as a metaphor for enlightenment. This connection to the idea of enlightenment is also present in the original title of the novel Kant Fängt Feuer which suggests the end of enlightenment in fire; and in so doing it emphasises the novel's concern with the deadlock, the utter helplessness of an enlightenment that is unable to reflect critically upon its own enterprise, and which results in being an instrument for domination and reification.¹⁶

In Die Blendung light achieves the opposite of enlightenment; light, as the title makes clear, dazzles those who come in contact with it, rather than clearing up their vision. Against this background it is not surprising that Kien walls up the windows of his room: his scholarly pursuits, his positivist approach make him shy away from the light of the sun. The rationalist can only survive as nihilist. The positivist who devalues any form of material existence cannot face the sun, whose light brings out the contour of things. Walling up the windows of his study also serves as an image for the isolation to which, as discussed above, all characters of the novel fall prey. In this respect one cannot find any difference in the behaviour of Peter Kien on the one hand and his brother, Pfaff, and Therese, on the other: all take their world to be absolute. Whether it is a head without a world, or world without a head, what we encounter is a universe which is fragmented in the extreme; it is a world in which parts exist on their own and shy away from making contacts with their surroundings. It is this atomisation of society which undermines the validity of a combination of materialism and religiosity and which, as a consequence, disrupts social cohesion. Atomisation and its social consequences eventually lead to the madness of crowds.¹⁷ As for his friend Franz Baermann Steiner, Canetti criticises individualism which paradoxically destroys individuality.¹⁸ Steiner's analysis of atomisation in his aphorisms echoes Canetti's implicit critique of fragmentation in Die Blendung.

When one recalls Canetti's aim of avoiding specialisation in scholarship the inability of a scholarly intellectual to offer an alternative to a world that collapses into entropy is quite striking. Kien is a caricature of the specialist. Indeed, for him the ‘truth’ can only be found if the scholar ignores everything that has nothing to do with his area of research. This might have an autobiographical reference in Canetti's chemical research.¹⁹ LaCapra's definition of positivism as being a narrowly focused discourse that “avoids or occludes the very problem of a critical theory of society and culture” fits Kien's specialist pursuits well.²⁰ Kien's undertaking is quite a contrast to the anthropological projects of both Canetti and F. B. Steiner, who want to have a social-ethical impact on modern Western society:

Man nähert sich der Wahrheit, indem man sich von den Menschen abschloß. Der Alltag war ein oberflächliches Gewirr von Lügen. Soviele Passanten, soviele Lügner. Drum sah er sie gar nicht an.

(Bl [Die Blendung], p. 14)

You draw closer to the truth by shutting yourself off from mankind. Daily life was a superficial clatter of lies. Every passer-by was a liar. For that reason he never looked at them.

(AF [Auto-da-Fé], p. 18)

The antithetical structure of the first sentence here mirrors Kien's way of thinking, which only allows for absolutes: drawing closer to the truth has to amount to a denial of social life; and any form of life in his own society antithetically precludes a drawing closer to the truth. This antithesis between truth, on the one hand, and ethics on the other, also indicates a deep split between spirit and concrete, physical reality. In Kien's mind there is a gap between these two entities which cannot be bridged.

This division between spirit and every-day reality leads to Kien's disgust with physical reality as such. The loss of an ethical perspective that unites different parts of society by means of a combination of knowledge and a sense of social responsibility—which finds its equivalent in the relation between truth and ethics as propounded by Hayden White—becomes a main cause of Kien's positivism.²¹ Kien's positivist nihilism that does not allow for a rationality embedded in a value system and transcends the instrumental concerns of scholarly enquiries, ironically outdoes itself in its main point of reference. David Darby has shown how Kien's repeated reference to Berkley's Principles undermines his own scholarly objectives. Berkley, “rather than affirming the autonomy of the individual subject's perceptions,” argues “against the skepticism implicit in the reading adopted by Kien and the schoolmen.”²² Although Kien disbelieves any kind of creed that might integrate his scholarship into a societal-religious context, Kien clings to a secular religion. John Milbank's analysis of positivism as replacing religion only to “become itself religion” offers an explanation for Peter Kien's wish to figure as an imago Christi.²³ Kien indeed identifies with Christ, as a saviour of books rather than man. Kien as a self-perceived miracle-working figure differs from Christ only in that his martyrdom testifies exclusively to the absolutism of specialist scholarship.

