Sanders Isaac Bernstein , August 13, 2024

Ultimate Chutzpah

Elias Canetti’s masterpiece takes on the ultimate adversary The Isle of the Dead, Max Klinger (1887). | The Art Institute of Chicago (Gift of Jack Daulton)

The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, translated by Peter Filkins. New Directions, 432 pages. 2024.

Elias Canetti began to articulate his conception of The Book Against Death during World War II, just after the London Blitz. “I cannot let this war pass,” he wrote on February 15, 1942, “without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death.” With such Aufzeichnungen, his signature aphoristic “notes,” the Bulgaria-born Dichterbattled death for the rest of his life, working on this book, which he called “mein eigentliches Buch”—his “actual,” “real,” or, in the able translation of Peter Filkins, “most central book”—until death conquered him in 1994.

The “last son of that central Europe culture,” as the Corriere della Sera named him in its obituary—a Sephardic Jew born in Ruse and raised in Manchester, Zurich, and Vienna, who, despite spending half his life in England, always wrote in German—Canetti is a writer without a clear place in a national canon or, even, really, in a major literary genre. He had but one literary descendant (Thomas Bernhard). The 1981 Nobel Prize laureate was, rather, a polymath and one of the past century’s great practitioners of a minor genre—the aphorism—in the tradition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Stendhal. He also had a major preoccupation: death. It is toward death that his single novel, the wild and dense modernist satire Auto-da-fe(1935), lurches; mass death is the haunting motivation of Crowds and Power(1960), his restless disquisition on the crowd across human history; death structures the social relations of two of his three published plays, The Comedy of Vanity(1934) and The Numbered(1964);death begins and ends his three-part autobiography of his youth—The Tongue Set Free (1977), The Torch in My Ear (1980), and ThePlay of the Eye (1985)—and death is a constant presence in his collected Aufzeichnungen, from which comes a third of The Book Against Death.

Indeed, as Susan Sontag wrote of Canetti in “Mind as Passion,” an essay that helped him win the Nobel Prize, “all of his work . . . aims at a refutation of death.” “Canetti insists that death is really unacceptable,” she continued, “unassimilable, because it is what is outside life; unjust, because it limits ambition and insults it.” Sontag might even understate Canetti’s resistance to death, which is both existential and personal, but also profoundly political. Even knowledge of death elicits his skepticism. As he mused between 1929 and 1942, before beginning The Book Against Death in earnest: “The knowledge of death appears to be the most consequential experience of human history. It turned into the acceptanceof death. Deliberate killing among usis only possible once we know that the deceased is to a certain degree dead.”

For Canetti, who still believed in the Dichteras a real romantic title, Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world”—or in his own phrasing, “the guardians of metamorphosis”—it was the role of the poet to work against the implementation of such fatal power, or at least to feel the responsibility to do so. At the outbreak of World War II, he had written, “Wäre ich wirklich ein Dichter, ich müßte den Krieg verhindern können,” a sentence he would return to years later in “The Profession of the Poet”: “Were I really a poet, I would have to be able to prevent the war.” By taking all of life into himself, the poet, he insisted in this essay, gains “the strength to stand against death.”

The Book Against Deathis a manifestation of this strength. It refuses to bow before realpolitik or reality. It resists death and the system of politics predicated upon death’s instrumentalization—from Canetti’s refusal to call the project quits, penning two thousand pages of notes out of which it was assembled, down to its aphoristic form. Canetti’s resistance to death is often presented as a kind of fanciful stance, but he admits, “It is not about abolishing it, which is not possible. It’s about condemningit.” Rather, The Book Against Death is a cri de coueragainst the blithe acceptance of an unjust status quo. “The slavery of death is the core of all slavery,” Canetti noted in 1946, “and if this slavery were not accepted, no one could wish for it.”

