Iris Murdoch and Elias Canetti

Intellectual Allies

Elaine Morley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907975745
• eBook ISBN: 9781351191777
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Since the revelation of Iris Murdoch's (1919-1999) affair with Elias Canetti (1905-1994), scholarship on their relationship has been largely biographical, focusing in particular on Canetti's alleged role as the real-life model for some of Murdoch's most invidious protagonists. Little research, however, has been done on the extensive common ground between the two writers' literary projects. In this groundbreaking comparative study, Elaine Morley conducts a careful philological comparison of Murdoch's and Canetti's works, from their literary themes and theories to their idiosyncratic stylistic practices. Morley demonstrates that these authors were preoccupied with a common philosophical problem, and that they were in fact not only personally close, but also more intellectually allied than has been previously thought. Elaine Morley is Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London where she convenes the MA in Anglo-German Cultural Relations."

Part One
Blindness and Vision

Die Blendung and The Flight from the Enchanter

Introduction

This section is the first of three which will explore affinities between Murdoch’s and Canetti’s writings. To set the scene for the subsequent literary comparison of Die Blendung and The Flight from the Enchanter, we commence with a discussion of the intellectual genesis of their relationship. This constitutes a first attempt to foreground the intellectual connections between these writers by outlining which parts of Canetti’s work Murdoch read and engaged with during this time. It is also important, as will be shown, to consider what Canetti was working on during these years, since Murdoch’s diary shows that he discussed his ongoing work with her.¹ Although there is no evidence from Canetti’s side, in the form of diary extracts or comments about Murdoch’s work, it is clear that from the outset, these authors had shared interests and that the hitherto concentration on their love affair and its alleged depictions in Murdoch’s writing with the monster-maiden motif is reductive and, at worst, misleading. This first section presents the backdrop against which the parallels in their writings will be discussed.

The Flight from the Enchanter, which is dedicated ‘To Elias Canetti’, deals with three major interconnected themes also discussed by the novel’s dedicatee. The first of these, and the main focus here, is the theme of blindness, the central metaphor of Canetti’s own novel. Die Blendung’s Peter Kien is, metaphorically speaking, blind to the external world. As a ‘Kopf ohne Welt’ [a head without a world], he lives inside his head.² Murdoch’s characters, like Kien, are metaphorically blind to the world around them, due to their personal obsessions with themselves and their own interior worlds. The comparison documents how this shared theme of blindness manifests itself in these novels and demonstrates how, for both novelists, it is connected to the theme of morality: the blindness of their characters is a manifestation of moral blindness. Significantly, these characters are complicit in their own blindness and their subjection at the hands of others, because they deliberately avert their eyes from reality and the external world. In contrast to Kien and the characters of The Flight from the Enchanter, Murdoch and Canetti emphasize the necessity of vision for moral behaviour. Murdoch’s essays, particularly ‘On “God” and “Good”’, and Canetti’s portrait of Dr. Sonne, are comparable in terms of revealing the significance of identifying what is ‘good’ for both authors.

Gender as it is discussed in these two novels is another major focus for the comparison and is connected to the themes of blindness and morality. For both authors, the male figures are blind to the females, because of their tendency to objectify them and to see women as homogenous groups, rather than as individuals. This phenomenon is underlined by the fact that Kien in Die Blendung and Rainborough in The Flight from the Enchanter actually fail to see the women in question. In addition to these considerations, we note that in Die Blendung, Therese, and indeed the other women, bear no relation to real women because they are merely compositions of gender stereotypes of women, and thus an extension of Kien’s fantasy world. In The Flight from the Enchanter, however, the women themselves are, in many respects, inversions of the figures found in Canetti’s novel. While the men hold false images of the women, the female figures break with gender stereotypes. Again the themes of vision and blindness form part of Murdoch’s and Canetti’s discussion of morality and its antithesis. Seeing the real through the suspension of the self is not possible for the satirical figures of Die Blendung. However, there is some possibility of vision in The Flight from the Enchanter.

