Death Recorded: On Elias Canetti’s “The Book Against Death”

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When my grandmother died, there was a great sense of outrage. She went to the hospital for a fall she took while opening the trunk of her car. It was supposed to be her neck, a fracture, or even just a bad bruise. Instead, there were tumors up and down her spine, and, as if the sight of them on the X-ray actually conjured them into existence, the next weeks brought the decline of her body, her eventual succumbing, childlike, in her bedroom overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It felt odd to witness this minor injury transform into the decline of a woman; despite this “natural” ending—she was approaching ninety—we felt some force conspiring against us. 

So, too, does Elias Canetti feel tricked, cheated by death; even, especially, in its inevitability. Remembering the death of his own mother, he writes in 1942: “Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again.” The Nobel Prize winning memoirist, novelist, and philosopher was unusually intimate with death. His father died when he was seven, his mother in his early 30s, followed by his first wife and brother; historically, death swirled around him as he “survived” both World Wars and the accumulated atrocities of the twentieth century, before his own death in 1994.  The Book Against Death, from which the quote above is pulled, comprises fifty-seven years of Canetti’s diaristic entries about the Ultimate Subject—spanning his mother’s death to his own. The title does not mislead, or euphemize: he tells us early and often, “I do not accept a single death.” The book is a manifesto against the very thing we all take as natural (“But no death is natural,” he parries). 

The book was never completed, and indeed perhaps never really begun; in it, he writes of a character resembling himself: “He left behind a collection of desks, and on each the first sentence.” This incompleteness is appropriate, for the subject matter is one destined for failure. What we are left with, in the form of working notes, is a very mortal account of a man’s desperate, fragile fight against the spectre that seems bent on suffocating him from all sides, this battle taking the form of fragmented fictions, sociological studies, personal anecdotes, parables, memories, interpersonal conflicts, all spun around the central tenet that “No other feeling approaches the intensity and the unshakable nature of this one. I accept no death.” Canetti’s project seems quixotic, in its nobility and its ontological futility. But Canetti is serious, demonstrated by the bulk of his lifetime being dedicated to this material, and so the book challenges us to take it seriously: What does it mean to spend a life “refusing” death?

To refuse death is to be always on guard and on the run, and Canetti’s life was indeed characterized by motion: born in Bulgaria in 1905, he and his family moved to England when he was six, and then—upon the sudden death of his father—relocated to Vienna; from there, the family lived in Zurich and Frankfurt, until his studies brought him back to Vienna, where he stayed until the Nazi annexation forced him back to the United Kingdom, where he lived the bulk of his career. It was about the time of his second move to England that his mother died, and that he began the Book Against Death in earnest. (It is not a surprise that the death of his last remaining parent and the metaphorical death of the country he called home, turned him toward his intensive survey of death). His artistic production was as active as his geographical relocations, gaining recognition among the literary elite (Iris Murdoch, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Musil,  Herman Broch are some names that made up his circle). In particular, he garnered acclaim for his sociological study Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) a philosophical-sociological rumination on the effects of the “group” on mass behavior, which makes sense, having witnessed first hand the book burning and genocidal fervor of the Third Reich, and the 1927 July Revolt in Vienna. Masse und Macht contextualizes his fears of “mass death”—if his intellectual interests lay in the effects of the collective on human behavior, then the natural evolution of these interests is the power to kill en masse, which was the innovation of the twentieth century.

Published in 1960, that book argues that individuals are activated, like atoms, to act differently in a collective. Canetti claims that people will do anything to avoid the touch of others: “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.” He is describing the fear of physical contact with a stranger, but he might well be talking about death; permeating his book is the sense that life is an ongoing battle in which you assert yourself against death or succumb to it, not unlike the crowds described here. He observes what happens when one does yield to the crowd: “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched…As soon as man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.” By yielding to the crowd, man also yields his individuality, and his fight against the collective. This can have a liberating and egalitarian quality, but more often, Canetti supposes, by submitting to the group, so too does the individual submit to hierarchy and structures of power. Thus crowds are linked to the capacity to subordinate other groups, to see them as inhuman. So too, with death, does Canetti imagine a world full of people, fearful and fighting, until one by one, in the tight embrace of some dogma or other, they accept death: the death of others, and then finally their own. 

These are high stakes for Canetti’s project, and perhaps for that reason, reading his book can feel grating, like watching a child beating his fist against the pillow; futile, but with infinite energy. It also means the text has little sense of forward motion; instead, it spirals, endlessly circling the subject. But this wilful persistence is also an assertion of the integrity of the individual’s experience against the masses who capitulate to atrocities that surround them. 

