Victoria Nesfield

York St John University, UK.

[email protected]

The Canto of Primo Levi: The Presence of Dante in Levis Holocaust Narrative.

Introductory Notes

This paper will briefly introduce Primo Levi and his Holocaust-related history,

then go on to discuss The Canto of Ulysses, a chapter of Levis testimonial If This is a

Man. I will argue three points for discussing the presence of Dante within Levis

Holocaust narrative: Firstly, that the design and structure of the Nazi concentration

camps deliberately stripped the Jews (and of course the non-Jewish prisoners) of their

identities, nationality being a significant facet of identity for Levi. Sustaining a sense of

Italian identity was not possible for Levi without his cultural memory. Secondly, I will

argue that Dantes Inferno and its imagery is representative of Levis own ordeal in

Auschwitz. Thirdly, I argue that despite the very real and urgent threat of sinking into a

memory-less existence in Auschwitz, and relinquishing the little identity Levi retained,

Dante succeeds in providing not only a literary identity for Levi to understand and

discuss his ordeal, but a cultural life-raft for Levi during his Holocaust experience.

Holocaust theorist James Young argued in a discussion of Holocaust narratives that

literary and historical truths of the Holocaust may not be entirely separable (Young

1988 p.1).

In the same text however, Young concedes that

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to concentrate on the poetics of a witnesss testimony, for example, over the

substance of testimony seems to risk displacing the events under discussion

altogether (Young 1988 p.3).

This ambiguity represents the difficulty of constructing a universal Holocaust narrative.

The limits of language and the everyday human understanding of the non-victims, or

non-survivors, inhibit the power to convey the realities of the Holocaust through a

sparse and simple testimony. A carefully constructed, emotive novelistic approach on

the other hand, such as Elie Wiesels Night, is vulnerable to criticisms of fictional

storytelling and style over substance. I believe that Primo Levis If This is a Man self-

consciously highlights the difficulties of the literary representation of the Holocaust.

Primo Levi

Primo Levi came from an assimilated Italian Jewish family in Turin. Educated as

a chemist through the Fascist years, after completing university, Levi joined an anti-

Fascist partisan group. Levi was captured in 1943 in hiding above Turin with his

partisan group. While under arrest he admitted to being Jewish, which led to his

deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, where he remained, working under

various labour divisions, until his liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945. Levi

was one of a relatively small contingent of Italian Jews to be deported to Auschwitz,

and amongst the Fossoli internment camp deportation, a very small number of

survivors to return.

Of 650, our number when we had left, three of us were returning (Levi 1960, 1979

p.378).

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He wrote his testimony to the Holocaust almost immediately after returning, and Se

Questo un Uomo (If This is a Man) was published in 1947. Little interest in or publicity

of the book silenced Levi and his memories for a decade until Einaudi republished the

book in 1958, leading finally to high sales and international interest. By the time of

Levis death almost thirty years later, here in Turin in 1987, he was an internationally

published and recognised writer, whose eloquent words and scientific analysis of his

Holocaust experience ranked him as one of the first and foremost voices of Holocaust

testimony, in Italy and across the world.

The Canto of Ulysses

The Canto of Ulysses is a short chapter of If This is a Man; it narrates one of

Levis Auschwitz experiences and one of his many apparently fleeting but significant

relationships with other inmates. This experience relates to Jean the Alsatian Pikolo,

the Kapos assistant. The Kapos were the higher ranking prisoners, usually convicted

criminals, placed in charge of prisoners in each barrack and work detail. As the

assistant to the Kapo, the Pikolo plays a menial but significant and powerful role in the

prisoner hierarchy. On a rare excursion from his usual work detail, to collect the soup

ration, Levi accompanies Pikolo on his own journey, and attempts to teach Pikolo

Italian, by using Dantes Comedy. Dantes Inferno, the first part of the trilogy, narrates

Dantes epic journey through the circles of hell, guided by Virgil. As Dante travels

through the Inferno, his imagery of the grotesque and the horrific pervade the

narrative of an imagined hell. Why does Levi, when asked to teach Pikolo Italian, select

Dante; specifically Inferno and specifically Canto twenty-six, the Canto of Ulysses? Levi

claims not to know himself:

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The Canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes into my mind (Levi 1960,

1979 p.118).

