Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science and Humanism after the Fall

Chapter 14: Autobiography and the Narrator

c h a p t e r 1 4 Autobiography and the Narrator Nancy Harrowitz In the last chapter of The Periodic Table, entitled ‘‘Carbon,’’ Primo Levi traces the itinerary of an atom of carbon as it moves from limestone to air to leaf. The energy of the carbon eventually emerges in the hand of the writer as he places the last dot of the essay upon the piece of paper, thus concluding the text: This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me that is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.1 Proposing a radical erasure of self, the text ends by giving the atom of carbon the last word, or rather the last dot. Levi the writer becomes the cipher; the carbon, the agent as Levi tells us that the cell is ‘‘in charge of my writing.’’ Aside from its figural appeal, Levi’s gesture of the grand conclusion based on a speck of carbon becomes particularly relevant when 177 178 Nancy Harrowitz examined in relation to two interrelated questions. The first is Levi’s selfportrayal as a writer, and the second is the concept of autobiography within his work. The critical reception of Levi as an author most approvingly points to his objectivity, his ‘‘dispassionate’’ witnessing, and his ability to universalize , to delineate, and to explore a broad humanistic context within which to examine the moral and ethical questions that arise from a study of the Holocaust. His scientific training is often cited as what permits him to take a long view, to write in a style which Irving Howe called ‘‘unadorned and chaste,’’2 and that Cynthia Ozick described as ‘‘lucid and calm,’’ demonstrating ‘‘magisterial equanimity.’’3 Levi himself advanced this view of his writing and his philosophy, even directly connecting his process of writing to scientific method and to chemical reaction in interviews and essays. Even among scholars who have looked less hagiographically and more critically at Levi’s work, there are still facile assumptions made about Levi that range from taking him at his word to a presumed authorial omniscience . In an essay on Levi entitled ‘‘Figural Realism and Witness Literature ,’’ Hayden White argues that Levi deliberately fosters a representation of himself as a writer based on a scientific objectivity. At the same time, White demonstrates that Levi’s writing is highly figural and that Levi sees these two as incompatible: Levi’s own writing practices run directly counter to his stated aim as a stylist. His writing is consistently and brilliantly figurative throughout and, far from being void of rhetorical flourishes and adornments, constitutes a model of how a specifically literary mode of writing can heighten both the referential and the semantic valences of a discourse of fact.4 White points out that Levi rejects notions of modern literature that do not deliver their message in a straightforward manner: for example, his essay entitled ‘‘Communication’’ in The Drowned and the Saved.5 And yet, Levi’s writing is anything but straightforward exposition, as White ably demonstrates by looking at the complex figural language that Levi employs in Survival in Auschwitz. White claims that Levi gives himself authorial credibility through his connecting scientific method with the ability to give accurate and meaningful testimony. But oddly enough, White concludes, ‘‘Levi believed that his was a style more scientific than artistic.’’ It appears that White misses the implicit point of his own argument: after making a strong case for the sheer artistry of Levi’s writings, he is now claiming that Levi did not 179 Autobiography and the Narrator understand his own craft and was not a good reader of himself. He takes Levi at his word when he says, ‘‘Levi’s own writing practices run directly counter to his stated aim as a stylist,’’ as if this statement leads incontrovertibly to the conclusion that Levi...