Canetti has a name for the worst of these people, those whom he calls “survivors.” Those who  “survive”—as in, outlast death—are not heroes, but tyrants whose lives are paid for by the deaths of others. These figures change throughout the book—Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, and Saddam Hussein, all get mentions—but the archetype does not evolve, merely gets a new face. By “typing” them, Canetti strips them of their individuality, and reveals that they are the key instruments in the “group,” willing, even eager, to kill others. More potently than any specific war or decade, we feel Canetti’s outrage at this group of people, whose lives are lived on the premise that others should die for them: “The survivors remain the number one danger to humankind, having reached the highest level through the availability of new types of weapons.” In this rage against “survivors,” we might sense a prick of guilt at his own outlasting, the fact that to survive always comes with the feeling of having committed some crime. Like saying the Lord’s Prayer, The Book Against Death is a way to distinguish himself from those masses who are convinced that anyone’s death might be good, might be necessary.

Canetti—a Jew—may not be crossing himself, but he does allude to religious doctrine throughout the Book Against Death. Readers would be hardpressed, however, to find a consistent dogma other than his refrain: “I accept no death.” He has no prescribed method of combatting death. Instead, he references many different religious approaches to mortality, particularly esoteric, mystical, or indigenous practices, while rejecting any doctrine that promises an after-life. Of Buddha’s enlightenment, for example, he writes, “If Ananda had loved him more…Buddha would not have died.” This seemingly childish reading reveals the sheer willpower of Canetti; the idea that some heretofore unachievable quality of love could overcome the fate of all creatures. It also asserts an important tenet for Canetti: that an individual’s experience could repudiate the experience of humanity at large; that the individual might transcend that which is universal and general: mortality. There is hope in this, and also inevitable failure. Such is the tension of his text. 

The idea that the individual might supersede the group also emerges in Canetti’s description of particular scenes from his life. In 1973, for instance, he becomes a father. He writes, “The end looks different since my child was born…O my child, my child, how much longer shall I remain your father? … I have experienced your first steps, your first words. Yet not once have I done anything for them, as I have done nothing at all, for I have protected no one from death.” In other moments, he writes of his first wife, Veza’s ashes’ final resting place, of funny and specific characters—butcher’s wives, old women with many dogs, a man who wants one last sneeze before his death. These personal events and specific scenes burst through the text in pockets of grief, or of joy or of humor, but ultimately don’t change the tenor of his ferocity; if anything, they add more evidence to his mountain of claims that death both permeates life, and ought to be combatted within it. By including personal experiences, along with the strange singular mixture of religiosity, and sensory details, he rejects death as he rejects the crowd – he refuses to lose his personal, individual human experience to the meaningless mass of death that surrounds him; he refuses death in the sheer specificity of his own life, through his own precise, continuous recording. 

That is the most discernible evolution in the Book Against Death: Canetti’s relationship to writing. As he ages, he becomes more impaired, less able to write, and because writing is his tool for combatting death, it becomes the focus as much as death itself. He admits in 1973: “Only within his scattered and contradictory sentences is it possible for a person to keep himself together, to entirely become something without losing the most important thing, to replicate himself, to breathe, to experience his own gestures, to form his own accent, to practice wearing different masks, to fear his own truths, to puff up his lies into truths, to piss off death, and once rejuvenated, to disappear.” He recognizes the critical role of recording to his project. 

Writing is the bridge, for Canetti, between life and death, for it is a process nimble enough to keep up with death’s motions, particular enough to assert individuality against the general, abstract nature of death. He writes, “Death disappears amid the play of language.” To play is to be versatile, responsive, in constant motion. In the same way that death can strike at any moment and in infinite ways, so too can writing morph, dance, duck and soar; it can perfectly cover death, if momentarily. It is the constancy of writing that suggests that the whole cloth Book Against Death can never exist, only ever notes toward it; its project lies in the activity of incompleteness, the important thing being that he is writing, continuously, endlessly. That is his fight, the words on the page. To end writing is to end the fight and Canetti notes, near the end of his own life, the fearful disappearance of language: “Slowly he loses, one after another, the letters of the alphabet. Which remain? Which does he slur? Which is the last that he slurs?” The Book Against Death is like a home he builds for himself with neverending augmentations, repairs, and add-ons; in it, he receives a momentary reprieve, but without the inexorable commitment to its upkeep—that is, without words—the gutters get clogged, the doors get rusty. Eventually, the roof caves in.

