The Laughter of the Madman, the Laughter of the Hyena. The Animal Side in Elias Canetti’s Work

Animals are key in understanding Elias Canetti’s idea of man. Many of his well-known themes regarding the human condition, such as death, the dynamics of crowds, the mechanisms of power, can be fully understood only by including a reflection on animals. In his works Canetti points out the mobility of boundaries between human and animal with regard to the concepts of mask, metamorphosis and theater, going beyond the sole visual aspects and focusing on the acoustic ones as well. He indeed seems to recover the ancient function of masks as vocal resonance instruments by introducing, especially in his Viennese production, his so-called acoustic masks. He was obsessed by human voices, but he needed to search for the animal side in them; therefore, he was also interested in listening to sounds produced by the animals themselves. One of the strongest experience ever occurred to him was when, in the twenties and in the thirties in Vienna, he listened to recorded animal voices in which he recognized the features of a drama. Moreover, the author highlights the continuity between the human and the non-human animal world in laughter: it is a hyena who laughs, but it is also the laughter of a madman. Starting from the primitive man and the jungle, the aim of this paper is to follow the animal sounds through their transformation into acoustic masks in which human features appear together with animal ones.