Elias Canetti's Auto-Da-Fé

The End of Modernism From 1949 to 2004, UNC Press and the UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures published the UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures series. Monographs, anthologies, and critical editions in the series covered an array of topics including medieval and modern literature, theater, linguistics, philology, onomastics, and the history of ideas. Through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, books in the series have been reissued in new paperback and open access digital editions. For a complete list of books visit www.uncpress.org. The End of Modernism Elias Canetti’sAuto-da-Fé william collins donahue UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Number 124 Copyright © 2001 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons cc by-nc-nd license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses. Suggested citation: Donahue, William Collins. The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. doi: https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807875223_Donahue Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Donahue, William Collins. Title: The end of Modernism : Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-fé / by William Collins Donahue. Other titles: University of North Carolina studies in the Germanic languages and literatures ; no. 124. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2001] Series: University of North Carolina studies in the Germanic languages and literatures | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2001035150 | isbn 978-1-4696-5742-4 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 978-1-4696-5743-1 (ebook) Subjects: Canetti, Elias, 1905- Blendung. Classifications: lcc pt2605.a58 z656 2001 | ddc 833/.912 — dc21 For my parents, Dorothy and John Donahue ‘‘Noch spür’ ich ihren Atem auf den Wangen.’’ This page intentionally left blank contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xv 'PSFXPSEUPUIFFEJUJPOYJY Introduction:ModernisminaDifferentKey1 1. TheNovel(s)intheNovel: Modernism as Parody of Popular Realism 18 2. ‘‘The truth is you’re a woman. You live for sensations.’’: Misogyny as Cultural Critique 43 3. Self-Indulgent Philosophies of the Weimar Period: The Use and Abuse of Neoempiricism and Neo-Kantianism 76 4. The Hunchback of ‘‘Heaven’’: Anti-Semitism and the Failure of Humanism 106 5. ‘‘An Impudent Choir of Croaking Frogs’’: Freud and the Freudians as the Novel’s Secret Sharers 137 6. Neither Adorno nor Lukács: Canetti’s Analytic Modernism 174 Notes 207 Bibliography 257 Index 271 This page intentionally left blank illustrations 1. Title page from a turn-of-the-century edition of Willibald Alexis’s DieHosendesHerrnvonBredow23 2. Jewish men publicly ogle an ‘‘Aryan’’ beauty (from Kurt Plischke, Der Jude als Rassenschänder) 51 3. ‘‘The Martyr Abroad’’: visual background to Fischerle’s escapist fantasy of American success (anti-Semitic cartoon from Brennessel) 52 4. ‘‘Der kleine Cohn’’—The malformed shirker as Fischerle’s cultural prototype (World War I–era postcard) 116 5. The stinking Jew: cultural reiterations of the ‘‘Fischerle type’’ (anti-Semitic caricature by Josef Plank) 121 6. ‘‘This total nose’’ (caricature from the anti-Semitic Kikeriki) 122 7. An anti-Semitic children’s book, Trau keinem Fuchs, teaches lessons on ‘‘Jewish’’ and ‘‘Aryan’’ physiognomy 123 8. Blond Germanic Siegfried approaches the dwarf Alberich (from Fritz Lang’s 1924 Siegfried) 126 9. ‘‘Jewish Metamorphosis’’ (a caricature of Jewish assimilation as essentially superficial) 132 This page intentionally left blank preface Canetti’s novel never fails to elicit rather strong opinions. Recently in the New Yorker, David Denby declared it ‘‘a long, provocatively odd, and emo- tionally demanding novel.’’ 1 Remarkable amidst the variety of these dis- tinctly unambivalent reactions is the fact that readers have tended to see Auto-da-Fé as a compellingly contemporary work, and in one notable case, even pronounced it a ‘‘postwar novel.’’ 2 This is an understandable error. Canetti did not really gain wide recognition until the early 1960s, when his quixotic anthropological study Crowds and Power first appeared. Implicitly addressing the Cold War stalemate, and hailed as ‘‘above ideology,’’ this much-discussed book was bound to encourage readers to associate Canetti in the first instance with the burning issues of that bipolar world, rather than with prewar modernist fiction. Yet placing Canetti the novelist alongside the likes of such unmistakably postwar writers as Grass, Böll, and Christa Wolf was probably more than an oversight. Those who read and reviewed the novel at this time, including those who certainly knew of its Weimar-era ori- gins (such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger), were in fact quite prepared to view it as a work chiefly about contemporary society. It may be that ‘‘social relevance’’ was already becoming a dominant criterion of literary achieve- ment, even before the student