EUGENE GOODHEART
615
of the crowd in which participants lose themselves in it and any sense of
critical objectivity.) The moral indignation that moved Canetti to join
the crowd seems
to
evaporate in his account of its behavior. He becomes
a fiercely dispassionate observer of its sensory elements: "the excite–
ment, the advancing, and the fluency of the movement," the dominant
presence of the word fire, and then the actual fire. There is the throb–
bing of his head, shots fired "like whips," the avoidance of corpses, the
seeming increase of the size of the corpses in the growing excitement he
feels . He notes the overwhelming presence of people and then their van–
ishing. "Everything yielded and invisible holes open everywhere."
Things tug and tear at him. He hears "something rhythmic in the air, an
evil music" which elevates him. He experiences himself as a resonant
wind. Images of water, fire, and air dominate the scene. Canetti was
trained as a chemist, and he seems to combine a visionary poetic gift
with a scientific passion for precise notation.
In
his account the crowd
is an agent of neither good nor evil.
It
is an elemental force to be stud–
ied with the objectivity one might use to study the motions of matter,
the actions of wolves, lions, and tigers.
Crowds and Power
is an idiosyncratic work. Its extensive bibliogra–
phy makes no reference
to
Le Bon's work, nor is there any reference to
Marx or Freud, though there is a section on the paranoid Dr. Schreber,
whom Freud analyzed. Canetti's typology is his own invention. Crowds
can be opened or closed; they can be invisible, baiting, prohibition,
reversal and feast crowds, each having its own dynamic. They are a
development of the "pack," an older unit, whose main characteristic is
that it cannot grow, though its "fiercest wish is to be more." Like the
crowd, the pack is prolific in the forms it assumes: hunting, war, lament–
ing, increase. Much of the exposition has the air of apodictic assertion,
which the reader can trust or resist, depending on his or her disposition
to the work. An example:
.
Of the four essential attributes of the crowd which we have come
to know, two are only fictitious as far as the pack is concerned,
though these are the two which are most strenuously desired and
enacted. Hence the other two must be all the more strangely pre–
sent in actuality.
Growth
and
density
are only acted;
equality
and
direction
really exist. The first thing that strikes one about the pack
is its direction; equality is expressed in the fact that all are obsessed
by the same goal, the sight of an animal perhaps, which they want
to kill.