Kien's secular religion results in his disgust with humanity. As a scholar who only looks for the truth, he can never look at people with whom he walks on the street. Although he actually walks with these people, he strongly desires to dissociate himself from them completely. As a consequence he mentally robs all these pedestrians of their humanity, calling them a ‘mass’. A mass is primarily a quantitative term and it precludes any notion of a qualitative one, like that of humanity. This disgust with the ‘masses’ also implies that Kien has no interest in influencing the ethical behaviour of the public. This becomes apparent when he declares his solitude to be independent of the opinion of the ‘mob’:

… er lebe ja allein, was der Wissenschaft nütze, sei der Menge an Wichtigkeit voraus.

(Bl, p. 70)

He lived alone; the service of knowledge was more important than the opinion of the mob.

(AF, p. 77)

Kien conceives of knowledge as something which cannot be shared; that is why we never learn anything about the actual substance of his scholarship. Timms noticed this absence of any presentation of Kien's scholarly inquiries:

Kien, as Canetti represents him has no inner life. We may be told time and again that his mind is filled with oriental erudition, but these values are never shown.

The reference in the opening scene of the novel to the wisdom of Mencius (Mong Tse) raises expectations of an intellectual feast which are never fulfilled. This failure to give the reader access to Kien's inner life seems to me to constitute the major limitation of Canetti's novel. It is a novel about the intellect which tells us nothing about the intellect—the richness of the mind replete with scholarship or of an imagination fired by the vision of an alternative culture.²⁴

In comparison to Karl Kraus, Canetti does not give a vision of China that offers an alternative to occidental shortcomings; yet one might ask whether this constitutes a failure. It would be truer to say that Canetti consciously represents Kien with this limitation in order to show the incommunicative character of this kind of scholar. If the reader learned anything of the fruits of Kien's research he/she would have the impression of someone who can engage in dialogue. Kien's solipsism is, however, one of his most striking features, and Canetti would have been inconsistent, if he had presented the scholar's imaginative, or excitingly learned inward wealth. Kien perceives any form of communication as succumbing to the lures of the “masses,” while Canetti wants to have an impact on the social behaviour of the public. In contrast to Kien the scholar, Canetti the poet seeks to win the attention of a huge audience.

Canetti's preference for a non-specialist audience accounts for his all-encompassing approach as an anthropological writer. This is in fact one reason for the amazing scope of the issues and indeed of the geographical distance dealt with in Masse und Macht: Canetti here moves from Siberia to Africa, from Australia to the North-pole, from America to India. Not only does Canetti break down the barriers between specialised fields of scholarly research; he also bridges the gap between the physical and the intellectual which for Peter Kien remains unbridgeable. This radical difference can be seen in a key aspect of the scholarly work: in Masse und Macht, the human body features as a main point of departure to ground Canetti's theory of human aggression. Unlike Kien he uses the empirical evidence gathered by workers in the field, such as anthropologists and thinkers concerned with the physical character of life.

The universalist approach of Canetti as a scholar and poet sharply contrasts with Kien's specialisation in ancient China. But it even goes further than that: Kien's scholarship depends on the intellectual force of the scholar only, whereas Canetti's notion of the Dichter presupposes the absence of a clearly defined individuality. The scholar Peter Kien only exists when he holds on to his individuality as a positivist scientist. The poet Elias Canetti, on the other hand, only comes into being when the individual Elias Canetti falls silent. Kien, the scholar, wants to affirm his distinctive personality; Canetti, the poet opens up his personality in a chain of metamorphoses:

Ein Dichter bin ich nicht: ich kann nicht schweigen. Aber viele Menschen in mir schweigen, die ich nicht kenne. Ihre Ausbrüche machen mich manchmal zum Dichter.

