Auto-da-Fé

Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé (its earliest draft dating from 1931) is as impressive a first novel as was written in the twentieth century. It was originally intended to be the first of an eight-volume comédie (or tragicomédie) humaine of modern times, peopled by madmen of the type that were confined in the Steinhof, the insane asylum that Canetti could see from the window of his room while he was writing. It was to be an enormous fictional typology of the madness of the age, with each novel intended to present a different kind of monomaniac—among others, a religious fanatic, a truth fanatic, a technological maniac, a wastrel, an obsessive collector, and a bibliomaniac. Through such exemplary figures, Canetti wanted to turn a glaring spotlight on the contemporary world. It is thought that only one other novel in the projected series was completed, a volume titled “Der Todfeind” (not in the usual sense of “mortal enemy” but meaning “the enemy of death,” which is a fair description of Canetti himself). Canetti may have produced sketches for other works of fiction, but after expressing his own alienation and frustration in his first book, he apparently found the novel form wanting for his purposes and became increasingly interested in presenting his thoughts in nonfictional form, particularly in Crowds and Power.

Canetti’s working title for his novel was “Kant fängt Feuer” (Kant catches fire), but the author soon chose not to use the name of the famous German philosopher for hisprotagonist. He also rejected the name Brand as too obvious an evocation of the Holocaust motif, though he finally settled on the scarcely less evocative name Kien, which means “pinewood.” Rembrandt’s painting The Blinding of Samson appears to have suggested the somewhat ambiguous title of the novel (Die Blendung means “the blinding,” with suggestions also of “dazzlement” and “deception”).

The ascetic Peter Kien describes himself as a “library owner”; as reclusive as he is erudite, this renowned philologist and sinologist represents a “head without a world.” In his obsession with books, having isolated himself from everyone else, he allows himself to get into the clutches of his scheming housekeeper, Therese, whose favorite item of apparel is a starched blue skirt (a garment worn by Canetti’s far more humane real-life landlady). When Kien marries this mindless, avaricious, lustful, and generally evil creature, he ostensibly does so for the sake of his beloved books (and on the advice of Confucius, one of the savants with whom he communes).

Following his traumatic expulsion from the paradise of his enormous library, Kien embarks on a peculiar odyssey and descends to the lower depths of society, a “world without a head.” Therese’s work of degradation is continued and completed by the predatory chess-playing hunchback Fischerle and the philistine janitor Benedikt Pfaff. Their cruelly exploitative stratagems, including the pawning of some of Kien’s books at the Theresianum (a disguised version of the actual Dorotheum, Vienna’s state-owned pawnshop and auction house), serve as a grotesque counterpoint to Kien’s idées fixes and the progressive unhinging of his mind. Kien’s final act is an apocalyptic self-immolation amid his books to his own uncontrollable laughter—a “wedge driven into our consciousness.”

Canetti’s novel seems to have been written in the white heat of rage and hate. To that extent, it reflects the influence of his mentor, Kraus, who wrote: “Hatred must make a person productive; otherwise one might as well love.” Auto-da-Fé may be read as a subtle political and social satire, an allegorical portrayal of a sick society, and a chilling adumbration of the crushing of the vulnerable “pure” intellect by the brutish “practical” forces of the modern world. Aside from the narrator, the only sane person in the book is a sweet child who appears at the very beginning. Even Kien’s brother Georges, a Paris psychiatrist who comes to his demented brother’s aid and seems to represent an oasis of rationality, finds insanity more interesting and worthwhile than sanity and may, paradoxically, abet the forces that push Kien over the edge.

Despite the banal viciousness of the characters and the prevalence of violence in the book, Auto-da-Fé may be read as a great comic novel; it includes many genuinely funny scenes and situations that give rise to that “thoughtful laughter” which George Meredith identified as the index of the comic spirit. In this typology of madness, however, any laughter is bound to be the sardonic rather than the liberating kind. Bertha Keveson-Hertz has properly identified “Swiftean satire, Dickensian humor, Proustian insulation, Joycean interiorization, and Poe’s maelstrom nightmares” in Canetti’s novel.

Claudio Magris has observed that

In his depictions of the range of elementary human instincts, Canetti somehow neglects the erotic sphere, but he does suggest that the urge to merge with the crowd implies a kind of sexual energy and interest.

Through Canetti’s craftsmanship, the reader is drawn into the oppressive atmosphere of the book with a growing sense of discomfort. The erlebte Rede, or interior monologue, is an effective device by means of which the storyteller lets the reader get into the mind of each character. The narrative ambience contains many surreal touches, yet these grotesque elements somehow seem natural.

It is possible to read Auto-da-Fé as a sort of inversion of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802): Peter Kien’s library is the Paradise; the city (of Vienna) is the Purgatory; the fire is the Inferno. Everything in the book moves in a magic circle of aberration. The author identifies with the limitations of his characters, and, unlike many other novelists, he makes no attempt to act as an omniscient narrator who restores order and sits in judgment. Canetti ascribes a peculiar role to madness: The aberrant becomes the rule and normality the exception as contrasts are leveled and personal qualities are impoverished. The blessing of originality has a price, and it is loneliness. The language of lunatics ought to unite them; instead, it creates a gulf between them, and soliloquy replaces discourse.

