The Temptation of Utopia and the Problematics of Language in Canetti's Auto da fé

Canetti's Auto da fé presents the reader with an extremely complex fictional univers which problematizes the very relationship between text and context, the word and the world, story and history, signifier and signified. What is at stake here is the very possibility of the novel and, by extension, of text in general to make any kind of meaning, to extract a minimal signification from the historical phenomena it purports to metaphorize. The article focuses mainly on the temptation of the novel to posit an opening, an exit from the nihilism of Europe between the two World Wars which the novel attempts to measure up to. But this proves to be a game with an idea (perhaps the idea of Utopia itself) that the text posits and then cancels out in the absence of historical meaning.