July 15, 2007
Discovering a new side to Primo Levi
My knowledge of Primo Levi had heretofore been limited to what I’d read in “The Periodic Table
What comes across is a writer who enjoyed playing with a variety of clever set-ups, such as a kangaroo going to a dinner party, gladiators doing battle with automobiles in front of a packed stadium and an extraterrestrial creature writing a fan letter to Piero Bianucci, the real-life editor of La Stampa and host of a popular science program on Italian television.
The stories are clever but Levi’s message is never subtle. Consider this passage from “In The Park,” a piece where Levi adroitly pokes fun at the world of literature by envisioning what it might be like if all its greatest characters lived together in one place. In the following dialogue, Antonio Casella, a new arrival, is touring the grounds with his guide, James Collins:
He [Antonio] said to James, “It’s clear that one wouldn’t get bored here. But what about practical needs? If, for example, one had to have a shoe resoled, or a tooth pulled?”
“We have some modest social services,” James answered, “and the medical system is efficient, but with staff from the outside. It isn’t that there’s a shortage of doctors here, but they don’t practice willingly. Often they are of an antiquated school, or they lack the equipment, or, again, they ended up here through some famous mistake—precisely what made them problematic, and therefore characters. Besides, you’ll soon see that the sociology of the park is peculiar. I don’t think you’ll find a baker or an accountant; as far as I know, there’s one milkman, a single naval engineer, and a sole spinner of silk. You’ll look in vain for a plumber, an electrician, a welder, a mechanic, or a chemist, and I wonder why. Instead, in addition to the doctors I mentioned, you’ll find a flood of explorers, lovers, cops and robbers, musicians, painters, and poets, countesses, prostitutes, warriors, knights, foundlings, bullies, and crowned heads. Prostitutes above all, in percentage absolutely disproportionate to actual need. In short, it’s better not to seek here an image of the world you left. I mean, a faithful image: because you’ll find one, yes, but multicolored, dyed, and distorted, and so you’ll realize how foolish it is to form a concept of the Rome of the Caesars through Virgil, Catullus, and Quo Vadis. Here you will not find a sea captain who has not been shipwrecked, a wife who has not been an adulteress, a painter who does not live in poverty for long years and then become famous. Just like the sky, which here is always spectacular. Especially the sunsets: often they last from early afternoon until nigh, and sometimes darkness falls and then the light returns and the sun sets again, as if it were granting and encore.”
In a similar vein, “The Sorcerers” depicts an Amazonian Indian chief’s disdain for anything not deemed useful to the tribe. Two English ethnographers who have come to study and record the tribe’s dialect end up marooned with the Indians while they await a boat to come rescue them.
In the meantime, the Englishmen need to prove their worth to the Indian chief by demonstrating some practical skill. Despite all their learning, their knowledge of science and their years spent in pursuit of scholarship, the two men struggle to convince the chief of their usefulness to the tribe. If they don’t think of something fast, the tribe will likely kick them out, leaving them to starve and die in the tropical forest. Or, the tribe may opt to kill the two Englishman themselves — the same as they do with their elderly.
One of the Englishmen asks the other whether the tribe will kill them without warning. His companion answers, “I don’t think so, and they won’t be violent. They’ll ask us to follow their custom.”
At the end of the story, Levi explains that the tribe, the Siriono of eastern Bolivia, actually existed.
He writes: “All the Siriono who are judged to be useless because they are incapable of hunting, sowing, and plowing with a wooden plow are left to die. A Siriono is old at forty.”
Levi then adds that the tribe has a “sinister renown: they teach us that not in every place and not in every era is humanity destined to advance.”
An unsettling reminder, especially coming from a man who spent a year in Auschwitz.
The stories in “A Tranquil Star” are alternately comical, poignant, sad and ironic. But those imprecise words mean less to me after reading Levi’s lesson on the inadequacy of language in the story from which the book takes its title: “Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written “very big,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.”
Indeed, how can we accurately describe what we’ve seen when language offers so little. The best we can hope for is to report our observations faithfully, even if we fail to capture the enormity of the actual event. Again, the specter of the Holocaust enters Levi’s message.
As Levi notes, there is the language of science and math—the language of numbers— which could be used to describe the star’s explosion more accurately. But, taking that route would remove the tale’s vitality.
The story “would not be a story in the sense in which this story wants to be a story,” Levi writes. “That is, a fable that awakens echoes, and in which each of us can perceive distant reflections of himself and of the human race.”
The so-called ‘tranquil star’ of this tale actually explodes out of existence. Up close, the explosion of a star would surely be, as Levi writes, one of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. Even so, the explosion is not noted on Earth except for a “barely perceptible spot” on a photographic plate at a secluded observatory.
And while a simple spot may seem insignificant from this distance, the astronomer who lives at the observatory cancels a family outing to dutifully write a report of the event and take more photographs.
“A Tranquil Star