Pimping unfinished business: Elias Canetti's "The Book Against Death"

Art by Jingli Yi

The Book Against Death, Elias Canetti (Fitzcarraldo Editions, June 2024) 

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023)

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We are all in variations of disguise from trench coats to swag chains. Our personal fictions are rehashed by the things we read, the films we watch, and the way the world unfurls - or doesn’t. But, in our natural inclination to tell lies, there’s a veritable mystery to be solved. The latest Elias Canetti translation, Das Buch gegen den Tod (‘The Book Against Death’) makes his life’s work that of a sleuth. Anatomising the human ability to veil certainty with its inverse, Canetti writes from 1942 to his death in 1994. In a collective ambition to solve the essential human unknown - death - Fitzcarraldo brings Peter Filkins’ translation 30 years on. 

Elias Canetti asks if language is the barrier to understanding some kind of universal mortality. If death is understood conceptually in a unilateral way but is conceptualised in mistranslations across time and space, is it really an expressible state? 

I think of Alice Oswald’s penultimate Professor of Poetry lecture: she slowly and pensively delivered: “in parts of Aboriginal Australia, it's not even permitted to speak a word which sounds like a dead person's name.” The room, subdued, suddenly felt alleviated of its existentialism. It is in words and language that death has any manipulable consequence anyway. 

And doesn’t the alcoholic, 50-Cents-shackled writer of Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall know it? Only where translation fails in the courtly climax does Sandra Voyter let on that her sense of her husband’s splat might not be as concrete as we’ve been led to believe. The German Anglophone-cum-Francophone crumbles, admitting that “French - it’s too difficult” when French law requires her to deliver her témoignage in the language of the court. Speaking French is a tactic too; a way of further veiling just how her husband fell to his death. So, translation is an avoidance tactic. Canetti complains about the thinkers, snarkily citing Schopenhauer, who use resignation to mortality as, well, an avoidance tactic against its inevitability. But, is he any better as a translator of translations? By the end of the tome, Canetti is almost exclusively recording quotations of translations - though, this is, indeed, an editorial choice.

So where does this leave poor Filkins, the translator of the translator? Whose endeavour to confront mortality by working closely with Canetti seems to push him as far in the opposite direction as is humanly imaginable. In a 2021 prototype of the new Fitzcarraldo, Filkins translated that which has presumably stood out to him from the beginning:

"I would like to be able to not think of death at all for an entire week, not even of the word, as if it were something made up, something interjected into the language, one of those monstrous creations composed of the letters, D.E.A.T.H., no one knowing any longer what the letters stand for, and no one who at all cares for language lowering themselves to utter it." (1946; 55)

D.E.A.T.H.: When death is communicated in its atomised form - it is ultimately and simply just les lettres. And letters are artificial - they only exist for the living. It is P.I.M.P.E.D. into the disguise of something knowable and cognitively understandable - as is the function of language. So, entangled within various levels of truth, death-verbalised is exhausting. We sense Triet’s Sandra Voyter would “like to be able to not think of death at all for an entire week”. She is drained by the need to verbalise her account of her husband’s death repeatedly and in several different languages. But to search relentlessly for meaning within that seems to be a dead-end: D.E.A.T.H. and P.I.M.P. stand for nothing. 

The thing that gives them meaning, then, is the fact that they belong to a translation. Joshua Cohen - of The Netanyahus (Fitzcarraldo, 2021) - has written the introductory essay to the edition. It is frustratingly sparing on insight into Canetti’s collected, 50-year-old musings on the inescapable human destination. Rather than in Canetti’s works alone, Cohen seems to find value in their relationship with Cervantes and Kafka. But maybe that’s a likely consequence of reading this edition of Canetti which is really a commonplace book for the death-obsessed. Cohen notes that like Aquinas reworked Augustine’s contra mortem, Canetti has reworked the morbid affairs of newspaper-clippings, poetry, scripture (etc..) The value Cohen finds is not in a single theoretical approach to mortality but in the arsenal of theories that comes from the act of translation itself - in the book as a Fitzcarraldo book. Like any skillful frontmatter, maybe this is just good marketing. 