(Aphorismen p. 254)

I am not a poet. I cannot be silent. But many men are silent within me, whom I do not know. Their eruptions sometimes transform me into a poet.

(My transl.)

Most important here is the italicised ‘ich’ upon whose negation the existence of Elias Canetti as Dichter depends. This ‘ich’ would be a poet as ‘ich,’ if it could always be silent, but, as Canetti makes clear, he cannot achieve this silence of the individual which is the prerequisite for the true poet. As it is, Canetti's Dichtung can only come into being when the one who writes falls asleep, and the alien voices which normally refrain from speaking, burst out into language. Only at these moments does Canetti write as a Dichter, and yet at these moments he clearly loses his individuality. One can perhaps best understand this notion of the poet as having lost all features belonging to the individual person who writes, when one recalls John Keats's notion of negative capability. Like Canetti's, Keats's poetics heavily relies on the concept of metamorphosis: the poet is only capable of writing poetry when he can negate his individuality and metamorphose into different figures which speak through him. In this way Keats's negative capability characterises the poet as the mere receiver of voices other than himself. Keats the poet appears as an Aeolian harp upon which the vocal pressure of his poem's protagonists play. The Romantic image of the Aeolian harp, and the Keatsian concept of negative capability greatly influenced modernist writers like T. S. Eliot. One could draw attention to James Joyce's famous words: when Joyce was in a café, he said that not he, but all the people around him actually wrote his novels; rather than being a writer, Joyce is a listener, who registers all that is given to the human in language. Canetti arranged to be buried beside James Joyce in Zürich. He similarly admired Fernando Pessoa who assumed a dozen different individualities, each having a distinctive poetic voice. There are many more references in modernist writing (Pirandello for example) in which the poet transforms into different personalities. It is against the background of this Romantic and modernist understanding of the poet that we should examine Canetti's notion of the Dichter. As a consequence, writing verse does not characterise a poet; rather it is his capability to undergo transformations; it is the openness which allows a multitude of voices into the heart of the writer. After the Holocaust the voices that haunt Canetti cannot be those set in tone by Keats's Aeolian harp; they need to be voices of utter darkness filled with death and all possible imaginable brutalities that has become a reality in the Nazi concentration camps.

Canetti's study of the ‘masses’ goes hand in hand with his listening to the voices of the victims of Nazi terror. By contrast, Kien's monoperspectival view of life results in his hatred of ‘uneducated people’:

Immer und ausnahmslos nehme man sich vor den Leuten der Masse in acht … sie sind gefährlich, weil sie keine Bildung, also keinen Verstand haben.

(Bl, p. 95)

… we must beware of these people of the masses. They are dangerous, because they have no education, which is as much as to say no understanding.

(AF, p. 103)

Kien's hatred of the ‘masses’ coincides with his refusal to have any impact on the ethical behaviour of his readership. Kien would argue that such an impact cannot be made because of the lack of education which one generally finds in the public. For Kien, lack of education means absence of learning, and with this absence of learning no understanding whatever is possible. As we will see later, Canetti the Dichter makes ‘experience’ part of his concept of education (Bildung). Kien, however, transposes any experience on the street into the realm of his library, and there, we suddenly see him needing the masses; we encounter a paranoid ruler, who would be unhappy without a mass-following. Canetti-scholarship has often taken Georg Kien's comment on the lack of a collective urge in his brother as an authorial commentary.²⁵ Georg Kien argues that intellectuals like his brother have no idea of a collective urge:

Von der viel tieferen und eigentlichen Triebkraft der Geschichte, den Drang des Menschen, in eine höhere Tiergattung, die Masse, aufzugehen, und sich darin 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 ihm selbst.

(Bl, p. 446)

Of that far deeper and most special motive force of history, the desire of men to rise into a higher type of animal, into the mass, and to lose themselves in it so completely as to forget that one man ever existed, they had no idea. For they were educated men, and education is a cordon sanitaire for the individual against the mass of his own soul.