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When my grandmother died, I too had this impulse—to record everything she said, and everything said about her death. I would stop in the middle of the street in order to write down my mother’s updates on her medical results. Once, on the way to the gym, I stopped to frantically search the App Store for an app that would let me record the latest briefing – that Isabel (I called her by her first name) was not long for the world, that she was “losing memory, the letters of the alphabet,” repeating only the basic instructions for dinner, what to buy at the market, that she became fixated on the idea that it was salmon season. I downloaded three recording apps before I realized that my mother was crying and that it was time to stop. 

On the day before Isabel died, I had my final conversation with her. She sat outside in my mom’s backyard, and I talked to her over Facetime. She had a milkshake in hand, and about three minutes of lucidity. I remember rushing to my computer, to record a video of the conversation, even just of my face having the conversation. It felt perverse, but also significant, as if to record this last was to give her some special stage. Was it keeping her alive that I wanted? Or was it an act of helplessness? Like Canetti, I felt that my only power was to record, which didn’t even work. In the end, my computer died and I was left with a gray image: a symbol of a camera with a line through it. No image available. 

Canetti obsessively writing the same phrase, in slightly different permutations, decades apart; me, attempting again and again to capture my grandmother—where does that impulse come from, the need to record? The Latin root: “recordari” combines re– as in repetition or restoration, and cord-, referring to the heart, the metaphorical site of memory (learn by heart). To record is to repeat what is stored within you, and by repeating, restore what has been lost. Canetti suggests that he is a storage container for the dead and words as a reviving mechanism: 

With every hour spent alone, with every sentence that you draft, you win back a piece of your life. …Write until your eyes close, or the pencil falls from your hand, write without wasting a second or thinking about what and how it should sound; write from a feeling of untapped life that has become so huge that it is like a massive mountain gathering inside of you; write without setting up a hundred different plans and restrictions, and with the danger that it will not last, and the danger that it will fall to pieces; write because you are still breathing and because your heart, which is probably already diseased, still beats; write until something from the mighty mountains of your life is carried away, since an entire nation of giants could not carry it all away; write until your eyes close forever; write until you choke to death.

We can see that recording is tantamount to living, for Canetti. Ironically, it is death that awakens this very living impulse to record. But by making death the subject of his living, Canetti brings death itself to life, makes Death a living creature which he—like a journalist—profiles; he goes to Death’s home, goes out for a meal with him, talks late at night over dinner; he orients his whole life around this figure (how many years since this or that death? How many dreams about this or that dead person? When to teach his child about death, and how?). 

In the weeks leading up to my grandmother’s death, I had begun keeping a journal of every time I crossed into Manhattan to get to work; initially, it was a way to track my obsession with the Brooklyn Bridge, which has long served as an object of affection. The journals began as a practice in attention, a disciplined recording of what I saw and felt on my way to work, but recording anything becomes a practice in death, even when the focus is just a bridge and a commute. When you really pay attention, you see how one day is lost to another, one moment to the next, that no two things ever repeat. Soon, death did emerge on the pages of my journal in a more literal way. Take the entry from September 14 2023: 

Isabel fell today and is being held in place by her neck brace; she fell in San Francisco in a parking lot of a Safeway and hit her elbow and fractured her neck. There were tumors around her spine in the scans too. And the soft underbelly of the well lit bridge makes one feel soft and vulnerable and one imagines those unfeeling parapets invulnerable as we fall one by one.

And Sept 26:

My therapist said “who’s speaking when you say that you can’t be sad about Isabel? it sounds like you’re not using your own language.” But what is there but borrowed language for death? Once when my mom went through a break up, her mother scolded her for crying: “Why are you crying?” She asked. “No one died.”  “But now she IS dying,” my mom told me on the phone. 

Finally, October 23, I found myself not on the Manhattan Bridge, but in a car on the Brooklyn Bridge:

Isabel died today and I’m on the Brooklyn bridge in an Uber, looking out and realizing I’m inside the object of my attention, the thing I look at every day. It’s slow and aflutter with different sounds but mostly wind and it’s peaceful and I imagine this is how it was when light filtered from Isabel in the form of breath and how it wasn’t sad as much as a fact, her lying there all creaturely, like we all will. I’m looking at the metal xs, the water, the boats, the buildings. Everything glows with the spirit of life brightening at the end of the day. I’m inside attention. Somehow it seems to be all about the water. Last night T said it was important to talk about Isabel because it was important to honor where we came from, which felt hopeful, funny, it feels like being on the Bridge is returning to the dirt, being in the place one always tries to describe but never can.

