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C H A P T E R ^ "Mon maitre, mon monstre": Primo Levi and Monstrous Science NANCY HARROWITZ In 1966 Primo Levi published his first collection of science fiction stories, entitled Storie naturali (Natural Stories), to be followed by another collection, Vizio diforma (Vice ofForm), in 1971.l Levi's sciencefictionholds a surprisingly liminal place in his opus. Almost entirely ignored by critics and not generally known by the reading public, the science fiction nonetheless provides a rich site for some of the most compelling and serious issues to be found anywhere in Levi's work. One of these issues, which I shall focus on in this essay, is the relation between modern science and the Holocaust. Levi elaborates their connection by adopting a discourse of monstrosity as a method of exploring and reading scientific epistemology and its relation to scientific ethics and politics. Before concentrating on a specific example of Levi's use of monstrosity, it is important to note how he has set up the entire text of Storie naturali in terms of the monstrous through his choice of an epigraph. The tremendous complexity of his science fiction is forecast and framed by this epigraph, which is in itself a study in complications. From Rabelais's Renaissance masterpiece Gargantua, the section that Levi abridges and cites is from the well-known fourth chapter, and he chooses the passage that comes directly after the description of Garganrua's strange birth from his mother's left ear: If you don't believe it, I should worry! but a good man, a man of good sense, believes what he's told and what he finds in books. Didn't Solomon say, in Proverbs XIV: "Innocents believe every word, etc."? . . . For my part, I find nothing written in the Holy Bible that is against it. But if such had been the will of God, would 51 NANCY HARROWITZ you say that He couldn't have done it? Hey, for mercy's sake, don't ever muddlefuddle your minds with these vain thoughts, for I tell you that to God nothing is impossible, and, if He wanted, from now on women would have their children that way through the ear. Was not Bacchus engendered through Jupiter's thigh? . . . Wasn't Minerva born out of Jupiter's brain, by way of his ear? . . . Castor and Pollux out of the shell of an egg laid and hatched by Leda? But you would be much more amazed and astonished if I now expounded to you the whole chapter in Pliny in which he talks about strange and unnatural births; however, I am not as barefaced a liar as he was. Read Book 7 of his Natural History, chapter 3, and stop pounding on my understanding.2 Once this epigraph has been scanned by the reader, Levi's own title, Storie naturaliy is perhaps no longer a mystery. But even though Levi reveals the source for his title, namely Pliny, the question of the epigraph is far from solved. One wonders, for example, why Levi doesn'tjust cite Pliny for his epigraph, since the title of his collection suggests that this may be a rewriting or a modeling after of Pliny. Why the double frame, Rabelais citing Pliny, rather than a straight horse's mouth? The differences between Pliny and Rabelais are vast: the one a historical narrative which tries to convince through anecdotes, eyewitness reports, and claims to veracity and the other an ironic, enormous superfiction that depends on hyperbole and exaggeration as its modus operandi. Seeking to undermine those truth claims on Pliny's part, Rabelais's effect is an ironic distancing from the subject of monstrous birth. He achieves this through the veiled hostility of jokes and obscenities, and through the epistemology and genealogy of lying that he presents, using Pliny as both his source and his scapegoat. Rabelais, however, is anything but straightforward himself. He is in fact emblematic of the hard-to-pin-down author, as he was both physician and priest, sceptic and believer, obscene and reverent. Levi names Rabelais as one of his literary influences in Le ricerche delle radici, and in an essay in Laltrui mestiere entitled "Francois Rabelais," Levi dubs him "mon maitre." In discussing the complications of Rabelais's masterpiece, Levi says the following of Rabelais himself: "The life of Rabelais, as far as we know it, is a tangle of contradictions, a whirlwind of apparently incompatible activities, incompatible as well with the image of the author...

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