In sum, Levi's goals for his literature from ITM are to provide
an account, a factual story, and to
examine the state of mind that both led to the creation and acceptance of the
Lager and also persisted in the victims within the Lager. In addition, his
goals from DS are to desimplify common conceptions of the concentration
camps, to provide testimony, and through these two goals, to answer the
questions of whether the camps will return and thus work to prevent that
return.
Complication of Purposes
Levi's working
through these five goals is, however, more complicated than it at first
appears. James Chiampi and Robert Gordon argue that Levi's “account” is in fact
infiltrated by the sublime (for Chiampi) and ethics (for Gordon) and that,
therefore, Levi's attempt at an objective examination of the human mind is
subjective from the beginning. Cheyette argues that Levi's presentation of
language and memory shows that his attitude toward their legitimacy and their
efficacy is ambivalent, which treats desimplification as the most overarching
of Levi's goals and complicates his goal of providing testimony. Chiampi argues, using Benedetto
Croce's definition of the atrocious sublime as something emotionally powerful
and abrupt but morally repugnant,[1]
that the concentration camp depicted in ITM is exemplary of sublimity,
but because its sublimity is based on its uniqueness, it also cannot be
exemplary, such that “the sublime is rendered both possible and impossible” (Chiampi
492). This issue becomes more complicated when Chiampi claims that, “Sublimity
could be said to oppose testimony: the surprise, horror and awe evoked by this
concentrationary sublime subvert the common, familiar plausibilities that are
wont to corroborate testimony and inspire shame” (493). In other words, if what
makes the camp sublime is the unique horror that it inspires, then depicting
the camp as sublime is directly opposed to testimony, which is based on
a sharing of experiences that must (on some level) be common for us to believe
and be affected by them. Thus, as an attempt to provide traditional testimony
for the sublime, Levi's project necessarily fails. Instead, “in Levi's hands
testimony becomes one textual effect among others” (493), or (in other words)
its status as a declared testimony becomes another artistic trope in the text
as a whole, where the text's function (for Chiampi) is to blur lines, like that
between testimony and the sublime or that between victim and perpetrator (493;
495). Similarly, Gordon argues that Levi's testimony is framed by an ethical
push. Gordon, explicitly following Lawrence Langer, splits responses to the
camps into two categories – historical and imaginative – where the former are concerned
with what happened (i.e. testimony), and the latter are concerned with meanings
surrounding what happened (Gordon 131-2). For Gordon, Levi appears at first to be
providing a historical testimony. But, by examining the moral duties that
surround Levi's testimony, specifically the duty to turn involuntary memories
into voluntary ones through communication (136) and the duty to recreate a
collective history once those who survived the camps have died (140), we see
that awareness of the act of testimony is necessary to understand the
testimony itself. Gordon, like Chiampi, argues that Levi does (and can) not
provide objective testimony, and that Levi's testimony is always in conflict
with something opposed to it (i.e. the imaginative response, just as Chiampi
argued that the sublime opposed testimony). In this way, both Chiampi and
Gordon complicate Levi's goals of giving an account, investigating the state of
mind involved in the creation of and existing in the Lager, and providing
testimony.
Cheyette, then, argues
that this complication, especially of Levi's supposedly detached, objective
testimony, is where we should seek meaning in the text (as we saw briefly above
[p. 48-9]). For Cheyette, the depiction of Levi as presenting a perfect memory
using perfect language fails to take into account the complications inherent in
Levi's treatment of both memory and language. Cheyette targets the moments in
Levi's texts in which Levi's memory and language fail him, such as his failure
to remember Jean Améry's features, despite their time together in the Buna
section of Auschwitz (DS 130, Cheyette 274)[2]
and his failure to describe his college friend Sandro Delmastro (The Periodic
Table 49, Cheyette 275). These points are important for Cheyette because
they contradict Levi's own claims that his memory of his time at the camp is
perfect.[3]
Thus, Cheyette argues that Levi's texts are drenched in contradiction and, more
generally, complexity in the same way that his topics are. In other words, just
as Levi's claims in “The Gray Zone” that the system of the Lager, by forcing
the victims to have positions that were complicit with its goals (the Sonderkommandos
in charge of operating the furnaces, the Kapos in charge of a group
of victims on the condition that they fulfill a quota of cruelty, etc.),
complicate the obvious binary of guilty perpetrator and innocent victim,
Cheyette argues that Levi's text, by explicitly claiming to represent memory
and yet (at times) failing to do so, complicates the notion of unmediated
representation of the Lager. For Cheyette, this parallel suggests that implicit
(and sometimes explicit) in Levi's texts is what he calls “ethical
uncertainty,” or the morally-based rejection of simple systems (Cheyette 278-9).
