The voices of Marrakech

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The voices of Marrakech are records after a trip (subtitles) by Elias Canetti , in the first 1967 series Hanser appeared.

construction

Canetti leads the reader as a first-person narrator to the Moroccan city ​​of Marrakech , which he toured in the 1950s accompanied by a film team, where he (who lived in London ) appears to the locals as an Englishman, to the inhabitants of the Mellah , of the Jewish quarter, but also as a Jew.

His book is not a travelogue in the usual sense, but (as the subtitle already suggests) a collection of memorabilia that have congealed into sketches, snapshots with which he tries to capture the charm of the city, at least to illuminate it like a flash.

The individual sections are fundamentally independent of each other, even if references or transitions are occasionally included to keep the book together inside.

content

Encounters with camels

The protagonist visits a camel market with his friend and discovers a lot of humanity in the camels. He is shocked by the fact that these camels are being slaughtered.

The souks

At the market the protagonist tells the impressions of the goods, their scents and colors and describes the haggling with the dealers.

The calls of the blind

In the constantly recurring demanding bitter cries of the blind, in connection with the promised blessing of Allah, the protagonist recognizes a deeper meaning of life.

The saliva of the marabou

The marabou is a holy man who puts the coins donated to him in his mouth, chews them and spits them out again with a lot of saliva.

Silence in the house and emptiness of the roofs

The protagonist describes a place that you need to be able to withdraw. On the flat roof of his friend's house, he first looks into the distance, but when he tries to look at the neighboring houses, his friend becomes restless. Because it is frowned upon to look into the neighboring houses.

The woman at the bars

On a walk he meets an unveiled woman who is speaking to him from the first floor with lovely words of endearment . Fascinated, he stands for a long time, looks up at her, until he finally asks a boy in French if she is crazy, which the boy confirms.

Visit to the Mellah

In this longer section, the protagonist visits the Mellah , the Jewish quarter. At first he comes across small shops with fine fabrics, but the further he goes, the poorer his environment becomes. Finally he comes to a small square, which he calls the center of the Mellah and with which he strongly identifies. After attending a school where the teacher had demonstrated the skills of his students, he is led through the Jewish cemetery by a strange guide and harassed by many beggars.

The Dahan family
Narrator and writer

In this short chapter, the protagonist describes the storytellers who gather people around them on the street and entertain them very skillfully with their powerful words. The focuser admires them very much and looks up at them. A little further away are the scribes who are waiting for customers with their writing utensils in front of them. A whole family sits with one of the writers.

The choice of bread
The slander

Begging children stood around the restaurant. The owner, a Frenchman, reports on his first experiences in Marrakech with such little young girls. He was out with friends and he was peeking through a hole while one of his friends was having fun with one of the young girls. He stepped into the darkness and stole the given money from the bedside table and they all laughed about it. Since this tale, the English felt contemptuous disgust at this Frenchman, and he was now far below these beggar children in terms of reputation.

The donkey's lust
"Scheherazade"
The invisible

interpretation

Semantization of the foreign

  • Canetti stages strangers by exposing himself to them without linguistic communication. He does not prepare for the country with the help of travel literature, does not learn Arabic on site, and does not need to be accompanied by an interpreter; it provokes non-understanding in order to “lose nothing of the power of strange calls”, to “be affected by the sounds as it is due to them, and not to weaken anything through inadequate and artificial knowledge”.
→ Staging the strange in its mysteriousness, cf. especially the episode with the marabou.
  • The narrator also refuses to make moral judgments: “When you travel you accept everything, the indignation stays at home. You look, you hear, you are excited about the most terrible thing because it is new. Good travelers are heartless. "
  • Because the foreign remains foreign, ie semantically empty, it becomes free for new content-related fillings, because even the semantic emptying of the foreign is a construct of the traveler. With the re-semantization of the foreign, Canetti accomplishes exactly the semiotic reevaluation of the cultural practices as described by Culler as typical for tourist behavior. Canetti goes beyond this tourist appropriation strategy insofar as he writes down his travel experiences → exoticism invites identification and deciphering and thus semantic fixation.

