Levi's genres – a combination of memoir,
autobiography, and essay – both complicate and inform the above conclusions.
More specifically, the genres that Levi employs are themselves desimplifications
of the categories of memoir and essay, thus furthering (albeit indirectly) his
goal of desimplification of perceptions of the Lager; moreover, by appealing
specifically to the genres of memoir, autobiography, and essay, Levi emphasizes
the notion that the prevention of the return of the Lager requires a critical
(unsimplistic) collective history about the concentrationary world, a
collective history that (in order to fight the depersonalization of the camps)
must be made up of personal accounts.
We
see that Levi's genre in ITM is a combination of memoir and
autobiography because Levi claims that one of his goals is to provide “an
account,” but one embedded in personal experience and whose goal is to
understand the human mind. In On Autobiography, Philippe Lejeune defines
autobiography as “Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person
concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in
particular the story of his personality” (Lejeune 4). It therefore has four defining
components: 1) that it is narrative prose; 2) that it deals with a single
person's life and specifically the development of her personality; 3) that the
author and narrator are identical; and 4) that it is a retrospective narrative
in which the narrator is identical to the protagonist (4). For Lejeune, the
difference between memoir and autobiography is that a memoir (by what we
currently mean when we use the term “memoir”) deals with a broad history
perspective (147), not with a single person's life like an autobiography does
(4).[1]
If
we follow the same movement we followed when examining Levi's preface in ITM,
we see Levi playing with these two genres. On one level, Levi is interested in
giving accounts and providing testimony for what happened in the Lager, in
which case his texts are memoirs because they deal with a broader historical
phenomenon (the world of the Lager). On another level, Levi is interested in
the human mind and how to understand it in terms of his experiences in the
Lager. If we agree that the aspects he is describing are aspects in the minds
of both victims and perpetrators, then they are aspects within his own mind,
such that ITM is an autobiography. That it deals with not a single
person's state of mind (thus failing Lejeune's second criterion for an
autobiography) is obvious because the Lager is where individuality ceased to
exist and where victims were forced to participate in the Lager's system with
the perpetrators, so a description of the development of Levi's personality must
be in part the description of a group development. Furthermore, it is unlikely
that Lejeune would not deem ITM an autobiography only because it appeals
to aspects of the mind that many people share, since one would expect that all
autobiographies make some sort of personal connection based on shared
experience or shared humanity with their audiences. In short, then, ITM
– at least given Levi's goals for it – is both autobiography and memoir, thus
seeking to be part of a collective history (memoir) but through a personal
account that works against the depersonalization of the Lager experience
(autobiography).
In
addition to being both a memoir and autobiography, ITM has attributes
common to a set of essays, while DS functions as a set of essays with
attributes common to a memoir. ITM fluctuates between a chronological
account and atemporal descriptions of aspects of the Lager. An example of the
latter is “This Side of Good and Evil,” in which Levi describes the trade
system in the Lager. In the beginning of the chapter, he continues his
chronological account (“For seventy days we had been waiting” [ITM 77]), but this description shifts
after one page into a description of “the Market” (78), which continues until
the end of the chapter, in which Levi turns to the more abstract question of
the place of morality given the Market as he has just described it (86). This
chapter, then, has two related moves. As it shifts from a chronological
narrative, it approaches an abstract topic traditionally relegated to the genre
of essay. This reading is supported by the language Levi adopts at the end of
this chapter and the beginning of the next. The last paragraph in this chapter
begins in the same way as an (admittedly generic) essay: “In conclusion” (86).
The next chapter begins, “What we have so far said and will say concerns the
ambiguous life of the Lager” (87), a moment that – because it deals explicitly
with the abstract topic of ambiguity in life – appeals to the genre of essay or
treatise.[2]
DS, in turn, though it is organized as a series of essays, is driven and
informed by personal testimony of life during and after the Lager (as we saw
above [p. 51]). In this sense, we might also read DS as a theoretical
memoir: a description of the issues with which those who have lived through the
Lager must deal (loss of memory combined with an obligation to remember, shame,
etc.) based on Levi's personal experiences. In short, ITM is at the same
time an autobiography and a memoir, with attributes of an essay, while DS
is a series of essays with attributes of a memoir.
This
analysis of the genres in ITM and DS is important for (at least)
two reasons: it reveals a further complication, along similar lines as (and
therefore supporting) the other desimplifications going on in Levi's texts; and
it provides a suggestion for how we should approach the Lager in general.
First, just as Levi complicates the binary of victim and perpetrator, his genre
complicates the binary of autobiography and memoir and the more general binary
of narrative and essay. Such complications make sense given that, in the Lager,
the historical event and the individual experience overlap (as we saw above
with the claim that the depersonalization in the Lager makes an entirely
autobiographical text impossible [p. 59-60]). By complicating even his genre,
Levi emphasizes the desimplification throughout all of his texts. More
specifically, the genres that Levi combines each inform the five goals of his
that we saw above (p. 52). In order to provide an account of life in the Lager,
Levi needs to use the genre of memoir, but given that he wants, with this
account, to understand the state of mind that permeated throughout the creation
and existence of the Lager, and thus in Levi himself, he needs to use the genre
of autobiography and (as we see with “This Side of Good and Evil”) also the
genre of essay, especially given that he suggests it provides for “a quiet
study of certain aspects of the human mind” (ITM 9, emphasis mine). Levi desimplifies by combining the genres,
and appeals to testimony (memory put to language) in all of them. Finally,
because Levi's genres support his other goals, they also helps us to answer his
last question in the preface to DS: what can we do to prevent the Lager
from returning? Levi, at least, can write in this way and about these things to
make us aware of the complexity of what happened and the possibility of its
recurrence.
[1] Lejeune is working from Charles Caboche's
definitions of memoirs in Les Mémoires et l'Histoire en France (Memoirs and History in
France), such as the definition that memoirs “have as their object the life
of the nation” (Lejeune 147). Although Lejeune criticizes Caboche here for
claiming that this definition is essential to memoirs and thus timeless,
whereas Lejeune argues that all genres develop historically, his criticism is
not against this way of thinking about memoirs, only against treating it as a
“definition” as opposed to a “description” (149). In other words, as long as we
realize that the qualities we identify in memoirs are historical and indicative
of what we expect from a memoir (not from what a memoir, in essence, is),
the identification is still useful. Thus, we may conclude, that Lejeune does
not disagree entirely with Caboche's description (though he does consider
it out of date [147]), so that (I would argue) it is safe to take the more
generic version taken above (that memoirs deal with a broader history than
autobiographies), especially insofar as it fits with Lejeune's claim that
memoirs are not autobiographies because they fail to be about individual
personalities (4).
[2] If we substitute “Auschwitz”
for “the Lager” and add some larger, Marxist terms, we might well even confuse
this sentence with one of Adorno's.