(AF, p. 461)

If Georg Kien knew that his brother had an idea of a mass-drive, he would have been able to anticipate the burning of the books with which the novel closes. The reader, on the other hand, learns after the first hundred pages that Peter Kien knows about the desire of losing oneself in a mass. In the chapter Mobilisation Kien addresses books as a kind of ‘Hetzmasse’ (rabble-rousing crowd); he wants to de-individualise each of them:

Noch sind wir in der Lage, als unverletzte, geschlossene Körperschaft, einer für alle, und alle für einen, zur Abwehr zu rüsten.

(Bl, p. 96)

We are still in the position of a complete and self-sufficient body, to arm ourselves in our own defence, one for all and all for one.

(AF, p. 104)

One for all and all for one is exactly the kind of slogan Nazis use to abolish their personality and immerse themselves in the ‘all’ of the crowd. The chiasmus of the ‘one for all and all for one’ construction stresses the lack of any distinction between the members of the crowd. Kien, who has despised the ‘masses’ on the street, turns into a mass-organiser within the walls of his library, and even when he angrily calls pedestrians a ‘mob’, he actually creates it by using the word.

However, Kien not only feels himself at one with the ‘masses’ of his books, he also appears as ruler who employs the sting of death as his main weapon:

2) die Verräter verfallen der Feme. 3) das Kommando ist zentralisiert. Ich bin oberster Kriegsherr, einziger Führer und Offizier.

2) The traitors will be shot out of hand. 3) That all authority is united in one man. That I am commander-in-chief, sole leader and officer in command.

‘Commander-in-chief’, ‘sole leader’ ‘officer’ and ‘command,’ all of these words are used to describe the character of the ruler in Masse und Macht. Kien in fact displays the disgust of ‘masses’ as the desire to bring these ‘masses’ into existence so as to be able to rule them. Ironically the books refuse to be transformed into a de-individualised ‘mass’: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, all of them insist on their personalities.

Whereas Kien the scholar desires to create masses out of individuals, Canetti the Dichter makes room in his heart for a variety of individual voices. In order to find room for these voices the poet must have undergone experiences which opened his heart for a multitude of different lives and sentiments; and it is this kind of experience which Kien fears most. According to Canetti, the poet must have experienced how other people think as well as feel in order to be able to communicate with them, and Canetti perceives this union between scholarship and experience (which is exactly what Kien lacks) in Herodotus.²⁶

In contrast to Kien's scholarship, Herodotus's learning is in Canetti's view innocent, because it wants to communicate. Whereas Kien confirms scholarship only in terms of specialisation, Herodotus subdivides different people not according to further specialist fields of knowledge; rather, he wants to open up space for different voices through the subdivision, and thanks to this experience of the ‘other’ he makes room in the heart of his readers who experience this otherness by reading him.

The interrelation between knowledge and social responsibility moves scholarship into the realm of ethics. This mode of poetic writing is not fictional since it is invested with the authority of empirical (experience) and scholarly (knowledge) facts. Dagmar Barnouw uses the notion ‘anthropologische Phantasie’ in order to convey the hybrid state of Masse und Macht between scholarly and imaginative writing.²⁷ In reading the works of Jakob Burkhardt, Canetti encounters such bodily scholarship, which also fits into his category of poetry as it allows for an infinity of voices.²⁸ In Jakob Burkhardt's writing, Canetti finds a bodily form of scholarship that is at the same time poetry, because it bestows new names on a reality that seemed to be isolated. A new name transforms the thing it denotes; it creates a universe that dissolves into a flux of metamorphoses. This world of transformation evokes a feeling of ‘körperlicher Erweiterung’²⁹ (bodily expansion) in the reader; the world which this kind of scholarship inhabits is therefore bodily indeed.

