Abstract
Amoral urgency of testimony and an untiring scientific curiosity stand out as the distinguishing characteristics of Primo Levi’s works. His eminence as a witness, however, is not the only reason for his rhetorical effectiveness: Levi systematically deploys the ethical authority of literature in his writing, both as an institution and as a set of discursive practices, through a system of citations and representations modeled on canonic texts, from Homer to Shakespeare and Rabelais. His meditations on ethics and testimony are constantly in dialogue with literary tradition, from Dante in If This Is a Man, to Manzoni in The Drowned and the Saved.3
Faced with the precarious existence of tribal life—drought, sickness, evil influences—the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world.
Italo Calvino 1
As for me, I can’t resist the vice of quoting.
Primo Levi 2
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Notes
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 27.
On this topic, see Marco Belpoliti, Primo Levi (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1997)
Alberto Cavaglion’s remarks in the recent annotated version of Levi’s memoir: Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo, ed. Alberto Cavaglion (Turin: Einaudi, 2012)
and Jonathan Usher, “‘Libertinage’: Programmatic and Promiscuous Quotation in Primo Levi,” in Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, ed. Joseph Farrell (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 91–116.
“Dark Band” and “The Survivor” are included in Primo Levi, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 43, 64; “Rappoport’s Testament” is published in Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve (New York: Penguin, 1986), 1–8.
See Nancy Harrowitz, “Primo Levi’s Science as ‘Evil Nurse’: The Lesson of Inversion,” in Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, ed. Roberta S. Kremer (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 59–73.
Jonathan Usher, “Primo Levi, the Canon and Italian Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 173.
In an eloquent interview Levi comments on this key point: “For the most part, authors choose one part of themselves, the better part. At times, I have portrayed myself in my books as brave, at others as cowardly, prophetic or naïve, but always, I think, as a balanced individual… I’m not very balanced at all.” Primo Levi, The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961–1987, ed. by Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon (New York: The New Press, 2001), 173.
Primo Levi, “Carbon,” in The Periodic Table (London: Penguin, 2000), 188–95; and “The Fugitive,” in A Tranquil Star (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 90–96.
See for instance “Man’s Friend” and “The Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge: A Winter’s Tale” in Primo Levi, The Sixth Day and Other Tales (New York: Summit Books, 1990), 34–37, 55–70; and “Censorship in Bitinia,” in A Tranquil Star, 46–50. On Levi’s fantastic stories and their relations with normativity, see also Roberto Farneti, “Of Human and Other Portentous Beings: On Primo Levi’s Storie Naturali,” Critical Inquiry 32.4 (2006), 724–40.
William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960); Peter Weiss’s The Investigation: A Play (New York: Atheneum, 1966).
Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 144.
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 304.
Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (London: Picador, 1993).
Marina Beer, “Primo Levi and Italo Calvino: Two parallel literary lives,” in New Reflections on Primo Levi: Before and AfterAuschwitz, ed. Risa Sodi and Millicent Marcus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 103–16.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 83–84.
See Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980)
and Imre Kertész, Fatelessness (New York: Vintage International, 2004).
Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (New York: Penguin, 1992).
Franz Kafka, Il processo, trans. Primo Levi (Turin: Einaudi, 1983).
Primo Levi, “Translating Kafka,” in The Mirror Maker (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 106–09.
In this regard, see also Levi’s remarks on Paul Celan’s poetry: Primo Levi, “On Obscure Writing,” in Other People’s Trades (New York: Summit Books, 1989), 169–75.
On this issue, see Marco Belpoliti, “Se questo è un sogno: Sogni, incubi e risvegli nell’opera di Primo Levi,” in Al di qua del bene e del male: La visione del mondo di Primo Levi, ed. Enrico Mattioda (Turin: Franco Angeli, 2000), 59–74.
Robert Gordon, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Dan Diner, Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Mein: Fischer, 1988).
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© 2016 Franco Baldasso
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Baldasso, F. (2016). Angelic Butterfly and the Gorgon: On Lightness in Primo Levi’s Writing. In: Vuohelainen, M., Chapman, A. (eds) Interpreting Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435576_13
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