movement established it more firmly. And it may also be that some critics simply mistook the date of republication—it was reissued in the wake of Crowds and Power in order, in part, to capital- ize on that book’s success—for the original date. Whatever the case, nobody seemed to miss the modernist context of the early 1930s, when Canetti actu- ally wrote what would be his only published novel. There is more to this, of course, than merely a testimony to the novel’s ageless appeal, though this would have pleased Canetti immensely since he aspired to nothing more than to be a writer who transcended his own times. This episode reflects an important fact about Auto-da-Fé: readers, even literary critics, are curiously disinclined to associate Canetti’s novel with the classics of literary modernism. For this, as I endeavor to demonstrate, there xii : preface is very good reason. Though surely part of the same anti-realist tradition that embraces Joyce, Musil, and Rilke, Canetti is indeed strikingly different. The novel’s wicked humor, its analytic posture, and above all its concern for the diminishing public sphere set it far apart from what we would come to know as ‘‘aesthetic,’’ or ‘‘high modernism.’’ In a graduate seminar on modernism, I recall asking about those es- tranged and world-weary aesthetes, the typical protagonists of high modernism: How did they navigate their social lives? My question, which arose out of my reading of Auto-da-Fé (a novel, incidentally, that was not on the course syllabus), was met with polite disinterest. As I began to work my way into the secondary literature, it occurred to me that critics often only complicated the matter by attempting to apply a high modernist template that just does not fit Auto-da-Fé. And, when the novel failed to measure up, they credited themselves with having discovered an ‘‘error’’ in its concep- tion. Fortunately, just around the time of these musings, a paradigm shift occurred—in the case of German literature, one that is associated chiefly with Peter Bürger, Russell Berman, and Andreas Huyssen—that enabled me to approach the novel with an eye to its rich social and cultural context. This approach has proven most fruitful above all in taking the novel on its own terms, opening up a vista on a whole array of topics that up to now have only been addressed, if at all, in piecemeal fashion. While this more capacious view of modernism structures the bulk of this study, allowing me to tap into Canetti’s unwavering interest in social ar- rangements, it occurred to me that adhering to the traditional construction ofliterarymodernismmay,initsownway,provejustasinstructive.What first helped me see the distinctive features of Auto-da-Fé, after all, was the marked contrast with aesthetic modernism. Thus in the final chapter of this study, I turn back the clock and place Canetti’s novel in the context of high modernism. This exercise throws the novel into contrastive relief, revealing more clearly than otherwise possible all the narrative features that comprise what I have dubbed Canetti’s trademark ‘‘analytic modernism.’’ Readers familiar with Canetti’s engaging autobiography, the evocative North African travel memoir, or his far-flung anthropological study are typi- cally struck by the breadth of the author’s interests, the variety of his experience, and the quality of his erudition. These same expectations are fully met in Auto-da-Fé, yet up to this point there was no book available to guide the reader through the rich and complex contexts and intertexts that make preface : xiii reading this challenging novel such a rewarding experience. Despite some valuable monographs on particular aspects of the novel, as well as quite gen- eral surveys of Canetti’s entire oeuvre, we have lacked a substantial study of the full range of topics broached by the novel: the Freud satire, the ‘‘cultural’’ case for misogyny, the virulent racial anti-Semitism in its relationship to a failed humanism, and a cluster of philosophical and pseudophilosophical movements of the interwar period. Though Canetti’s novel belonged to world literature long before it was reclaimed by German readers in the early 1960s, scholarship has tended to favor the German readership. I will attempt to serve two masters: both the generalist who knows the novel as Auto-da-Fé in the ordinarily quite ex- cellent Wedgwood translation, as well as the more specialized Germanist, who will want to examine the original text in the context of my analysis. In order to accomplish both tasks I have arrived at the following solution: I have translated all quotations (or used available standard editions) from the secondary literature, including Freud, Adorno, and Lukács. For the novel itself, which is the principal object of my study, I have provided both the English (which in not a few cases represents my revision of Wedgwood) and Canetti’s German original. While this may seem pedantic and cumbersome, it will, I think, prove worthwhile.

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