Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 8

Finally. Finally, we reach the end of my extended take on Elias Canetti's monumental novel Auto-da-Fé. I will admit it's taken some of the wind out of my sails. It is dense, difficult, harsh, and pointed. It's ruined me for further in-depth reading for awhile. If you click here, you will find the previous posts in this series (plus this one and any that come after). As always in blogland, they scroll from the bottom of the page upward.

As I've noted, the last chapter of the book throws our understanding of the novel into utter disarray. Brother Georg (-e, -es) Kien, gynecologist-cum-psychiatrist, has lately come to the rescue of our hero, Peter Kien, re-ensconced him in his apartment keep amidst his vast collection of books of Eastern wisdom, and returned to Paris—like a true deus-ex-machina. We now feel we can breathe a sigh of relief and relax our way through the final denouément, the bad guys having been duly ushered off-stage. Though no justice was properly done, all is okay: Peter will get on with his solitary, scholarly life only somewhat worse for the wear.

So we come to the last, short chapter "The Red Cock." Essentially, Kien here recounts the long, long string of his delusions—all very much still crackling despite the blandishments of his brother's pseudo-psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He still fears the ghost of Therese; he fondly recalls the "loyal" dwarf, Fischerle; he is haunted by the guilt of the murder he never committed, and he fears his imminent arrest; he tries to burn imaginary blood stains out of the carpet; he still hears the voices of the burning books in the Theresianum and the knocking of the police at his door; and he still imagines Pfaff is his friend—even as his war council library again comes to life, only this time conspiring against him. Paranoia sets in. The external world threatens break into his own. He takes refuge behind a book:

"A letter detaches itself from the first line and hits him a blow on the ear. Letters are lead. It hurts. Strike him! Strike him! Another. And another. A footnote kicks him. More and more. He totters. Lines and whole pages come clattering on to him. They shake and beat him, they worry him, they toss him about among themselves. Blood. Let me go! Damnable mob! Help! George! Help! Help! George!

But George has gone. Peter leaps up. With formidable strength he grasps the book and snaps it to. So, he has taken the letters prisoner, all of them, and will not let them go again. Never! He is free. He stands up. He stands alone. George has gone. He has outwitted him. What does he know of the murder? A mental specialist. An ass. A wide-open soul. Yet he would gladly steal the books. He would want him dead soon. Then he'd have the library. He won't get it. Patience! …

Kien seizes the book on the table and threatens his brother with it. He is trying to rob him; everyone is out for a will, everyone counts on the death of his nearest. A brother is good enough to die, thieves kitchen of a world, men devour and steal books. All want something and all are gone, and no one can wait. …

The books cascade off the shelves to the floor. He takes them up in his long arms. Very quietly, so that they can't hear him outside, he carries pile after pile into the hall. He builds them up high against the iron door. And while the frantic din tears his brain to fragments, he builds a mighty bulwark out of books. The hall is filled with volume upon volume. He fetches the ladder to help him. Soon he has reached the ceiling. He goes back to his room. The shelves gape at him. In front of the writing desk the carpet is ablaze. He goes into the bedroom next to the kitchen and drags out all the old newspapers. He pulls the pages apart, and crumples them, he rolls them into balls, and throws them into all the corners. He places the ladder in the middle of the room where it stood before. He climbs up to the sixth step, looks down on the fire and waits.

When the flames reached him at last, he laughed out loud, louder than he had ever laughed in all his life." (463-64)

Expectations are that Canetti should have given us a sympathetic hero in Peter Kien, the ascetic scholar as a unifying consciousness, someone who could ennoble and educate those with whom he comes in contact. In Therese, we would have expected to see the ignorant peasant as noble, educable. In Fischerle, the low-life aspirational dwarf as an American success story. In Pfaff, the former cop as righteous defender of the state. And in Georg Kien, the psychiatrist as selfless and effective. Canetti gives us none of this. Therese is brutishly ignoble. Fischerle is comically villainous. Pfaff is abusive. Georg is a buffoon. And Peter is delusional, paranoid: Insane. Thus the satire.

Indeed, if there is any consistent voice here, it is the voice of the misanthrope. Misogyny, anti-semitism, anti-humanism—the preponderant themes throughout—are all forms of misanthropy. There is nothing redeeming in any single character. All are unlikeable. The narrator whom I have called "Canetti", though he articulates their very essences, does not like any of his characters. And Canetti, the writer, draws them as two-dimensional caricatures, figures, stereotypes—each of whom is misapprehended and imagined as yet another sort of stereotype by each of the other characters. "Canetti" wants us to see how ridiculous each of these characters is, how prejudicial, limited, and insular. And Canetti wants us to agree with that.

But what to make of this carnival of grotesques? Is there some sort of intelligible, enduring message—beyond the specific context of Weimar Vienna—that can reach us here in the early 21st Century? Or is this all mere fun and games at the expense of the folks in Canetti's own place and time?

It would be too facile a hypothesis to assert, as many have, that Canetti is saying the integrity of the intellect is sapped and ultimately destroyed by forces of self-righteous ignorance and venal commercialism and brutality. Or, conversely, that the disengaged life of the intellect is no guard against the forces of what Canetti some decades later called the "mass man." (This, of course, was the Nobel verdict.) Canetti does not portray his scholar/protagonist in so sympathetic a manner as to justify such an easy reading.

We might, in homage to that foremost Sinologist, Peter Kien, assert in Confucian fashion: A man made out of words easily burns. Whatever the hell that might mean. It does, however, have the virtue of taking into account the whole of the story.

And, of course, that brings us back round to my own little pocket view: that of the Ur-story. I've used this analytical tool here on this blog to examine a number of crucial texts. (You can find most of them by looking on the right hand side of the page here, under the Pages heading, "Ur-story: Jim's Book Club.") Briefly and baldly restated, we recognize in the Ur-story aspects of our own essential mortality and the sense of loss and insecurity that entails, and the literature—and, frankly, anything worthy of the name—I've examined encompasses the varied and all-too-human responses to this fundamental existential situation.

