The Offense of the Memory: Memory and Metaphor in The Drowned and the Saved

Abstract

As the epigraph to what would turn out to be his final book, Primo Levi chose a few lines from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner that lend impressive moral authority to the witness:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns,

And till my ghastly tale is told

This heart within me burns.¹

It is memory, of course, that visits this agony upon the mariner, the memory of having sinned first by felling the fateful albatross and then, all the worse, by surviving his fellow sailors after they paid the heavy price for his violent presumption. Thereafter, the mariner’s transgression overtakes him as a force unto itself, a Fury that he can neither predict nor control, a phantom of the mind that plunges him—in true Romantic form—into physical pain. His only relief takes the form of confessions that will (also with vintage Romantic defiance) imperil simple bourgeois happiness, robbing the wedding celebration of joy with the tale of his devastating (if entirely human) failure. In fact, Coleridge’s mariner does not so much tell his tale as find himself the vehicle for its searing truth, a mere—more or less helpless—medium of agonizing revelation. In return for bearing his agonizing truth so unconsciously, even selflessly, all the mariner can claim is a kind of helpless irreproachability, the ghosts that throng his burning heart and tongue comprising a veritable moral imperative.