The word to tell. Trauma and writing in Primo Levi’s work

Abstract

The scientific training of Primo Levi, his clarity of language, the character –so hostile and far removed from “the language of the heart”- and the moral tension of his writing all creating a unique combination of psychological, stylistic and formal elements to give form to the most significant personal testimony ever written about experience in a Nazi concentration camp. Primo Levi builds his text using a Dantesque model; for instance, he describes the experience in the camp of Fossoli employing Dante’s image of the limbo. When Dante’s words don’t come to help him, he turns to the language of the Bible to imbue his style with fire. Levi’s marmoreal language, his dry, clear prose style, turned a moral duty into a literary strategy. Placing him on the borderline between a writer of tru literature and a producer of written testimony only contributes to concealing and removing the question of writer’s responsibility when dealing with the most disturbing problems of our most recent past. For many years the majority of readers failed to realize that “Se questo è un Uomo” (If This is a Man) is a philosophical and anthropological study of a drastic experience. In this respect, Levi’s concept of “grey zone” – more present in his last work than in his first – has for him a heuristic value that goes beyond the description of human behaviour in extreme situations. In his last work, this “grey one” becomes a powerful cognitive instrument, which though a dual mirroring process, connects Levi’s research with Hilberg’s, Arend’s and Stanley Milgram’s work.