by Franco Baldasso

The passage is one of the most celebrated and quoted in Primo Levi’s entire work. In the chapter “The Canto of Ulysses,” from Survival in Auschwitz, the writer recounts an “unhoped-for hour of open air” within the atrocious routine of the Lager. Levi is chosen by Jean, a young Alsatian, the “Pikolo”—the Kapo’s right-hand man and “a quite high rank in the hierarchy of the Prominents” of the camp1—to accompany him in bringing the vat containing the daily ration of soup. It is a desired and singular occasion, being one hour of time to reach the kitchen and return. An hour, therefore, without the torment of forced labor and the fear of being beaten. It is an occasion for exchanging a few words, and Pikolo asks Levi to teach him Italian.

    The famous 26th canto of Dante’s Inferno comes to Levi’s mind. In it, Ulysses, alongside Diomedes in the eternal fire, tells the pilgrim and his guide about his last adventure. Levi tries to remember the Dantean tercets and to translate them into French, but his memory is halting. His recollections and thoughts related to the celebrated episode open a bottomless spiral within the closed world of Auschwitz. Dante’s passage is quoted according to the standard of transcription and humanistic interpretation in vogue in the Italy of the time, and which Levi had probably learned by heart at the Liceo Classico d’Azeglio in Turin. The verses  assume, in the dark, forbidding condition of the Lager, the light of an ancestral message: “Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance / Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence.” For a moment, Levi seems to glimpse in the Dantean verses “something gigantic . . . perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today.” It could be a glimmer of dignity, but also the pain of remembering, inside the camp, what “being a man” should have meant. Levi, in fact, appeals to his companion:

Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps . . . he has received the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders.

“The Canto of Ulysses” is probably the most obvious of the innumerable Dantean inserts and cross-references within Levi’s work. They were a true “poetic memory,” in the sense given to this term by Gianfranco Contini,2 Dante being for Levi, as Lorenzo Mondo suggested, “before literature itself.”3 In all of Levi’s work, in fact, the Dantean Commedia appears as a rhetorical horizon as well as an inexhaustible formal archive. But another, even more radical, aspect can be found: an aspect that involves Levi’s rereading of the classics throughout his writing, and of Dante in particular. This rereading is one of the techniques that Levi uses to convey not only the experience in Auschwitz, but his entire interpretation of the Holocaust. The consequences of this aspect of his writing are reflected in the dramatic distance and negotiation between the Primo Levi represented in his books, and the actual person.

    The occasion narrated in “The Canto of Ulysses” is extremely significant in this regard. As Zaia Alexander noted in an essay on Levi’s relationship with translation, the true lacuna in the text is not the verses from Dante, but Levi’s translations into French for the benefit of his companion.4 It should be noted that Jean Samuel, called Pikolo in Survival in Auschwitz, also miraculously survived Auschwitz. And especially that recently, Samuel broke a decades-long silence by publishing his own memoirs,5 which illuminate in a new way the passage in question. A circumstance almost Pirandellian in appearance: it is as if the character of a book, at a certain point, knocked on his author’s door in order to protest the conventionality of his representation, or at least his own irreducible otherness. But this situation’s paradoxical aspect did not escape Levi himself: he would later take up precisely this motif, making it the principal theme of one of his stories, ironically titled “Creative Work.”6 Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that the impossibility of superimposition or congruence between the two figures tells us not only about a deep existential divide. At a more profound level, it draws our attention to the intrinsic literariness of Survival in Auschwitz, and to the internal rhetoric of a text that Levi, in the preface, had stated that he wanted to construct as “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind.”7

    Returning to Il m’appelait Pikolo: un compagnon de Primo Levi raconte, even in the title, Jean Samuel recounts his memoirs and his experience in Auschwitz, clearly connecting them with the deep friendship that bound him to Levi for his entire life. For this reason, Samuel’s memoirs show traces of, and are a response to, those of his friend—Primo Levi’s memories, which had already been published in a series of texts. Samuel’s memories diverge from Levi’s precisely on the essential point of the occasion narrated in “The Canto of Ulysses.” A great part of the episode’s pathos lies in understanding the virtues read by Levi in the Dantean character at the moment of his remembering. These are secular qualities, like courage, and the will for individual affirmation, by then completely extinguished in the Häftlinge, the prisoners of the Nazi Lager. Levi lingers in particular on a fundamental point of the Dantean text: “Ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto” (So on the open sea I set forth). He adds: “It is much stronger and more audacious, it is a chain which has been broken, it is throwing oneself on the other side of a barrier, we know the impulse well. The open sea: Pikolo has traveled by sea, and knows what it means.” The passage, crucial for the Dantean interpretation, is also crucial for understanding Levi’s book and the psychological and existential condition experienced by the prisoner of the Lager. Yet Samuel, in his memoirs, recounts having seen the sea only after the war: Levi’s clarification is therefore apparently incorrect. Samuel concludes:

Still today I ask myself about this mystery of memory: both of us had the sensation of a crucial meeting, unforgettable, and yet that memory was not based on the same gestures, on the same words, on the same emotions.8

    The pathos of the entire passage is based on an illusion of reciprocity and on an illusory ethos. Robert Gordon has suggested that here, the true hero is neither Levi nor Ulysses, but Pikolo.9 But upon more careful examination, it is clear that the fictional reciprocity is rhetorically aimed at a reciprocity of understanding with the reader. The passage in fact has no real intention of reproducing what happened: the verbal exchange between the two in the text does not appear. Yet for Levi, the same methods for representing the existential and psychological complexity of humans within the concentration camp—for representing this new truth and subject of study—constitute the recollection of the forms of literary culture. Levi’s Ulysses is not only different from the Dante’s; he is an inversion of the human condition within the enormous biological and social experiment created in Auschwitz. By rewriting the Dantean episode and overturning its meaning via its own verses, Levi creates a subtle semantic shift. He also gives, in my view, his most convincing and never-abandoned answer to the problem of representing the Shoah in a written account. Levi chooses to recount Auschwitz through the languages and imagery typical of the foundations of Western culture, beginning with the literary canon, appropriating and reversing their methods and entirely changing their meaning.

    In Italy, Dante is the center of that canon. Therefore it is not by chance that Levi chooses to re-use the formal structures of the Divina Commedia, and in particular of the Inferno, in order to reverse their meaning and to describe a historically real landscape that is, as he himself states, “before good and evil.” This landscape does not possess any of the ethical and philosophical foundations on which Western culture is based (and with which it represents itself), but rather destroys them from within.

Translated by Lindsay Eufusia, edited by Sylvia Juran.