Die Spuren der Andersheit in den Werken von Elias Canetti: Ein Beitrag zum interkulturellen Verstehen by Arupon Natarajan (review)

Early in this study, Arupon Natarajan explains how he came upon his topic: “Ich komme aus einem indischen Bundesstaat, dem Tamilnadu […] wo die Menschen sehr sprachbewusst sind” (5). Immediately one senses an affinity for the object of his study, the multicultural writer and linguistically gifted thinker Elias Canetti. Like numerous poststructuralist studies, this one possesses an openly autobiographical approach, which again would seem in the spirit of so much of Canetti’s work. The book contains numerous and diverse chapters on places and cultures that to a considerable extent mirror Canetti’s own wide-ranging interests, writing, and travel: America, Morocco, England, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, China, and India, not to mention Judaism qua religion and the Ladino and Hebrew languages.

Natarajan sets out to achieve four principal goals: (1) a deeper insight into Canetti; (2) a definition of the term otherness; (3) a contribution to the understanding of authors who live in a multicultural setting; and (4) an appreciation of the plurality of the modern human being that might lead to greater harmony among diverse peoples.

These are noble and intriguing aspirations—and, again, resonant of so many of Canetti’s own concerns. Unfortunately, they have very little to do with the study itself. Otherness and international hermeneutic are terms that are too often bandied about without any kind of analytic rigor. Using any author’s works as a source to gain insight into the writer is always perilous, and in this case as well, it remains an elusive goal. Not only does Natarajan fail to make use of Sven Hanuscheck’s authoritative (800-page) 2005 biography—which addresses in a far more sophisticated and well documented manner some of the same questions the author raises—he also does not seem fully aware of the extent of Canetti’s own autobiographical corpus. There is no mention of the unvarnished, sometimes vitriolic, but always stimulating posthumous volume Party im Blitz, not to mention the various collections of letters (for instance, between Canetti and Marie-Louise Motesiczky, between Canetti und Rudolph Hartung, and those that circulated among Veza, Elias, and Georges Canetti) that have been published in the interim.

The book is fastidiously organized—as one might expect from a German dissertation—into multiple subsections, so that the reader may harbor hopes of quickly locating discussions of various cultures that intersect with specific aspects of Canetti’s work. But in this respect as well, the reader will be disappointed. The entire study appears to be based primarily on the three-volume autobiography Canetti published during his lifetime (the book is widely thought to have won him the Nobel Prize), a few of the Aufzeichnungen and essays, and bits of the modernist novel Die Blendung. The results are modest indeed. Natarajan makes precious little use of the rich secondary literature on even these works. Thus there is no real engagement or dialogue with Canetti scholarship but instead a mere concatenation of loosely connected discussions that too often restate the primary text. When one does encounter original analysis (or speculation), one is left to tease it out on one’s own, insofar as Natarajan sometimes fails to mark clearly where his précis of Canetti’s work ends and his own commentary begins.

Given the author’s interests and background, I was most eager to read the section on India, because this is certainly an under-researched area of Canetti scholarship. How well did Canetti actually know Indian philosophy and history? How are we to understand its (presumably different) function in the various genres of his writing? An interest in India was certainly in vogue at the time of his writing Die Blendung, as Hermann Hesse’s oeuvre attests. And it seems clear that Canetti recycles at least some stereotypes. Unfortunately, here too, where the author might have shone most brightly, we are treated to...