SOURCE: Maia, Rousiley C. M. “Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé: From the Antithesis of the Crowd-Man to the Madness of Power.” Thesis Eleven, no. 45 (1996): 28-38.

In the following essay, Maia explores Canetti's crowd theory as it appears in his novel Auto da Fé.

Auto-da-Fe represents a new style of novel about the crowd, which incorporates aesthetically many of Canetti's theoretical concerns with crowd phenomena. In his highly introspective novel, the most interesting crowd is never the physical throng and there are just a few examples of the human crowd, in the obvious sense. However, Auto-da-Fe is full of crowd symbolism, which is comprehensible only in relation to the complex typology and theory of crowds Canetti develops in Crowds and Power. Canetti ranges very widely in Crowds and Power to challenge the evolutionary-atavist tradition underpinning classical crowd theory of the Le Bon type and to provide a complete crowd theory of...