What is notable is that Dante and his words occur to Levi at a rare point of relative

happiness and relaxation with Pikolo. The short hour Levi can walk and talk with

Pikolo, away from the harsh labour, the brutality of the Kapos and the guards, and all

the violence and bleakness that has become the everyday existence for Levi, is an

escape into his memories. As Pikolo and Levi compare memories of their mothers,

their upbringings and their homes, Levi is transported back to the Italian culture he

was stripped of upon entrance into Auschwitz, a culture that the atheist, assimilated

Italians identity was informed to such a significant extent by.

First Argument: The Stripping of Identity in the Concentration Camp

Levi had recalled earlier in If This is a Man the painfully obvious and rapid

decrease in Italian prisoners in Auschwitz, and thus Levis connection to a strong Italian

community identity was lost.

We Italians had decided to meet every Sunday

evening in a corner of the Lager, but we stopped it
at once, because it was too sad to count our
numbers and find fewer each time, and to see
each other ever more deformed and more squalid
(Levi 1960, 1979 p.43).

As Levi lost Italian compatriots in the camp, and found himself assimilating to the

Lager-German which was the language of the orders and the commands, his use of

Italian diminished. The Italians, Levi later said in an interview, became

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deaf and dumb, flung into an alien world (Benchouiha 2006 P.13).

Although exceptions such as friendships with Alberto, Lorenzo and Daniele emerge at

various points, Levi relied upon his memory to retain his Italian identity in a structure

designed to remove all facets of individual and cultural identity. Language was one

facet of identity that the Nazis and the SS could not forcibly remove entirely, or

physically strip away from the Jews in the camps, but the demographics of the Jews

within Auschwitz, meant that Levis assimilated Italian identity and his language still

presented an insurmountable barrier to forming a unity with the majority of the

prisoners, most of whom spoke Polish or Yiddish. While the Nazis managed to control

the de-socialisation and dehumanisation of the Jews in most respects of identity, the

clear East/West dichotomy between Jews in Europe to have emerged throughout the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries also played its own part in dividing the disparate

nations of Jews whose lives and identities converged in the sites such as Auschwitz

across Poland and Germany. The religious Jews of Eastern Europe may have been able

to form a community of sorts within the concentration camps, united by their faith and

their Yiddish tongue, but assimilated Jews from the West such as Levi, who naturally

spoke only Italian, were isolated by their relatively few numbers and their national

languages.

Second Argument: The Inferno as a Representative Hell

Levi writes The Canto of Ulysses in the present tense, as if the thoughts he

shares with his readers are occurring at that exact time. With the hindsight of writing a

Holocaust testimony and the problems associated with it, it must be observed that

Dantes Inferno narrative is arguably representative of Levis descent into his own

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Inferno, Auschwitz. Although Dante writes from a secular Christian background and

Levi from an assimilated Jewish background, the political strife that exiled Dante from

Florence, could be seen as reflected in Levis exile to Auschwitz, and his own musings

on the ordeal of the exiled Jew under National Socialism. The limitations of language,

the loss of meanings of words after Auschwitz, and the absence of a real-life precedent

for Levi to relate his Holocaust experience to, leave a void in which the Holocaust

testimony is situated in. This is especially true of Levis personal situation, as he was

one of the very first survivors to publish his testimony, and his experience in 1947

indicated the general public reluctance to acknowledge or to understand the realities

of the Holocaust. In Dante Levi had a literary precedent of hell, a vocabulary and, for

the primary Italian market, a national heritage too to rely upon. Levi, unlike other

survivor-writers, Elie Wiesel being a primary example, is generally reluctant to fill his

writing with rhetoric; however, by using Dante (and also in parts Homers Odyssey)

Levi makes use of a literary framework of an emotional journey narrative to situate his

own experience within. Nicholas Patruno elaborates on Levis use of Dantes imagery

to place his own experience within; the Inferno, he argues:

Is valid in terms of the phenomenon of which he

writes and the need to draw a literary parallel. The
description of Dantes similar path through hell,
although he has taken it for totally different
reasons and as an observer with a predestined
salvation, has not come without an arduous
struggle to describe adequately the horror of the
event (Patruno 1995 p.12).