Satire is certainly one mode of literary fiction. It is Canetti's here. In Auto-da-Fé, we note the loss inter alia of community, of rationality, of common sense, of basic communication, of human decency, of sympathy. Each character is out for him/herself, using each other character for her/his own ends. In this convention of solipsists, we have the clashing of many mutually exclusive worlds. Civilization itself, it seems, is at stake.

And the proper response to this situation of loss? According to Canetti: Ridicule. Unalloyed, unabashed ridicule.

Indeed, if there is anything to be drawn from this monstrous, difficult, monumental novel, it is that ridicule is the only proper response to the absurdity of the human situation—the proper response to the Ur-story: Life is meaningless and short. Hah! Hah! Hah! People are mean and low. Hee! Hee! Hee! Civilized culture is falling apart. Ho! Ho! Ho! Fuck you all!

So saith Canetti. So saith I. And this is why this is a great novel.

Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 7

(cont'd from previous posts)

I think I've finally found the appropriate theme song for my look at Elias Canetti's monstrous novel Auto-da-Fé, the second song in this YouTube video from Hüsker Dü's final album Warehouse Songs and Stories: "Charity, Chastity, Prudence, and Hope," beginning at 3:50 (The first song, "These Important Years," isn't half-bad either.)



If you click here, you will find the previous posts in this series (plus this one and any that come after). As always in blogland, they scroll from the bottom of the page upward.

I continue with my breakdown of the main characters. Today: Georg Kien. Georg, in my view, is primarily a vehicle for Canetti to explore and expound upon (i.e., hammer home) certain of the thematic ideas raised in the novel.

Georg is the only brother of Peter Kien, our protagonist. Peter first mentions his brother to the avaricious dwarf Fischerle: "Kien cited his brother in Paris, a well-known psychiatrist; earlier he had amassed a fortune as a gynaecologist. 'A fortune, did you say?' Fischerle immediately decided to make a halt in Paris on the way to America. 'He's the right man for me,' he said, 'I'll consult him about my hump.' 'But he's not a surgeon!' 'Don't matter; if he's been a gynaecologist, he can do anything.'" (267) Including psychoanalysis! The jokes at Freud's expense abound.

Again, in case we didn't get it the first time, Canetti restates the theme:

"It was long past noon, he couldn't eat for hate, when suddenly his eye fell on two large brass plates on a single house. One of them read: Dr. ERNEST FLINK, Gynaecologist. The other, immediately below, belonged to a Dr. MAXIMILIAN BUCHER, Specialist in Nervous Diseases. 'A silly woman could have everything she wanted all at once,' he thought and suddenly remembered Kien's brother in Paris, who had made his fortune as a gynaecologist and then turned to psychiatry." (335)

Before embarking on his journey to America, Fischerle sends Georg a telegram to summon him to Vienna. It reads: "Am completely crackers. Your brother." (337) And like a classic deus ex machina, Georg appears for the first time in the last eighth of the book, in the chapter entitled "A Madhouse," described as "beautiful and kind," (395) a real first for this book. Surely this is someone who can straighten out this mess.

"He was tall, strong, fiery, and sure of himself; in his features there was something of that gentleness which women need before they can feel at home with a man. Those who saw him compared him to Michelangelo's Adam. He understood very well how intelligence and elegance could be combined. His brilliant gifts had been brought to fruitful effectiveness by the policy of his beloved [Note: the third wife, much younger, wife of the founder of the institute where Georg works]. When she was sure that no one would follow her husband as the head of the institute but George himself, the director suddenly died without provoking any comment. George was at once nominated his successor and married her as a reward for her earlier services; of her last one he had no suspicion." (396)

Parsifal, anyone? Siegfried?

Georg's methods are radical for the time: "He treated his patients as if they were human beings. Faithfully he would listen to stories he had heard a thousand times before, and would express spontaneous surprise and amazement at the stalest dangers and anxieties. He laughed and cried with the patient he had in front of him." (396) He's a proto-R.D. Laing, listening to the voice of schizophrenia, absorbing its wisdom and poetry, empathizing with its pointed insight.

Canetti being "Canetti", he uses Georg to launch into a critique of the genteel literary fiction of the day:

"Since he had belonged to them [i.e., the patients consigned to his Institute] and given himself wholly to their constructions, he no longer cared for polite literature. Earlier he had read with passion, and had taken great pleasure in new turns given to old phrases which he had thought to be unchangeable, colourless, worn out and without meaning. Then words had meant little to him. He asked only academic correctness; the best novels were those in which the people spoke in the most cultured way. He who could express himself in the same way as all writers had done before him, was their legitimate successor. The task of such a writer was to reduce the angular, painful, biting multifariousness of life as it was all around one, to the smooth surface of a sheet of paper, on which it could pleasantly and swiftly be read off. Reading was fondling, was another form of love, was for ladies and ladies' doctors, to whose profession a delicate understanding of lecture intime properly belonged. No baffling turns of plot, no unusual words, the more often was the same track traversed, the subtler was the pleasure to be derived from the journey. All fiction—a textbook of good manners. Well-read men are obsessed with politeness. Their participation in the lives of others exhausts itself in congratulations and condolences. George Kien had started a gynaecologist. His youth and good looks brought patients in crowds. At that period, which did not last long, he gave himself up to French novels; they played a considerable part in assuring his success. Involuntarily he behaved to women as if he loved them. Each in turn approved his taste and accepted the consequences. Among the little monkeys a fashion for being ill spread. He took what fell into his lap and had difficulty in keeping up with his conquests. Surrounded and spoilt by innumerable women, all ready to serve him, he lived like Prince Gautama before he became Buddha." (398-99)

Canetti goes to some length to describe Georg's conversion from gynecology to psychiatry. It involves a banker's wife whom Georg is "treating", a pornographic work of art, a man whom "Canetti" calls a gorilla, and his devoted sex slave. The gorilla man speaks an invented language, a "private language" in Wittgenstein's terminology, in which the names for each object in his shuttered world shifts according to the man's momentary passion. As noted earlier, this appears to be a broadside against Berkeleyan subjective idealism. Georg learns the man's language and decides that he is happy, and he decides not to treat the man. He notes the similarity between the man and "the greatness of the distracted to whom his friend was so closely akin, and with the firm principle that he would learn from them but would heal none. He had had enough of polite literature" (403) Thus, he decides to become a psychiatrist. He becomes famous and is mentioned for the Nobel Prize.

