Citario. Derived from the Latin “citāre” (to quote) plus the suffix “-ārium” (repository), similar to “bestiary.” A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among Spanish-speaking scholars at Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as Erasmus’s) and proto-examples from the 19th century, such as “Familiar Quotations.” This “Citario Canetti” commemorates the 120th birthday of that interpreter of crowds and creator of parables on absolute thought.
—From Canetti—
Man lives in terror in the midst of the crowd, and only when he manages to dissolve completely into it does this terror dissipate. It is a strange, almost paradoxical liberation. He loses his individual identity, his fear of annihilation, because he is already annihilated in the immensity of the crowd. The crowd is a refuge, a protective cloak, but at the same time a force that destroys individuality. In the crowd, the barriers between individuals fall, and the pressure of uniformity becomes overwhelming. Responsibility is diluted, individual consciousness vanishes, and man becomes a unit of an alien will, or at least of a collective will that transcends his own. This state of dissolution is both a blessing and a curse, an escape and an irreparable loss.
♣♣♣
Kafka’s true process is not that of Josef K. in the novel, but the one he imposed on himself through his relationship with Felice. It was a process of self-affirmation through denial, of seeking freedom through renunciation. Kafka did not want to marry because marriage meant the loss of his only reason for living: writing. He saw married life as a trap, a dilution of his essence. The letters to Felice are a heartbreaking testimony to this struggle, to his inability to reconcile ‘normal’ life with his literary vocation. The fear of power, of authority, of the invasion of his intimate space, is not only a theme in his works; it is the very substance of his life, a constant that haunts and defines him. Canetti argues that Kafka, by denying himself marital happiness, condemned himself to a life of loneliness, but in return, he left us a body of work that is the purest manifestation of the anxiety and helplessness of modern man.
The Other Process of Kafka
♣♣♣
The first time I felt the true power of words was not in a book, but in my mother’s mouth. Her stories, told with feverish intensity, created entire worlds before my eyes. They were not mere tales; they were invocations, spells that transformed reality. I learned that every word had weight, vibration, the capacity to build or destroy. Language was not just a means of communication; it was a tool for conjuring existence, for giving shape to the formless, for capturing the ephemeral. That early fascination with the spoken word, with its sound and meaning, was the seed of my future obsession with written language, with the possibility of fixing those ephemeral voices in something lasting.
♣♣♣
I understood the seduction that lies in a life that reduces everything to the simplest form of repetition. How much or how little variation was there in the work of the craftsmen I saw working in their small workshops? And in the haggling of the merchants? And in the steps of the dancers? And in the countless cups of mint tea that all the guests drink here? How much variety is there in money? How much in hunger? I thus understood what those blind beggars really were: the saints of repetition.
The Voices of Marrakech
♣♣♣
The word freedom serves to express a very important tension, perhaps the most important of all. One always wants to leave, and when the place one wants to go to has no name, when it is indeterminate and no borders can be seen, we call it freedom. The spatial expression of this tension is the burning desire to cross a border, as if it did not exist. For the mythical feeling of the ancients, the freedom to fly reaches the sun. Freedom in time is the overcoming of death, and we even content ourselves with delaying it indefinitely.
The Province of Man. Notebooks 1942-1972
♣♣♣
Hitler’s buildings were designed to attract and contain as many spectators as possible. Thanks to the creation of these large masses, he gained access to power, but he knew how easily any large mass tends to dissolve. There are only two means—apart from war—to counteract the dissolution of the masses. One is its growth and the other its regular repetition: as a keen empirical observer of the masses—and there have been very few—he knew their forms and their means. In huge squares, so large that it is difficult to fill them, the masses are given the opportunity to grow and remain open.
The Consciousness of Words
♣♣♣
I don’t regret those orgies of books. I feel as I did during the time of expansion for Crowds and Power. Even then, everything happened through adventures with books. In Vienna, when I had no money, I spent all that I didn’t have on books. In London, in the worst times, I somehow managed—against all odds—to buy books from time to time.
I’ve never learned anything systematically, like other people do, but rather through sudden bursts of excitement. It always began with my gaze falling on something I had to possess at any cost. The gesture of grabbing it, the joy of throwing money out the window, carrying it home or to the nearest place, gazing at it, caressing it, leafing through it, keeping it for years, the moment of rediscovery when things got serious—all of this is part of a creative process whose secret details I do not know. But in my case, nothing happens any other way, and therefore I will have to buy books until the very last moment of my life—especially when I know full well that I will never read them.