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 In The Canto of Ulysses Levi assumes the role of Virgil to Pikolos Dante, but

Levi is agonised to discover he can no longer recite all of Dantes words. The distance

between Levis Italian home and his previous life, and his situation in Auschwitz was

immense and Levi, away from his language, his books and his culture, was beginning to

forget. There is a very real sense of urgency in recalling Dante in Levis narrative, as

Levis hour with Pikolo comes to an end, and he says:

I keep Pikolo back , it is vitally necessary and

urgent that he listen, that he understand this as
pleased Another before it is too late; tomorrow he
or I might be dead, or we might never see each
other again (Levi 1960, 1979 p.121).

While Levi and Pikolo are alive, and are still men, they must recall Dante, as to lose the

memories of the Italian language, is for Levi, to lose the last element of identity, of

what it is to be a man in Auschwitz. Levi closes the chapter poignantly, with Dantes

line

And over our heads the hollow seas closed up, the last line of canto twenty-six

(Levi 1960, 1979 p.121).

Levi and Pikolo have reached the soup queue; their journey is at an end and Levi has

failed Pikolo and himself, he cannot complete the Canto of Ulysses. Slowly, Levi is

beginning to be beaten by the camp system; he is becoming, to use an expression of

Dantes and his own, one of the sommersi, the drowned.

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Third Argument: The Emotional Success of Dante

Despite the torment Levi experiences in not being able to recall the Canto of

Ulysses, the words of Dante do offer moments of optimism and happiness for Levi

while he experiences his own trial. As a non religious Jew, and an ostensible atheist,

Levi does not pray in camp, nor does he have a religious identity to rely on for hope or

for an emotional outlet, in the way Wiesel explores through his dispute with God in

Night and The Trial of God. Instead of God, Levi recalls the words of Dante in a similarly

hopeful and euphoric state:

As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like

the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a
moment I forget who I am and where I am (Levi
1960, 1979 p.119).

Dantes words are elevated, ironically to the status of religious epiphany. It is not

typical of Levi to indulge in such rhetoric as this, but in the Canto of Ulysses after the

agony of the holes in his memory, comes the ecstasy of Dantes Italian words.

To Conclude

Dante, a figure of Italian literary culture and champion of the Italian language,

provides Levi with a national and literary identity to cling to; this is Levis primary

identity, as a non-believing Jew, and the opportunity to return, mentally at least, to the

words of Dante, remind Levi of the culture he belongs to, as far away as it seems

within the barbed wire fences of the Auschwitz perimeters. Levi once described

Auschwitz as the

caesura which snapped in two the chain of my memories (Levi 1960, 1979 p.359).

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I argue that while Auschwitz is a rupture in the chain of Levis life and memories, the

words of Dante, a symbol of Italian language and culture, forms a link between Levis

pre and post-Auschwitz life, and while he is interned in camp, Dante is a reminder to

Levi of his identity, and his humanity, and to quote Dante himself, to remind Levi to

think on why you were created: not to live like animals indeed, but to seek virtue

and knowledge (Alighieri 2007 p.159).

References
Alighieri, D. 2007. Inferno. London: Vintage Classics.
Benchouiha, L. 2006. Primo Levi: Rewriting the Holocaust. Leicester: Troubador
Publishing.
Levi, P. 1960, 1979. If This Is a Man and The Truce. London: Penguin.
Patruno, N. 1995. Understanding Primo Levi. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press.
Young, J. E. 1988. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.