Georg's theories differ from the conventional, bourgeois notions of his assistants:

"Conventionally minded, they held fast to the customs and beliefs of the majority in their period. They loved pleasure, and explained each and all in terms of the search for pleasure; it was the fashionable mania of the time, which filled every head and explained little. By pleasure they meant, of course, all the traditional naughtiness, which, since animals were animals, have been practised by the individual with contemptible repetition.

Of that far deeper and most special motive force of history, the desire of men to rise into a higher type of animal, in to 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 in itself a cordon sanitaire for the individual against the mass in his own soul.

We wage the so-called war of existence for the destruction of the mass-soul in ourselves, no less than for hunger and love. In certain circumstances it can become so strong as to force the individual to selfless acts or even acts contrary to their own interests. 'Mankind' has existed as a mass for long before it was conceived of and watered down into an idea. It foams, a huge, wild, full-blooded, warm animal in all of us, very deep, far deeper than the maternal. In spite of its age it is the youngest of the beasts, the essential creation of the earth, its goal and its future. We know nothing of it; we live still, supposedly as individuals. Sometimes the masses pour over us, one single flood, one ocean, in which each drop is alive, and each drop wants the same thing. But it soon scatters again, and leaves us once more to be ourselves, poor solitary devils. …There will come a time when it will not be scattered again, possibly in a single country at first, eating its way out from there, until no one can doubt any more, for there will be no I, you, he, but only it, the mass.

For one discovery alone Georges flattered himself, and it was precisely this: the effects of the mass on history in general and on the life of individuals; its influence on certain changes in the human mind. He had succeeded in proving it in the case of some of his patients. Countless people go mad because the mass in them is particularly strongly developed and can get no satisfaction. In no other way did he explain himself and his own activity. Once he had lived for his private tastes, his ambition and women; now his one desire was perpetually to lose himself. In this activity he came nearer to the thoughts and wishes of the mass, than did those other single people among whom he lived." (410-11)

Based on passages such as this, many readers of Auto-da-Fé attempt to link the novel up with Canetti's much later chef-d'ouevre Crowds and Power [vide the Nobel Committee] and assert that Canetti was prophesying the rise of Naziism in Germany. I shan't.

So, with all that magnificent background, what does Georg do in the novel? He heals Peter's severed finger and interviews him, using his favored Freudian techniques—flattery and self-abnegating empathy, the mirror-consciousness that creates transference in the patient—to get through to him. Peter, still delusional, attacks Georg as a fraud and, importantly, as a woman. They argue about women and sex and misogyny. They discuss Kant and Confuscius, Buddha and Wang Chung, and the history of institutional misogynism. At one point, Georg says:

"'Anything that has ever been said to me, whether to hurt or to flatter, I remember always. But mere statements, simple facts which might have been addressed to anyone else, these escape me with time. Artists have this—a memory for feelings, as I'd like to call it. Both together, a memory for feelings and a memory for facts—for that is what yours is—would make possible the universal man. Perhaps I have rated you too highly. If you and I could be moulded together into a single being, the result would be a spiritually complete man.'" (436)

Then Peter begins regaling Georg with mythic stories from Germany and Greece, and, in what I take to be the absolute artistic apex of the novel, Georg divines from this the truth of what has happened to Peter—his abuse by Therese and Pfaff. It is a magnificent yet preposterous reversal of the psychoanalytic hermeneutic in which the myths and archetypes of humanity are derived from the individual's account of his personal history. Brilliant and absurd! Only then is Peter able to drive off the mass-men persecutors of his brother and set things aright.

"Canetti", or I should say Canetti, allows Georg one last insight. After his interview with Peter, he learns that Peter has 'squandered' his half of their father's inheritance on his Asian library. "One half of their vast paternal inheritance was locked up in dead tomes, the other in a lunatic asylum. Which half had been the better used?" (451)

Georg re-ensconces Peter in his restored library, and all is right with the world. He returns to Paris. And if the novel had ended here, perhaps we should have found Georg to be the true redeemer. But no. There is one final reversal which throws everything that has gone before into question.

(to be continued)

Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 6

(cont'd from previous posts)

This is the continuation of my look at Elias Canetti's monumental novel Auto-da-Fé. If you click here, you will find the previous posts in this series (plus this one and any that come after). As always in blogland, they scroll from the bottom of the page upward.

I left off in the midst of looking at the major characters in the book. Sorry for the interruption.

Benedikt Pfaff, the brutish caretaker of Kien's apartment building, is a former policeman who, in the past, abused his wife and daughter literally to death. This is all in his backstory told in excruciating detail in Part Three, Chapter 1, "The Kind Father", but Canetti constantly references it to show how Pfaff's conscience haunts him throughout.

We first encounter Pfaff as the caretaker (super, watchdog) of Peter Kien's apartment building:

"From beggars and hawkers No. 24 Ehrlich Strasse had for many years been free. The caretaker, in his little box adjoining the entrance hall lay in wait day after day, ready to spring upon any passing derelict. People who counted on alms from this house held in mortal terror the oval peep-hole at the usual height, under which was written PORTER. Passing it, they stooped low, as if bowing down in gratitude, for some particularly charitable gift. Their caution was vain. The caretaker troubled himself not at all about the ordinary peep-hole. He had seen them long before they crouched past it. He had his own tried and tested method. A retired policeman, he was sly and indispensable. He did indeed see them through a peep-hole but not the one against which they were on their guard.

