SOURCE: Mack, Michael. “Die Blendung as a Negative Poetics: Positivism, Nihilism, Fascism.” Orbis Litterarum 54, no. 2 (1999): 146-60.

In the following essay, Mack posits that Canetti proposes a negative poetics in Die Blendung, demonstrating what the poet should not be, which in turn leads to a better understanding of Crowds and Power.

In this essay I shall discuss Canetti's novel Die Blendung in relation to Canetti's poetics, which in turn influenced his friend Franz Baermann Steiner's image of the poet.¹ Peter Kien—the novel's main protagonist—embodies the positivist scholar whose rationalism consists in nihilism, which mirrors fascism, rather than opposing it. Kien's skepticism opposes Steiner's and Canetti's poetics: indeed his specialism precludes any form of radicalism and as a result it also prevents the existence of a world in which death is transcended through a belief in metamorphosis. Kien figures as an anti-type of Canetti's image of the poet...