Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti

First published:Die Blendung, 1935 (English translation, 1946; also as The Tower of Babel, 1947)

Type of work: Parody

Time of work: Probably the 1930’s

Locale: Vienna and Paris

Principal Characters:

• Peter Kien, a world-famous sinologist with a private library of twenty-five thousand books
• Therese, his vulgar and greedy housekeeper, whom he marries
• Fischerle, a hunchbacked dwarf who befriends Kien in order to swindle him
• Benedikt Pfaff, a sadistic house porter who becomes Therese’s lover
• George Kien, Peter Kien’s younger brother, a distinguished psychiatrist

The Novel

Elias Canetti divides Auto-da-Fe into three sections: “A Head Without a World,” “Headless World,” and “The World in the Head.” The “head” is Peter Kien, a reclusive, internationally renowned sinologist who lives in a top-floor apartment, engulfed by his twenty-five thousand books. He is a purely cerebral bachelor, divorced from any awareness of human beings or human values. He has no significant contact with the world beyond his scholarly reading. Therefore, he believes that “Knowledge and truth [are]... identical terms. You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.”

Kien hires a housekeeper, Therese, who is noiseless and seemingly devoted to each of his tomes, handling them with gloves. Soon Kien has a nightmare in which he is the sacrificial victim of two Mexican priests who, disguised as jaguars, drive books through his body and then burn both him and the books on an altar. Awakening, Kien dissects the dream rationally, finding the origin of each element in his recent reading and dismissing the vision’s subrational omens. He decides to marry Therese, regarding her as “the heaven-sent instrument for preserving my library. If there is a fire I can trust in her.”

Kien and Therese are soon at odds in a bizarre maze of misapprehensions and cross-purposes. The vehemently materialistic Therese screams greedy demands at him and insists on obtaining his bankbook; she also wants him to make his will in her favor. (She has the mistaken idea that her husband is wealthy.) When he refuses, she bodily ejects him from their apartment. Kien then meets Fischerle, a hunchbacked, dwarfish pickpocket who dreams of becoming the world’s chess champion. Kien’s demented devotion to books drives him to “buy” copies of a vast number by taking inventories in the city’s bookshops of all available volumes that correspond to his own library. He then mentally “unloads” them in his hotel room each night, lifting “packet” after “packet” out of his deluded head. Yet he never actually purchases any of them. Fischerle profits from Kien’s madness by inventing a quartet of quasi-sellers who “sell” books to Kien, while the dwarf pockets the lion’s share of the money Kien has withdrawn from his savings account to pay for them.

Kien also imagines that his harridan wife, driven by her avarice, has taken no time to buy food and has, therefore, had to cannibalize herself, eating portions of her own body until she has consumed herself. Convinced that Therese is dead, Kien strenuously denies her weighty presence when she insists on having him arrested for the “theft” of their savings. In a grotesque address to the mentally retarded police officers, Kien asks them, in the terrifying presence of his wife, to “Liberate me from this hallucination!... Prove to me that she is dead!”

After Fischerle has been barbarously murdered and mutilated by one of his whorish wife’s lovers, Kien returns to his home. Fearing Therese, however, he hides in the brutal caretaker Benedikt Pfaff’s cellar apartment, subject to his cuffs and kicks. There, he is discovered by the novel’s only sane and stable personality, Kien’s younger brother George, director of a mental asylum in Paris. George is able to rid Peter of both Therese and Pfaff, and restore him to his library. Once George has returned to his patients, however, Peter breaks down completely. He imagines his beloved books revolting against their owner, with letters detaching themselves from their pages to assault his ears, footnotes kicking him, and the whole library becoming a “damnable mob.” Fantasizing that even his brother is plotting to rob him of his books and that the police are outside the apartment door about to arrest him for having murdered Therese, Kien sets his books ablaze, climbs to the top rung of his ladder, and there awaits a Wagnerian self-immolation while laughing the loudest laughs of his life.

The Characters

In an illuminating essay he wrote in 1973, Canetti summarized Auto-da-Fe’s composition and initial reception. In 1929 and 1930, he originally planned a Balzacian eight-volume cycle of novels that would constitute “a human comedy of lunatics...each focusing on a figure on the verge of madness, and each of these figures was different from all [the] others down to his language, down to his most secret thoughts.” Kien was to be that “pure bookman.” His name was initially Brand, German for “fire” or “burning”; it was eventually changed to Kien, which means “pinewood” in German, suggesting his combustibility.

Peter Kien is a forty-year-old hermit dwelling in the crabshell of his library, acknowledging no reality beyond the Chinese brushstrokes and pictures inscribed in his books. They are his mandarin masters of silence, insulating him from meaningful relationships with other human beings. Moreover, even his books are not entirely indispensable, for Kien has a superb memory and carries “in his head a library as well-provided and reliable as his actual library....” In his schizoid self-deception, he regards his books as encompassing the whole world. Elias Canetti draws Kien as a bizarrely perverted Platonist, capable of denying or distorting phenomenal experiences while overloading his mind with abstract schemata. Like Don Quixote, Kien subjects empirical reality to confirmation or rejection by his preconceived ideas. Thus, he hears on one of his walks the cooing of pigeons. Having read that pigeons make such a sound, Kien agrees to receive it as a valid sensation: “‘Quite so!’ he said softly, and nodded as he always did when he found reality bearing out the printed original.”