As a scholar Canetti opens up the bodily experience of his readers through a chain of metamorphoses. The scholar as the guardian of metamorphoses exactly covers Canetti's definition of the Dichter as ‘Hüter der Verwandlung’, and it is indeed very close to that of Franz B. Steiner who calls the poet ‘der einzige Hüter der Mythen aller Völker’ (the only guardian of the myths of all peoples).³⁰ In his speech ‘Der Beruf des Dichters’ (1976), Canetti refers to the myths of primitive peoples as the richest source for his notion of ‘metamorphosis.’ In this speech Canetti expresses his gratitude to social anthropology for having preserved the myths of ‘primitive’ people who have already died out or are in the process of dying out, but he contrasts the scholar who collects these myth with the poet who can bring them to life again (“Für seine Rettung [of mythical experiences] kann man der Wissenschaft nicht genug dankbar sein; seine eigentliche Bewahrung, seine Auferstehung zu unserem Leben, ist Sache der Dichter.”).³¹ For Canetti myths offer an immense richness of metamorphoses. This connection between myth and the ability to believe in the reality of ideas such as metamorphosis has been made in E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture, a book which Canetti cites in his bibliography to Masse und Macht and which Steiner would have been familiar with as an anthropologist. Tylor sees the poet as a remnant of primitivism within modernity; the poet still belongs to the ‘mythologic stage of thought’ that characterises primitive thinking:

A poet of our day has still much in common with the minds of uncultured tribes in the mythologic stage of thought. The rude man's imagination may be narrow, crude and repulsive, while the poet's more conscious fictions may be highly wrought into shapes of fresh artistic beauty, but both share in that sense of the reality of ideas which fortunately or unfortunately modern education has proved so powerful to destroy.³²

Modern poet and savage alike take ideas for reality: what they cannot grasp as a reality proved by empirical test is nevertheless real, in fact, the ‘primitive’ does not differentiate between the empirical and the metaphysical, between the immanent and the transcendent. For the ‘primitive’ myths themselves are empirical. Tylor's concept of the ‘mythologic stage of thought’ coincides with Steiner's and Canetti's understanding of myths as grounded in empirical reality: the empirical itself is seen as the mythological.

Tylor's interpretation of the modern poet as a remnant of the ‘primitive’ in modern culture contributes a great deal to the understanding of Steiner's and Canetti's definition of the ‘Dichter.’ Canetti's ‘Hüter der Verwandlung’ takes ideas of metamorphosis as a reality, otherwise he would not be able to transform himself into a variety of animal and human identities. The concept of metamorphosis presupposes a union between knowledge and belief. The one who undergoes metamorphosis needs to have an image of the empirical as a fluid entity, in which bodies can flood as easily and as quickly as ideas in the mind. According to Steiner and Canetti, therefore, a mythological world presumes a perception of the empirical that is radically different from that of the modern scientific world; it has to be a perception that does not distinguish between ideas and empirical facts, instead it has to perceive the empirical as driven by ideas. Metamorphosis can only be a real force in a society which is mythical. In a mythical society knowledge has not been separated from belief. As a consequence, the Dichter as ‘Hüter der Verwandlung’ takes care of a mythological world that is deeply threatened by the rationalist-nihilistic world-view of modern science.³³ Interestingly, Canetti, following Tylor and Steiner, explains the link between metamorphosis and myth in Der Beruf des Dichters:

Was aber neben allen spezifischen Einzelgehalten das Eigentliche der Mythen ausmacht, ist die in ihnen geübte Verwandlung. Sie ist es, durch die sich der Mensch erschaffen hat.

(GW [Das Gewissen der Worte], p. 289)

What, however characterises the essence of the myth—disregarding all specific singular features—is the metamorphosis which is practised in them. It is this by which man has created himself.

(My transl.)

Here Canetti discusses metamorphosis as the main characteristic of a mythological world, but whereas Tylor is doubtful as to the merits of such ‘primitive’ state of mind (“… fortunately or unfortunately modern education has proved so powerful to destroy”) Canetti sees human identity as dependent on a mythological world in which the empirical still offers the possibility of metamorphosis.

