La terza via: Dante and Primo Levi

It is well known that the original title of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir was to be the Dantean I sommersi e i salvati, taken from the “ventesimo canto / de la prima canzon, ch’è d’i sommersi” (Inf. 20.1–2), until Levi’s friend and fellow partisan, editor Franco Antonicelli, convinced him to use a line from his 1946 poem Shemà, “se questo è un uomo”:

Voi che vivete sicure Nelle vostre tiepide case Voi che trovate tornando a sera Il cibo caldo e visi amici:

Considerate se questo è un uomo

[…].¹

The Italian title Se questo è un uomo was later rendered in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz, although most British editions carry the more faithful title, If This Is a Man.

It is less well known that Levi wrote what would become a classic in Holocaust literature and the Italian canon under rather unusual circumstances, on the train as he commuted between Turin and his factory job in Avigliana, on his lunch break, at night, when he was on watch at the factory. The neat chronological order of the chapters in the version we know today was imposed ex post facto: Levi, in fact, wrote in order of urgency, furiously, to bear witness to the Holocaust, to tell his taleas a modern Ancient Mariner. As he writes in his preface, the book

è nato già fin dai giorni di Lager. Il bisogno di raccontare agli «altri», di fare gli «altri» partecipi, aveva assunto fra noi, prima della liberazione e dopo, il carattere di un impulso immediato e violento, tanto da rivaleggiare con gli altri bisogni elementari; il libro è stato scritto per soddisfare a questo bisogno; in primo luogo quindi a scopo di liberazione interiore. Di qui il suo carattere frammentario: i capitoli sono stati scritti non in successione logica, ma per ordine di urgenza.²

The most urgent of these chapters, the first written, was “Storia di dieci giorni”, a diary of Levi’s actual liberation. The next, written a week later, on 14 February 1946, was “Il canto di Ulisse”. Furiously penned at work, on his lunch break, Levi noted, “ho scritto quasi tutto il capitolo «Il campo di Ulisse», nella mezz’ora da mezzogiorno e mezzo all’una. Ero continuamente in una specie di «trance»”.³

That this chapter is the best crafted and most powerful of Se questo è un uomo is a testament to Levi’s unique, even unrivaled gifts as a writer. That he turned to Dante and to Ulysses in particular is fortunate, but not fortuitous. After all, Levi received a classical education in Italy a time when Dante still occupied a central place in secondary education and, as a teenager, he had taken part in Dante tournaments were contestants earned points continuing the excerpt posed to them. His references to Dante are legion, direct and indirect, including phrases like ‘laggiù’ and ‘sul fondo,’ both shorthand for the inferno of Auschwitz. In fact, another early title for Se questo è un uomo, earlier indeed than I sommersi e i salvati, was to have been Sul fondo.⁴ Giuseppe Mazzotta, in “Thinking through Death”, his February 2008 keynote address at the Yale international conference entitled “Primo Levi in the Present Tense: New Reflections on His Life and Work Before and After Auschwitz”, brilliantly outlined the Hellenistic origins of Levi’s thought. Indeed, Levi draws on Dante and on the Ulysses episode in particular in such a knowledgeable and meaningful way as to make their connection more than just circumstantial.

In focusing on Ulysses, it is my contention that Levi opens a ‘third way’ for himself to identify with the homesick voyager; to know all that was knowable, as Croce puts it; to pursue knowledge by relentlessly asking why in opposition to the Holocaust dictum hier ist keine Warum. Levi writes:

spinto dalla sete, ho adocchiato, fuori di una finestra, un bel ghiacciolo a portata di mano. Ho aperto la finestra, ho staccato il ghiacciolo, ma subito si è fatto avanti uno grande e grosso che si aggirava là fuori, e me lo ha strappato brutalmente.—Warum?—gli ho chiesto, nel...