Two feet from the floor he had bored in the wall of his little box a second peep-hole. Here, where no one suspected him, he kept watch, kneeling. The world for him consisted of trousers and skirts. He was well acquainted with all those worn in the house itself; aliens he graded according to their cut, value or distinction. He had grown as expert in this as he had been in former times over arrests. He seldom erred. When a suspect came in view, he reached out, still kneeling, with his short, stout arm for the door latch; another idea of his—it was fixed on upside down. The fury with which he leapt to his feet opened it. The he rushed bellowing at the suspect and beat him within an inch of his life. On the first of every month, when his pension came, he allowed everyone free passage. Interested persons were well aware of this, and descended in swarms on the inmates of No. 24 Ehrlich Strasse, starved of beggars for a full month. Stragglers on the second and third days occasionally slipped through, or were at least not so painfully dealt with. From the fourth onwards only the very green tried their luck." (85)

Kien, after once being mistaken for a vagrant and nearly beaten to a pulp, tames the caretaker by giving him a monthly gratuity "larger than the tips of all the other tenants put together." He enlists Pfaff to help him throw out all the furniture with which Therese has cluttered up his library. Pfaff remains loyal to Kien—so long as the money keeps coming in. He visits Kien when he is sick and protects him from Therese's rages. Kien hallucinates, imagining Pfaff as a contemporary landsknecht. This delusion of peasant nobility, as so many others, abides.

After Therese exiles Kien from his library, the next time we see Pfaff, he is accompanying her to the pawn shop (the Theresianum) to try to wring some money from Kien's library to which both feel they are due. As they say in Hollywood, they "meet cute"—NOT. Therese is incensed that Kien has no money, and now that he's abandoned her (meaning, now that she's run him off), she's not sure what to do. Pfaff, likewise, is incensed because Kien, the "Professor", is late with his tip. Pfaff accosts Therese as she returns from yet another awkward, delusional encounter with the furniture salesman and asks her where Kien has gone. Therese is inarticulate, and Pfaff thinks she's killed the goose that laid his golden eggs. He storms up to the flat, searches it, tosses Kien's desk, and throws books to the ground in a rage. Therese brings over a ladder to help replace them:

"Her successful day moved her to sway her hips. With one hand the caretaker handed her the books, with the other he went for her and pinched her violently in the thigh. Her mouth watered. She was the first woman whom he had won by his method of wooing. All the others he had simply assaulted. Therese breathed to herself: There's a man! Again please. Aloud she said, bashfully: 'More!' He gave her a second pile of books and pinched her with equal violence on the left. Her mouth overflowed. Then it occurred to her that such things aren't done. She screamed and threw herself off the steps into his arms. He simply let her fall to the ground, broke open the starched skirt and had her.

When he got up, he said: 'That'll learn him, the old skeleton!' Therese sobbed: 'Excuse me, I belong to you now!' She had found a man. She had no intention of letting him go. He answered 'Shurrup!' and that very night moved into the flat. During the day he stayed at his post. At night he advised her, in bed. Little by little he learnt what had really happened, and ordered her unobtrusively to pawn the books before her husband came back. He would keep half the proceeds as his due." (280-81)

During the melee at the pawn shop, where Kien is trying to ransom books others are trying to pawn, Pfaff arrests Kien, beating up both Kien and Therese in the process. Eventually the police show up and subdue the maniacal Pfaff and bring Kien, Therese, and Pfaff down to the police station. All the while, Pfaff fears they want to question him for the disappearance of his wife and 'beloved' daughter—whom, we are told, he had abused mercilessly and killed ("He polished his red-haired fists on his daughter with real pleasure, he made less use of his wife. … [h]is wife died, of overstrain. … On the day after [her] funeral his honeymoon began. More undisturbed than before, he treated his daughter as he pleased." (367-68) He even puts the young girl through an unholy catechism:

"'A father has a right to…' '…the love of his child.' Loud and toneless, as though she were at school, she completed his sentences, but she felt very low.

'For getting married my daughter…' —he held out his arm—'…has no time.'

'She gets her keep from…' '…her good father.'

'Other men do not want…' '…to have her.'

'What could a man do with…' '…the silly child.'

'Now her father's going to…' '…arrest her.'

'On father's knee sits…' '…his obedient daughter.'

'A man gets tired in the…' '…police.'

'If my daughter isn't obedient she gets…' '…thrashed.'

'Her father know why he…' '…thrashes her.'

'My daughter isn't ever…' '…hurt.'

'She's got to learn what she…' '…owes to her father.'" (370) FN

After they return from the police station, Pfaff locks Kien up in his closet and returns upstairs to Therese in the flat. Kien watches the shoes and trousers that Pfaff normally observes through the lower peep-hole. Pfaff manages to extract even more money from Kien, forcing him to pay for food. When Therese appears with his dinner, Kien still believes himself to be hallucinating, puts on a blindfold and cuts off his finger, then kills Pfaffs beloved canaries—which, by the way, are the same color blue as Therese's iconic starched skirt. Pfaff does not get the chance to punish Kien because Kien's brother Georg shows up to save the day—sort of.

Georg sees through Pfaff's bluster, divines his guilt, manages to wring a confession out of him by pretending to be the chief of police from Paris, and drives him off with threats and bribery.

"Benedikt Pfaff, the stalwart ginger-headed tough, contracted his muscles, knelt down, folded his hands and implored the Head of the Police [whom he believes Georg to be] for forgiveness. His daughter had been ill, she would have died of her own accord anyway, he begged leave to recommend himself, and asked not to be sent away from his job. A man had nothing in the world except his peep-hole. … Pfaff promised to redeem all the books he had pawned, in person, on the following morning. He was, however, to leave the house. At the far end of town, close to the dairy shop bought for the woman, he was to be set up in the animal business." (454)

Not at all a satisfactory comeuppance for this thug.

[FN: A quick interpretive note: I'm trying to steer clear of interpretations here, but this one deserves a note mainly because so many readers of Auto-da-Fé find Canetti to be sympathetic of Georg, Kien's psychologist brother. One of the clear targets of Canetti's satire is the doctrinaire Freudianism of the day. One of the scandals of Freud's psychoanalytic theory relates to his theories of female hysteria and the so-called Electra complex. He derived these by discounting the testimonies of his neurotic female patients w/r/t to their abuse, physical and sexual, by their fathers. Simplistically stated, Freud attributed these to their repressed fantasies of being in love with their fathers—oh, and to their discovery that they lacked penises. Canetti here is viciously skewering Freud, in fact the very assumption on which much of his psychoanalytic theory of neurosis is founded: Pfaff's abuse of his daughter is very real and graphically drawn. And her fantasies of escape, however neurotic and projective, have nothing to do with either her lack of a penis or her love for her father.]

