Elias Canetti - I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole: An Elias Canetti Reader

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By Joshua Cohen

How to biographize Elias Canetti, one of the worlds great autobiographers? What account would be useful? What usefulness could also be made beautiful? What should be the relationship between his own version of himselfhis own multiple versionsand this? On the one hand, it would be wasteful to spend this introduction previewing the very same information that will be encountered again, in better prose, in the pages to come (and in the hundreds and hundreds of Canettis pages that I didnt include, many of which struck me on certain days as just as worthy of inclusion). On the other hand, to be too unfaithful to Canettis memoirs would be a betrayal: it would be pointless if not merely uncharitable to make a survey of the authors omissions, obscurations, mutilations, and straight-up falsifications, because my purpose here is to introduce Canetti the Major Writer You Should Read and not to vouch for the character of Canetti the Friend (not a very good friend), or Canetti the Husband (not a very good husband), or Canetti the Lover or Brother or Father or Son (its all pretty messy, to be honest).

I might take counsel from Canettis wife Veza, herself a novelist of high accomplishment, who once wrote in a letter to Canettis brother Georg: No document that gives access to Canettis inmost being must be allowed to survive.

Or I might take counsel from Georg, who, when Veza asked him to destroy that letterto destroy all her lettersdid not.

And that, Im realizing, is the best approach: to address myself to the destructions that did happen, to address myself to the burnings.

The First Austrian Republic in which Canetti came of age was the fractious remnant of a lost empire, a struggling democracy rived between an entrenched rightist nationalism aligned with industry and the Catholic Church and a diffuse coalition of socialist/communist/generally leftist labor organizations. Each camp maintained its own paramilitaries composed primarily of veterans of the First World War. In the winter of 1927, a rightist paramilitary called the Frontkmpfervereinigung held a rally in Schattendorf, near the Hungarian border, which was considered the territory of a leftist paramilitary called the Schutzbund. The two groups clashed outside the Schattendorf train station and two affiliates of the Schutzbund were shot dead: Matthias Csmaritsa Croatian whod lost an eye fighting for the dual monarchyand Josef Grssing, a schoolboy, age eight. Three Frontkmpfer were charged with murder in the Vienna courts, but they pleaded self-defense and in midsummer were acquitted. The day of the verdict was July 15, the day after Bastille Day. The workers of Vienna called for strikes and a street protest turned into a riot. Agitators descended on the Palace of Justice, just off the Ringstrae, shattered its windows, smashed its furnishings, and set its archives on fire. Firefighters arrived, but the rioters cut their hoses. The police responded with bullets, which left nearly ninety people dead and nearly six hundred people wounded.

Among the witnesses to the carnage was Elias Canetti, whose chronicle of the event appears here on , and includes the statement that July 15, 1927, may have been the most crucial day of my life after my fathers death.

At the time, Canetti was a twenty-one-year-old student desultorily pursing a medical education at the University of Vienna. He had already lived in five countries (Ottoman Bulgaria, England, Switzerland, Germany, Austria), acquired five languages (Ladino, Bulgarian, English, French, German), and weathered one world war.

What made July 15, 1927, especially crucial (only the English has the implication of excruciation and martyrdom) was that it provided Canetti with the scenes and themesof fires, of crowdsfor the two major books of his career.

Die Blendung (The Blinding) is Canettis only novel, published in 1935. It concerns a reclusive Viennese bibliophile and Sinologist who, at erotic and professional loose ends, or merely channeling the society that surrounds him, ends up torching his own vast library, and in the process immolates himself. Canetti derived the character from an unidentified man in the crowd who, in the throes of the July 15 unrest, was yelling, The files are burning! All the files! The question of what would motivate a man to mourn the death of archives amid the deaths of fellow humans was to preoccupy Canetti through the advent of the Nazi book pyres. Die Blendung was translated into English as Auto-da-Fthe preferred ordeal of the Inquisition, which displaced Canettis Sephardic Jewish ancestors from Spainthough Canettis original suggestion for the translated title was Holocaust.

Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) is a nonfiction treatise that Canetti claimed to have begun even before he began the novel, though he published it only in 1960. Its few hundred dense pages of anthropology, sociology, comparative religion, and incomparable metaphysics mine its authors memories of July 15 to forge a prototype and study of the crowd, that amorphous and often arsonous body that Canetti regarded as the ultimate political symbol of his eraa symbol that was also a process, by which individuals become consolidated and absorbed into a mass: In the crowd the individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. Note how this transcendence is just a feeling, however, a promise that when unfulfilled causes a reaction of base physicality, of craven violence, which doesnt always ebb as the crowd disperses: So long as the fleeing crowd does not disintegrate into individuals worried only about themselves, about their own persons, then the crowd still exists, although fleeing.

Canettis milieu might have been the last in world history to still believeto accept as a substitute for the belief in God a belief in the attainability of Enlightenment synthesis. Novelists Hermann Broch and Robert Musil were producing books that tried simultaneously to document realitywhich was being changed by innovations of mass communication, or mediaand to arrange it according to the principles of realism; their writing was founded on this paradox, in which fiction was responsible both for reporting the facts and for making their chaos conform to aesthetic order. Writers of nonfiction, meanwhile, worked toward theories, systems, rationalistic or at least self-rationalizing methodologies of explanation. Think of the Frankfurt School, for example, which erected itself atop the ruins of Freud and Marx. Canetti tried his hand at the epic novel and concluded its pages in flames. He tried his hand at the grand unifying theory of crowds and wound up alone and lonely, claiming he never wanted or needed the followers he never even had. It was only in the memoirs that he achieved the dream of novelistic fluency and programmatic amplitude, though even that series went unfinished. Of the five planned volumes, each to be titled after an organ of sense, only threeThe Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear