Presentation of "A Phone Conversation with Primo Levi"
On the occasion of the Turin International Book Fair, May 11th 2012 was presented A phone call with Primo Levi, the book by Stefano Bartezzaghi taken from the third Primo Levi Lecture and published by Einaudi in a bilingual Italian / English edition.
A Phone Conversation with Primo Levi - Presentation of the Third Primo Levi Lecture
A conversation between Domenico Scarpa and Stefano Bartezzaghi
Domenico Scarpa
This is the third time, the third year in a row that I find myself in a hall at the Book Fair greeting students who have come to listen to these dialogues after they had listened to our Primo Levi Lectures several months before. This is a special year. It is an anniversary. It is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the passing of Primo Levi. You know that anniversaries are usually celebrated, particularly in Italy, with many, many words that fly about in ways that are much too light. We of the Center have preferred to move in a way that is a little different, avoiding using very many words and, instead, offering several in-depth studies on the words of Primo Levi. It may be that we have been wordy ourselves, but the point is that our work is going ahead, and today we will be talking about the work of Stefano Bartezzaghi with Stefano Bartezzaghi, who is here to talk to us about his A Phone Conversation with Primo Levi.
In depth-studies, I was saying. So, in this year only, only within the last two months, a commentary was published by Einaudi through the Primo Levi Studies Center. It is an annotated edition of Primo Levi’s principal work, his most well known one -- If This is a Man. The commentary was written by Alberto Cavaglion and is the fruit of twenty years of study. His study may not always have been exclusively about Levi and may not always have been continuous -- that would have been excessive -- but it was passionate study. It is a labor of persistence, a work examining the various layers of Primo Levi’s words.
A few days ago, on May 6, the Jewish community had an encounter, and again it was an encounter for study, a Limmoud on the figure of Primo Levi, which was marked by the release of a small booklet. Its text is by Bianca Guidetti Serra, who was a friend of Primo Levi’s right from his early years. What’s more, she was one of the people whom Primo Levi addressed letters to, postcards mailed in the face of his predicament during his deportation and during his trip from Auschwitz through Russia and all of Europe back home to Italy. They are extraordinary postcards. Her very fine text, Primo Levi, l’amico [Primo Levi, a friend] was collected in a small booklet printed by the publisher, Silvio Zamorani.
We, instead, find ourselves here to talk with Stefano Bartezzaghi about his lecture on Primo Levi, which was the third lecture, following those of Robert Gordon and Massimo Bucciantini. I believe that choosing Stefano Bartezzaghi was not a run-of-the-mill gesture. Apparently, Stefano is not a literary scholar, or he isn’t one at first glance. This is the reason why we were interested in him. In fact, his competence is a crossroads of many kinds of competences. His attention to language teaches us to stay still, to mull over the words of Primo Levi. He teaches us, above all, to go beyond this book, beyond If This is a Man, which is a very important book, fundamental for the twentieth century, but which has a galaxy of texts, of linguistic languages, around it. Every time Levi thinks about a book, every time he puts his pen on a piece of paper -- even more – even before he puts his pen down, he imagines authentic linguistic universes, each different from the other, which are to be discovered, as in a voyage of adventure. And this is a thing that should interest the students pretty much.
So, to begin with the adventure behind Stefano’s book, A Phone Conversation with Primo Levi, I would begin at the end. We have said this: there is a book that is fundamental, a book that is more famous than the others, and that is If This is a Man; and then, there are the others writings all around it, written over the span of forty years. Stefano concludes his book imagining, inventing a conversation, a bit of which we can manage to listen to and a bit of which not, a conversation that reaches us a little and gets interrupted a little or gets lost. It is a conversation between Levi and another great contemporary writer, an American who has also passed, David Foster Wallace. After this conversation there is a chapter – the last one, a very short one – entitled Primo Levi, ancora / Primo Levi, Again. And it is sort of preliminary good-bye from the book, where something that I find very interesting is being talked about. In “Primo Levi, Again,” you talk about Primo Levi’s “accessory ideas.”
The impression, Stefano, is this. Given that this book, If This is a Man, is surely Primo Levi’s principal book, one the reasons, if not the main reason, that we continue to question the words of Primo Levi, consists in his “accessory ideas,” those that go along with anything that he says – the things happening backstage, the derivations, the backgrounds. I don’t know if this is right, but I would like to hear from you about these “accessory ideas.” What are they?
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Thank you. This is an excellent place to start off from, as far as I am concerned, especially because at the university I studied a subject called semiotics and which is, in fact, an attempt to describe how language functions along with all the other forms of making meaning, the ways we have of referring to the world and communicating with each other. And this discipline, beginning with its name itself, is often accused of, has often been accused of, inventing words that are very hard to understand, right? Like syntagm, paradigm. There are a lot of jokes told about the technical terminology of semiotics, to the extent that semiology has had a hard time defining itself as a philosophy or as a science. It is something that is part of both great fields. What is great about Primo Levi is that, in fact, he very often talked about language. He was considered a linguist among linguists, an amateur linguist. And, so, in my book I then talk, too, about the word dilettante / amateur, which is a very important word, after all, not to be taken naively, full of “accessory ideas.”
Here, one of the first things that struck me when they asked me to work on Primo Levi – it was our common friend, Marco Belpoliti [who asked me] – was the fact that Levi, in the description of language and of words, used the term “accessory ideas” for what in semiotics is called connotation and has a meaning that is harder to grasp. Levi manages to speak about language in a way that reaches us very simply, very easily. He does not need to invent terms that pretend to be complicated because “accessory ideas” is an expression that makes everything very clear. Namely, every word is connected to an idea -- let’s say it like this – but not to just one idea. There are other ideas that surround it. This is why languages are hard to translate. The different languages are hard to translate and they are never translated perfectly because we may have words to say the same things but these words bring “accessory ideas” along with them in every language.
In any case, after reading George Orwell and rereading him after many years, I realized that idee accessorie / accessory ideas, at least in the Italian translation, is a term that appears in his essays on “Newspeak,” which Orwell wrote as appendices to his novel, 1984. And I had thought… I am a bit critical of research on sources. When you go read an author to see if he had been influenced by Balzac or by… it is an exercise that annoys me a bit, sincerely, because I believe that certain things can also happen by chance. However, every once in a while, I dream that Primo Levi had read it there and had kept this expression. He had found it effective in the Italian translation of Orwell. And, I like it, obviously, that the expression can come from a masterpiece of anti-utopian literature, from a book that also contains an anti-utopia of language, a language that does not serve any more to get things across but to cover them up.
So, here it is that the idea of “accessory” ideas can be applied exactly to the works of Levi, too, for all of the reasons that have been already said here. And I add my own, the fourth version of a reason. Namely, Primo Levi cannot be read, cannot be analyzed, if we don’t understand If This is a Man. In fact, If This is a Man was substantially not understood while it was being written and when it was first published. It can’t be understood if we don’t take everything else into account because, in effect, it is a very strange book. It is less strange for us because it is one of the first readings that are done in secondary school and so, then, it does not stand out against the background of other books. Only afterward do we realize how different If This is a Man is from other books in Italian literature and other literatures. This is because Primo Levi was not only a chemist. He was not only a witness. Even there, even for what he narrated in If This is a Man, he had, right at the time of the experience of his deportation, he experienced it in a way different from the others. And in this way in which continually…. There is the thing. There is the experience, and there is the reflection on the experience. In every sentence, almost, Primo Levi tells us something and comments on it. And very often he comments on it from two different points of view. He really changes his mind in a very fluid, very linear way. At times we do not notice it. We have to stop reading and say, “But, here, he is saying another thing!” And this, in fact, given that I like David Foster Wallace very much too… (The two never met. Maybe Wallace read Levi, but we don’t know it. He never said so.)… by reading one and reading the other I kept on finding references and parallels, and I invented this conversation between the two of them. In fact, I felt authorized to do so because Primo Levi, in those stories of what is called fantascienza / fanta(sy)-science [science fiction] but is really fanta-something, imagines the existence of a park in the Beyond – evidently – where characters from novels go to live, literary characters, in effect, where Reno Tramaglino can live in the same chalet with Cleopatra. And, hence, since the two authors appear as characters in their own novels, in their own works – both Primo Levi and Wallace – I thought that they could meet in a park that I imagined to be like a Lungo Po [the Po River promenade in Turin], the Lungo Po where Primo Levi really took his conversation partners to go for walks and have long conversations. I was lucky enough to meet some of Primo Levi’s conversation partners and they described this habit of his to me.
The walk with Wallace is at the end of my book. I had wanted to add an appendix, which is an analysis of a page of Primo Levi’s writing, one of his pages from among those that are really more minor than minor. In fact, it is the answer to a survey by the newspaper, Stampa Sera. Stampa Sera had asked -- I would imagine -- several people, what relationship they had with old age and he – it comes out like a kind of interview, but it is evidently a text he wrote because we can recognize the very features of his writing – delivered a very brief text in which he starts off saying, “Me, old?” And he really seems like the main character of Taxi Driver who is doing the famous scene at the mirror, “You talkin’ to me?” Levi starts off with a question directed at the readers and the interviewer and constructs a little autobiographical show that ends up with a focus on language. Even in a minor text – he took three quarters of an hour at most to write it, I think – we find a very good synthesis of very many of the features of Levi’s writing.
Domenico Scarpa
I’ll read it! I’ll read it for a second.
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Go on!
Domenico Scarpa
Me, old? Absolutely yes: my date of birth, my long-sightedness, my grey hair, my adult children all go to show it. Last week, for the first time ever, someone gave up their seat for me on the tram, and it left me feeling very strange. In myself, as a rule, I don’t feel old. I haven’t lost my curiosity for the world around me, nor my interest in other people, nor my competitive instinct nor my taste for playing games and solving problems. I still like interacting with nature, I take joy in encountering it through all five senses, studying it, describing it in speech and writing. All my organs, my limbs, my memory and my imagination are still in working order, and yet I am all too aware of the grave ring of that terrible word I have just written down: “still.” [Stampa Sera, 15 November 1982; Marco Belpoliti & Robert Gordon. Eds. The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961-1987. Trans. Robert Gordon. New York: The New Press, 2001. Translation of Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987 ed. M. Belpoliti (Torino: Einaudi, 1997)]
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Here, there are … aside from the ending, it is paradoxical, isn’t it? Because he said, “I have written the word still / ancora two times and this is the third time. So, he still / ancora wrote it again /ancora. He still wrote “still!” / ha scritto “ancora” ancora!
Domenico Scarpa
And that makes four!
Stefano Bartezzaghi
And these are the kinds of things I like! But this passage, in my opinion, should be studied by schools of writing, above all for the way in which the catalogue is constructed. It is a passage chock full of catalogues. They seem to be things just jotted down; but, in fact, when he says, “All my organs, my limbs, my memory and my imagination are still in working order,” this is already a design of the functioning of the human body and mind.
Domenico Scarpa
Yes, yes, it is like an X-ray version of an anatomical chart by Vesalius [sixteenth-century anatomist]. It is a Vesalius chart, certainly!
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Or, “my taste for playing games and solving problems.” You understand here, in fact, that he is enthusiastic about puzzles. And there is also the game of changing points of view, because he says, “Me, old? Absolutely yes.” And we always feel like we have gotten there right away…. It is not as if we say very often “absolutely yes” or “absolutely no” because we are no longer able to say, as the Gospel tells us, yes when it is yes, and no when it is no. Levi says, “In absolute terms, yes,” but in reality he is saying, “relatively speaking, yes.” That is, in absolute terms, from an objective point of view, I am old. My date of birth at the records office and so on say so, a catalogue that is still accurate and precise. But, subjectively, this is what changed the point of view: you can be old on the outside, let’s say, but young inside! After all, that may seem to be something trite, but it is not so at all.
However, now, in talking about these forms that we also can call “contradictions,” we can do this if we understand how fertile and legitimate contradictions are. In fact, there is something that has to do with my title. Obviously, I got myself into a bit of trouble with this title, A Phone Conversation with Primo Levi because that led some people to believe that I had called Primo Levi up, something that, unfortunately, never happened to me. In reality, the telephone call is the call that he made to all of us because in a radio interview…. (In fact, the radio fascinated him. There was the question of the human voice. The telephone also fascinated him, this instrument that is a little strange.) In a radio interview he says, “A written book must be a telephone that works.” This is a very strange thing if you think about it because, in fact, a telephone is oral and, instead, he is really talking about a written text and this is one of the phrases where he talks about clarity, which was really one of his battles, one of the few cultural disputes that he engaged in, aside from, obviously, those against negationism and against a type of historical revisionism that pushed things too far. In fact, he engaged in disputes about clarity, about the fact that writing has the obligation to say what it has to say and to say it clearly, about the fact that you are able to say everything even if maybe you are not really obliged to say everything, but you are able to say everything. This is therefore the negation of incommunicability, a polemical argument against very hard and big words and arguments that do not end up anywhere. And, in fact, he said: “When I write, I feel like I have my reader nearby.” And I remember that Giampaolo Dossena, a scholar of games, in fact, and, let’s say, an acquaintance of Primo Levi’s – let’s not use the word “friend,” which is also a little… however, an acquaintance, after all, they liked each other, here…. Dossena once had written, “I see you,” to his readers, while he was writing, “I see you through the grid of writing.” This form of writing that always takes the conversation partner into account is another very great lesson.
And then, though, what happens? See how far intellectual honesty can go…. Levi was introduced to a strange work by the French writer, Raymond Queneau, Petite cosmogonic portative [A small, portable cosmogony], a short poem that talks about the foundation, that is, it talks about the world, how the cosmos developed, in a language that is spectacularly full of puns and even coded allusions, so much so that Italo Calvino asked Primo Levi to help him, to explain some details to him. Italo Calvino had to write a comment on this poem and did not understand many things in it. He turned to Primo Levi as a writer and, above all, as an expert on science. Besides chemistry, which was Primo Levi’s first profession, Levi was, in fact, passionate over science as an activity. And Primo Levi got down to study those things and find out what Queneau meant to say. And, in the end, when the book was finally published, he wrote an article in the newspaper, La Stampa, where he said: I had always been convinced that a writer should speak clearly. However, let’s see now. Now that I have read Queneau, I am also thinking that maybe…. I am happy to write like I write. However, I would like to write like him. I would like to be obscure like Queneau is obscure, too, because he made himself obscure through his games, through his taste for enigmas, and I have to say, in effect, that I would like to be a writer like Queneau.
Domenico Scarpa
Well, and so, the funny thing is that Levi had engaged in this controversy about clear writing and obscure writing with a writer named Giorgio Manganelli. I am saying this, above all, for the young people here, because this name should come across to them. And Manganelli is the guy who wrote some very funny pages – you can laugh yourselves to death – about telephones that do not work, about the mix-ups that can happen with telephone lines.
So, let’s imagine this Primo Levi who would like to write in another way. There are other writers that Levi, a clear writer, had identified obscure writing with, writing in layers. One is Queneau. Another is François Rabelais. Still another is Stefano D’Arrigo – hence, writers very different from one another. And this brings me to another question, one that constantly stands at the center of Stefano’s book, A Phone Conversation with Primo Levi. In the meantime, I wonder – this is not the question, but it is a consideration – I wonder this: what about us? Can we see ourselves really calling up Primo Levi? Was Primo Levi a person who it was natural to, easy to call up? I am saying this because there was one of our writers in the second half of the twentieth century, a very famous one, who, instead, was somebody who acted as if he were encouraging his friends (any even pests) to call him up. This writer was Alberto Moravia. Moravia worked from eight to twelve every morning, invariably. He had his picture taken in the 1980s sitting at a desk that was completely cleared off, but had a typewriter on it – there were not yet any computers. And on the desk, too, there sat a telephone. And he said that he loved to be interrupted. I don’t know if we can look at Primo Levi like this, like somebody that you can get to. I rather see Levi as somebody who reaches us, not somebody who has himself be reached.
But the question was about a clear writer, like Primo Levi, who appreciates writers who, instead, are not clear at all, a Levi who imagines that he can write in another way, who can imagine to want to write in another way, hence a potential writer. The adjective potential…. At a certain point at the beginning of your book, you say that writing If This is a Man as a first book freed inside Primo Levi the potential writer that was in him. This is a wonderful idea and it is, by the way, completely opposite of what they usually say – that is, that this book had closed a number of roads to go down instead of opening them. But potential, a Primo Levi who is potential. What does that mean?
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Well, I think that it is something, after all, even historical (let’s say) that can be verified. I take it for true, after all, in as much as we can be sure about things like that. We have a lot of biographical evidence about Primo Levi before Auschwitz and about his literary interests. He tells us that he had written a number of things. There are texts by Primo Levi that are dated 1943, for example, the poem Crescenzago. There is the story of these friends, this little colony, in part, Turin people who that were transplanted to Milan, right during the war years, not before the war. These are the first years of the war. These are young people who meet and write little poems. They also, in fact…. They are young people who, as Ernesto Ferrero once said, he said that “Primo knows everything” because he was a little bit the intellectual leader of this group of friends. And, hence, it was a kind of literature – and this is interesting – experienced as one experiences it as a young person, as a collective game -- that’s it -- as entertainment. And then Levi – when I was saying before that he had experienced deportation in a way that was different from the others, I think he experienced it precisely as a writer. And, it is not so far off to make me think that this is also one of the reasons why he survived, isn’t it? The fact of having…. He says it at least a couple of times. These are all things that I am telling you -- based, in fact, on the testimony that he gives about himself and, obviously, considering him sincere and truthful. There was the fact that he was living through the experience with the mentality of a person who has to tell the story of it. He says he used to write in the air. He used to write, then having to throw the writing away, to get rid of those notes, because he could have been risking his life simply by holding a piece of written paper.
But, evidently, there is a function of writing, the function that Maurizio Ferraris was later to write about – that is, writing not as communication but as recording, first of all, which is something basic.
There are so many times that we write down things for ourselves – at least, this happens to me – things that I later don’t go back to look up, but things that were important to have written there because writing gives things a shape. It is not only a transcription of thought, as if thought were linked to orality. No, here, writing is a shape in itself. And Levi, through this, then, became a writer in action – that’s it – therefore, an actual writer. However, he had already been one. He was a writer through his education, through his way of thinking, and through whoever knows what ways people become or are born or become potential writers.
By the way, obviously, we have talked about Queneau. Domenico Scarpa is quoted in my book for his memorable doctoral dissertation on the relationships between Perec and Levi, relationships that do not exist, by the way, in the sense that Perec must surely have read Levi….
Domenico Scarpa
Not at all! The funny thing is that they neither read nor knew about each other. So, it was an exercise on the flying trapeze. [laughter]
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Nice, very good, very good. Another telephone call with Primo Levi…
Domenico Scarpa
Yes, yes, we have to call him again! [laughter]
Stefano Bartezzaghi
And, so, potential relationships, then. Perec and Queneau, together with Italo Calvino, were two of the main exponents of the Oulipo group dedicated to potential literature. It was a group that made up literary games. Rather, it still does it because the group still exists [www.oulipo.net]. But it makes up games that are rather serious, really. But, they are always with this semi-serious thing, a sniggering attitude. And they work on the concept of literature before literature – that is, that is not yet literature. The fact is that rhyme, for example, as a literary form, precedes words and when we set up a rule like the rule of rhyming, it is as if we had set up a rule of a game that we then begin to play. This is, in fact, something that makes Primo Levi a fellow traveler of the Oulipo group, because, in those same years he wrote some stories, he wrote some works that are based on restrictions and these restrictions are very often the restrictions of games, to the point that they end up being authentic literary games, such as his palindromes and rebus puzzles. He published his palindromes in a short story. He talked about his rebus puzzles only in an interview, with Gianpaolo Dossena, of all people, asking him, however, not to mention his name. Therefore what came out was a very strange interview with an anonymous writer, who then could be recognized pretty easily in the end.
However, there is this aspect, according to which, when Levi finally reached the point of authentic games, he was able to feel a little self-consciousness. The reason is, after all, back then it was not so usual for fifty-year-olds to play games, especially serious people, notoriously serious people, like Primo Levi. Let’s keep in mind that, later, after Primo Levi wrote his first book neither connected with his experience as a deportee and prisoner nor with his trip back to Italy, he wrote a book of short stories, some of which were funny and he published them under a pseudonym because, after all, it seemed to him, at least, that it was the work of another writer. Take a look -- right? – how they do it in…. For example, Stephen King who has his…. In the English-speaking world, often, there are pseudonyms, which after all are not so secret, but they serve to say that this or that is like the work of a different writer. It’s another line of production. This was how it was for Stephen King.
Domenico Scarpa
Well, there is also a kind of training in this. That is, the writers – we can imagine them physically in full-relief, like sculptures. They move around and they train. There is a little part, posthumous, of the works of Pasolini that is called L’hobby del sonetto [the sonnet hobby]. Every morning Pasolini woke up and composed a sonnet. Try it yourselves, I wish, as an exercise…. Primo Levi obviously had the hobby of the rebus puzzle. He made them up for his private use. He designed rebus puzzles just as he designed palindromes.
But wanting to go on to another game, a game that he, Primo Levi, played, but, above all, one that Stefano plays – the anagram. The anagram of Primo Levi, a possible anagram, turns out to be l’impervio, Primo Levi equals l’impervio [the inaccessible]. [laughter] Take it from there!
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Yes, it is an anagram that I too had found many years ago. It always made me laugh because as a writer… if there is a writer that is not inaccessible, it is Primo Levi himself. Because, we can access him, right? The road that you cannot go over, that road is inaccessible. Instead, we can access Primo Levi in a way that is so, so smooth, so pleasant. I noticed this the first time that I read the first books that were not If This is a Man or The Truce. Hence, these were books where the content of which I was reading did not appear too vivid, too much like something to commit to memory, and, in the end, so much as to obscure the way that the books were written. When you go to, let’s say, the more affable Primo Levi, then we can better notice the quality of the writing. This is not because the other books are better written, but simply because this quality stands out better.
And so, there are, in the anagram tradition, the anagrams that say the opposite of the real thing. There are anagrams like Marco Antonio, which, with the same letters, becomes antico romano [Mark Anthony…ancient Roman]. And this is historically true, right? You can consider this to be very true, too. Bibliotecario – its anagram is beato coi libri or bibliotecaria, beata coi libri. It works for the feminine, too [(male) librarian… blessed among books… (female) librarian… blessed among books]. And I have some doubts about this because I know some librarians that are fed up with books – not always, but… However, ideally, a librarian should be blessed among books. At least, I hope so for his sake. In the English-language tradition, these anagrams are called aptagrams -- that is, apt anagrams, opportune ones. Then, there are antigrams. Antigrams are those anagrams that say the opposite of the truth, like funeral, real fun. So, I have always thought that Primo Levi l’impervio is a fine example of an antigram because Levi is anything but impervio/ inaccessible. Then, instead, I realized, while preparing for the Levi Lecture, that, in reality, this anagram is an aptagram because what is inaccessible is not Levi, but it is what he had to take on. In the real terms of the potentiality of literature, what does a writer do? A writer is not somebody who always tells us the things that we already know because when he or she does this, this is really just combinatorics – i.e. a way of scrambling pieces of what we already know into a different order. Certainly, here, at the Book Fair, the Fair is full of things that have already been seen, probably including the things that I am saying – books made of recycled things, a little like anagrams, new combinations of things that are already known. However, a real writer is he or she who tells us something that, before then, we hadn’t known could be said. We hadn’t known that things were like that. This could be because of an innovation in a form, could be because of… but the important thing is this: to say something that could not have been said in that way there. And, therefore, so that it could become possible to say that something, that person had to be born.
This, for example, is the thing that basically brings Levi and David Foster Wallace nearer on my mental shelf. Maybe this is a little crazy, so excuse me for it. One reason is this. David Foster Wallace died at a very young age. He is a writer of the generation of people who now are in their fifties. We have seen them emerge, after all, with a bit of delay in translation, obviously. A lot of books came out and then there were the books of Wallace. He was different! And everybody recognized it. This year the Pulitzer prize was not awarded for the first time, I think, because they didn’t come to an agreement, because they were supposed to give it to Foster Wallace, to Wallace’s posthumous book, which, however, is a book that he had not written. It is a collection of the things that he left behind, basically, a project for a book, like Pasolini’s [posthumous] Petrolio [also the English title]. How can you give an award to a book that he did not materially give permission to publish? It was a very hard thing. They were paralyzed. The American writers, the friends of Wallace, do nothing other than write books where Wallace appears as a character and then they say, “No, no, but it isn’t him; no, no, no, those are superficial coincidences!” Another reason is this. When Wallace arrived, he was somebody who said something that could not be said in that way. And this, according to me, is true literature. It is when we readers notice that something has been set in motion that had been only potential and that we would never have noticed. And it took that, that piece of writing and at that point I also agree to talk about genius. This is a word that, by the way, I do not like very much, but at that point, yes. There, yes.