Like Canetti, Steiner mourns the loss of what Tylor calls ‘the mythologic stage of thought’ and following Tylor's concept of the poet as a ‘primitive’, he calls the Dichter the preserver of the myths of all peoples; of myths, that is to say, which embody a world capable of undergoing metamorphoses. ‘Der einzige Hüter der Mythen aller Völker’ moves the poet in fact into close proximity to the anthropologist of religion: an anthropologist of religion, who identifies with the ‘primitive’, undermining a modern diremption between knowledge and belief.

Canetti's poetics in many respects coincides with the anthropology of religion as advanced by F. B. Steiner.³⁴ In Die Blendung Canetti depicts the positivist scholar Kien as a representative of nihilism, which furthers the cause of fascism. Canetti's negative poetics contrasts with his image of the poet as a radical intellectual, who works for a mythological world in which knowledge and social responsibility interpenetrate. A connection between scholarship and literary modes of writing—in which myths are taken seriously—constitutes the style of Masse und Macht. The anthropological poetics implicit in Masse und Macht has its counter-image in the scholar Peter Kien of Die Blendung.

Notes

1. For Canetti's portrait of F. B. Steiner see: Canetti Aufzeichnungen 1992-1993, Zürich: Hanser 1996, pp. 17-24.

2. Interestingly Canetti characterises Steiner's poetry as the examination of words: “Dichten war für ihn ein Prüfen von Worten.” (Canetti, 1996, p. 21). Similarly Steiner characterises himself as a ‘prüfer’ (F. B. Steiner Eroberungen, Heidelberg: Lamerbert Schneider, 1964, p. 50.)

3. “Gespräch mit Joachim Schickel”: p. 104-131. In: Elias Canetti: Die Gespaltene Zukunft, München: Hanser, 1972.: p. 105.

4. See also discussions of this opening scene in: M. Barth: Canetti versus Canetti/Identität, Macht und Masse im literarischen Werk Elias Canetti, Frankfut a.M: P. Lang), 1994: p. 34-35, and: Hans Reiss: “The Writers Task: Some Reflections on Elias Canetti's Autobiography”, in: A. Stevens (Ed.), Elias Canetti. Londoner Symposium, Stuttgart, 1991: pp. 45-58, p. 47.

5. Harriet Murphy depicts Canetti's novel as an self-referential aesthetic universe “devoid of concrete references” (Murphy: Canetti and Nietzsche. Theories of Humor in Die Blendung, New York: SUNY, 1997, p. 46). This may be true as far as the solipsism of the protagonists is concerned, but it distorts Canetti's social agenda.

6. R. Sorin “Souvenirs”, in Blanc-Montmayer (Ed.) Elias Canetti, Paris: Édition du Centre Pompidou, 1995, pp. 51-57, p. 53.

7. R. Hartung has referred to the connection between atomisation and lack of moderation in “Fabel und Gestalt” in: Literarische Revue 3, 1948, pp. 341-47.

8. R. Elabaz and L. Hadomi “On Canetti's Novelistic Sign” in: Orbis Litterarum, Vol. 48, 1993, pp. 269-80, p. 272.

9. For a discussion of Masse und Macht as a response to the Holocaust see my article “‘Representing the Holocaust’. Power, Death and Metamorphosis: An Examination of Elias Canetti's Use of Anthropological Sources” in Masse und Macht. (forthcoming in Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift).

10. E. Canetti Das Gewissen der Worte, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1985, p. 283.

11. For a discussion of Kien's one-sidedness see: A. Doppler: “‘Der Hüter der Verwandlungen’. Canetti's Bestimmung des Dichters.”: pp. 45-55. In: F. Aspertsberger and G. Stieg: Blendung als Lebensform/Elias Canetti. Königstein, 1985. M. Moser has argued that Die Blendung depicts the realisation of mad obsessions (Moser Musil Canetti Eco Calvino. Die überholte Philosophie, Vienna, 1986, pp. 72-73.

