Elias Canetti. Biographie
2006; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1756-1183
Autores ResumoHanuschek, Sven. Elias Canetti. Biographie. Munich: Cari Hanser Verlag, 2005. 800 pp. euro29.90 hardcover. Biographies, when done well, can offer so much more than a mere guilty pleasure. We may well wonder if we have any right to the intimacies that are laid bare in these pages, and whether we are not, in the end, just well-read gossips. But such qualms quickly dissipate in reading Hanuschek's magisterial Elias Canetti because he illustrates so powerfully that the simple life-versus-works divide-that fundamental New Critical dichotomy that is the mainstay of the biographical fallacy-was never very clear to Canetti himself. For most of his career, he was unsure of himself, anxious not only in the usual ways about securing a publisher, staying focused, and surviving financially, but uncertain in a deeper sense about what kind of writer he would become. For years after completing his great modernist novel Die Blendung (1931, published 1935) he felt he should write more of these; and with the help of his wife Veza, he went so far as to mislead a potential publisher into believing that he actually had a few more novel manuscripts at the ready. Then, after finishing his life's work, Masse und Macht (1960), he went about announcing a planned second volume, which of course never saw the light of day. He wrote three remarkable dramas-two of which ignited scandals at their respective premieres-but never found a real niche in the theater. Amidst all of this, starting in earnest in 1942, he began writing what he would call the an untranslatable term not because of its intrinsic linguistic difficulty, but because Canetti gathered so many disparate genres under this single heading: diary entries, aphorisms, mini-essays, dialogues, caricatures, philosophical musings, political commentary, and poetry. He worked daily on these and they became, as Hanuschek shows, his Zentralmassiv: from them were born all the later works, including a number of chronologically-organized Aufzeichnungen volumes (on the whole, not enthusiastically greeted by readers) as well as Canetti's most popular books, the autobiographical trilogy, and the incomparable Stimmen van Marrakesch (1968). Like one of his favorite school teachers, Canetti remained throughout his life refreshingly unfertig, and the literary locus of his great (self-) experimentation was undoubtedly the Aufzeichnungen, Werk, das ihn als einziges ganz enthalt (172). Hanuschek is a paragon of sensitivity and good judgment when it comes to handling tricky source material. He reminds us-without being defensive about Canettithat the Aufzeichnungen intend to try out arguments and personae not always directly attributable to their author; and he warns us to listen closely to the Wiener Schmah, coquetry, and humor that imbue Veza's letters to Canetti's brother Georg. Rarely are we entitled to take a statement at face value. And, woe unto the critic who mines this material for quick biographical equations; for Canetti reports that he saw himself in at least twenty of the figures from his Ohrenzeuge gallery, not to mention the other works. Hanuschek knows the corpus well enough-probably better than anybody, if one includes the Nachlas-to caution against quoting Canetti like scripture. Throughout, his focus is rightly on Canetti as author, though he does not neglect to tell us that Canetti enjoyed imitating the laughter of his daughter, Johanna, and learned how to knit from her. Though he sets out vor allem anhand des riesigen Nachlasses, die Innenseite der grosenteils bekannten Publikationsgeschichte [zu] zeigen (15), he in fact far exceeds this goal. …
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