Domenico Scarpa
Well, let’s try to ask a question that makes a move along a little more over there, or a stretch of telephone line more over there. Let me buzz by another name. You quote a very beautiful phrase by a Russian linguist. He is Russian but he spoke a dozen languages and he even wrote them -- Roman Jakobson. He said…. He said it in Latin, but I’ll tell you in Italian, “I am a linguist. There is nothing linguistic that is foreign to me.” And Stefano says, rightly, that that phrase can be applied perfectly to Primo Levi, to his passionate interest and also a little neurotic interest in words, for his insistence on touching them, on caressing them, on digging for them, on putting them to the test, on assaying them– Galileo’s Il Saggiatore / The Assayer – on putting them to the test. Here, if Primo Levi finds himself face to face with the inaccessible, where will he get to? How far will Primo Levi arrive with language? Is there something that, by its very nature, cannot and should not be expressed in language, or, that absolutely must not be expressed? Is there something that cannot be translated. Is there something that is not linguistic – in spite of what Levi says or wants or would like?
Stefano Bartezzaghi
I remember, too, that Jakobson uttered this phrase in an essay transcribed from the tape-recording of a talk he gave at a conference of linguistics and anthropology. This thing is significant because the phrase takes up Terrence, who said, homo sum [I am a man], not linguist any more, but man. I am a man and therefore nothing of what is human is foreign to me. I do not consider anything of what is human in me to be foreign. And Jakobson says, “I am a linguist.” Nothing that belongs to language is foreign to me. The thing that I am saying is that for Levi the two phrases are as if they merged into each other -- that is, “I am a linguist. Therefore nothing human is foreign to me” and “I am a man. Nothing linguistic is foreign to me.” They are practically the same thing.
Domenico Scarpa
Let me interrupt you because, seeing that we have quoted Terrence, there is a point in Primo Levi’s works where he makes a calque, loan translation, from the Latin of Terrence. The sources may be boring but they are amusing. And Levi says, more or less, “I am a man, and at times I have also written poetry.” Levi writes this calque on the jacket flap of his poetry anthology, At an Uncertain Hour / Ad ora incerta [Collected Poems]. Hence, in reality “I am a man” and “I am a linguist” are two phrases that have already been written in Levi’s texts. With this, Stefano, I raise you [as they say in poker].
Stefano Bartezzaghi
You raised me, but you answered your own question yourself because what you cannot say, what you do not manage to say, that’s poetry! That’s poetry. That’s the poetic. That’s the material of poetry. That is what cannot be said in prose – that is, what cannot be said in any other way but poetry. That is the obscure feature. Levi… there are really two times that he said: “I opened my eyes before an indescribable scene.” After that, he describes it. How come? It was indescribable!... Not at all, we’re here for that. We are potential writers and so we are working on it and what is potential is being turned into action.
And this is the big show -- the continuous, incessant engine in Levi’s works itself. Levi can’t sleep. What does he do? He makes up a rebus puzzle. He told Dossena – inside my book, there is also this text, appearing virtually for the first time, in which Dossena tells the story of his encounters with Primo Levi – that Levi made up these rebus puzzles before going to sleep – or, instead of sleeping, let’s say. And, besides, this is very nice, because the rebus puzzle has really been connected with dreams, to the dimension of dreaming, ever since antiquity, ever since the first interpretations of dreams. They said that these dreams were a little like rebus puzzles, mixtures of language and things. And Freud also says, “The dream is a rebus puzzle that has been imagined.”
What is Levi doing here? He starts to think about rebus puzzles or he makes up palindromes. And the main character of his stories about palindromes says, “Well, take a look here. This palindrome came to me. It is a double decasyllable. It is beautiful, sounds good. It is a perfect palindrome, and it even makes a little bit of sense.” The reason is that the sense comes later. The sense is found at the end. Look, there is this inexhaustible machine, which, according to me, according to Levi, is the human being, who keeps on feeling out the world and describing it or constructing it according to his or her own writing and his or her language, and who is always in a relationship with language. When a human being looks at him or herself, as “the tenant on the floor below,” meaning the unconscious, says, [“To a Young Reader,” in Other People’s Trades (London: Abacus, 1991), p. 208] he or she finds things that are hard to say, maybe impossible to say, things that cannot be explained, that cannot be made sense of, and that is where there are special languages. There are, for example, poetry, or, in special moment of relaxation, games.
Domenico Scarpa
Now, I had wanted to quote that palindrome that Stefano alluded to more fully – that smooth-sounding decasyllable that is not even senseless because: Eroina motore in Italia / ai latini erotomani or è [heroin-or-heroine-motor-in-Italy / to-latins-sex-maniacs-now-is]. This is a palindrome, as you can hear with your ears and you can see with your eyes. Seeing that we have decided to speak Latin, it is a phrase that you can read in both directions -- from right to left, as we usually do, and from left to right. Another hard word, it is a bustrophedic phrase, one that goes back and forth like oxen when they are tracing furrows in the field, pulling plows.