In “The Storyteller,” from which Canetti extracts a citation, Walter Benjamin writes about how readers turn to the novel to experience the fullness and significance of fate that they can never experience in their own life, “the hope of warming his chilly life with the death that he reads about.” The Book Against Death offers no such consolation. Canetti acquiesces to death no ability to create meaning. From him it receives no poetic gravitas. In Canetti’s book, death is “superfluous,” only an immediate interruption of sensory experience. “His last wish: one last sneeze,” he jokes, deadly seriously, in 1942. “Can one die dreaming?” he asks in 1973. “The lastbook that he reads,” he preemptively mourns in 1978, “unimaginable.” In his aphoristic vision, life never loses its edges; he never permits death to round it. Even at his most at peace with death’s inevitable arrival, it is always as life’s interruption—never its completion. “But I curse death. I can’t help but do so,” he writes in 1985. “And should it make me blind, there’s nothing I can do but repel death. If I were to accept it, I would be a murderer.”

As a catalog of such observations, The Book Against Deathis less a coherent, self-contained text than the accreted traces of a life. Canetti began to collect materials after his mother’s death in 1937—though notes from as early as 1929 have been incorporated into this current book, even if Canetti did not begin to write his daily Aufzeichnungenuntil February 15, 1942. The Book Against Death contains reflections on actual events, gnomic adages, schemes for works never completed, sardonic quips, periodical clippings, citations from other texts, and fabular fragments. His father, mother, and his first wife, Veza (née Taubner-Calderon), who all died far too young, return as figures he owes his life to; Hera (née Buschor), his second wife, who also predeceased him, and Johanna, his daughter, appear repeatedly; as do his idols—Kafka, Musil, and Proust, along with Bernhard—his disavowed disciple—Benjamin, Stendhal, and the biblical Elijah. So, too, surfaces the motif of the Titanicsinking as its musicians play on. The Book Against Death is an encyclopedic testament to the centripetal force that death exercised over Canetti across his life; it is also testament to his committed and unyielding resistance to it, fashioning a far-reaching ethics out of personal tragedy.

Canetti first encountered death at the age of seven. Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a wealthy Sephardic family in 1905, Canetti moved to Manchester at six, when his father, Jacques Canetti, went to work for his brother-in-law in a bid for independence from his overbearing father, whose curse he would carry across the English Channel. Jacques died within a year from a sudden, massive heart attack—the day that his son would name “the most crucial day of my life.” The father had been the center of Elias’s world, the sun who would brighten and lighten his mother’s overriding earnestness. Canetti’s future literary career was only made possible after his death—as it was then Canetti’s mother, Mathilde Arditti, taught him, with unyielding rigor and stinging insults, the language of her intimacy with Canetti’s father, which was to be the language of his literature: German.

“Did my father have to die at such a young age for me to travel this path?” wonders Canetti in The Book Against Death. “Was he the victim sacrificed in order that this vital path be restored? I have no doubt at all that I would have become an entirely different person if I had stayed in England and if my father had notdied so young.” His father’s demise was only his first experience of death. Canetti moved with his mother and younger brothers to the continent. He slept in the same bed as his mother, learned German from her, and even remembers holding onto her when she wanted to fling herself out the window. Fiercely jealous of her suitors as a boy, she cut off contact with him after he married Veza in 1934. They spoke again only on her deathbed. He took her death hard. A rare dated entry—June 15, 1942—reads:

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true.

Canetti needed to make sense of how death played out in his life. “What was it all for, hidden, afraid, the stories that made you who you are, where are they?” asks Canetti in 1965. He recalls the particulars of an episode that would become a cornerstone of his first autobiography, The Tongue Set Free: the axe “with which you wanted to strike your cousin.” At the age of five, the young Elias attempted to kill his cousin Laurica with an axe because she wouldn’t show him her writing notebooks. Chanting in Ladino, his mother tongue, “Now I’m going to kill Laurica! Now I’m going to kill Laurica!”, he was only prevented by his grandfather’s timely intervention. After the thwarted murder, his grandfather frequently reminded the young Elias of “how she would have looked in her blood, how her brain would have foamed out of the split skull” and how Elias would never have been able to atone, as the dead cannot grant forgiveness. Canetti recalls, “My true religion thus originated in a very definite, personal, unatonable event.”

