The Irony of Emendation: A Reading of Primo Levi’s “L’ultimo Natale di guerra”

This passage from the racconto “L’ultimo Natale di guerra” could be used to explain a peripeteia in the thought of Primo Levi, whereby the tragic yields to the benignly comic in his remembrance of Frau Mayer and the events surrounding Christmas 1944. Here, Levi claims how his own lately recovered memories, together with the testimony of others, supplements his recollection of his eleven months in Auschwitz:

In quel tempo io lavoravo come “specialista” in un laboratorio chimico all’interno della fabbrica: sono cose che ho già raccontato altrove, ma, stranamente, col passare degli anni quei ricordi non impallidiscono né si diradano, anzi, si arricchiscono di particolari che credevo dimenticati, e che talvolta acquistano senso alla luce di ricordi altrui, di lettere che ricevo o di libri che leggo.”¹

We encounter such emendation elsewhere in Levi’s writings. He constantly refers to and qualifies his descriptions of characters and events from Se questo è un uomo: for example, in the chapter “La vergogna” from I sommersi e i salvati, he will recall L’ultimo, Chajim, Szabó, Robert, Baruch, Sivadjan and others. Elsewhere he will do the same with Jean il Pikolo, Rumkowski and the story of Lilít, as if an endless emendation held forth the possibility of preserving and bringing his entire experience of Auschwitz together into a harmonious whole. In “L’ultimo Natale di guerra,” he will introduce a far gentler narrator than before, one whose tone lacks the bitterness that concludes the chapter “Die Drei Leute vom Labor,” as if to set an ironic distance between himself and his own language. I would also argue that the irony that he sets in play compromises the power of memory to re-collect, to complete and to still. Read individually, each piece is complete and sufficient unto itself; however, when each is read against the memory of the other, they gloss and deconstruct each other. Thus do we speak of the impossible possibility of memory in Levi: promising total presence, it promotes disintegration. Levi’s task is the equally impossible/possible work of mourning: both to preserve and to renounce.

In his 1949 essay, “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” Cleanth Brooks defines irony in poetry simply as “[the] obvious warping of a statement by the context.”² Context, in Brooks, is organic, with every part modifying every other part; that is, the “poetic” elements are not just mechanistically tacked on. Moreover, “there is a general skepticism as to universals” (1046), which, one could argue, is a consequence of such irony. I shall substitute “verbal artwork” for Brooks’s “poetry,” and claim that Levi’s witness to the Holocaust is, by its particular, peculiar organicism, necessarily ironic: possessing, of course, tragic irony, self-irony, dramatic irony, situational irony, as well as “playful, arch, mocking or gentle irony” (1042)—all of which serving as unstable “examples” of structural irony. Consider the context and subject of his recall: Levi-Häftling is immersed in the “concentrationary sublime” (Croce’s sublime: “L’affermarsi improvviso di una forza morale ultra-possente”).³ Even his most historicist critics have put together, at times unwittingly, a strong case for his artistry, and each quality of that artistry is, given its subject, ironic. Novelty: throughout his writings Levi calls Auschwitz an unicum; which is, of course, itself a sardonic understatement. Autonomy: the rules and laws of Auschwitz are unique to the context, while common-sense practicality is foreign. Regardless of his talent and training as a chemist—hence, his value to Monowitz/I.G. Farben—he can be selected at any moment for the gas chambers.

Moreover, while rules and laws are normally intended to promote the well-being of the collectivity, these rules and laws, on the contrary, intend its degradation and destruction. That is, the concentrationary universe is overseen by a deliberately elaborated and carefully administered anti-eudaemonism and sadistic deontology. The concentrationary/literary marvelous: more than improbable, the enormous monstrosity of Auschwitz makes it unbelievable. Indeed, it was intended to be that way, hence the SS boast that no...