Oddly, what emerges in my documentation of the end of Isabel’s life, as in Canetti’s obsessive approximations of death, is life itself. Death is the backdrop upon which the smallest levels of life—the animals, the dirt, the light on the parapets and motion of the waves, the mundane acts of talking—develop their meaning. In approaching the end in such detail, he injects his investigation of death with the singular textures of daily life. 

Canetti acknowledges the paradoxes of life and death coexisting by explaining “The Beyond is within us: a grave realization, but it is trapped within us.” The Book Against Death becomes as much an ode to Death, a hate so strong it necessitates its opponent; a hate so strong it resembles love. Death is the necessary spark for his writing—his life force—and without it, his struggle would not exist, his language would slacken with no other side to hold them. The recording is a kind of incantation he waves in front of death, doubly a beckoning and a repulsion: come here he says, I want to condemn you. And there death emerges, more alive than ever. 

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It strikes me as natural, on the one hand, to fight death. On the other hand, I find it childish. Accepting death, as Canetti would hate for us to do, seems to me the sign of wisdom, of accepting one’s limitations as human, and conceding that meaning is made from the fact of our deaths. There is something essential about the endings: the seasons; the days; and yes, our lives. 

What makes me pause in my critique is a reminder of Canetti’s context, the way that death insinuated its way into the cracks of his days, the silences in his most personal moment. I don’t think we can ignore the fact that his life is an onslaught of personal losses and mass atrocities, especially as The Book Against Death continues into the latter half of the twentieth century, and we watch Canetti grapple with the horrors of war, of tyrants and murderers—the death of his mother and wife  and brother; World War II, the advent of the atomic bomb, the Vietnam War, the fall of Communism, the Yugoslav and Gulf Wars, and more. Each of these events is separate, has its own set of particularities, but each one appears on the page in a nearly timeless manner; each example feels like an echo of the rest, one dictator replacing another, one genocide replacing the next; in that way, he flattens history into a clear struggle: those who hate death, and those who accept it, or even—most awfully—use it to their advantage in an age of technological innovation

The month Isabel died, the newest iteration of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began. On 10/13, I wrote: 

The bridge is like a life where you don’t get to go back over again and you just hope you get a beautiful golden morning like this one where you can look forward to the parapets ahead and see the golden tipped wings of the last and where no one is bombing you.

The end of my grandmother’s life intersected with a new era of gruesome violence, of rapacious governments ransacking the helpless. I felt a sense that these two things could not be the same: that death could not be, on the one hand, a grotesque mutilation of a child in the middle of occupied territory, and the quiet last breaths of a woman who lived a charmed life, dying peacefully in an apartment looking over San Francisco Bay. In the midst of life, death blossomed, creating the sense that there was little separation between the daily chores of living, of returning to the bridge, and the daily news of something crumbling. It echoed the sentiment of Canetti’s book—that there is not life on one hand and death on the other, but an amalgam. This confluence of small and large scale loss at first made me feel that death lost its proper place, but really I was becoming more aware of how death appears in different cloaks, that behind the facade looms the same infinite void. 

Canetti writes, “In the rush toward [mass death] the individual death loses its weight. Given how many more people there are, can they each die an individual death? When that is no longer possible, we will have reached the point of no return.” For him, there is no separation between the small and the large; it is all equally horrific, unnecessary. In the age of mass killings, all people begin to represent something larger than themselves: the victims of a government’s desire, or the beneficiaries of a government’s desire, the victims or beneficiaries of capitalism, the victims or beneficiaries of ethnic cleansing; both sides lose their personal meaning. For Canetti it becomes impossible to separate what is personal and political; all deaths become personal to him, and all personal deaths exist in relation to a global situation, subsumed into the mass machine of killing that he cannot get out of his sight. He bears witness to the ways in which each death is particular and is an atrocity. And the only way to do that is to continue to write each year, each month, each day, to make sure that individual death is possible; that our human lives are worth something beyond the political symbols they can become. 
Perhaps when I read his  “childishness,” I am actually seeing the only life-affirming response to the fact of death. The only way to love life, for Canetti, is to engage head on with the death that overwhelms life. It also might be a wilful evasion to pretend that his context is so specific after all. He reminds us, in his Book Against Death, “There are massacres all over the planet and they can remain hidden for years … That means that many of them can remain hidden for good.” Any direction you look, you can see killing and death on a mass scale. Maybe if all of us had our eyes open to that death happening, hidden, everywhere, we too would feel the flattening of the personal and political, would take it upon ourselves to see each death as the death of an individual, and in seeing that, would be compelled to write against death, to record its every contour, to wave the incantatory wand of language against it—to make it stand still for even one moment, to give us a small respite, before the next cries of terror, the next explosions, break through.