Canetti's mother - she forgot about the time, we kept reading and reading

I should write something about Elias Canetti and his mother.  Early in The Tongue Set Free, just a fifth of the way into the memoir, Canetti’s father suddenly dies.  Canetti is eight, I think.  He ends up moving into his father’s role in some ways.  The mother’s psychology is the curious thing, how she demands from her young son some of the intellectual and emotional satisfactions she once got from her husband.  Thus her insistence that he learn German instantaneously, or her course of reading Shakespeare and Schiller with Canetti – German was the language she shared with her husband, theater was the art the loved together.

I hate to think what this would do to a kid less tenacious and brilliant than Canetti, but she likely would have demanded less in that case.

She made an effort not to influence me.  After each scene, she asked me how I understood it, and before saying anything herself, she always let me speak first.  But sometimes, when it was late, and she forgot about the time, we kept reading and reading, and I sensed that she was utterly excited and would never stop…  Her wide nostrils quivered vehemently, her large, gray eyes no longer saw me, her words were no longer directed at me.  I felt that she was talking to Father when she was seized in this way, and perhaps I, without realizing it, had become my father.  (83)

A break is inevitable; thus Canetti’s confusion between the Schnitzler-like doctor who pursues his mother and the forbidden sexual content of the Schnitzler books his mother reads in place of Schiller.  Canetti’s own move toward independence occurs in Switzerland, in part due to his discovery of Swiss literature.  He first has contempt for it, as when, at the celebration of the Gottfried Keller centennial, he cannot believe that this writer he has never heard of can be any good:  “but what struck me to the core of my naïve attitude was the lofty claim for a writer whom not even mother had read” (168).  This bit of the story has a happy ending, by the way: “at the time, I couldn’t guess with what delight I would some day read Green Henry.”

The Zurich poet and historical novelist Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (who I have not read) breaks through Canetti’s resistance, as does Jeremias Gotthelf’s nightmarish The Black Spider (“I felt haunted by it, as though it had dug into my own face,” 253), which leads to some sort of break with his mother, who uses the novella as a weapon to attack Zurich, Switzerland, and her son (“nobody with any understanding took Gotthelf seriously today,” 254).  The memoir ends with the mother’s long, brutal attack on Canetti’s Bildung, his education, his interest in Switzerland, and the writers he likes.   It is wild; neurotic, cruel and misguided and, psychologically, of high interest, however strange.

And it is only half as strange as the story Canetti tells his mother about a circle of dancing mice:

“You’re being unfair,” she said, “that’s just like you.  You expect too much.  Mice aren’t people, after all, even if they do have a kind of dancing.”  (221)

Good point, Mom.

Canetti’s memoir and mother often reminded me of Romain Gary’s Promise atDawn, as different as the books are, as different as the mothers are, two stories of powerful but displaced Jewish mothers and their brilliant sons wandering across Europe, searching for not just a home but a culture.

Jeremias Gotthelf's The Black Spider - long-legged, poisonous, and countless

Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (1842) starts with a trick. Gotthelf was a Swiss pastor who wrote tales and novellas of peasant life, humorous or otherwise. The Black Spider, now his best-known tale, begins with a christening – the family gathers, the godmother forgets the baby’s name, a feast (“then there were dried beans and stewed pears and a gammon of bacon and magnificent loins of pork from three-hundredweight pigs, red and white and juicy”) is prepared and demolished. But then the grandfather is led to tell the horrible story that gives the book its title.

It’s a deal-with-the-devil tale, a highly original one. A peasant village is dragooned into a series of pointless tasks for its feudal lord. A Green Man, with a red feather and a “little red beard” that crackles and sparks, offers to do the work for them, at the small price of an unbaptized child.

The peasants eventually decide that when the time comes to deliver a child, they’ll figure out some way to trick the devil. That plan always works well. In fact, at first it doesn’t go so badly, until the Black Spiders show up (Spider Alert!):

“Then Christine felt as if her face had burst, as if red-hot coals were being born and coming to life in it; she felt a crawling over her face, over all her limbs, as if everything in her were coming to life and crawling in fire over her body. Then, in the livid light of the lightning, she saw, long-legged, poisonous, and countless, black spiders hurrying over her limbs and away into the night, to be followed by others, long-legged, poisonous, and countless. At last no more came, the fire in her face died down, the Spider settled and shrank into an almost invisible spot, gazing with dying eyes at the infernal brood it had borne and sent forth as a sign that there was no jesting with the Green Man.”

Yes, Christine makes the deal with the devil, and later Christen helps defeat the Black Spider, and did I mention we began with a christening? A main subject of the short book is the strength of individual faith and the weakness of collective faith. As a group, the peasants are indecisive and paralyzed, while decisive individual actions both cause all of their troubles and save them.

As with many of the tales associated with German Romanticism, the characters can appear flat, but only because the writers have a different approach to characterization. In these sorts of stories, the descriptions of the outside world tell us about the internal world. The Black Spider is sometimes extremely literal in this regard, as the above passage shows.

The spider is almost symbolically too rich. It is collective sin and punishment, the evil inside us all, but also, from Swiss folklore, a plague metaphor. And it’s also a vigorously described actual monster, with a sense of humor – it likes to perch on it’s victim's head, so everyone but its immediate prey can see it.

I’ll reserve my complaints about the availability of 19th century German literature in English for tomorrow. The Black Spider ought to be, in the U.S. a creepy horror classic, at least. In print somewhere, at least.

I read The Black Spider in a book of Three Eerie Tales. Here’s a fellow who read it in an old anthology with a fantastic Edward Gorey cover, well worth the click. It’s also been published on its own, with a boring cover, but scroll down a bit for a skin-crawling illustration. And here’s a discussion of what Robert Walser thought about The Black Spider (it “makes my back cold”). Now that’s an endorsement!