Levi often traces out furrows in the fields of writing, in one verse or in the other, in the opposite direction. He did this with another figure that I’d like to talk about now, seeing that we are talking about the language of Primo Levi. I’d like to talk about oxymorons and I’d like to talk about an oxymoron that there is in a great detective novel, which is by Simenon and it is entitled [in Italian] Maigret e i testimoni reticenti [Maigret et les témoins recalcitrant/ Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses]. Is Levi a witness who is “reticent”? Is there this oxymoron in him, too? When he is a witness (and if he is), is it fitting that he is, that he is a “reticent witness”?
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Here, Levi chooses. He really has an image of literary composition as something that has to be constructed in a very careful way. He said he had written several of his books, including If This is a Man, in a very fluid way. Even so, one thing is fluidity while you are writing. Another thing is construction. And it is in construction that we can see him. In fact, in the most recent – for the time being – edition of Primo Levi for Einaudi, obviously, Marco Belpoliti drew up a chart and this chart is very fascinating because it is the hypertext of If This is a Man. In it there are all the writings, all the points at which Primo Levi refers to If This is a Man in all the rest of his works.
Very often, he had continued to write up until his last stories, anecdotes, and almost until his last drafts, right? He wrote little meaningful stories of things that happened during his deportation, or – let’s say – during the time of covered in The Truce. It was a time of liberation, but he still had the status of a prisoner in Russia on the way back to Italy. And, in several of these stories, which he wrote a long time afterwards, Levi said that these did not go into his other books because, evidently, in those earlier books he had sought to… he had chosen the things to say precisely in order to strengthen the effectiveness of the testimony he gave. We should not think that sincerity consists in telling everything. As it comes, it comes. This is a type of sloppiness in contemporary literature and non-fiction. This idea of spontaneity – this is a very mistaken idea. It is really a great step backwards on the cultural level. Testimony is not invalidated by the fact that it is edited, weighed, and chosen. This I’ll tell. That I’ll not tell. In fact, the fact is that reticence is not an act of censorship…. No! You cannot say that! It depends on what is being told. If a person does not tell things that cast him in a bad light, for example, this can be understood on a human level, but it invalidates the testimony. Meanwhile, if a prosecutor, a state’s attorney, asks me to describe my relationship with Domenico Scarpa, I… it is not as if I tell him the entire story of all the times we have seen each other and have talked with each other…. I choose, something, right? I do this in order to get a meaning across, in order to give an idea of this relationship. Primo Levi did the same thing because he chose. He told some things. Other things he did not tell because they had to do with people that were still alive and, after all, he decided for each individual time which things to tell and which not. There is nothing, in my opinion, that he did not tell for the reason that he was not able to – that is, because he was not in possession of the creative instrument. Look, this thing of ineffability – I don’t believe it. He could eff everything, express everything. He did not choose to eff – that is, capture everything and put it down on paper. And, obviously, we have to respect this decision of his.
Domenico Scarpa
Here, there is a phrase that you write at a certain point, one that belongs, more or less, to this part of the book, about the treatment of episodes that have been experienced, about the treatment of reality, of experience, about how one transforms experience into writing, how one expresses this. And you even make this phrase stand out because you isolate it between two of your paragraphs. I’ll read it. It is very short because it is isolated: “The Muse – capital letter – is always rearranged by the Métier” – métier with another capital letter.
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Well, yes. The reason is, like this, there is a relationship between inspiration – between what is dictated by the Muse; the Muse can be the memory, too – and its translation on the page. I think that this is the experience, even for students who write an essay for school, right? You think that you have at lot of things to say, or, on the contrary, nothing because then, during writing, something always happens, something more or something less. Obviously, when the person writing is a writer, there is also his or her craft, the métier.
These two words – Muse and Métier – were also capitalized because M and M make an alliteration, one that Levi made in a letter to Gianpaolo Dossena. Dossena played poker with the verses of Italian literature, right? For Dossena, amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona [he counts under his breath; love that does not pardon any loved one from loving, Dante Inferno, Canto 5, v.103], this verse is a Four. It is a four-of-a-kind of As that he capitalized. This is called alliteration. In scholarly terms, it would be termed four a-ces. And these alliterations can also be found in the works of Primo Levi. He once wrote to Dossena and said, “Help me find out. I am doing this thing but I do not understand why I am doing it. Help me find out if it is coming from the Muse or if it is coming from the Métier.” In other words, is it a thing that comes to me from an inspiration, or is it my work itself as a poet that makes me do it? And, saying this, he made another alliteration – between Muse and Métier. These are the two opposite poles. There is no writer who is missing one of these, after all. If somebody has a muse and does not have the métier, he or she does not write. If one has the métier and does not have the muse, maybe he or she writes but we do not read it.
Domenico Scarpa
Now, those of us who are trying to be more modest never get to four-of-a-kind, but let me deal you a three-of-a-kind, at least – hence, Muse, Métier, and the third is Metaphor. I’d like to try, more or less, to wrap it up with this: Metaphor, to carry something beyond, to jump over the hurdle; Primo Levi and metaphors – the topic of the Ms, as many as you want.
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Primo Levi and the metaphors. Primo Levi had a fertile relationship with rhetoric. He did not think that rhetoric was an accident, an accessory. Or maybe it could have been an accessory, but we have seen at the beginning of this conversation that he had a strong idea of the importance of accessories. And the metaphor, the queen of rhetorical figures, is the obvious fuel feeding the literary imagination. The reason is that the metaphor forces us to think of something in a figurative way, to give a figure, a shape, to what we are saying, hence to give a practical example in order to translate
what we want to say and make it understandable to others, to point out a feeling.