12. For a discussion of Kien's powerlessness see: D. Dissinger Vereinzelung und Massenwahn, Bonn: Bouvier, 1971, p. 185, and D. Roberts Kopf und Welt, München: Hanser 1975, p. 164.

13. For a discussion of the one-sidedness of all characters in the novel see: P. Russel: “The Vision of Man in Elias Canetti's Die Blendung” in: German Life and Letters, 1974: p. 24-35, and E. Timms: “Canetti, Kraus and China” in: Stevens, 1991: p. 21-31.

14. F. Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Berlin, New York, 1982: p. 92.

15. Grimm: Deutsches Wörterbuch/Zweiter Band, Leipzig, 1860: p. 106.

16. Canetti's novel as a critique of enlightenment touches on many issues discussed in Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialektik der Aufklärung, which is again a response to fascism.

17. Dissinger discusses the dialectic between individualism and the craving for an emergence in the crowd (Dissinger, 1971, p. 99).

18. For Steiner's critique of individualism see a short selection from his aphorisms: “Festellungen und Versuche”, in: Akzente, 3, 1995, pp. 213-227.

19. Barbara Meili has pointed out coincidences between Canetti's autobiography and his only novel (Meili Erinnerung und Vision, Bonn: Bouvier, 1985).

20. D. LaCapra Soundings in Critical Theory, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 13.

21. White argues for an interpenetration between truth and ethics in his essay on the Holocaust “Historical Employment and the Problem of Truth” in: Friedlander Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, 1992, Havard U. P., pp. 22-36.

22. D. Darby Structures of Disintegration. Narrative Strategies in Elias Canetti's ‘Die Blendung’ Riverside, 1992, p. 52.

23. J. Milbank “Stories of Sacrifice: From Wellhausen to Girad” in: Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 12, pp. 15-46, p. 27.

24. E. Timms: “Canetti, Kraus and China” in: Stevens, 1991, p. 28.

25. Stephan Wiesenhöfer takes Georg to be an authoritative commentator on all protagonists of the novel (S. Wiesenhöfer Mythos zwischen Wahn Kunst. Elias Canettis Roman ‘Die Blendung’, Munich: tuduv), 1987, p. 145). Recently Nicola Riedner has followed Georg's interpretation in seeing Peter Kien as separated from the masses (N. Riedner Canetti's Fischerele. Eine Figur zwischen Masse, Macht und Blendung, Würzburg: Könnigheusen & Neumann, 1995, p. 113. A notable exception of this absolutisation of Georg's view of his brother is Martin Bollacher (M. Bollacher “Elias Canetti: Die Blendung” in: P. M. Lützler Deutsche Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts, Königstein: Athenäum), 1983, pp. 237-254, p. 249.

26. For Canetti's view of Herodotus see GZ, [Die gerettete Zunge] p. 242.

27. Anthropologische Phantasie: “Canetti und Freud zum Phänomen der Masse” in: John Pattillo-Hess (Ed.) Canettis Masse und Macht oder die Aufgabe des Gegenwärtigen Denkens, Vienna: Bundesverlag, 1988, pp. 37-51, p. 38. For a discussion of the connection between Canetti's social responsibility and his interdisciplinary approach, see: Dagmar Barnouw “Masse, Macht und Tod im Werk von Elias Canetti” in: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 19, 1975, pp. 344-388, p. 345.

28. For Canetti's view of J. Burkhardt see GZ, p. 224.

29. ibid.

30. Steiner coined this phrase as a result of his close intellectual friendship with Canetti in the context of a commentary on his lyrical cycle Eroberungen (E, p. 125).

31. Canetti, 1985, p. 285.

32. E. B. Tylor: Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, Vol. 1, London, 1871: p. 284

33. In Der Europäische Nihilismus Heidegger has shown how much Nietzsche's nihilism is the outcome of Descarte's rationalism.

34. For a discussion of F. B. Steiner's and E. Canetti's poetics see my article “Dichter und Anthropologe: Franz Baermann Steiner's Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus” in: Mit der Ziehharmonika. Zeitschrift für Literatur des Exils und Widerstands, Nr. 3, 1997.