In this sense, Levi's mode of presentation itself emphasizes the necessity of
desimplification even as it fails at Levi's other goal of objective testimony.
Therefore, as we can see from Cheyette's, Gordon's, and Chiampi's arguments and
from examining moments in Levi's texts, even Levi's goals have a complex
relationship with each other (specifically with the goal of desimplification),
where what appears to be the simplest and most obvious goal (presentation of
the events he experienced in the Lager) becomes fraught with complications.
At this point, it
should be obvious that desimplification plays a dominant role in the secondary
sources about Levi's text and appears (if briefly) in Levi's explicit notes
about his texts in their prefaces, specifically in DS. Desimplification
also, in various forms, fills Levi's texts. Throughout his texts, especially ITM,
Levi switches tenses from past to present several times every chapter.[4]
These switches suggest that the Lager's position within both Levi's life and
the world after 1945 is ambiguous. As Levi does in DS, one might ask
whether it is gone, because it is, at the same time, in the past yet lingering
also in the present. In ITM, Levi also alternates between
depicting his personal experience (with the singular pronoun “I”) and the
communal experience in which he takes part (with the plural pronoun “we”), thus
shedding a confusing light on the status of individuality in the Lager. As we
saw Adorno claim, the Lager (or, for Adorno, “Auschwitz”)
is highly objectifying and highly depersonalized. As it threatens to destroy
the individuality of the victims, Levi's text becomes a jumble of communal
experiences (like the experience of trade in the Lager in “This Side of Good
and Evil”) and personal experiences (like the experience of remembering Dante
in “The Canto of Ulysses”).
In DS, Levi emphasizes the importance of
atrocities other than the one that he experienced even as he denies that
importance. He ends the preface by explaining that he is concerned with the
concentration camps partly because he can speak about them from experience and
partly because they formed a unique atrocity. “Never have so many human lives
been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of
technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty” (DS 21). To illustrate this point, Levi looks at the example of the
massacres of the Spanish conquistadors, claiming that these atrocities were
committed without the knowledge of (or against the will of) the government,
that the deaths were spread out over a longer period of time, that the
atrocities were aided (accidentally) by the spread of epidemics, and (finally)
that they occurred so long ago that we ignore them (21). This last point
concludes the preface. This conclusion is surprising for two reasons; first,
his final point is also his primary concern about the Lagers in “The Memory of
the Offense,” that they are receding into the past, and even away from our
memories. Second, by concluding with the Spanish conquistadors in an essay
about the Lagers, he deemphasizes the importance of the Lagers because he gives
the textual weight of concluding to another atrocity entirely. His essay
“Shame” ends in a similar way, with a reference to other atrocities (87). Thus,
even as he explicitly emphasizes the uniqueness of the Lagers, the way in which
he does so disproves his point – other
atrocities are just as important as the Lagers (since he ends two of his essays
with them), and what has made us think of these other atrocities as different
from the Lagers is historically contingent. In one hundred years, the
victimization by the Lagers will be ignored in the same way as the
victimization by the Spanish conquistadors. In each of the above cases, we see
desimplification, explicitly or implicitly, playing out in Levi's texts.
