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PARTISAN REVIEW
Canetti devotes a section to the role of the survivor as an agent of
power. We should not confuse Canetti's survivor with how we commonly
understand the survivor nowadays.
In
his exemplary embodiment, he is
the person who has survived the concentration camps. He may have
done so at the expense of others, but he does not pride himself on hav–
ing outlived his fellow inmates. On the contrary, for the rest of his life he
will bear a burden of guilt. Canetti's survivor seems close to Darwin's
conscienceless victor in the struggle for existence, though Darwin is never
mentioned in the book. He desires nothing less than to outlive the rest of
the world. Ruler or paranoid, often both at the same time, he seeks the
extermination of his subjects . Paranoia in this perspective is not so much
a pathology as it is the very condition of rule and command.
In
Sopho–
cles's
Antigone,
Creon's son Haimon warns his father that if he puts
Antigone to death he will rule a desert. Haimon reflects the wisdom of
the play that to rule one must have subjects. The ru ler who remains alone
on the earth ceases to be a ruler. Not so for Canetti, for whom the very
idea of rule entails destruction. The survivor is not only its embodiment,
he is "mankind's worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom." Canetti
wonders whether it is "possible for us to escape him, even now at its last
moment." The concluding sentence of his book is a call to the disarma–
ment of power.
"If
we would master power we must face command
openly and boldly, and search for means to deprive it of its sting."
What then is the alternative to power?
In
one of his most eloquent
essays, "Kafka's Other Trial," Canetti finds a recourse against power in
Kafka's vulnerability to his father, his lovers-indeed, to every aspect of
his world. His account of Kafka's tormented relationship with Felice
Bauer is so compelling and so moving that it may overcome a reader's
resistance to its affirmation of powerlessness . Would we care to read
The Metamorphosis
or
The Trial
if its author had not transformed the
pathos of his existence into a powerful art? Does power need always to
be invidious? Shakespeare's answer is in the opening line of sonnet
132:
"They that have the power to hurt and will do none." No one desires
vulnerability and weakness . What we all desire-I hate to use what has
become a cant word-is empowerment. Canetti admits as much when
in a "jotting" in
The Human Province
he notes: "I have never heard of
a person attacking power without wanting it, and the religious novelists
are the worst in this respect." Hannah Arendt had a different sense of
power when she understood its absence as a source of violence. Terror–
ism, for example, is the action of the weak, not of the strong.
Canetti's declared hostility to power may be mis leading, for he is
clearly attracted to it as a subject for his imagination. When he finds
