616
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
is asserted, not demonstrated, that growth and density are only acted.
Why is it that the pack cannot grow? And if it cannot grow, what does
an
increase
pack mean? The lucidity of Canetti's prose doesn't always
throw light on the motives of his thought.
In the section "On the
Psyc~ology
of Eating," he writes that "the per–
son who eats alone renounces the prestige which the process would
bring him in the eyes of others." And what is the prestige of eating in
public? "But when people eat together they can see other's mouths
opening. Everyone can watch everyone else's teeth while his own are in
action at the same time. To be without teeth is contemptible." The turn
of mind here is peculiar to Canetti. I can think of more obvious reasons
for eating together: the pleasures of company and conversation.
It
would be strange, at least for those in advanced societies, to concentrate
on the masticating habits of others while eating-though one appreci–
ates a description of those habits by a writer like Canetti or Naipaul.
There are numerous passages that are idiosyncratic, if not perverse, in
this manner. There are also passages that tell us what we already know
without the shock of recognition.
Crowds and Power
contains no thesis or doctrine.
It
is a work of
observation and speculation from which one can infer a view of the
human condition. For Canetti crowds appear everywhere and in myriad
forms and are the source of power, the other major theme of the book.
Power has force and violence as it cognates and is invariably destructive.
Unlike Hannah Arendt, who distinguished between power as benign
and force as malign, Canetti conceives of force as the actualization of
power.
If
there is a moral bias in the work, it is against power. Much of
the book is given over to ethnographic accounts of massacres of tribes
by other tribes. As a nonreligious, non-Christian writer, Canetti does
not believe that man has fallen from grace to a condition of sin. Vio–
lence is aboriginally human and has no significant history. Canetti's
anthropological perspective creates the impression of endless cycles of
destruction, human and non-human. He does not share the Enlighten–
ment view that human nature is malleable and susceptible to the influ–
ences of society, for good or evil. Destruction seems to issue from the
biology that human beings share with all anima l life. At times Canetti
reads like a zoologist whose main subject happens to be the human
species. His survey of anthropological literature only confirms the con–
viction that the world wars that have marked our past century were
manifestations on a grand scale of what has always been true of human
life everywhere. Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone would
find their place in a revised edition of
Crowds and Power.
They are the