There is, however, a
limit to Levi's desimplification. Even as he argues, in “The Gray Zone,” that
the system has forced the victims to be complicit within it and thus that the
binary between guilty perpetrator and innocent victim is too simple, he
maintains that there is an important distinction between perpetrator and
victim. “I know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know
that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on
active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or
an aesthetic or sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is precious service
rendered…to the negators of truth” (49).
In other words, although the relationship between the two elements in
binaries that Levi complicates are not simple, Levi does not conflate the two.
A victim remains distinct from a perpetrator, and to confuse this distinction
is a crime in two senses: morally and truthfully.[5]
Reversed, this idea means that desimplification is limited by morality and
truth. In other words, for Levi, we should desimplify insofar as what we are
desimplifying is, in fact, not simple and insofar as we are not failing another
moral imperative by doing so.
[1] Chiampi quotes Benedetto Croce's Estetica
come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale: teoria e storia in
Italian. My thanks to Edward Carlson for helping me work through the Italian to
understand how Croce defines “the sublime” and therefore how Chiampi is using
that term.
[2] We see examples of this complication with
memory throughout both DS and ITM. In the chapter on “Kraus” in ITM, for example, Levi describes a day
working in a mud hole, and (after the day ends) claims that, “now it lies dead
and is immediately forgotten; already it is no longer a day, it has left no
trace in anybody’s memory” (ITM 133).
This final claim is confusing in Levi’s memoir. If the day was unmemorable (so
unmemorable, in fact, that it left no
trace in anybody’s memory), then
Levi could not possibly remember it. Thus, that he tells a story about it
anyway puts into question the authenticity of his project as a whole. Yet, its
authenticity is something he guarantees in the preface (10). This contradiction
becomes further complicated in “The Memory of the Offense,” in which Levi
claims that, “practice...keeps memories fresh and alive in the same manner in
which a muscle often used remains efficient, but it is also true that a memory
evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become
fixed in a stereotype...” (DS 24, my
emphasis). That Levi emphasizes people's propensity towards stylization when
using stories to express their memories is interesting given that many of his
memories are told in terms of stories, specifically ITM.
[3] We see such statements throughout Levi's
texts. For example, in “The Memory of the Offense,” where Levi argues that
memories over time become simplified and stylized in order to make them
bearable, he concludes that the memories he presents in the remainder of the
text “seem to me unaffected by the drifting I have described” (DS 35).
[4] For example, on page 66 of ITM, in
the order that they appear, we have: “we arrived”; “makes trouble”; “The Vorarbeiter
distributed”; “one which weighs”; “we left”; “Today we have to unload”;
“Meister Nogalla…supervised”; “Now the cylinder lies.” One might argue that
some of these are references to the recent past and the rest to the present, or
that the present tense implies thoughts, while the past implies action, but
none of these explanations fits every occurrence of a tense switch. There is an
extent to which the present, insofar as it implies immediacy, occurs at highly
emotional moments in the text, thus suggesting that Levi is reliving his
experience as he retells it and also flagging the moments of high intensity.
Thus, the beginning of the text, when the experience of the camp is still new
and unpredictable in its horror, is told mostly in the present, as is the
chapter “The Canto of Ulysses,” a
chapter that Gillian Banner describes as a feat of resistance in which
Levi achieves wholeness and humanity through memory (Banner 104).
[5] It might also be useful to pay close
attention to the way in which Levi expresses these two senses. The truthful
problem is “above” the moral one. Thus, one might argue that, for Levi, the
issue of desimplification is more concerned with accuracy than moral good. This
argument would pose a complication to Cheyette's claim that central to Levi's
project is his constant fear “that such simplifications, which we think of as
'knowledge' or 'understanding', will not honour the dead” (Cheyette 278).
Whereas Cheyette is claiming that Levi's concern with simplification is that it
fails the victims, the notion of truth as more important for Levi than morality
(when dealing with simplification) suggests that Levi is more concerned that
simplified thoughts about the camps fail to accurately depict the suffering of
the victims that they appear to than that these thoughts fail to honor the
dead.
