SOURCE: Elbaz, Robert, and Leah Hadomi. “On Canetti's Novelistic Sign.” Orbis Litterarum 48, no. 5 (1993): 269-80.

In the following essay, Elbaz and Hadomi find Canetti's novel Auto da fé to be an important development in the narrative progress of the twentieth-century novel.

Elias Canetti's novelistic performance is of paramount importance in our investigation of the productive process of narrative forms as it has evolved in the modern and post-modern novel in the aftermath of the First World War.¹ Despite the relative neglect Auto da fé has known from its publication in the 1930s until 1981 when the author was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, this novel proves to be a topos, a privileged and destabilizing semiotic space with regard to the evolution of the novelistic sign, a field of play for multiple and very elaborate semiotizations.

Few novels, indeed, have had such an impact on the modern receptive consciousness, for...