(to be yet continued)

Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 5

(cont'd from previous post)

After several interruptions (e.g., half marathon, Carolina in the NCAA tourney, MLB Opening Day) and diversions (e.g., the last several posts), I now plunge back into my look at Elias Canetti's fiction masterpiece Auto-da-Fé.

It's so easy, as a reader, to want to overinterpret literature. For those of us who grew up as 'people of the book', that is to say those of us of Judeo-Christian heritage, this was our mother's milk; we were raised to wring every ounce of meaning out of every Biblical passage we possibly could. "Who is the Son of God?" "What does the seven-headed dragon symbolize?" "666?" "What does it mean to 'honor' your parents and your God?" etc. What's hard in such a hyper-hermeneutic environment is to find the text's true limits and restrict reading to reasonable, legitimate inferences.

One problem is the tendency in literary criticism to universalize characters, and, lord knows, with Canetti's caricatures it's awfully easy to do so. But Barbara Johnson points us in one particularly fruitful direction in her discussion of Billy Budd. The great scandal of Herman Melville's unfinished novella was that it defied readers' expectations.

"No consideration of the nature of character in Billy Budd, however, can fail to take into account the fact that the fate of each of the characters is the direct reverse of what one is led to expect from his 'nature'. Billy is sweet, innocent, and harmless, yet he kills. Claggart is evil, perverted, and mendacious, yet he dies a victim. Vere is sagacious and responsible, yet allows a man whom he feels to be blameless to hang."

People want to identify with the characters, their essences, and be comforted by their fates: the bad guys get their comeuppances and the good guys prevail. This—more than worries about capital punishment, law vs. justice, repressed homosexuality, good vs. evil, Adam vs. Jesus Christ, etc.—this deep irony accounts for the Literary outrage caused by this seemingly simple tale about men on a ship at sea.

It also provides us a good way of approaching Auto-da-Fé: how do the fates of Elias Canetti's characters match their essences, and what does that tell us about what Canetti is up to? [N.B.: Canetti spills far too much ink, at least to contemporary sensibilities, detailing the minutiae of his characters' backstories. My analysis will focus, for the most part, on their actions 'in scene': what we see them do, not what Canetti tells us about their pasts.]

Therese Krummholz begins as Peter Kien's illiterate housekeeper. She seethes with lower class resentment. Kien, deluded about her, marries her in the belief she will protect his library from fire when he is not there. In a great comedic scene, she tries to seduce the monastic Kien but is a failure.

"Therese approached swinging her hips. She did not glide, she waddled. The gliding was simply the effect of the starched skirt. She said gaily: 'So thoughtful? Ah, men!' She held up her little finger, crooked it menacingly and pointed down at the divan. I must go to her, he thought, and did not know how but found himself standing at her side. What was he to do now—lie down on the books? He was shaking with fear, he prayed to the books, the last stockade. Therese caught his eye, she bent down and, with one all-embracing stoke of her left arm, swept the books on to the floor. He made a helpless gesture towards them, he longed to cry out, but horror choked him, he swallowed and could not utter a sound. A terrible hatred swelled up slowly within him. This she had dared. The books!

Therese took off her petticoat, folded it up carefully and laid it on the floor on top of the books. Then she made herself comfortable on the divan, crooked her little finger, grinned and said 'There!'

Kien plunged out of the room in long strides, bolted himself into the lavatory, the only room in the whole house where there were no books, automatically let his trousers down, took his place on the seat and cried like a child." (59)

Over time, she takes over more and more space in his spartan library, further desecrating his sanctuary. She demands that Kien purchase furniture for her. She is over fifty, but believes she is a desirable young woman. When she goes to buy furniture, a flattering salesman fawns over her. She believes he is in love with her and fantasizes a new life with him. In her new position, she starts feeling entitled and demands that Kien provide for her in his will. She mistakenly believes he is much richer than he is. He mistakes her demand, believing she wants to include him in her will. Once Kien tells her he has very little money and that he invested practically his entire inheritance in his library, she beats him senseless and throws him out of his own apartment.

Therese returns to the furniture store and disrobes in front of the flattering salesman. She is a spectacle and a laughing stock, but believes the people admire her beauty and dignity. She returns home, comforted in her delusional grandeur, meets up with Pfaff, the caretaker, a "real man," and they move in together in Kien's apartment. She and Pfaff decide to pawn all of Kien's books. Kien catches them, and mayhem ensues. Kien, believing her dead, refuses to recognize her for the rest of the novel. When Georg Kien comes to help his brother, he divines the situation with Therese and bribes her to vacate the apartment by promising to set her up in a dairy shop across town so long as she promises to steer clear of Peter. Happy ending.

After being kicked out of his own library/apartment/flat, Peter finds himself in a low-life cafe, the Stars of Heaven, filled with thieves, conmen, pimps, and prostitutes who fall upon him when he flashes the stacks of cash in his wallet. One of them, the Jewish dwarf Siegfried Fischerle, rescues him, primarily so he can poach Kien's fortune for himself. He is a chess-player, you see. Here we see him for the first time:

"Suddenly a vast hump appeared close to [Peter] and asked, could he sit there? Kien looked down fixedly. Where was the mouth out of which speech had issued? And already the owner of the hump, a dwarf, hopped up on to a chair. He managed to seat himself and turned a pair of large melancholy eyes towards Kien. The tip of his strongly hooked nose lay in the depth of his chin. His mouth was as small as himself—only it wasn't to be found. No forehead, no ears, no neck, no buttocks—the man consisted of a hump, a majestic nose and two black, calm, sad eyes. For a long time he said nothing; he was doubtless waiting while his appearance made its own impression. Kien accustomed himself to the new circumstance. Suddenly he heard a hoarse voice under underneath the table"

'How's business?'" (174-75)

Kien enlists Fischerle in his service, much as Don Quixote enlists Sancho Panza. Kien persists in the delusion that, even though he has been kicked out of his library, he is carrying around his entire library in his head. Like a cunning Panza, Fischerle buys into this delusion, even offering to help Kien by carrying around some the books in his hump. Each night Fischerle helps Kien unpack the 'books' from Kien's head and carefully stacks them in whatever hotel room they find themselves.

