Abstract
“I’ve always thought that bridges are the most beautiful work there is,” remarks Tino Faussone in Primo Levi’s 1978 book The Wrench (La chiave a stella).1 Levi’s rigger-protagonist appreciates bridges because “they’ll never do anybody harm; in fact, they do good, because roads pass over bridges, and without roads we would still be like savages. In other words, bridges are sort of the opposite of boundaries, and boundaries are where wars start.”2 The nomadic Faussone enjoys seeing the world while “going from one construction site to another,” appreciating the diversity of the planet: “the world is beautiful because it’s all different .”3 Typically working at interstitial places such as shorelines, riverbanks, or on an offshore oil rig that is “like an island, but … an island we had made,” Faussone is a “Homo faber” who finds meaning in work performed well. The rigger’s wrench is, for Faussone, also a key to the stars whose dust he finds on top of the tall constructions he has helped to erect.4 A celebration of the “freedom” attainable from “being good at your job and therefore taking pleasure in doing it,” Faussone demonstrates Levi’s argument that freedom means “not having to work under a boss.”5
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Primo Levi, The Wrench, trans. William Weaver (London: Abacus, 2013), 145.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, ed. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 281.
Andrew Charlesworth, “Towards a Geography of the Shoah,” Journal of Historical Geography 18.4 (1992): 464
Dalia Kandiyoti, “‘Our Foothold in Buried Worlds’: Place in Holocaust Consciousness and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces,” Contemporary Literature 45.2 (2004): 306.
Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles and Tim Cole, “Geographies of the Holocaust,” in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1.
Trevor J. Barnes and Claudio Minca, “Nazi Spatial Theory: The Dark Geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103.3 (2013): 671, 681.
Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 12, 112.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 17, 26, 93–94. Emphasis in the original.
Primo Levi, “My House,” in Other People’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1999), 1.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 2012), 5.
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Everyman, 2000), 84.
Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London: Penguin, 1993), 23.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 197.
Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve, trans. Ruth Feldman (London: Penguin, 2002), 99
Dan Diner, “Historical Understanding and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as Epistemological Vantage,” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, ed. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 77
Giorgio Agamben, “What Is a Camp?” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, ed. Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 253. Emphasis in the original.
Agamben, “What Is a Camp?” 255; Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca, “Topographies/Topologies of the Camp: Auschwitz as a Spatial Threshold,” Political Geography 30.1 (2011): 3–12.
Paul B. Jaskot, Anne Kelly Knowles and Chester Harvey, with Benjamin Perry Blackshear, “Visualizing the Archive: Building at Auschwitz as a Geographic Problem,” in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 167.
Primo Levi, The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Everyman, 2000), 225.
Robert S. C. Gordon, “Introduction,” in Auschwitz Report, by Primo Levi, with Leonardo De Benedetti, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon, trans. Judith Woolf (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 14.
Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 12; see also Risa Sodi, “La terza via: Dante and Primo Levi,” MLN 127.1, Italian Issue Supplement (January 2012), S199–203.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988), 103.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 409.
Michael Ignatieff, “Introduction,” in Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve (London: Penguin, 2002), 4.
Primo Levi, with Leonardo De Benedetti, Auschwitz Report, ed. Robert S. C. Gordon, trans. Judith Woolf (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 39, 45–46.
Levi, If This Is a Man, 91, 99; Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, trans. John Shepley (Marlboro, Vermont: Marlboro Press, 1989), 20.
Levi, If This Is a Man, 44. Bruno Bettelheim similarly writes about occupying himself with psychological theories about the camp experience in order to forget his circumstances. See Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 38 (1943): 417–52.
Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1977), 148.
Lucie Benchouiha, Primo Levi: Rewriting the Holocaust (Leicester: Troubadour, 2006), 35.
Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory: Toward an Ethics of the Borderland,” symploke 11.1–2 (2003): 36.
Michael Rothberg, paraphrased in Larson Powell, “The Meaning of Working through the East,” German Studies Review 37.3 (October 2014): 606.
Michelle Balaey, “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory,” Mosaic 41.2 (2008): 160.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2016 Minna Vuohelainen
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vuohelainen, M. (2016). The Concentrationary Universe: Primo Levi’s Spatial Consciousness. In: Vuohelainen, M., Chapman, A. (eds) Interpreting Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435576_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435576_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56392-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43557-6
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)