Abstract
As the epigraph to what would turn out to be his final book, Primo Levi chose a few lines from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner that lend impressive moral authority to the witness:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns,
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns.1
It is memory, of course, that visits this agony upon the mariner, the memory of having sinned first by felling the fateful albatross and then, all the worse, by surviving his fellow sailors after they paid the heavy price for his violent presumption. Thereafter, the mariner’s transgression overtakes him as a force unto itself, a Fury that he can neither predict nor control, a phantom of the mind that plunges him—in true Romantic form—into physical pain. His only relief takes the form of confessions that will (also with vintage Romantic defiance) imperil simple bourgeois happiness, robbing the wedding celebration of joy with the tale of his devastating (if entirely human) failure. In fact, Coleridge’s mariner does not so much tell his tale as find himself the vehicle for its searing truth, a mere—more or less helpless—medium of agonizing revelation. In return for bearing his agonizing truth so unconsciously, even selflessly, all the mariner can claim is a kind of helpless irreproachability, the ghosts that throng his burning heart and tongue comprising a veritable moral imperative.
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Notes
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in Coleridge: Poems and Prose (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 54.
Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 15–16.
Verónica Tozzi particularly emphasizes Levi’s analytical, scientific approach to the task of writing about Auschwitz, even arguing that “as a good chemist paying attention to facts and conceptual clarity, Levi classifies people in the way he would natural elements in the periodic table.” Verónica Tozzi, “The Epistemic and Moral Role of Testimony,” History and Theory 51 (2012): 8.
Marco Belpoliti and Robert S. C. Gordon, “Primo Levi’s Holocaust Vocabularies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 51.
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Representing Auschwitz,” History and Memory 7.2 (1995): 122.
William Gass has argued that the usual English translation of the following well-known passage using the word “genius” probably overstates the case and recommends “Grube’s more restrained” alternative, “inborn talent,” instead. William Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2012), 277.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Random House Vintage International, 1955; 1997), 312.
Judith Woolf, “From If This is a Man to The Drowned and the Saved,” in The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage International, 1988), 31–32.
The technical term for the rhetorical trope highlighted in Figure 1 is conduplicatio, the “repetition of a word or words in succeeding clauses.” Richard Lanham, AnalyzingProse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 252. In this particular example, the complicated nesting of the conduplicatio incorporates the effects of anáphora (the repetition of key terms at the beginning of successive phrases), epíphora (the repetition of key terms at the end of successive phrases), and isó-colon (a succession of phrases of equal length and corresponding structure). See Lanham, Analvzing Prose, 251–53.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Random House Vintage International, 1967; 1989), 29.
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© 2016 Brian Walter
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Walter, B. (2016). The Offense of the Memory: Memory and Metaphor in The Drowned and the Saved . In: Vuohelainen, M., Chapman, A. (eds) Interpreting Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435576_11
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