Fischerle's own plan is to relieve Kien of his money, dandify himself, and go to America to defeat Capablanca for the world championship of chess. In pursuit of this dream, he comes up with an elaborate con: he hires four denizens of the Stars of Heaven, gives them a stack of books, and tells them to go to the city's pawnshop, the Theresianum. He alerts Kien to the dangers of the shop, telling him that there is a book-eating ogre who works there, and gets him to pay the dwarf's minions not to pawn their books, i.e., ransom the books. Kien worries that the top floor of the pawnshop where the books are kept is a fire hazard. When Therese arrives, as noted, chaos ensues.

Fischerle manages to con Kien out of four-fifths of his fortune. He obtains a false passport, buys a garish suit of clothes, a suitcase, and a train ticket to take him to Paris and closer to his goal of America. Just before his train is set to leave, Fischerle returns to his flat above the Stars of Heaven to retrieve his notebook which, among other things, contains Capablanca's address. His wife, a prostitute, is entertaining one of Fischerle's former employees, a beggar who pretends to be blind to increase his take. He is seething because Fischerle, the last time he'd seen him, had tipped the blind man with a button—the thing in this world he detests the most.

"'He's under the bed!' screams the woman. 'What!' bellows the double. Four hands drag the dwarf out; two clutch him by the nose and throat. 'Johann Schwer is my name!' someone introduces himself out of the darkness, lets go of his nose, not of his throat, and bellows: 'There, eat that!' Fischerle takes the button into his mouth and tries to swallow. For a single breath the hand lets go of his throat, until the button has gone down. In the same breath Fischerle's mouth attempts a grin, and he gasps innocently: 'But that's my button!' Then the hand has him again and strangles him. A fist shatters his skull.

The blind man hurled him to the ground and fetched from the table in the corner of the little room a bread knife. With this he slit the coat and suit to shreds and cut off Fischerle's hump. He panted over the laborious work, the knife was too blunt for him and he wouldn't strike a light. The woman watched him, undressing meanwhile. She lay down on the bed and said: 'Ready!' But he wasn't yet ready. He wrapped the hump in the strips of the coat, spat on it once or twice and left the parcel where it was. The corpse he shoved under the bed. Then he threw himself on the woman. 'Not a soul heard anything,' he said and laughed. He was tired, but the woman was fat. He loved her all night long." (364-65)

A bad, ironic end.

(to be continued)

Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 4

(cont'd from previous post)

Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé is a complicated, complex, disorienting read. One of the problems we have is trying to get a fix on the narrative voice. It's difficult, for example, to identify the place of the narrator in the overall scheme of the novel.

He appears occasionally, using the characters, mainly Kien, to draw his conclusions. For example (p. 71):

"Blindness is a weapon against time and space; our being is one vast blindness, save only for that little circle which our mean intelligence—mean in its nature as in its scope—can illumine. The dominating principle of the universe is blindness. It makes possible juxtapositions which would be impossible if the objects could see each other. It permits the truncation of time when time is unendurable. Time is a continuum whence there is one escape only. By closing the eyes to it from time to time, it is possible to splinter it into those fragments with which alone we are familiar.

Kien had not discovered blindness, he only made use of it: a natural possibility by which the seeing live. Do we not to-day make use of every source of power of which we become possessed? On what means and possibilities has mankind not already laid hands? Any blockhead to-day can handle electricity and complicated atoms. Shapes to which one man as well as another may well be blind, fill Kien's room, his fingers, his books. This printed page, clear and co-ordinated as any other, is in reality an inferno of furious electrons. If he were perpetually conscious of this, the letter would dance before his eyes. His fingers would feel the pressure of their evil motion like so many needle pricks. In a single day he might manage to achieve one feeble line, no more. It is his right to apply that blindness, which protects him from the excesses of the senses, to every disturbing element in his life. The furniture exists as little for him as the army of atoms within and about him. Esse percipi, to be is to be perceived. What I do not perceive, does not exist. Woe to the feeble wretches who go blithely on their own way, whate'er betide.

Whence, with cogent logic, it was proved that Kien was in no wise deceiving himself." (71)

This is supposed to be Kien's philosophy, brought about by his closing his eyes to the influx of furniture brought in by Therese, lately his wife, to clutter up his Spartan library/apartment. If he ignores these things, they cease to exist. He refuses to acknowledge that which is unfamiliar. It is his weapon against that which he does not want to accept. The Latin, for those of you playing along at home, is from the English philosopher George Berkeley (sans the copulative); it is the watchword for his philosophy of "subjective idealism," something the scholar Kien might reasonably have been expected to be familiar with.

But the voice is simply too lucid to be Kien's. Kien is delusional and somewhat addle-brained. It's hard to believe Kien actually thinks in this rational a manner. Rather, this sounds more like the articulation of Kien's philosophy by that elusive narrative voice.

It's convenient, of course, to say that this is simply Elias being Elias; that the narrative voice is indistinguishable from the author's. It's convenient, but wouldn't be entirely accurate. The voice that articulates Kien's (and the other characters') thoughts so lucidly—the narrative voice—let's call "Canetti" (in scare quotes).

And this "Canetti" needs to be distinguished from the historical Canetti (no scare quotes), the Hungarian Jewish author, one-time lover of Iris Murdoch, and winner of the Nobel prize who died in 1994.

For Canetti, "subjective idealism" is a thing to be satirized; it's articulation has a clear purpose: Kien here is meant to represent the folly of Berkeleyan empiricism. Those whose idealism, whose systematic point of view, whose limited perspective, blinds them to real world facts that don't fit neatly into their schemes are the subject of his scorn—and they can be found in every age. Undoubtedly, this Canetti had specific targets in the context of Weimar-era Vienna in mind by attacking Berkeleyan subjectivism, but it is beyond my scope to suss out who they might have been.

Recall, too, that Canetti's original German title for the book was Die Blendung, or "The Blinding". This tells us that in this brief disquisition on blindness we are close to the heart of the book's stated intent. Suffice it say, in this Canetti's view, it is a bad thing to shut ourselves off from the realities of the world.

"Canetti" is more of a ventriloquist or puppeteer. He puts words in his characters's mouths and thoughts in their head. He articulates their essences, if you will, or individual consciousnesses. His is the unifying persona of the narrative. His voice is articulate and, frankly, somewhat heavy-handed and repetitive.