I believe it is also part of the rebellion against death. I never want to know which of those books will go unread. Until the end, it remains undetermined which ones they’ll be. I have the freedom to choose; at any moment I can choose among all the books around me, and for that reason, I hold the course of my life in my own hands.
Notes 1973–1984
—On Canetti—
A book in which I am certain that the author has revealed much and hidden much: Mass and Power, by Elias Canetti. First of all, the book has no superscripts. Nothing interrupts the flow of the exposition, which is both a narrative and a reflection. The two are intertwined in such a way that they are inseparable. Superscripts are a particularly annoying obstacle to narrative: its flow does not accept the intrusion of external elements. This already indicates what is essential in the book: the stories. In this regard, we can recall a note by Canetti from 1971: “Do not avoid the word ‘story’ (in the sense of narrative). But be careful with ‘text.’” Canetti had a reverence for sources. It would have been inconceivable for him not to specify where, on which pages of which books, the stories, episodes, and myths had appeared to him.
Thus, in the Notes section, we find precise references to the books on which Canetti based his work. But there is never any concern to indicate, as is customary in academic circles, the various important works on the subject. It is always a single occurrence, where the story told is physically present. This way of making notes in a book was unusual in 1960, when Massa and Power appeared. Today it is more common, especially in the books of some historians who want to let their pages breathe freely. In Canetti, the reason was more complex and profound, as will become clearer in the following section, which corresponds to the bibliography and is rightly entitled Literature. It would be easy to imagine a plausible bibliography for a book by an unknown author with the title Crowds and Power, published in 1960. First, there would be a lot of American sociology, dozens of articles and books, especially from the 1930s onwards. Then there would be some obligatory passages: Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and some precursors, such as Le Bon. None of this is to be found in Canetti. And this glaring omission contributed greatly to the suspicion and confusion with which the book was received—to the modest extent that it was received—by the academic world.
Roberto Calasso, The Madness of the Nymphs and Other Essays
♣♣♣
Auto de fe (1935), Elias Canetti’s first book and his only novel, is a solitary and extreme work, marked by uncompromising happiness from the outset. Here everything unfolds in the tension between two beings who have grown up at opposite ends of the great branches of the tree of life: the sinologist Kien and Teresa, his housekeeper. Kien is a great scholar who despises teachers, considers contact with the world superfluous and unpleasant, and is ultimately interested in only one thing: books. Books surround and protect him, lined up like twenty-five thousand warriors on the walls of his windowless house. An expert, like all philologists, in the art of doubt, Kien has an unshakeable faith: for him, “God is the past” – and he longs for “the day when men will replace their senses with memory and time with the past.” Until that happens, Kien, who sits at his desk mastering an infinite mental keyboard, hardly ever leaves the house, lost in the unknown, becoming helpless and grotesque: of all his treasures, all that remains is the illusory armor of a “character.”
Roberto Calasso, One Hundred Letters to a Stranger
♣♣♣
Canetti, the rebel, fights against the tyranny of the self entrenched in its own individuality, fights against the spirit established in the system, fights against thought imprisoned by its own dynamics, and that struggle translates into the breakdown of thought in every sentence, into “the spontaneous and casual statement that does not develop,” into the submission—the torture?—of words through writing in order to escape their “terrible and devastating effect.” Thus, a paradox emerges that encapsulates Canetti’s exemplary nature and greatness: the expansion of consciousness through the concentration of words. Knowledge that expands not so much through words as in words, just a few, which, however, are thinned out—like the skin of a balloon—to transparency in order to contain as much meaning as possible.
Ignacio Echevarría, “El insaciable”
♣♣♣
Sometimes Canetti resembles the powerful figures in his books, with their desire to keep life under control, which he has explored and exposed in Crowds and Power; all great writers are haunted by the demons they lay bare, they know them because they carry them within them, they denounce their power to the extent that it threatens to dominate them. It seems that at times he wants to hold the world in his hands, or at least his own image, with the unspoken desire that only Canetti should speak about Canetti. When Mrs. Grazia Ara Elias wrote to him that she too had been born and raised in Ruse and remembered the Canettis and also Dr. Menachemoff, whom he described in his autobiography, Canetti, who did not reply, perhaps felt uneasy at the idea that someone else might claim rights over the image of Ruse, the doctor, and everything that he, having written about it, considered perhaps his exclusive property.
