Few novels have had such an impact on the modemrn receptive consciousness, forDie Blendung presents the reader with an extremely complex fictional universe that 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, oftext in general to make any kind of meaning, to extract a minimal signification from the historical phenomena it purports to metaphorize. Because of the insurmountable gap between text and context, between story and history, the novel, as the privileged tool of literary expression--Canetti seems to be saying--must perforce manifest, in the metaphor at least, its inability to channel the devastation of history through language. If the novel is to signify, it must incorporate the breakdown of signification. Its positivity, in effect, lies in its failure to mean. It has been claimed that Die Blendung, because of this insurmountable gap between text and context, does not seem to refer to concrete phenomena in the historical reality of the period in any immediate way, that it does not even make note of the contextual events which have, no doubt, accompanied its production, and that the metaphor is so overdone in Canetti's novel that one questions the very legitimacy of its referents. This novel, much like the modem and postmodern novel, is autotelic in nature, its metatextual dimension being quite evident on the surface of the text. It is not without reason that the main protagonists of Die Blendung are involved with writing: in fact, the problematic of writing seems to be the main concern of the novel. By profession, Kien deals with the corruption of ancient texts and the restoration of their truth. He is also preoccupied with the proper recording of phenomenaalbeit sometimes trivial phenomena--in his notebook of stupidities, that notebook the purpose of which is to establish a oneto-one relationship between the event in life d its rendering in the text in order to accede to a better understanding of the event. Sometimes, Kien draws long catalogues to help him locate books after he leaves his library, or the mental "Liste der unschuldigen Bucher, die er zu Fall gebracht hatte" (BD 119). Fischerle, too, keeps a special kind of diary: namely, one of chess champions in which he records the basic data of their biographies, a limited version of the story of their lives. And, finally, Therese makes her own list, that of the stock in the library which she draws on strips of newspaper, she also specializes in a particular kind of writing: the writing of the letter "0" and its numerical counterpart, the zero.