Akustische und physische Bilder des Fremden in Elias Canettis „Die Stimmen von Marrakesch“

[Machine translation] Accompanied by a film crew, Elias Canetti spent three weeks in Marrakesh in 1954, but it was not until 1968 that he published The Voices of Marrakesh. Recordings after a trip. In the fourteen prose pieces in this volume, the Moroccan city is shown as a multilingual space of remembrance, in which the foreign proves to be a versatile category whose description is rooted in both auditory and physical perceptions., The soundscape of Marrakech is reflected in the intensity of the traveller's acoustic experiences and reveals the city as a social, cultural, religious and economic space. Since the “voice is in a concrete sense a trace of the body” (Kolesch), the physical dimension plays a fundamental role in Canetti's perception and presentation of the foreign, although the spatial binding of acoustic impressions in this text has so far received little attention from critics., The title of the work refers to different voices that oscillate between disembodiousness and physicality: on the one hand, to the inhabitants and animals of Marrakech, which the first-person narrator also describes in their corporeality or lack of body; on the other hand, to the voice of the city itself, which presents itself as an urban and architectural space as well as as a voice-powerful and multilingual “urban body” (for anthropomorphizing urban discourse, see Ett and Ackroyd)., The absence and presence of the physical dimension of the voice is also reflected in the revealing relationship between orality and writing. Acoustic memories are visualized in Canetti's recordings and are spatialized in the “body of the text,” in which the voice of the first-person narrator vividly stages the acoustic and physical foreign Moroccan experience.