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c h a p t e r 1 0 Primo Levi’s Struggle with the Spirit of Kafka Massimo Giuliani It has already been shown that Primo Levi’s science-fiction stories are a kind of modern midrashim.1 In the Jewish tradition, this term refers to an exercise of pedagogical hermeneutics that creates imaginary stories and dialogues about biblical figures and that intentionally forces the original texts or interprets the silence—the ‘‘not said’’—of the tales with the goal of deducing a moral teaching, a psychological detail, a davar acher (that is, a new interpretation) of the text or figure to which the midrash refers. These stories use the science-fiction register to exorcise the fear generated by a technological world that appears as projected in the future only out of an excess of imagination, but that, in reality, is our present (to previous generations, this present would have appeared exactly as a science-fiction world). And every time something is said through an excess of imagination or a transgression, in this case of science and technology, the mechanism of irony is at work. Irony is, by definition, ambivalent because it allows the listener or the reader to smile or to feel hurt. This is the reason why Primo Levi is a master in using irony; he is not a humorist (humor always forces us to smile), nor is he sarcastic (sarcasm always makes people suffer and feel hurt). Moreover, in order to write science fiction, it is not necessary at all to use technological material or language that is projected into the future. 137 138 Massimo Giuliani As proved by Italo Calvino’s hilarious Cosmocomics, and as shown by Levi himself, for example in the beautiful story ‘‘Quaestio de centauris,’’ the material may be the prehistory or the classical mythology, or simply the ‘‘past tense’’ (passato prossimo) of the years of World War II or the postwar reconstruction, and the geographic context may be an imaginary country, such as Bitinia (‘‘Censorship in Bitinia’’) or real cities such as Berlin (‘‘Angelical Butterfly’’) or Turin (‘‘Cladonia Rapida’’). Once Levi has a moral message, which is the engine of the story, then characters and anecdotes develop and come out with the force of the paradox, of the unbelievable but possible, of the irrationality that generates surprise and admiration (hence the smile, and perhaps, at the same time, the hurt). At the end of reading most of the stories of The Sixth Day—the stories originally included in Storie naturali (1966) and Vizio di forma (1971)—we, the readers, understand the message: de te fabula narratur. These stories, which are simultaneously natural and surreal, biological and technological, historical and fantastic, are the ‘‘new parables’’ of a humanistic gospel that Primo Levi has written, in different ways and out of his own experience in Auschwitz, aiming, first, at testifying to the complexity of human nature; second, at preventing the risks of a curiosity that pushes human beings into creating the most sophisticated instruments to better dominate matter (here is the essence of technology); and third, at making sense of a reality that, mixing rationality with chaos and logic with passion, seems to be completely meaningless. Good examples of this are the six tales, not consecutive , which have the tragicomic Mr. Simpson as the protagonist, the Italian representative of Natca, an American advanced-technology firm. Their conclusion (see the last story) is the defeat of Mr. Simpson, who is described by Levi with words taken from the Bible. Simpson has fought with the last technological invention—the Torec, or Toral Recorder, for living in a virtual reality—‘‘like Jacob [has fought] with the angel, but his fight was lost from the very beginning,’’ and now, in the rare pauses of losing himself in his virtual technological trips, Simpson finds consolation in reading Qohelet, the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, and in meditating on its famous sentence nihil novi sub sole, ‘‘there is nothing new under the sun,’’ an ironic voluntary punishment for somebody who spent his life pursuing novelty. This reading, instead of atoning, serves the goal of allowing him to identify with the old king Solomon, the alleged author of Qohelet, described by Levi as ‘‘satiated with wisdom and days, who has seven hundreds wives and infinite wealth and the friendship of the black queen, who adored the true God and the fake gods. . . . But Solomon’s wisdom was conquered through pain in a long life of works and errors...

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