Primo Levi and the Identity of a Survivor by Nancy Harrowitz (review)

The term "identity," which features so prominently in the title of this splendid book, as well as throughout its pages, means "sameness or oneness." But what Nancy Harrowitz so effectively proves is the lack of sameness or oneness at the root of Primo Levi's anguished struggle to write the story of his life. Her purpose in this study is to investigate the several identities that jostle and collide with each other as Levi strains to reconcile the rival demands of autobiography, testimony, and an irrepressible creative drive. This interpretive strategy produces a reading of Levi that is unparalleled in complexity, subtlety, and depth. While the autobiographical and testimonial projects presuppose a strict adherence to canons of authenticity, Harrowitz never loses sight of Levi's risky recourse to literary expedients. It is risky because any perceived deviation from historical fact would undermine the credibility of the imperative to bear witness. Instead, Harrowitz aptly points out that in moments of maximum tension Levi feels the need to resort to classical mythology or literary analogies to make his point, as if only by marshalling his humanist heritage could he convey the meaning of trauma. Two sections of the study immediately come to mind in this regard: first, Harrowitz's richly contextualized and brilliantly interpreted image of the Gorgon in The Drowned and the Saved and, second, her superb reading of the "Canto of Ulysses" in Survival in Auschwitz.

In this latter section, Harrowitz takes an important position on one of the most exhaustively studied passages in Levi's first Holocaust memoir, the "Canto of Ulysses." While scholars routinely read this episode – in which the prisoner Levi is able to recall strategic verses from Dante in conversation with another inmate – as a redemptive moment, Harrowitz builds on Lawrence Langer's darker interpretation of Levi's meaning. Langer reminds us that Dante's Ulysses represents the dangers of rhetorical virtuosity, and Levi himself realizes how his own literary skill may undermine the credibility of his testimony. Langer's "minority" report on this passage is given new depth by Harrowitz's insistence on Levi's concluding lines in the chapter – lines that refer to the tragic end of Ulysses' sea voyage beyond the limits of the known world. In a beautiful formulation, Harrowitz writes that "Levi gains the consolation of high literature fleetingly, only to make the loss, its disappearance in the shipwreck, that much more intense."

A further vexed issue in Levi studies on which Harrowitz has shed penetrating light is that of the author's troubling representation of the Muselmann – the inmate who seems to have given up, the broken man who becomes the object of the narrator's contempt. In a bold move, she repudiates the philosopher Giorgio Agamben's and Levi's own stated view of this abject figure as someone devoid of thought. Harrowitz acknowledges Levi's distancing technique, attributing it to the threat that the Muselmann poses for his own survival strategy. But, in a dazzling shift, she invokes one of Levi's early poems, "Buna," in which the first person poetic voice endows the "spent man" with a subjectivity – the possibility of returning the gaze of the "I" so that "speaker and subject [can] embrace a common humanity and grieve its loss." In showing the plurality of attitudes that Levi evinces towards the Muselmann across his body of writing, Harrowitz has helped me to think through my own unease about Levi's treatment of this abject figure.

Of the three conflicting identities that Harrowitz has singled out for consideration – those of the autobiographer, the witness, and the creative writer – it is to the rival claims of the first two that she dedicates some of her most intense pages, because this conflict pivots around the allimportant notion of shame, a notion to which Levi turns in a key chapter of The Drowned and the Saved. According to Harrowitz, the shame of survival requires that the testimonial imperative take precedence over the autobiographical one...