Canetti’s resistance to death ultimately assumes the force of religious ardor. It is his first principle, from which all others follow. “Mytrue essence exists in the fact that I repudiate everydeath and hate them all,” he writes in 1962. “I can locate it at the beginning of my thinking and at the center of my world. It is my‘Cogito ergo sum.’ I hate death, therefore I am. Mortem odi ergo sum.” This religion takes shape in The Book Against Death through the idea of the “first human,” almost a messianic figure: “The first human would be one who never killed and never wished for death.” Similarly, in 1970, he even remarks how “uncanny” his name is, considering “the prophet Elijah defeated the Angel of Death.”

Canetti, for all his righteous, zealous protest, was no secular saint. His treatment of Veza—and her career, which she gave up to help him write Crowds and Power—has been the subject of much scholarly dispute. His German biographer, Sven Hanuschek, suggests Veza herself was content with this state of things as well as the “unbourgeois” relationship that granted her husband license to satisfy his “faunish” nature with no such license for herself. In jealous fits he would surveil his wife. Friends, lovers, and rivals alike referred to him as “the Master,” a figure who would test out his theories about power on the people around him. One particularly stinging criticism of Canetti comes from Gerhard Melzer, who has written that, ironically, Canetti “kills when he writes,” with the critic noting that Canetti’s writing is an attempt at intellectual superiority to prolong his own literary life at the expense of others.

And yet, while other texts of Canetti’s might be merciless in their satire (see Auto-da-fé) or strain for a kind of totalizing authority, as in Crowds and Power, TheBook Against Deathis unguardedly partial and sincere. “Writing is,” he notes, pleading with Kafka for salvation, “a form of prayer, the only one that I know.” “I wanted to surviveno one,” he insists. Again and again Canetti confesses his own insufficiency, what in 1984 he calls “the survivor’s guiltyou have always felt.” Perhaps the fullest expression of this feeling emerges in 1966, when he reflects on having escaped Europe early enough and weathered the war in relative safety, a feeling that he then works into an ethic:

How shameful, shameful that Ihave outlived all the victims. Was I in battered Madrid, was I among those who fled Paris, was I in Auschwitz? Have I done enough, have I justified the fact that I was only a witness, not a victim, do I deserveto live, and will the outcome of this life alter future horrors in the slightest?

Concerned whether he cares too much about the death of his loved ones and not enough about those he didn’t know, this passage ends with him returning to his special role as Dichter, as a figure morally responsible for the world, charged with forging connections between the personal and political:

How can I find the balance between the close and the distant, how can I be the scale that justly weighs the two? In my heart I know that it is not about me, but rather about everyone else, but is it enough to know that in one’s heart, when perhaps each is deceived by his heart?

For Canetti, death becomes the limit through which he must extend his thought and compassion. Falling close to a Butlerian sense of shared precarity, Canetti, emerging through his own grief, records his desire to make every life grievable. As he wrote in the midst of World War II, “We lament the dead. But how very much we must first lament those who must die!”

“Entire cities and districts can mourn as if all their men had fallen, all their sons and fathers,” writes Canetti of wartime casualties. “But so long as 11,370 have fallen, they will forever seek to have it add up to a million.” In this early adage in The Book Against Death, Canetti recognizes and refuses the abstraction once captured by Kurt Tucholsky (“The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!”). His very style militates against it. An aphorism, like each human life, is a world unto itself. And aphorisms insist on specificity. As the historian Carlo Ginzburg, tracing the form back to Hippocrates, writes: “Aphoristic literature is by definition an attempt to formulate opinions about man and society on the basis of symptoms, of clues; a humanity and a society that are diseased, in crisis.”

For Canetti, his society was sick with death—as remains the case today. Society has accepted death as the coin of power, which grows obscenely rich on it. Last year—in a large part due to the relentless bombing of Gaza—more civilians were killed across the globe than any year in the past decade. To date, Israel’s murderous campaign—carried out with U.S. bombs—has killed more than thirty-nine thousand Gazans and exposed over a million more to starvation. And, with the United States having resumed shipment of two-thousand-pound bombs in July, there is no end in sight, only more of the same: the continued enrichment of munition manufacturers, the further entrenchment of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the ongoing displacement and destruction of the Gazan people. And that’s before one considers what might eventuate in a wider regional war.

