Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Language of Judgment: Primo Levi's Se questo e un uomo

1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.1995.0067

1080-6598

Dalya M Sachs,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

The Language of Judgment: Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo Dalya M. Sachs “I think there are as many ways of surviving survival as there have been to survive.” —Philip K., quoted in Holocaust Testimonies In the 1976 Appendix to an annotated edition of Se questo è un uomo* intended for use in Italian schools, Primo Levi assembled a list of questions which had been posed to him repeatedly throughout the decades following the book’s initial publication, either in readers’ letters or by students at the innumerable lectures he gave throughout Italy. Reasoning that the consistency with which he was asked certain questions was a reflection either of the inadequacy or the opacity of parts of Se questo è un uomo, Levi published his replies, point by point, in order to respond to a “justifiable and logical curiosity” that somehow had not been satisfactorily answered by the book itself. He places the following as the first of those eight questions: “In your book, there are no expressions of hatred for the Germans, no malice, no yearning for vengeance. Have you pardoned them?” 1 Levi first offers a personal psychological explanation: By nature, I am not prone to hatred. I consider it a bestial and primitive emotion, and I prefer instead that, as far as possible, my actions and thoughts be based on reason; because of this, I have never harbored [End Page 755] hatred, in the sense of a primal urge for revenge, for suffering to be inflicted upon my real or presumed enemies, or for personal vendetta.2 But later, Levi draws on quite different types of explanation for his tone, and instead of a psychological motivation, he invokes a narratological strategy for the absence of any “expressions of hatred”: . . . in writing this book, I deliberately took on the calm and sober language of a witness, not the plaintive tone of a victim nor the outrage of an avenger: I thought that my words would be most believable and useful the more they appeared to be objective and the less they sounded fervent. Only in this way does a witness fulfill his function, which is to prepare the ground for the judges. The judges are all of you. 3 That perhaps his personality and sensibility are exemplified in the tone—as yet only defined as an absence of something (hatred, malice, and vengeance)—tells us about the origin and particulars of the text, but this autobiographical solution is in some sense tautological, given the autobiographical genesis of the text itself (such a solution proposes that the text is not one of “hatred, malice and vengeance” because the mind which organized and transcribed its experience is not one of “hatred, malice and vengeance”). The first part of Levi’s answer is rendered no less valid, but it is an answer whose justification and proof is evidenced in the events, descriptions and narration of the text itself. But the second part of Levi’s response speaks of stylization, of the presumed effect on the readers of certain writerly decisions and techniques. The first reply explains the cause of the tone; the second acknowledges the attempt to create a certain effect with it: he wanted to be heard, and he wanted to put the readers in a certain position through his “calm and sober language of a witness.” This language is intended to be “believable and useful.” The very fact that Levi wrote this as a response to questions he has received in response to his book shows that indeed he has been heard (if not always believed), so his techniques did achieve at least some of their desired ends. But to understand this effect—namely, this absence of anger in sensibility and technique—we need to define what is created in place of anger. Only then can we return to the second part of Levi’s reply, both to see what the implications of this effect are, beyond positing the readers as judges, and to begin to frame a response to the questions Levi’s work forces us to confront. In the attempt to label the tone that takes the place of anger in Se [End Page 756] questo è un uomo...