Elias Canetti’s Words Against Death
Death is one of the great literary subjects. It is also an essential narrative device, at once extreme and quotidian. How many stories hinge on either the escape from death or a fate worse than death? And when there is nothing left to happen, characters die. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, subjected to every possible humiliation and degradation after his metamorphosis, simply expires under the couch. Another Kafkan death: Josef K., also subject to every possible humiliation, faces one more as he is publicly executed, stabbed in the street, “like a dog!”
Fictional characters die all the time, yet death confounds representation. The traditional novel hopes to show us life from inside, as it were, and cannot do this with death. This hasn’t stopped novelists from trying. in , attempts to capture the interiority of Otto Quangel during his execution, in , attempts to write the exact moment when Port Moresby dies, the entire linguistic edifice of the book must be distorted; if Bowles had written it straight it would have been unremarkable. Yet that passage—“point of darkness and gateway to repose”—cuts so acutely against the rest of Bowles’s style that the whole book sinks around it. More recently , in , sets out her narrative as the final thought of her narrator, conveyed in a single, 150-page long paragraph, a literal last gasp. It is a wonderful little book, but any critical reader will feel our narrator remains alive throughout the novel. Close to death, on death’s door—these are all ways of being not quite dead yet.