Yet, Canetti’s inveterate resistance to death, his refusal to become inured to any of it, verges on delusion according to Joshua Cohen, who wrote the book’s introduction. Canetti’s antipathy toward death confirms him as “quixotic”—Cohen here recycles the adjective that Sontag once applied to Canetti, whom, “in matters of death,” she wrote, was “an unregenerate, appalled materialist, and unrelentingly quixotic.” This book is, Cohen concludes, “a prose garlic bulb or rabbit’s foot,” or the vomitous balm Quixote applies to himself and Sancho Panza, which promises “one needn’t fear death, nor worry about dying from any wound.” Though Cohen has respect for this “powerfully gnomic, mad, sincere book,” his invocation of the “quixotic” seeks to contain the radiating power of its aphorisms, whose implications are as much social and political as they are metaphysical and personal.

That this echoes Cohen’s recent response in The New Republic to the politics of Jewish American anti-Zionists is more than mere coincidence. Cohen has a knack for ridiculing a politics with which he disagrees by redescribing the political as personal. In this case, he first declares that the Jews espousing this line “are not going to be Jews in a generation.” And then he pronounces on these supposedly-soon-to-be-extinct specimen: “For these Jews to have reserved for themselves as the final expression of their Jewishness the condemnation of Israel—I have to salute them, I might even bow down to them. It is ultimate chutzpah.” A matter of principle becomes a matter of nerve—as with Canetti, where his ethical protest against accepting the deadly politics as usual is transmogrified into an eccentricity.

Still, it isultimate chutzpah to write against death in the face of the certainty of succumbing to it—and to do so in a world invested in its instrumentalization. Even during World War II, Canetti himself noted this risk: “Today, anyone who says anything against deathis ridiculous . . . It is on the side of the Fatherland, and what could be more holy than combining the father and the land?” Despite his support for Israel, Canetti wrote for the Egyptian soldiers killed in the 1967 war and for the Iraqi civilians, who were being killed by American war planes during the first Gulf War. He criticized the “massacres committed by the Americans” in Vietnam in 1969, writing that “now more than ever it is clear that we are all capable of the same.” And he makes no exception for his reader nor for himself—there is little smugness here. “Even you yourself,” he writes, “and don’t think you’re not, for there is no respite in the fact that you have never yet been forced to kill.”

The Book Against Death is a bracing text. I find it impossible to read these aphorisms and not think of the fragments of lives circulating on the internet, on the world’s great (if most often disappointing) site of contemporary aphorisms, the platform formerly known as Twitter. These fragments, too, indict a system of world politics in crisis, sick with death. And these missives reinscribe a humanity into the abstraction of the system, not allowing us to blithely accept the ongoing mass delivery of destruction. Scholars can argue that Canetti, the heir of Stendhal and Lichtenberg, lives on through the great influence that Bernhard has had on contemporary literature. But the true spirit of The Book Against Death, at least, is most alive in these posts, which compose a collective Book Against Death—written against the obliteration of mass death, affirming the specificity and texture of life.

From the final message from the poet and writer Nour al-Din Hajjaj before an airstrike killed him on December 2:

My name is Nour al-Din Hajjaj, I am a Palestinian writer, I am twenty-seven years old and I have many dreams. I am not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news. Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children’s laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.

Heba Abu Nada, a novelist and poet, wrote these words on October 8, twelve days before her death:

Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets, quiet apart from the sound of the bombs, terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer, black apart from the light of the martyrs. Good night, Gaza.

Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet, pinned the poem below to his X profile, with the message, “If I must die, let it be a tale. #FreePalestine #Gaza,” a month before he was killed:

If I must die, 

you must live 

to tell my story 

to sell my things 

to buy a piece of cloth 

and some strings, 

(make it white with a long tail) 

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 

while looking heaven in the eye 

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— 

and bid no one farewell 

not even to his flesh 

not even to himself— 

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above 

and thinks for a moment an angel is there 

bringing back love 

If I must die 

let it bring hope 

let it be a tale