Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read More for Mental Health

The literal translation of the German title of Auto da Fe is The Blinding, or perhaps more idiomatically, The Deception. The question this latter raises is: Who is deceiving whom? The unrelenting comic irony suggests that everyone is deceiving not only everyone else, but also themselves. All the characters are mad to some degree, and Kafkaesque to the extent that they emerge out of a somewhat hostile, vaguely Eastern European world in which they are striving to survive but about which they have little understanding. Each pursues his chosen 'ism' - idealism, materialism, hedonism, aspirationalism - with relentless determination and in determined secrecy since none are comprehensible to the others.

Peter Kien, the central figure, is a pseudo-academic recluse whose self-identity is defined as the precise opposite of his bother George. Brother George is a celebrated gynaecologist turned psychiatrist who, therefore, (thinks he) knows everything there is to know about women. Peter knows absolutely nothing about other people much less women. He knows only books, particularly books written in the Chinese language which he has never heard spoken, and most particularly books written by Confucius, with whom he has frequent intimate conversations and intellectual arguments. Without advice or consultation Peter marries his housekeeper. What could possibly go wrong?

Mutual connubial disappointment of course ensues. She wants sex and furniture; he wants silence and books. He feigns blindness; she, an affair. He mounts an insurrection, rousing his army of books to fever-pitch against the woman and the furniture, except, understandably enough, for the pacifist Buddhist tomes and the French volumes which decline to fight over a mere woman. The English participate grudgingly since the impetus for war had come from the racially inferior Chinese. Before overt hostilities can begin, Peter, this Napoleon de la bibliotheque, betrayed by a treacherous library ladder, has crashed to the carpeted floor, bleary and bleeding.

Peter, his brother George, his wife, the porter of his apartment block, the dwarf who is out to cheat him, even the salesman with whom the wife seeks an affair, all 'live in their heads'. The realities they perceive, or rather define, are patently delusional, in that for each to achieve their desired state the world would have to be different than it is. It would have to conform with Confucian aphorisms, or the advice of a demented mother, or the speculations of economic and business pundits. Each character has his own ideological touchstone which he values above all else, including actual personal well-being.

All actual experience is rationalised through the fateful filters adopted by each. Peter articulates the general philosophy: "Esse percipe, to be is to be perceived. What I do not perceive does not exist." Having established this premise, one's strategy becomes clear. Peter simply removes his wife from his perception by not seeing her: "Blindness is a weapon against time and space...The dominating principle of the universe is blindness...It permits the truncation of time when time in unendurable." Having become blind to his wife, he then discovers that he cannot become deaf to her, thus suggesting a strategic flaw which he cannot comprehend.

One class of books Peter finds objectionable: novels.

"Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much more completely dies he crack open the personality of his victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State."

This is Canetti's skeleton key. Writing during the ascendancy of fascist and communist totalitarianism in the 1930's, fiction is the only effective tool for overcoming the insanity of ideological logics. The insanity is in our heads not in the world. Peter dislikes novels because he knows how they work, and he is implicitly a believer in totalitarian culture.

The tone of Auto da Fe is somewhat dismal, despite its comedic flow, because the human condition Canetti describes is somewhat dismal. Our devotion to ideology is a chronic issue which becomes more evident as democratic politics becomes more visible and, as recently, more radical. The tendency appears to be to blame the 'system', to look for procedural and regulatory solutions. Canetti suggests that these solutions won't get us very far.

Returning to the original German title, 'blinding' is a synonym in mystical Kabbalism for the 'making and breaking of vessels.' These vessels refer both to language and to the human beings who employ it, often unwittingly, to deceive themselves. The mystical tenor of Auto da Fe fits well with a Kabbalist interpretation, as does its denouement when we persist in our linguistic errors. We may indeed be better off reading more fiction.

Postscript: the following appeared in my feed. Reading is indeed both a submissive and subversive activity. It is also dangerous since its effects are subtle and incalculable. Nevertheless restricting reading is always a greater disaster. https://aeon.co/essays/how-books-can-...

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