Black, White, and Gray in Levi
In If This is a Man (ITM),[1]
written directly after his time in Auschwitz, and in The Drowned and the
Saved (DS), written forty years later, Primo Levi approaches the
topic of literature after Auschwitz more indirectly than Adorno does. He does
not make direct imperatives regarding literature, but rather – in the prefaces
to his texts – explains what he thinks his texts should do. Because these goals
(as we will see) point to larger goals of social change, we would be justified
in thinking of Levi's texts as pieces in a larger framework, such that he would
argue that other pieces of literature should also hold goals that lead to the
same social change. Generalizing from the particulars of Levi's goals in this
way is slightly problematic because, as we will see (p. 56), part of
what defined the Lager for Levi was its destruction of all particularity, such
that one component of his work is to reclaim his own particular existence.
Thus, when we construct a general set of goals from Levi's particular ones, we
will at the same time keep in mind that they are particular goals for Levi.
These goals are: to give an account of his experiences; to attempt to examine
the state of mind that led to and existed within the Lager; to complicate
common perceptions about the Lager; to engage through language with his
memories; and to answer (or approach) questions about how we should think about
the Lager today. I will examine these goals as they are developed in Levi's
prefaces and then complicate and expand upon them with moments in the texts and
with the texts' genres (ITM appears at first to be a memoir, and DS
a collection of essays).
By
approaching Levi in this way, I leave myself open to the objection that I am assuming
that the narrators' claims in the prefaces about the purposes of these texts
are equivalent to what Levi would claim are the purposes of the texts, and
that, more generally, anything can tell us what Levi considers the purposes of
his literature to be. In other words, I am assuming I have access to authorial
intent. And, if I cannot know Levi's purpose, the objection continues, then I
am unjustified in assuming that the narrators of the prefaces in ITM and
DS are identical to each other or even that they are the same as the
narrators of the texts themselves.
The
response to this objection is that we can assume that these prefaces are both
expressing the beliefs of Levi precisely because they are prefaces. In Paratexts,
Gerard Genette argues that the function of what he calls the “original
assumptive authorial preface” is to explain why and how we should read the
following text (Genette 197). An “original assumptive authorial preface” is a
preface published with the original text, the alleged author of which is the
same as the author of the text (as opposed to a character in the text or
someone else entirely), whose authenticity is verified by other paratextual
signs, and also by the author's assumption that the text is her own by speaking
of it implicitly as hers in the preface (179-84). The preface to Levi's ITM
was published with the original. The author alleges to also be the author of
the text by claiming it to be “this book of mine” (9). The authenticity of this
allegation is supported both by the title of the preface (“Author's Preface”
[9]) and by the signature at its end (“Primo Levi” [10]). And, the author also
implicitly writes about it as his by writing about the experiences contained in
the book as his own (“It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944” [9]). Thus, we can conclude that
Levi's preface is an example of an “original assumptive authorial preface” as
defined by Genette. Furthermore, because the purpose of an original assumptive
authorial preface is to talk about why and how to read a text, these prefaces
tell us what Levi considers to be the purposes of his texts, such that we are
justified, in an examination of the purpose of literature in Levi, to appeal to
these prefaces. Also, because both of these prefaces have the same author, we
are further justified in examining both of them together to come up with a more
comprehensive set of purposes.
[1] This text, in my Works Cited is entitled, Survival
in Auschwitz. Here, I use the title more literally similar to the Italian
one used by Levi (Se questo è
un uomo). The title If This is a Man is also preferred by the Levi
scholars examined in this paper.