Canetti, on the other hand, eschews psychological realism. He engages in pointed Juvenalian satire. And that is because he has bigger fish to fry than the portrayal of an individual consciousness. In fact, it could be argued that the critique of the novelistic focus on character and consciousness is the very heart of Auto-da-Fé: to wit, the novelistic focus on individual consciousness blinds us to the uses and abuses of power and leads to the ultimate breakdown of the public sphere—family, community, culture, society, and ultimately the state.

(to be continued)

Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 3

(cont'd from previous post)

I continue today my look at Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé. It is a complex book which does not lend itself to easy analysis, and I often find myself at a loss how to proceed here. It is, as I noted in my first post in this series, a savage satire. And, generally, I find myself pretty much in agreement with Daniel Green:

"Although certainly the best satire is also the most artful, I would still maintain that satire aspires to be primarily a mode of moral or political discourse, or of cultural criticism, and not an object of aesthetic contemplation."

The problem with an older text such as Canetti's (1935) is that we latter-day readers (without the sort of massive, multi-disciplinary scholarship to which a blog like this one can hardly aspire) simply do not have authentic access to the object of the satire: namely, the moral, cultural, and political discourse against which the text levels its attack—to wit, Weimar-era Vienna. The question becomes, then, whether the novel is, therefore, simply out-of-date or whether we, today, can look at the only thing we have (the text itself) and try to draw out something interestingly meaningful? Stated differently, do the characteristics of our own society today somehow mirror those of interwar Austrian society such that Auto-da-Fé's satire may at least partially hit home? Is it still relevant today?

Assuming, then, that there is some sort of satiric brunt to the text to which we can have access, we must first look at the text itself—its aesthetic qualities—to see what it might be trying to say (or, at least how it might be trying to say whatever it is it is attempting to say), mindful all the while of our own complicity, as readers, in the very culture who's practices are potentially being satirized. [As I indicated in my first post, however, such an assumption of meaning is problematized by the text itself. Whether or not this assumption is an intended object of the book's satire is another question altogether going to the heart of my reading.]

That being said, it's really quite difficult to get a fix on this novel. For one thing, the narrative is problematic. The narrative voice remains aloof, yet it asserts its intimacy with all the book's characters. It bounces around from head to head, often in the same paragraph; fantasies, dreams, memories, thoughts, plans, intentions, judgments, and running internal commentary from different points of view commingle with the action and dialogue. This makes for difficult slogging when first reading the text, putting off many readers after about the second or third chapter. But, upon re-reading, it makes it even more difficult to get a sense of the novel's narrative unity.

Here's an example picked at random (p. 321 of the Wedgwood translation). It comes in one of the most farcical scenes in the book in the chapter called "Private Property". After a fracas at a pawn shop over some used books, Kien has been taken to the police station for questioning. Kien believes he has been hauled in because he killed Therese by locking her up in his library and abandoning her. In actuality, she ran him out and took over the apartment. He thinks she's dead and that he's hallucinating her presence before him. Pfaff, deluded by guilt, fears he's going to be interrogated for the incestuous, abusive death of his daughter. Each of the policemen has his own agenda, as well. Fischerle, the other major character, does not appear in this scene, but is present in his absence. His doppelgänger, the Fishwife, his female, Jewish, hunchback dwarf twin, is killed by the crowd at the pawn shop. They believe that because of her deformity she must have committed some vague crime. Fischerle, who was there, managed to escape after picking Kien's pocket. No one cares about the death of the poor, deformed Jewess; their inquiry is about a potential breach of the peace (breaking the glass door of the pawn shop) and a robbery of which, in point of fact, Kien is the victim [notes mine]:

"The policemen nudged each other. He [the inspector who'd been daydreaming about purchasing beautiful silk ties and worrying about his tiny nose] was in one of his moods. Therese's foot overstepped her circle [the starched, blue, hoop skirt she always wears]. The man with a memory [Policeman 1] saw his goal in sight. Not one word had he forgotten. He intended to repeat the whole story in place of the accused. 'He's tired already,' he said and shrugged a contemptuous shoulder at Kien, 'I'll tell you quicker!' Therese burst out: 'I ask you [her trademark phrase], he's murdering me.' In her fear, she spoke low. Kien heard her; he disallowed her. He would not turn round. Never! for what purpose? She was dead. Therese shouted: 'I ask you, I'm afraid!' The man with a memory [Policeman 1], annoyed at the interruption, challenged her: 'What's biting you?' The father [Policeman 2] spoke soothingly: 'Nature has created women the weaker sex,' a motto he had derived from his son's last German composition. The Inspector drew out his mirror, gaped at himself and sighed: 'I'm tired too.' His nose eluded him; nothing interested him any longer. Therese screamed: 'I ask you, he must be put away!' Once again Kien resisted her voice; he would not turn round. But he groaned loud. The caretaker [Pfaff] was sick of all the fuss. 'Professor!' he bellowed from behind, 'It's not so bad. We're all still alive. And no bones broken!' he couldn't relish death. That's how he was. With ponderous steps he strode forward. He intervened."

Whew! It's dizzying. The reader has to keep in mind and catalog each character's reasons for being in the scene, their history, their delusions, etc.

Contemporary novel readers are used to psychological realism. Though we know that there is a writer actually writing the words on the page the characters speak and think, we bracket this knowledge and pretend we are gaining some sort of privileged insight into the internal world of the characters. The writer achieves this aesthetic effect by using, mainly, either the first person POV or the free indirect style. And the reader accepts that the realist author tries to portray each character uniquely and multi-dimensionally. To give each character a different voice—something I've called elsewhere on this blog "method writing."

This simply does not happen here. The characters are stereotypes, flat. Certain characters have limited vocabularies and specific recurring identifying markers and motifs, but their thoughts and utterances do not vary in style. Because of this, it's often difficult to pin down the narrative point of view. It rings false to our aesthetic ear. What's more, because of this perspectival relativism, there doesn't appear to be a global narrative voice. And we feel disoriented.

