SOURCE: Darby, David. “A Literary Life: The Textuality of Elias Canetti's Autobiography.” Modern Austrian Literature 25, no. 2 (1992): 37-49.

In the following essay, Darby examines Canetti's apparent awareness in the narrative of his autobiography of the difficulty of writing an autobiographical work.

I propose a reading of Elias Canetti's three volumes of autobiography against the grain.¹ Unlike the author's other extended prose narrative, Die Blendung, which exploits overtly complex narrative strategies to disrupt the ease of the reader's task, these texts have generally been received as works of a reassuring structural order and simplicity. This essay offers a study of the inconsistencies of the narrative and thereby an exploration of one aspect of the formal artifice which characterizes the narration of Canetti's literary life. By reading “against the grain,” I mean that I will focus my attention on the frequent passages in the text which reveal in the narration an...