At the Ideal Heaven café, frequented by Fischerle and other shady characters, there is a “geschlossene Masse,” a closed company; the other characters live outside the crowd. Brother Georges judges the masses positively, whereas Peter Kien hates the masses as an incarnation of the primitive and the barbaric. The hypnotic attraction to fire is seen as one of the characteristics of the crowd, and in this regard (as in others, though not in political, historical, and other topical matters), Canetti drew on his real-life experiences. In July of 1927, he had witnessed the burning of the building of the Ministry of Justice on Vienna’s Ringstrasse by a mob enraged by a jury’s acquittal of some killers; the ensuing police riot claimed many innocent victims.

The disturbing figure of the scheming pimp and pander, Siegfried Fischer, known as Fischerle, has come in for some critical speculation. Might Canetti intend this petty criminal to represent the assimilated Jew in Austrian society, and is the cutting off of his hump (by a beggar) a symbolic adumbration of the bloody end of assimilation for Austrian Jewry? It is difficult, however, to accept such an interpretation of a character who is depicted as an anti-Semite’s stereotype; in any case, the drama of Fischerle’s life begins when he abandons the crowd and desires to become a chess champion in America, where his hunchback will somehow disappear. As for the vicious building superintendent, Pfaff—with huge fists and powerful feet—he is a recognizable Viennese type who was to see his day of fascist glory in Adolf Hitler’s Austria.

Georges seems to be a paragon of strength, worldliness, empathy, and sanity. He attempts to straighten out his brother’s life and to act as a deus ex machina, but he fails to recognize Peter’s true state of mind. The doctor finds the insane more interesting than the sane; for example, the patient called the Gorilla has access to levels of experience not available to the sane. Is insanity, Georges wonders, perhaps a higher form of existence? In his inner complexity, Georges may actually represent only a more sublime form of moral aberration, a metaphysical type of madness.

Kien may be regarded as a modern Don Quixote. Both characters may be pictured as middle-aged, tall, emaciated, storklike, sexless, and virtually disembodied in their unworldliness and rejection of bodily needs and functions. Therese, Pfaff, and Fischerle are the satellites that correspond to Sancho Panza. In both cases, there is an obsession with books, a consultation with them in times of need, and a readiness to do battle with their enemies. In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), the absoluteness of literature is stressed; in Auto-da-Fé, the absoluteness of scholarship has pride of place. Don Quixote reads the world in confirmation of books; Kien finds bliss in them and distress in the reality surrounding him. Don Quixote misinterprets reality; Kien negates it. Don Quixote has a catharsis and regains his good judgment before his idyllic or lyric death; Kien is vouchsafed no such grace: He piles his books into a mighty fortress before torching them, perishing with the treasures he has tried so hard to preserve. His flight into the flames is his only escape from his own isolation; death by fire is his deliverance, his expiation, and also an act of nemesis. In Cervantes’ novel, there is some real dialogue, but Kien’s conversations, with the possible exception of some of those with his brother, create no human contacts. Certainly the split between the hero (or antihero) and the world has been a recurrent theme in world literature since Cervantes. In his only work of fiction, Canetti handles this theme with consummate skill, with awful prescience, and with soul-searing impact.

Kafka’s influence

An even more obvious influence on Auto-da-Fé than the work of Cervantes is that of Franz Kafka. In The Conscience of Words, Canetti notes that when he was working on his novel’s eighth chapter, he discovered Kafka’s long short story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1936) and tried to imitate it. This fascination with Kafka continued at least into the 1960’s, when Canetti wrote Kafka’s Other Trial, about Kafka’s troubled engagement with Felice Bauer. In that work, Canetti argues controversially that Kafka’s novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937) was inspired by that flawed romance. Because Canetti tended to identify with Kafka, one might wonder if Canetti was projecting the origins of his own Auto-da-Fé on those of The Trial. As is evident from his wife’s stories—overt commentaries on social ills—she was more extroverted than he. Particularly in his early works, his approach is typically introverted, referring only obliquely to topical events. Similarly, Kafka tended to be much more introverted than Felice. In Auto-da-Fé, the dysfunctional relationship of Kien and his wife is a caricature of such a pairing.

In The Conscience of Words, Canetti praises Kafka’s writings as being like Chinese literature in their acceptance of powerlessness. Chinese literature is Kien’s obsession, his way of withdrawing from the world. In Crowds and Power, Canetti contends that all human beings secretly fear all others and want to be the sole survivors of the human race. He categorizes ancient leaders either as “kings” (extroverts, who wish to dominate others) or “shamans” (introverts, content to try to unify their own internal divisions). According to Canetti, Kafka’s superiority even over ancient shamans is that in various fictions he recognized the animal-like (and other) parts within him, whereas the shamans believed they became such animals literally. How then is one to assess Kien against this standard? He is to be praised for withdrawing from the kings’ political sphere and also for freeing himself from shamanlike superstitions, but his scholarship attacks ruthlessly all points of view other than his own, and he is sadly ignorant of his own self-contradictions—an ignorance that strengthens his will but ultimately leads toward madness. At the conclusion of the novel, his brain is described as being torn to fragments, against which chaos and that of the society around him he builds a wall of books, sets it on fire, and laughs insanely.

In The Tongue Set Free, Canetti explains how differences in languages left him with inner turmoil. In his childhood, he was forced to learn some Ladino, Romanian, Bulgarian, Romany, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Turkish, German, and English, along with their associated cultures, all of them subtly or overtly in conflict with each other, so that his lifelong, introspective struggle to unify internal contradictions was understandable, particularly when Europe itself was much torn by internal conflicts. Composed when the rise of Nazi Germany was a chaos trying to batter its way into Canetti’s study, the comedy of Auto-da-Fé may have helped him resist an introverted temptation to withdraw as self-destructively as did Kien into extreme, Kafka-like introversion.