When Murdoch was writing The Flight from the Enchanter in 1954, she was simultaneously translating Canetti’s drama Komödie der Eitelkeit (1950), which was written between 1933 and 1934.³ The third section of Part One turns to consider important connections between these two works pertaining to the idea of blindness and its connections to power and morality. The basic premise of the play is that, in order to combat the problem of vanity, an imaginary state bans mirrors, portraits, and photographs. The authorities thus effectively blind their subjected citizens to themselves. However, rather than solving the initial problem of vanity, this remedy simply leads to people finding ever more inventive ways of catching glimpses of themselves. Their fixation on their own reflections results in a turning away from the world and others.⁴ Their lack of a sense of their own individuality breeds individualism, the main problem from which Canetti’s Kien also suffered. We shall point out further comparisons with Murdoch’s novel, which similarly deals with the issues of power, blinding, and moral advancement.

The final section of Part One looks beyond blindness and in doing so marks the point where Murdoch’s work appears to diverge from that of Canetti. It indicates the early signs of a thrust which would increasingly become more central to Murdoch’s thought over the ensuing decades. Apart from Franz Metzger, a young boy Kien meets in the street, none of Canetti’s characters can see. None is held up to be exemplary. In Murdoch’s novel, however, Peter Saward, as his name implies, is presented as a sighted and thus more optimistic, indeed antithetical, version of the myopic Kien: he represents an example of how Murdoch’s writing can be viewed as being in dialogue with that of Canetti. This inversion illustrates an apparent disagreement with his work about the blindness, evil, and folly of humanity; Murdoch’s writing, which also diagnoses these problems, speaks more explicitly about seeing and goodness.⁵ That is not to say that Canetti did not believe in the human capacity for vision and virtue. Rather, his focus in Die Blendung was to present the evil with which the world was replete.⁶ In response to similar problems, Murdoch uses her work to discuss more overtly the human capacity for moral improvement, a subject which is implied by the satire of Die Blendung. These considerations may go some way to explaining why commentators such as Conradi, as noted in the Introduction, claim that Murdoch’s and Canetti’s writings are in opposition to each other, that Murdoch was interested in the human potential for good and Canetti the human capacity for evil. By arguing that the moral improvement of humanity was central to both authors’ work, the process of interrogating this theory begins.

Foregrounding Intellectual Connections

Contrary to all previous assessments of their relationship, Murdoch’s first encounter with Canetti was not a personal one.⁷ The accepted view is that Franz Baermann Steiner, Murdoch’s fiancé and Canetti’s friend, introduced the pair.⁸ However, relegated to a footnote by Conradi is the more interesting fact that Murdoch wrote to her friend the French writer Raymond Queneau on 4 June 1952 (before Canetti greeted her and before they met) noting her interest in the thinking of ‘Canetti, Kojève, Hegel’. This was not, however, the first time Murdoch mentioned Canetti’s writing to Queneau.⁹ In 2006 Conradi recalls that, while looking through some of Murdoch’s correspondence to Queneau in 2001, he made a note of a letter from 1947 or 1948 wherein she also made enquires of Kojève and, ‘quite distinctly’, of Canetti.¹⁰ Queneau was very much engaged with Canetti’s writing at this time, because he was working on having Die Blendung translated into French.¹¹ It had just appeared in English in 1946 (the year Queneau first met Murdoch), and John Bayley remembers the frisson the book occasioned in English intellectual circles.¹² He also believes that Murdoch, like many others, read it around this time.¹³ All in all, given the emphasis that she places on an interest in Canetti’s thinking in her epistolary conversations with Queneau, who had a particular admiration for Canetti’s writing which would certainly not have escaped Murdoch’s attention, and finally, given Bayley’s conviction that Murdoch read Die Blendung when the English translation appeared in 1946, it is more plausible that Murdoch’s first encounter with Canetti was an intellectual one, based on a reading of Die Blendung. Her letters to Queneau make it clear that Canetti was a shared interest for them and also confirm that Murdoch was engaged by Canetti’s ideas in the first instance. This insight is striking given critics’ hitherto exclusive emphasis on Murdoch’s personal connections to Canetti, as detailed in the introduction to this study.

