SOURCE: Eigler, Friederike. “‘Fissures in the Monument’: Reassessing Elias Canetti's Autobiographical Works.” In Critical Essays on Elias Canetti, edited by David Darby, pp. 261-75. New York: G. K. Hall and Co., 2000.

In the following essay, Eigler argues against the critical notion of continuity throughout an author's canon, finding Canetti to be a thoroughly “heterogeneous” author.

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In his 1976 lecture “Der Beruf des Dichters” (“The Writer's Profession”), Elias Canetti is critical of authors who write the same book over and over again.¹ Canetti himself penned, over the course of 60 years, a relatively small number of very different works: the early novel Die Blendung (1935; Auto-da-Fé), several dramas, the monumental anthropological study Masse und Macht (1960; Crowds and Power), a travelogue of his trip to Marrakesh (1968), numerous essays, a three-volume autobiography (1977-1985), and several volumes of Aufzeichnungen, that is, collections of notes and aphorisms.² Despite this heterogeneous production, which spanned a large part...