Levi had warehouses, so to say, of rhetorical figures and the biggest one was certainly the Dante Alighieri warehouse. Here, in Dante, Levi finds, in the image…. Above all, I found the problem of the writer who has to write something. In the last canto of the Paradise, thus in the last canto of the entire comedy. For Dante, the problem is God. It is the vision of God, which already is a vision that he did not understand and then, in any case, what he understood, he did not have to words to say. And Dante was fighting against the limits of his mind, of his ingenuity, and of his human intellect. There is a text that Levi wrote for a journal of chemistry in which he explains to chemists how he really keeps on being a chemist even when he is working as a writer. It is called “Ex-Chemist” [in Other People’s Trades]. And, for once, it is a kind of paradox. It is a self-contradiction. And he says, you know, we chemists know matter and, for once, there is a kind of paradox. There is a self-contradiction. And he says, you know, we chemists understand matter. Normally, people in general have three or four different shades of azzurro / light blue – the sky, the sea…. But we, when we say light blue, we have so many more of them because we work with matter itself. Matter, by the way, is that which is not metaphor. It is the source of metaphor. These are two polar opposites. Therefore, for him, see how the metaphor has become a tool for learning. It is always in a relationship with the knowledge of reality. Thus it is not an ornament, but it is something like an optical instrument – the metaphor – for seeing reality. And there, talking with chemists and explaining things to chemists, he writes a passage. He writes a quotation without even saying so. He makes a quotation from Dante. How could he do that? How could he have thought they could have grasped this thing? For Levi, Dante was a thing that was part of our turf, of our common repertory, of the encyclopedia itself that we, as Italians, share in, an everyday presence.
But it is right there that we can find a key, one of many that are spread out over all over Levi’s works, a key for the things that we were saying at the beginning. The reason is, then, that the greatest metaphor is exactly that of effibility (the capacity to be understood), of the fact of taking the language of experiences that maybe are understood only by ourselves or that we alone feel able to describe, and, in the case of Dante, also of the imaginary experiences that were constructed.
Domenico Scarpa
Good, I would say we have come fully around because we have demonstrated Primo Levi’s need, the need in Primo Levi, for what is accessory. And, so, I’d like to say to the people present that I thank them for being here. Get yourself this accessory, this book, for reading Primo Levi’s works. In the meanwhile, I’d like to announce the fourth Primo Levi Lecture, which will take place on November 8. There will be a brief comment [from the audience]. However, I will finish what I was saying so as not to leave it half-said. If not, we won’t be able to make up the palindrome, not even this time. On November 8 Mario Barenghi of the University of Milan-Bicocca will come to talk to us, again in the great hall of the School of Chemistry, with a lecture whose title we will leave up in the air until November, a title that will arouse our curiosity, Perché crediamo a Primo Levi? / Why do we believe Primo Levi? Comment from the audience.
Bruno Contini, from the audience
If you allow me, I would like to tell the story of a telephone call with Primo Levi that I got, I believe a few months – I don’t remember exactly which year it was – a few months before his death. Primo called me – I work as an economist – Primo called me saying, “Listen, Bruno, I’d like to write something about the economy of exchange inside the lager.” The economy of exchange means barter, doesn’t it, the exchange of those little things that some people managed to get for themselves better than other people did. Levi was able to get some things, in that he was working in a chemical factory, but there were so many other people who, in some way or other, managed to get some things. And so, there was continuous barter among the…. “Will you give me a hand? Will you help me write this essay?” And so, we saw each other once and I understood what Primo had in mind. I thought. I said to him, “Look, Primo, let me think. In my opinion, the person who can help you the best is not me. I work on something entirely different. It is Mario Ferrero, who is a young friend of mine.” He said, “Good, I’ll think about it. I’ll talk to Mario Ferrero.” As far as I know, I never talked to Mario and after a few months – it seems like a few months to me – Primo took his life. This, in my opinion, is a totally new feature, and perhaps Primo had wanted to clarify it in some way. It makes me very sad not to have gone along with his proposal.
[applause]
Domenico Scarpa
Thank you, to all!
Stefano Bartezzaghi
I would only like to say one…
Domenico Scarpa
Go on, Stefano. Go on!
Stefano Bartezzaghi
Just a minute only to say that I am very glad to hear this real-life story. The reason is that, while I was working on the lecture – and there a little trace of this in my book – I noticed at a certain point that I would have liked to re-reread all of Primo Levi in order to pick up on all the quotations that have to do with business because, in relationship to the lager but not only to the lager – let’s remember too when he talks about his ancestors who were textile merchants -- business is a sort of semiotics inside Primo Levi’s mentality. And then, at I certain point, I gave it up because I realized that I was starting to write a second lecture. And so, if I am invited another time again, I will talk about business in Primo Levi and I will be able to add this story too, which I think is very significant and is one more lament for the things that Primo Levi did not manage to write. Thank you.