ELIAS CANETTI’NİN KÖRLEŞME ROMANINDA AYDININ TOPLUMA YABANCILAŞMASI
THE ALIENATION OF THE INTELLECTUAL FROM SOCIETY IN ELIAS CANETTI’S AUTO-DA-FÉ

Summary/Abstract: Literary texts serve as a rich mirror reflecting the sociological dimensions of the tensions between the individual and society. In the modern era, as the public role of the intellectual has increasingly come under scrutiny, the withdrawal of the intellectual figure from social bonds has been strikingly portrayed, particularly in novels. Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung) portrays the story of an intellectual who retreats into knowledge, distances himself from everyday realities, and experiences the destructive consequences of this isolation on both personal and collective levels. The primary aim of this study is to reveal how the loss of the modern intellectual's social responsibility creates a process of alienation through the character of Peter Kien. Employing a qualitative research method, data were collected through document analysis, using the Turkish translation by Ahmet Cemal (Sel Yayıncılık, 2015) as the primary source. The character’s level of alienation was analyzed through a descriptive analysis method using an ‘analytical framework’ consisting of five parameters: humiliation of others, paranoid generalization, violent fantasy, cognitive alienation, and mass contempt. In the examination, the novel’s three-part fictional structure (A Head Without a World, Headless World, The World in the Head) was used as the fundamental analytical framework, and Kien’s process of mental enclosure was correlated with the socio-cultural atmosphere of 1930s Europe. The findings demonstrate that Kien’s intellectual arrogance renders him vulnerable to manipulation in everyday relationships, and the safe space he constructs by taking refuge in books completely collapses in the face of external reality. In this context, the study argues that the isolated world constructed by the intellectual by escaping social responsibility is not a safe haven but an illusion that accelerates mental and physical exhaustion. The novel’s finale proves that abstract knowledge, detached from practical life, loses its enlightening function and evolves into a destructive force that threatens the subject’s existence.

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