11 - Primo Levi, the canon and Italian literature

Summary

Primo Levi holds an 'insider-outsider' place in Italian literature, which continues to exercise critics, just as it exercised Levi himself, who labelled himself 'the writer who is not a writer' (The Black Hole of Auschwitz, pp. 101; OI, 1202). But this apparently single, lengthy debate about where to place him in the canon actually covers many separate issues, pertinent to other authors besides Levi. Amongst the hotly debated questions are: was he primarily an Italian writer or part of a wider or narrower community - in Levi's case scientific, Jewish, moralist, rationalist, memorialist? Was he a writer of fictions or rather an essayist, autobiographer or chronicler? Was he a great writer, or somebody destined to write about great things?

Recent critical writing on Levi, in Italy and beyond, reveals that the commonest topic is Memory, almost exclusively Levi's position in the memorial literature of the Holocaust. Slightly less frequent are discussions of Levi as a moralist. Again the focus is on keeping alive the lessons of a chronologically receding, but morally ever-pertinent, personal and universal wrong. After these 'great' themes, whose terms are often dictated by external values and militant agendas Levi himself sometimes rejected, we finally reach intellectual and artistic concerns with which the author was explicitly engaged: the role of reason and science in life and literature, the value of work and place, the hidden trace of language as clue to our past, the fragile nature of artistic creativity. On Levi's craft as a writer, and on his literary standing, there is surprisingly little. Even the three major biographies in English, by Angier, Anissimov and Thomson, concentrate on the extraordinary aspects of his life (including the challenge of being 'ordinary'), rather than on the culture of his writing. He is arguably the victim of mass selective memory, remembered for why he wrote, particularly at the beginning and end of his career, rather than how he wrote.