From Jean de La Bruyère to John Aubrey and Beyond: The Development of Elias Canetti's Character Sketches

The character sketch is a genre with origins that can be traced back to Aristotle's prize student, Theophrastus. Theophrastus sought in his Characters to explore the broad range of human foibles by compiling, defining, and illustrating them through a description of bad behavior on the part of individuals whose acts provide paradigmatic instances of the comprehensive catalogue of human errancy. In their introduction to Harvard's Loeb Classical Library edition of Characters, Jeffrey Rusten, I. C. Cunningham, and A. D. Knox note that Theophrastus's compilation influenced European literature to a minor extent prior to the seventeenth century, but that the character sketch reached its zenith in that century and the following one. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moralists of England and France were particularly notable and prolific practitioners of the genre; Rusten, Cunningham, and Knox cite such figures as Joseph Hall, Samuel Butler, and Richard Flecknoe in England and Jean de La Bruyère in France. In the nineteenth century, the genre only manifested itself in the form of character studies in preparation for the composition of novels, such as Dickens's Sketches by Boz (1836) and Thackeray's The Book of Snobs (1846). In the twentieth century, Rusten, Cunningham, and Knox find only one work worth mentioning as a descendant of the character sketch genre begun by Theophrastus: Austrian writer Elias Canetti's 1974 compilation Der Ohrenzeuge: Fünfzig Charaktere [Earwitness: fifty characters].¹

Canetti's thin volume has received scant critical attention. The reason for this relative paucity of interest in Ohrenzeuge may be connected to its relative slenderness, the surreal and fragmentary quality of the fifty brief, incohesive sketches (an incohesiveness grounded in a lack of character motivation Rusten, Cunningham, and Knox see as entirely in keeping with Theophrastus's approach, though they find Canetti's surrealism unique with respect to its literary type), and its seeming generic awkwardness as an essentially solitary work; Ohrenzeuge was the only text since the eighteenth century belonging to the typology of the character sketch compilation worthy of notice, as the introduction to Theophrastus's Characters suggests (39–41). The generic uniqueness of Ohrenzeuge came to an end in 2003 when Canetti's second collection of character sketches was (posthumously) published as Party im Blitz: Die englischen Jahre [Party in the blitz: the English years].

While a number of essays have been published on Ohrenzeuge that provide an overview of this work and touch on its place within the character sketch tradition, Party im Blitz appeared so recently that, as of this writing and to the best of my knowledge, it has been the object of mainly cursory newspaper, magazine, and journal reviews.² However, the posthumous publication of Party im Blitz, seen in conjunction with Ohrenzeuge, establishes Canetti as the first important writer since the eighteenth century to have substantively engaged with the character sketch genre. Given the importance of this genre in literary history, it is worthwhile to explore how Canetti's writing within this tradition compares to that of other writers who compiled character sketches during the heyday of this literary type. Obviously, the question of direct influence is fundamental in this regard, though, given Canetti's omnivorous reading habits and his critical dialogue with a huge range of authors, the postulation of unambiguous influence with respect to his writing in all forms is difficult to establish in any definitive manner. Nevertheless, this essay will primarily argue the following thesis: Canetti's Ohrenzeuge most closely approximates La Bruyère's Caractères [Characters] (1688) with respect to style, perspective, and even psychology, while Party im Blitz can be seen to follow most closely the character sketch model established by relatively obscure seventeenth-century English author John Aubrey's Brief Lives, a comprehensive selection of which was first published in 1898. As we will see, even the posthumous editorial approach to Brief Lives and Party im Blitz creates a strong affinity between the two works. Of course, in attempting to establish Canetti's typological kinship with La Bruyère and Aubrey, the...