Indeed, formal play is, believe it or not, what gives this text charm. It is a remarkable compilation of frontmatter, poetry, journal entry - the list ought to go on. You might get whisked away on a wistful account of some beloved character in the life of Elias Canetti; then, “she hung herself from her false eyelashes.” (144) He stops the narrative in episodic and isolated bombast. Shock-factor pivots on artifice - a pair of “false eyelashes” - in much the same way in Anatomy of a Fall. Surprise for Sandra comes only when she is masquerading as a blissfully-ignorant innocent. Naturally, it takes her blind son, for whom “false eyelashes” bears no consequence and for whom disguise is pointless, to tempt us towards the unreliable realm of being certain of the truth. In translation, this is pure cunning. The German for ‘little boy’ is pimpf (c.1920, OED) which is an etymological parent of pimp and if there is one thing this film does well, it is pimping the truth to its audience. It should be noted that pimpf has ties to both ‘little boy’ or ‘squirt’ as well as being a ‘member of the Nazi Jungvolk’. While I am not tempted to compare Sandra’s blind son to the members of the Hitler Youth, there is an overall sense of being misled and having truth corrupted that is familiar to Canetti’s own sense of the unforgivable. In fact, in Canetti’s view, there is no comparison at all: “Every Nazi is the opposite of every animal.” (1945; 51) A year prior, poetry was the best means to communicate this: 

It was the stars

That chilled him inside.

He died for their sake

Every second night. 

(1944; 48)

There is something unintelligible at work here. Just as translation can lean towards meaning but will never be directly understandable from the original, Canetti reasons immediately after that “in order not to become more understandable, simply don’t die.” (48) But, Canetti’s supposition can’t help but ask if these skirtings around the intelligible, like Cohen prizes the act of translation, miss the point of challenging the living. It is almost as if the most mind-bogglingly unjustifiable acts - like genocide - escape full scrutiny in Canetti’s reasoning. But, perhaps something of the original has just been lost in translation. 

One mode of mediating the unintelligible might be by holding an anatomist’s scalpel to the very system that decides what is and isn’t reasonable. We are told “there should be a court that could absolve us of death if only we answered all its questions honestly.” (1966; 126) This Powell-&-Pressburger forethought runs far with the truth reckoning in Justine Triet’s court. A judge and its avocat général can ask as many questions as a good, long court scene on screen is worth but it will never get around the fact that the dead are dead. Including Triet’s postlapsarian court, some will never get around

The murderer who never utters a nasty word.

The murderer who murders the innocent before they become guilty.

The murderer who rescues his victim.

The murderer who tenderly mourns all those he has rescued.

(1973; 176)

So, there are loose ends; loopholes in systems that will never be well-equipped enough to resolve something as unintelligible as death. Of course, even Canetti’s own system of coming to terms with death had no contingency plan for his own. 

Maybe this unfinished-ness was exactly what was needed to get the most creatively out of death. For Triet, death frames her conceptual challenge of artifice and for Canetti, it gets to the bottom of the nature of the self and what it means to reiterate it, breathe it, to learn its every gesture, to manifest its accent, to practise wearing its masks, to fear its truths, to dissolve its lies into truths, to piss death off, and once rejuvenated, to disappear. (1973; 176)

From the realm of uncertainty that is parallel to the unfinished, the dissolution of lie into truth works contra mortem—in the direction Canetti spends 50 years ambling towards. But, as the unfinished dictates, Canetti was headed closer to resented mortality. We cannot accuse him of fickleness, though. By 1994, he was well aware of his disposition and the incompleteness of his work enriched his theory. Simply, “without writing I come undone.” (324) Then, the only reason writer Sandra Voyter does not shatter during her fall, is that she is always conjuring fictions. With every word she conducts the to-ings and fro-ings of the ‘likely story’ of just how her husband died; we can imagine them written down in the scrawl of a pencilled draft on piles of yellowing paper. 

Canetti and Triet, alike, compose a volume of death that is so unfathomably full. Indeed, we will, most of us, never come close to understanding Canetti’s arc of death (and life) until we too are curled in our deathbeds. But, despite this fullness, we are presented with sketches of thoughts, with illusions of the factual, with conclusions never quite tied up. I suppose, then, being contra mortem is about having some kind of unfinished business.

OLIVIA BOYLE is neither a cook nor a dermatologist but is willing to help.