Canetti’s treatment of Kien and the novel’s other characters is a fusion of comedy with horror, precision with fantasy, that can best be described as grotesque. Each of the characters elevates his or her fantasies to obssessionally held truths, unable or unwilling to check them against the perceptions of other people. Each is, therefore, driven by one or more monomanias. In addition to Kien’s pathological bookishness, Therese is led by avarice and sexual frustration, Fischerle longs to dominate through chess triumphs, and Pfaff delights in brutal exploitation of physical weaklings. These characters are all demented subjectivists, ruled by an absolute inner world. Paranoia infects them all. Their eccentricities are extreme enough to render them psychotic.

Therese’s characterization may be the most memorable and repulsive of this foursome. She is a misogynist’s delight: vicious, greedy, gross, ugly, selfish, shrewish, and merciless. Her conversation consists largely of monotonous daily tags, such as “up already,” “I ask you,” or “I make so bold.” Her torrents of platitudes and cliches become unbearably repetitive to Kien: “Several dozen times every day, she said the same thing.” Her values are vulgarly materialistic, compounded by spiteful self-righteousness. Her ludicrous carnal cravings—never fulfilled by the asexual Kien—cause her to mistake the flattery of a furniture salesman (“the superior young man”) for romantic interest. She imagines a liaison with him, laced with assignation lunches and nightly embraces. Her idee fixe leads her to public embarrassment: She literally confronts the salesman in the furniture showroom, undoes her skirt, and presses him to her fat body in a viselike embrace before a large, laughing crowd.

Critical Context

Elias Canetti is a Bulgarian-born Jew of Sephardic ancestry who was brought up largely in Vienna, although he also lived in England and Germany. In the second of his autobiographical volumes, Die Fackel im Ohr (1980; The Torch in My Ear, 1982), as well as in the essay cited above, he tells how an episode that occurred on July 15, 1927, influenced him to write not only Auto-da-Fe but also his most important sociological treatise, Masse und Macht (1960; Crowds and Power, 1962). On that day, the Viennese newspapers headlined a verdict that Vienna’s radicals regarded as a flagrant miscarriage of justice. Workers had been killed in the Austrian province of Burgenland, but their killers had been acquitted, and the acquittal was termed “a just verdict” by the government’s party. Enraged, thousands of Viennese workers marched on the Palace of Justice and set it on fire. In retaliation, the police killed ninety of the demonstrators. That day, Canetti recalls, “I became a part of the crowd. I dissolved into it fully. I did not feel the least resistance to what it did.”

One consequence of this profound experience was the writing of Crowds and Power, an impressively original study of the nature and structure of crowds. The other resulting work, Auto-da-Fe, was additionally prompted by Canetti’s sighting a man in a side street moaning over the destruction of his files inside the burning Palace of Justice. “Better than people!” retorted Canetti. Peter Kien’s characterization was born that day.

Auto-da-Fe is a forbidding novel with an uncompromising narrative style which reflects the claustrophobic inwardness of the characters’ unbalanced minds. The novel has failed to gain widespread popularity, possibly because of the disagreeableness of almost all of its characters. Even George Kien, while empathetically humane to his patients, is an egotist, pleased to be the subject of their awe and adoration.

Nevertheless, the novel is a masterpiece. With it, Canetti joins such modernist authors as Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Heimito von Doderer, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Gunter Grass, and Nathanael West. Canetti recalls reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) while he was laboring on his novel: “Nothing more fortunate could have happened to me at this point....[T]here was the rigor that I yearned for....I bowed to this purest of all models....” Kafka’s example encouraged him to write a severely disciplined work, representing the abnormal and aberrant in a ruthlessly calm and factual manner. Beckett’s fiction, particularly Watt (1953) and the Unnamable (1953), parallels Canetti’s concentration on his characters’ ludicrous delusions and elaborate speculations. The deformed physical and mental attributes of such people as Fischerle and Pfaff are akin to West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) or Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) or The Flounder (1977); indeed, Auto-da-Fe surpasses these satiric-absurdist texts in the intensity of its uncompromising focus on the grotesque. In stressing the divorce of abstract knowledge from vital experience and in suggesting madness as the sadly underlying agenda of the contemporary world, Canetti’s work bonds with that of other noted Central European novels: Doderer’s The Demons (1956), Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930), and Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1931-1932). In addition, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique provides the narrative framework for the novel.

The saddest yet most instructive context for Auto-da-Fe is the twentieth century’s history of totalitarianism. Power games may be confined to books, chess, money, and sex in this novel, but world events have unleashed its violence on a genocidal scale. The Reichstag fire, the Nazis’ burning of humanistic books, concentration camp ovens, and the bombing of cities testify to the savage truth of Canetti’s vision of the world as a self-destructive inferno.

Bibliography

Canetti, Elias. “The First Book: Auto-da-Fe,” in The Conscience of Words, 1979.

Enright, D.J. “Auto-da-Fe,” in Encounter. XVIII (June, 1962), pp. 65-68.

Hulse, Michael. Essays in Honor of Elias Canetti, 1987.

Sokel, Walter H. “The Ambiguity of Madness,” in Views and Reviews of Modern German Literature, 1974.

Thomson, Edward A. “Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung and the Changing Image of Madness,” in German Life and Letters. XXVI (1972), pp. 38-47.