Murdoch’s relationship to Queneau is important when considering her relationship to Canetti because of what it tells us about her interest in Canetti’s novel, and also because there are parallels in the genesis of the relationships in terms of the more established authors’ roles for her. Her reading of Queneau’s work, most notably his novel Pierrot mon ami, predates their first personal encounter by two years.¹⁴ As already noted, this pattern was also the case with Canetti and Die Blendung. When she came to know Queneau personally, Murdoch was an aspiring writer, and in a letter to him dated 28 February 1946 she expressed her hope of finding a ‘literary master’.¹⁵ Queneau performed this role of ‘master’ writer to the apprentice Murdoch for some time.¹⁶

While there are many similarities between Murdoch’s relationships with Queneau and Canetti, there are also important differences; most notably, her con nection to Canetti was deeper and more sustained. If Murdoch still sought a liter ary master in 1952, she probably met the right person in Canetti. His zealous instruc tion of Friedl Benedikt resulted in three novels. Literary role-models had always been very important to Canetti himself, and it is thus unsurprising that his efforts to encourage young writers in the 1950s earned him the status of literary guru in Hampstead. The degree to which he helped these fledgling poets varied considerably. Assisting Benedikt was probably the most intensive of all his tutelages: they met frequently, she followed him to London from Vienna and lived near him, kept a diary for him, and dedicated all of her literary output to him.¹⁷ In other cases, however, his assistance consisted of conversation and, by inference, encouragement. Sometimes he put the younger writer in contact with another ‘established’ author whom he deemed more qualified to be of assistance: he put Ingeborg Bachmann, for instance, in contact with Erich Fried, who had more connections with other poets. His relationship with Murdoch was different from that with Benedikt and certainly with Bachmann. Murdoch was thirty-three years old when her relationship with Canetti began. She was set soon thereafter to become a published novelist and held a teaching post at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. By contrast, Benedikt was more than a decade younger when she met Canetti and was struggling to know what to do with her life. A teenage bride, she left her husband after two years and returned to her parents, directionless. She had some thespian ambitions which were dashed when she was rejected by the Max-Reinhardt Schauspielschule.¹⁸ There are, however, some comparisons between these women’s relationships to Canetti. Both were aspiring writers who read Die Blendung before they met Canetti. While there is no surviving evidence that Murdoch wrote a regular diary for Canetti, as Benedikt had, she did send working drafts of her writing to him for criticism.¹⁹ Both also dedicated novels to Canetti. While the contrasts between these relationships indicate a greater degree of parity in Murdoch’s connection to him, there is no doubt that both relationships were rooted very much in shared interests (manifested in their original admiration for Canetti’s writing), and in their own personal literary aspirations.

What did Canetti’s support of Murdoch involve? We know that they discussed their work and ideas and that he encouraged her. Soon after they met, as Canetti notes in Party im Blitz, he gave Murdoch a book as she left to return to Oxford:

Ich begleitete sie zur nahen Finchley Road Station, ging die Stufen der Untergrund mit ihr hinunter und ließ sie auf einer Bank zurück, mit dem Buch in der Hand, das ich ihr kurz zuvor geschenkt hatte, ‘The Lyrebird’ […]. Dieses zauberhafte Buch, das ich erst vor kurzem entdeckt hatte, gab ich ihr, sie verstand, was es zu bedeuten hatte, es war eine Art von Taufe, durch die sie unter die Dichter aufgenommen wurde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Blindness and Vision: Die Blendung and The Flight from the Enchanter
• 2 Isolation and Communion: Die Blendung, Masse und Macht, and The Time of the Angels
• 3 Possession and Non-Possession: Masse und Macht and The Sea, the Sea
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index