Category: Notes

It is amusing to imagine how the old and very rigorous scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would react if they knew that poetry would soon come to light, under never-before-heard applause, whose recipe boils down to saying foolish things in verses with no meter, no rhythm, no punctuation and no capitalization. And imagine them comparing the much-criticized romantic insubmissions with this! But what is most curious, and perhaps too patent to be ignored, is that the phenomenon has not been limited to poetry, but has also encompassed music and, even more scandalously, the plastic arts. The common man has imposed himself and his preferences, abilities and worldview on all spheres. He has claimed all the means for himself, appropriated the best position in all functions. Finally, the revenge after so many centuries of oppression!

Two basic postures summarize man’s attitude towards life: that of victim and that of creative agent. We see infinite reflections of these in philosophy, historiography, psychology and literature. There is no possible reconciliation between the two, since wanting to create and actually creating have nothing to do with success or failure, fact or possibility, idea or realization. It all comes down to judging oneself as a patient or an agent, always judging what has happened or how one might react. It is therefore a question of whether or not it can be glimpsed a possible field of action, which for some is everything, and for others non-existent. Between the two, once again, there is no possible conciliation, especially since the latter type cannot stand the former’s posture.

The impression we get when, right at the beginning of this novel, we come across a spectacular scene in which the protagonist, Professor Peter Kien, is approached in the street while he is thinking, or rather, is insistently demanded by a stranger, until the latter, ignored, takes the liberty of pushing him because he thinks he has the right to claim attention for himself, the impression we get is that we are in the presence of a superior spirit. After all, how many would be able to conceive of a scene like this? to imagine that there could be a human being who thinks while being silent, and that silence itself is not, for some, the expectation of communication? Thus, we are already tempted to recognize Canetti as a legitimate dignitary of the Great Church. And we also create an exaggerated expectation of Professor Kien. Then the novel becomes a torturous sequence, a progressive and merciless annihilation, until there is not the slightest trace left of the personality that at first impressed us. It is a great novel, there is no doubt about that, and there are points where the sequence of absurdities curiously gives reality to the characters, whose obsessions seem to throw them all into a state of semi-consciousness, whose psychological tensions always seem to bring them within a hair’s breadth of collapse. What more can be said? The discursive technique does get tiresome at a certain point, but it is not fake and it is effective: the proof is that we feel tempted to shoot each of the characters, just as we often do with real human beings. The work, however, would be better suited to the theater… And all we can do is recognize in the author the quality that is so lacking in his characters: lucidity.