(to be continued)

Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 2

Link

(cont'd from previous post)

Those of you familiar with my Ur-story series of readings [see sidebar] will recall that I try to focus on the elements of the text from a writer's point of view, with special emphasis on the relationship of the work to something I call the Ur-story: an uber-theme in literature stretching from the Gilgamesh to Gillespie, from Jahweh to Gaddis. Briefly restated, the ultimate subject matter of serious literature (which I take to include comedy, by the way) has to do with the individual's coming to consciousness of the inevitability of her own mortality and the multiform variety of human (all-too-human) responses to this profound sense of existential loss.

How does Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé fit into this scheme, if at all? Let's take a look.

Instead of a cast of realistic characters, Auto-da-Fé presents the reader with a parade of grotesques. None of the main characters is remotely sympathetic or likeable. All are stereotypes. Most are insane or at least maximally delusional. Each has his/her own rather utilitarian agenda which is mutually exclusive and, in effect, incognizant of the humanity of any of the others.

The main character is Peter Kien. Peter (I'll use his Christian name to distinguish him from his brother Georg(-e)(-s) Kien) is a philologist and reputedly (at least according to him) the world's foremost sinologist, i.e., interpreter of Chinese texts. He is described as tall, skeletal, absent- and single-minded. He is reclusive and misanthropic. He possesses what is claimed to be the greatest private library in the city (let's call it Vienna), some 25,000 books, comprised mostly of original Chinese texts. He cares for his books more than for his fellow man. In fact, for part of the novel he is said to carry his library around with him in his head. When we first find him, he is engaged in scholarly research, but he refuses to submit it to professional journals or read it at academic conferences both of which he disdains. Thus, his reliability is suspect from the first.

The narrative revolves around Peter (though is not told from his perspective (more on that later)) and his interactions with the four other major characters. Therese Krummholz is the illiterate, 50-something housekeeper Peter marries because he believes she will take care of his library. She is lustful and vain and self-righteous and is always associated with a starched blue skirt. Siegfried Fischerle is a hook-nosed, hunchbacked, chess-playing, thieving, lowlife, Jewish dwarf who dreams of going to America and dethroning Capablanca to become world chess champion. Benedikt Pfaff is the thuggish, ex-cop caretaker of Peter's apartment building. His flaming red hair and expressive fists are the iconic leitmotifs of his character. He raises canaries in the small closet where his abusive behavior ultimately resulted in the deaths of his wife and his 'beloved' daughter the guilt for which he carries around with him throughout the novel. Georg Kien is a gynecologist-turned-psychiatrist (a joke in itself) who indulges the madnesses of his patients. He is handsome, well-meaning, and vapid. He is meant to be a sort of last hope, a deus ex machina whose efforts at redemption ultimately come to naught.

Reading Auto-da-Fé is like showing up at the proverbial convention of solipsists (and this includes the minor characters as well); the joke being whether there can ever be more than one person in attendance.

(to be continued)

Ur-Story: Burning Man, Part 1

Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé is not an easy novel. By any coventional measure, it's not a fun book. It is savage. It is misanthropic in so many ways. Its satiric vision is merciless and bleak. Its style is wordy and clunky (which may be a result of its being German and translated) and repetitious; it certainly isn't lyrical. The narrative voice tramples upon the action and dialogue. The characters are stereotypes and caricatures; they seem like tokens being manipulated around a game board to execute the overall strategy of the writer. None of the characters are likeable, and ultimately they're all utterly unredeemable. Neither does the dialogue seem organic to the characters; it feels as though the writer is putting arguments in his characters' mouths. The book does not have a conventional plot. Its story is crabbed. Its imagery is heavy-handedly symbolic. At first face, it feels as if its themes overwhelm its characters and the plotlines, but then it mocks the reader's intellectualizing expectations. Ultimately, it provides the reader no comfort or consolation.

Why read it then? one might ask; no one likes to be mocked. Good question that.

Originally published in 1935, in German, under the title Die Blendung (The Blinding or The Dazzlement or The Glare), it was first translated into English in 1947 and titled The Tower of Babel. It was Elias Canetti's first and, it turns out, only novel. I'm not sure it could be published in today's pop cultural, affirmational, commercial publishing climate.

It is heavily allusional and grounded in the culture of Weimar-era Vienna, an aspect (intertextuality) and an audience-response (dated) that will, unfortunately, escape most non-scholarly, contemporary readings.

Like Melville's Moby Dick and Gass's The Tunnel, it is monumental and controversial. Like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, it delves into madness and delusion. Culturally, it belongs on the shelf alongside such modernist contemporaries as Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers, and Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, among others.

Canetti won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. According to the Nobel committee,

"His oeuvre consists of a novel, three plays, several volumes of notes and aphorisms, a profound examination of the origin, structures and effect of the mass movement, a travel book, portraits of authors, character studies, and memoirs; but these writings, pursued in such different directions, are held together by a most original and vigorously profiled personality. ... The main scene of the macabre and grotesque events that [Auto-da-Fé] discloses is an apartment house in Vienna. It is an aspect of key importance when Die Blendung is regarded by several critics as a single fundamental metaphor for the threat exercised by the "mass man" within ourselves. Close at hand is the viewpoint from which the novel stands out as a study of a type of man who isolates himself in self-sufficient specialization - here, the sinologist Peter Kien surrounded by his many books - only to succumb helplessly in a world of ruthlessly harsh realities."

The Nobel Committee's vague and passive thematic association of Auto-da-Fé with Canetti's later, magisterial Crowds and Power (1962) is not only anachronistic, it is too simplistic a read. It's almost as if they didn't quite want to have deal with it on its own, as if to say anything directly about it might somehow contaminate them. One can almost see the reviewer holding the soiled, reeking manuscript out at arm's length with one hand and holding his nose with the other as he decides what to say about it. After all, he simply couldn't ignore it.

And certainly, there is an element of intellectual elitism vs. ignorant populism in the situation of the novel, but this single opposition makes for an unsatisfying thesis—as, I would suggest, would any single such construction. The last chapter of the novel effectively throws all such attempts at structural explanations into disarray. It casts us back on our theories and imputations of meaning. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Suffice it to say Auto-da-Fé avoids easy closure. In lit-crit jargon, it problematizes meaning itself.

Beware: Spoilers this way loom.

[to be continued]