Myths for Survival: Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht

Abstract

Myths for Survival:Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht David D. Kim (bio) In den Märchen der Nationen kehrt dieVerwandlung von Menschen in Tier alsStrafe wieder. In einen Tierleib gebanntzu sein, gilt als Verdammnis. Kindernund Völkern ist die Vorstellung solcherMetamorphosen unmittelbar verständlichund vertraut. —Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung I On 10 December 1981, the polyglot Bulgarian-born Austrian-Jewish writer Elias Canetti had the rare honor to give a speech at the Nobel Banquet. Having been awarded the eminent prize in literature, he used this special occasion to reflect on his indebtedness to Europe despite its “grosse Schuld” (“Elias Canetti—Banquet Speech”). Even after the two World Wars, he said, he stood on the shoulders of four Austrian literary giants—Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil—whose oeuvres had taught him to resist war, oppression, and death. At a particularly vexed time for Europe, their works had shown him the arts of survival. Perhaps this encomium was not unexpected from a writer who had remained loyal to the German language through more than forty years of living abroad. In addition [End Page 623] to German, Canetti spoke Ladino, English, Bulgarian, and French, but it was those German-speaking modernists from the bygone Habsburg Empire who had helped him understand how to escape from violent death on a profoundly troubled continent. According to Canetti, Kraus had immunized him “gegen Krieg,” while Kafka was opening his eyes to the imaginative possibility of “sich ins Kleine zu verwandeln und sich so der Macht zu entziehen.” Broch was a close friend of his who had illustrated the value of “Atmen,” while Musil’s “Waghalsigkeit” to dwell on a single work without knowing whether it would ever be completed had impressed him greatly. For Canetti, these writers had sustained his life through the Great Wars. At first glance, this homage seems perfectly sensible, but upon closer examination it raises questions that cultural and literary scholars have not addressed thus far: why doesn’t Canetti consider any of their works to be “das wichtigste Buch” in his life (Nachträge 32)? How is it possible that Die Verwandlung or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften does not claim this distinction? Canetti admits that it actually goes to an ethnographic work, a large reservoir of exotic Bushmen myths in English translation. It is called Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911). In Nachträge aus Hampstead (1994), a collection of Canetti’s earlier writings published in the year of his death, the book is described as follows: Dieses Buch befindet sich seit 1944, seit 16 Jahren, in meinem Besitz. Ich habe oft geglaubt, daß es das wichtigste Buch ist, das ich kenne. Wenn es auf die Konzentration von Unbekanntem in einem Buch ankommt, so ist es mein wichtigstes Buch: ich habe am meisten daraus gelernt, und es ist noch immer nicht erschöpft. (32) Without being specific about what he means by the unknown or the unfamiliar, Canetti celebrates the work of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd as an unexhausted source of foreignness. He goes so far as to call himself “ein Lehrling der Buschmänner” (162). And in Masse und Macht (1960), a work he considers his magnum opus, this ethnography is again celebrated as “das kostbarste Dokument der frühen Menschheit” (385). This tribute is remarkable, even startling; for how can an ethnographic text, then little known and now long forgotten, trump every other book in Canetti’s bibliophilic collection? The peculiar role that Bushman mythology plays in Canetti’s writing has recently attracted much attention, and this article contributes to the interdisciplinary debate by examining a particular set of representations in Specimens of Bushman Folklore as the principal foundation [End Page 624] for his distinctly literary imagination of politics and society.1 My claim is that Canetti arrives at reading Bushman mythology as a cultural imaginary of survival in ‘cruel modernity and the task of uncovering thsi work. requires a systematic inquiry into sedimented layers of interpretation, as Canetti moves between poetic language, political philosophy, and ethnographic narrative.2 More specifically, the text takes readers to Bushman myths about porcupines via theoretical...