The tourist look

  • Culler: Tourists as "agents of semiotics", as semioticists who understand everything they see as a sign of cultural practice, as "authentic". What is authentic for the tourist is "that which, beyond its usefulness, participates in a cultural sign practice specific to the foreign culture"
The “typical” is not presented to the tourist suddenly, but mediated by markers, e.g. B. Travel guides, museums, postcards, signs.
  • Authenticity therefore does not depend on the thing itself, but requires a semiotic mediation through which one signifier is marked as authentic by another signifier.
  • Modern tourism is characterized by the permanent need to certify authenticity.
Application to the text by Canetti:
“Canetti now stages the authenticity of his experiences in the text in a way that not only corresponds to the previously outlined model of the foreign experience, but actually doubles it. On the one hand, Canetti seeks to gain access to Marrakech through a process of semioticization that follows Culler's model pretty closely; on the other hand, he deepens his interpretations of the observed cultural practices by duplicating the following: what turns out to be a cultural signifier on a first semiotic level functions on a second level as the signified of an essentially mythical signifier. "
→ Double coding of foreign experience: first, semiotization of cultural practice, second, meaning as a myth.
  • Examples: Canetti is not interested in the economic dimension of trade, but in the communicative function of market life in the souks.
Encounter with the marabou: incomprehension and disgust regarding the stranger swallowing coins; Orange dealer as a cultural translator who explains Canetti that he is a saint. Later, the void created by the lack of meaning is apparently compensated for by finding a metaphysical meaning ("The friendliness and warmth that passed over to me during his words was as I have never received it from a person.")
→ Canetti almost always transcends the meaning of an episode in the direction of a mythical meaning.
↔ Connection with Canetti's theory of the poet as the “guardian of transformation”, who should gain access to the other through empathy and empathy
  • Cf. episode with the calls of the blind: abstraction from the practical aim of the calls, then empathic emulation and “mythization”. The incomprehensibility of the alien creates a void that is filled by mythization and recoding, but which, according to Fuchs, is always tied back to experience and therefore does not curdle into a cliché.
Research on Canetti: Kabbani expresses the accusation of Eurocentrism against Canetti with recourse to Said's study. He inscribes an ontological difference between Orient and Occident in his travel book and implies a Eurocentric superiority: because Morocco is incomprehensible to Canetti, it is exotic and attractive; it offers something mysterious and allows "relief from the boredom of daily existence"; the book ends after all abused animals, mutilated natives, and creatures are depicted.
→ According to Fuchs, certainly not inapplicable on the level of imagery and motifs.
But: the narrator himself has no secure identity, it is not clear whether he is English or not, and his religious identity also distinguishes him as an outsider. The binary opposition between what is one's own and what is foreign is thus undermined because it does not even allow the image of a sovereign subject to arise; the foreign is not read with a view to the domestic because there is no such thing.
→ Canetti's “domination-free handling” of the foreign culture.
His reassessment of sensory impressions also fits in with this: he is particularly interested in the non-visual, his “gaze” is not touristy → no visualization of the unfamiliar, but privileging the culture of sounds and smells.

Testimonies

" The Voices of Marrakech is that book through which Canetti becomes something of a trusted friend to the reader and in which a kind of joy in everything human (...) shines out of all descriptions of the urban misery of the oriental cities on the edge of human existence." François Bondy

"Classic one would like to call this prose's reference to the world, because its author looks at the people, animals and objects of Marrakech with such unswerving power without the subjectivity of the viewer ever being pushed into the foreground." Rudolf Hartung

“As cautiously and shyly as Canetti proceeds, the reader will witness a process of knowledge. A process without any intellectual strain ... Whatever Canetti experiences and observes in Marrakech remains, pure narrative visualization, sensually close and tangible. ” Eberhard Horst

reception

Just like Elias Canetti and yet in a different way and to a large extent distancing himself from him, Juan Goytisolo in Engel und Paria (1985), Hubert Fichte in Der Platz der Hanged (1989) and Michael Fisch in khamsa - or The Water of Life (2010) deals with the Djemaa el Fna in literary terms.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jonathan Culler: The Semiotics of Tourism. In: Ders .: Framing the sign. Criticism and its Institutions. Oxford 1988, p. 155.
  2. ^ A b c Anne Fuchs: The tourist view. Anne Fuchs: The tourist view: Elias Canetti in Marrakech. Approaches to a semiotics of tourism. In: dies./Theo Harden (ed.): Reisen im Diskurs, Heidelberg 1995, pp. 71–86. ISBN 3-8253-0303-9