- Person
- Elias Canetti
- Lived
- 1905–1994
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bulgarian-born British
The story
The ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC), Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, wrote Characters, thirty brief outlines of moral types and the first known attempt at systematic character writing. The form found many later imitators, most famously the French moralist Jean de La Bruyère, whose Characters appeared in 1688, and English writers such as Joseph Hall and Thomas Overbury. George Eliot later drew on the tradition in her Impressions of Theophrastus Such.
Elias Canetti had long been fascinated by how individuals reveal themselves through habits of speech. In his plays of the 1930s and 1950s he developed what he called acoustic masks, the fixed phrases and rhythms that make each person unmistakable. Those plays, The Wedding, The Comedy of Vanity and Life-Terms, are absurd, sharply satirical dramas that have found audiences in experimental theatres in Europe and the United States. The Swedish Academy also compared his sharp, ironic observation of people to La Bruyère.
In 1974 Canetti published Der Ohrenzeuge: Fünfzig Charaktere, a set of fifty short character sketches in the spirit of Theophrastus. Each sketch portrays an invented human type under a short, memorable name, and the title itself, The Earwitness, echoes his lifelong attention to the human voice. The pieces are brief, ironic and often comic, and readers find in them weaknesses they recognise in others and in themselves.
Canetti recorded a reading of the book, released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1975, which won the German Record Prize that year. An English translation, Earwitness: Fifty Characters, followed in 1979.
The book shows a lighter side of a writer better known for his studies of crowds, power and death, and it belongs to the period when his reputation was finally growing, between the Georg Büchner Prize of 1972 and the Nobel Prize of 1981. Though slim, it carries the ancient character sketch into the modern age, an art that depends on seeing people clearly and describing them without cruelty or flattery.
Why it matters
Earwitness renewed one of literature's oldest forms and gave readers a witty gallery of human foibles to recognise in others and in themselves.
About Elias Canetti
Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who wrote in German, author of Auto-da-Fé, Crowds and Power and a celebrated memoir trilogy; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981.
More about Elias Canetti
- Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé became a modernist classicElias Canetti's only novel, Die Blendung (1935), known in English as Auto-da-Fé, came to be recognised as a major work of European modernism.
- Elias Canetti wrote Kafka's Other TrialIn Kafka's Other Trial (1969), Elias Canetti used Franz Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer to illuminate the inner life behind The Trial.
- Canetti's memoirs portrayed Vienna between the warsElias Canetti's later memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985), portray the intellectual life of Vienna and Frankfurt before the Second World War.
- Elias Canetti wrote The Voices of MarrakeshElias Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh, a short book of impressions from a 1954 journey to Morocco, became a classic of travel writing.
- Elias Canetti spent 30 years writing Crowds and PowerElias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), the fruit of decades of thought, is a much-cited study of how crowds form and how rulers wield power.
- Elias Canetti's notebooks became The Human ProvinceElias Canetti kept notebooks of reflections for decades; a selection from 1942 to 1972 was published as The Human Province.
- Canetti's memoir preserved a lost Sephardic worldElias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free (1977) preserved the vanished world of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in his Bulgarian birthplace, Ruse.
Sources
- Elias Canetti Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti Jewish Virtual Library
- Theophrastus Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti EBSCO Research Starters
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