A Temple of Texts: Essays by William H. Gass

Author:William H. Gass [Gass, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49824-3
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2006-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Now, as I continue to dance about the memory of my foolish encounter with Canetti in Berlin, imitating Barth’s felicitous footfalls, the moment becomes as full of significance as it was noisy then, because it is noise that Canetti hates—social static, gabble, chatter. He says of Hermann Broch, but it is also true of himself, that he is most interested in the specific way a man makes the air shake; yet the air we stood in on that evening was already pulsating. The air we tried to shape and give voice to was a trembling air, beaten till bruised by a concerted instrumentalized huffing, by flatulent sounds called tunes, by arrangements that would never reach music, by the commercial culture that has consumed our everyday life. And in that eloquent 1936 tribute to Hermann Broch, Canetti speaks of the air as if it were free, unowned, “the last common property.” Today, however, our air has been subdivided, built on, leased, rented. Today, we know that when we breathe our last, that last breath will have been a chimney’s smoke before we breathed it, or the fume in an exhaust, a radioed wave, smoker’s cough; it will be wet with a clarinetist’s spit; it will have taken shape in a subway, somewhere between a paunch and a hip; it will have been bought, sold, renovated, washed, reused; and even then we’ll have to pay well in advance for it, like a seat for the World Series. Our last breath will be brought to us, very likely, through a rented plastic tube. Perhaps we won’t be able to put sufficient funds up front. In that case, our last breath may be denied us.

Elias Canetti begins his autobiography (the first volume of which he has entitled The Tongue Set Free) with a characteristically arresting and symbolic episode that he says is his earliest memory. Every morning, as he steps out into the hall of the house where he is staying, in the company of the girl who is taking care of him, a smiling young man confronts him with a jackknife he has withdrawn from his trousers, and after commanding the boy to stick out his tongue, he places the cool blade alongside it, threatening to cut it off. Each morning the young man refrains—folds and repockets the knife—but promises to carry out the operation the following day. Suddenly (as it must have seemed), both young man and maid disappear from Canetti’s life. Much later, he learns that this knife-smiling youth has been having a vaguely defined affair with his nannie, and uses this frightening gesture to ensure the little boy’s silence. “The threat with the knife worked,” Canetti writes, “the child quite literally held his tongue for ten years.” A page later, we learn he was two at the time.

This vividly drawn vignette is more than merely an apt and gripping beginning to the first volume of Canetti’s memoirs. It foreshadows many of his fundamental themes: the critical importance of the tongue

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.