What Is Auto-da-Fé All About?

A central question that is inevitably raised by any readings and discussion of Auto-da-Fé, whether these involve laypeople or literary scholars is, What is the novel really about? Why did Canetti write Auto-da-Fé? What was he trying to accomplish with it? Virtually every essay written about Auto-da-Fé— and a rich body of literature about Auto-da-Fé has grown since Canetti was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1981— has provided different answers to these questions.

This is not entirely surprising, however. Auto-da-Fé is a complex literary text, with a multilayered structure and content, written by an extremely intelligent, erudite, and sophisticated intellectual who had an ambitious agenda but never made it explicit. As is the case of other similarly complex and ambitious works of art, Auto-da-Fé can be read, analyzed, and interpreted at many different levels. As remarked by an early reviewer, Auto-da-Fé “is of such richness that all sorts of commentaries come to mind uninvited and en masse” (Brion 1987, p. 308). Different readers get something different out of the novel, depending on their age or gender, their social and cultural background, their field of expertise and education, their knowledge, their sensitivity, their literary taste, their political or ideological orientation, and also the particular time of their life in which they read the novel, the reasons they read it, and their expectations. David Darby, a literary scholar who has written extensively about Canetti, remarked that Auto-da-Fé is an excellent example of an “open text,” a concept developed by Umberto Eco to describe a literary text in which the author expects the reader to contribute significantly to the interpretation of the text and for which different interpretations are expected from different readers. Accordingly, literary scholars typically bring their own perspective to the interpretation of Auto-da-Fé – Marxist, feminist, or aesthetic— and their essays appear to be mainly aimed at criticizing each other. Auto-da-Fé inevitably elicits strong visceral reactions.