Claudio Magris,
♣♣♣
Veza Canetti’s first book was published in 1990, nine years after Elias Canetti, to whose work he owes so much, was awarded the Nobel Prize. The bitter injustice of this oversight is highlighted by an incredible correspondence which, together with some letters from Elias Canetti, consists mainly of letters from Veza to Georges Canetti. In fact, it is hardly possible to speak of correspondence, since Elias Canetti destroyed the letters from his wife and brother. As a result, the book became something of a novel full of gaps, a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing. Perhaps this is precisely what makes it so fascinating. The reader has to read between the lines, and then, from the rejoicing and lamentation, from the expressions of admiration and willingness to sacrifice, from the attacks and defenses, they arrive at an idea of a spiritual pas de deux in which a third party is constantly called as a witness, without allowing us to read their testimony. This third party is Georges, Elias’s brother, who stayed in Frankfurt and survived the Nazi occupation and rule there. He is a renowned pulmonologist who also published notable books but ultimately died of the disease that was his specialty, eight years after Veza’s death. The letters that his brother was unable to destroy come from Georges’s estate. The image they convey is not always satisfactory to Canetti’s admirers. For his part, he is fully aware from the outset that his work is more important than anything else. Everything must be subordinated to it, for he knows that he is going to create a masterpiece (first Auto da fé, then Crowds and Power) and in this conviction he is unreservedly supported by Veza.
Cees Nooteboom, “Elias Canetti, 1905-1994”
♣♣♣
Like few others, Canetti reflected on the disastrous processes of our century, the rise of fascism, the hypertrophic development of the apparatus of power, the murder of the Jews, and the scale of atomic annihilation, and like few other writers, he came to understand in the course of his evolution that representations of the end are useless. His ideal is not that of the prophet but that of the teacher, whose happiness lies in the fact that, as Canetti notes in his observations on the conversations of Confucius, learning never ends. If the ruler is always in his place, the learner is always on a journey. “Learning must remain an adventure, because otherwise it will have died at birth. What you learn at this moment will depend on chance encounters, and thus, from encounter to encounter, it will continue, learning in transformations, learning in pleasure.” However, the central activity of the learner is not writing but reading. “Read until your eyelids tremble with fatigue.”
W.G. Sebald, “Summa scientiae. System and Critique of the System in Elias Canetti”
♣♣♣
In the summer of 1925, Canetti broke with the monstre sacré that was his mother. Although he was still studying at the University of Vienna, he was now free to respond vehemently to the calls of experience, to something that, if his premonitions were correct, would awaken his latent abilities like a signal fire in the night. On July 15, 1927, that signal came, literally. Turning against their own Social Democratic leaders, Vienna’s most radical workers, enraged by a recent judicial scandal (several workers had been shot dead in Burgenland and their killers acquitted), marched to the Palace of Justice. They set it on fire. On that day, Canetti, the lyrical metaphysician, the allegorist of violence, came to his full realization: “I became part of the crowd, I dissolved completely into it.” This immersion—the French expression bain de foule [bath of crowds] accurately conveys Canetti’s experience—confirmed his decision to analyze, as Gustave Le Bon had begun to do in the 1890s, the internal structure, exponential energies, and contagious aura of the crowd. It was not until 1960 that Crowds and Power appeared, an incomplete work, fragmentary in its brilliance. But the crowd and the feeling of crowd in which he had been immersed on that violent summer day would preoccupy Canetti from then on.
George Steiner, G.S. in The New Yorker
♣♣♣
The lack of sentimentalism is a central feature of Auto-da-Fé, as it is of Canetti’s essays and theater. The cerebral coldness of his visions—that strange control which intelligence seems to exercise even at the most incandescent moments of delirium, in those episodes—such as Peter Kien’s harangue to his books, perched atop a ladder, or Fischerle’s chess fantasies centered on Capablanca—in which, within the fictional reality, the boundary between objective facts and desires is eclipsed, and life becomes a fantastic alloy of the two—suggests an expressionist novel. As in the paintings of a Kirchner or a Dix, or in the engravings and caricatures of Grosz, the intensity and contrasts of color, the virulence of the line, the alteration of perspective—that is, the formal execution of the work—advance toward the reader as a spectacle, revolutionizing that external reality which the artistic object seems to represent, until it is transformed into a reality of its own, owing more to the artist’s subjectivity and skill than to any resemblance to the model that inspired it. An objective life is perceived, without doubt, as weak and distant, reconstituted in fiction according to the whims and fantasies of a creator who has made use of it to express those fantasies. Auto-da-Fé is, like the most accomplished of these works of German Expressionism, a realistic nightmare.
Mario Vargas Llosa, “Auto-da-Fé: A Realistic Nightmare” (The Truth of Lies, 2002)
