by Primo Levi
For all these reasons, whenever a reader expresses astonishment at the fact that I, a chemist, should have chosen the path of writing, I feel authorized to respond that I write precisely because I am a chemist: my old profession has been largely transfused into my new one.
François Rabelais
Some books are dear to us even if we can’t quite identify the reason: in such cases, were we to delve deep enough, unsuspected affinities would likely turn up, abounding in insights into hidden aspects of our personalities. There are other books, however, that serve as our traveling companions for years, for a lifetime, and the reason is clear, accessible, and easy to put into words; among that latter group, I venture to cite, with reverence and love, Gargantua and Pantagruel, the immense but only work of François Rabelais, mon maître. This book’s odd fate is well-known to us all: how it sprang from the life and learned leisure of Rabelais, a monk, physician, philologist, traveler, and humanist; how it grew and proliferated, with absolutely no plan, for nearly twenty years, and for more than a thousand pages, the most dazzling inventions piling up in total imaginative freedom, half robust folk epic of buffoonery, and half steeped in the vigorous, sharp-eyed moral consciousness of a great mind of the Renaissance. On every page, you encounter, audaciously paired, brilliant, or bawdy, or saccharine scurrilities, and, along with them, citations (authentic and otherwise, nearly all summoned from memory) from Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew texts; dignified and high-flown exercises in oratory; Aristotelian subtleties that prompt a giant’s laughter, others endorsed and sanctioned with the good faith of a man who lives a pure life.
If we add to this fundamentally irregular weave, and the frequently daunting language, the violent lambasting and satirizing of the Roman Curia, it becomes clear why Gargantua and Pantagruel commanded only a limited readership over the centuries, and why so many have been tempted to pawn it off, suitably amputated and revised, as children’s literature. Still, I need only open it to sense in it the book of today, that is to say, the timeless, eternal book that speaks a language we will always understand.
That’s not to say that it treats the fundamental themes of the human comedy: quite the opposite, for you’d seek in vain the great traditional poetic inspirations—love, death, religious experience, the whims of fate. Because in Rabelais you will never find brooding, insight, personal reflection: every word he wrote is alive with a different, witty, outgoing state of mind, essentially that of the innovator, the inventor (not the utopian); the inventor of stories grand and small, the bosin, or sideshow raconteur. For that matter, this revival is no coincidence; we know that the book had an obscure precursor, lost without a trace centuries ago—a country fair almanac, the Chroniques du grand Géant Gargantua.
But the two giants of his dynasty are not mere mountains of flesh, preposterous drinkers and eaters: at the same time, and paradoxically, they are the legitimate epigones of the giants who waged war on Zeus, and of Nimrod, and Goliath, and they are also enlightened princes and joyous philosophers. In Pantagruel’s great scope and hearty laughter the dream of the ages is embedded, that of a hardworking and productive humanity, which turns its back on the shadows, striding with determination into a future of peaceful prosperity, toward the golden age described by the ancient Romans, neither in the past nor in the distant future, but within reach, provided the powerful of the Earth do not abandon the paths of reason, and hold fast against enemies both within and without.
This is not idyllic hope; it is robust certainty. You need only will it, and the world can be yours; all you need is education, justice, science, art, the law, and the example set by the ancients. God exists, but in the heavens: man is free, not predestined, he is faber sui, the maker of himself, who must and can rule the Earth, a divine gift. And so the world is beautiful, filled with joy, and not tomorrow but today: because to each of us the illustrious delights of virtue and knowledge are given, and also the bodily joys, likewise a divine gift, of dizzyingly sumptuous banquet tables, “theological” drinking parties, and tireless lovemaking. To love human beings means to love them as they are, body and soul, tripes et boyaux.
The one character in the book who is human in size, who never spills over into the realm of symbolism or allegory, is Panurge, a remarkable backward hero, a distillate of restless, inquisitive humanity, in whom, to a far greater degree than in Pantagruel, Rabelais seems to offer us a sketch of himself, of his own complexity as a modern man, his own contradictions unresolved but cheerfully accepted. Panurge—the charlatan, buccaneer, clerc, variously hunter and prey, courageous and fearing “nothing but danger,” starving, penniless, and dissolute, who makes his entrance begging in every language, living and extinct—is us, is Mankind. He’s not exemplary, he’s not “perfection,”* but he is humanity, alive in that he seeks, sins, enjoys, and learns.
How can we reconcile this intemperate, pagan, worldly doctrine with the evangelical message, never rejected or forgotten by Rabelais, the shepherd of souls? It is in fact impossible to reconcile: this, too, is typical of the human condition, to be suspended between the mud and the sky, between nothingness and infinity. Rabelais’s very life, or at least what we know of it, is a tangle of contradictions, a whirlwind of activities apparently incompatible with one another, or with the image of the author that we traditionally reconstruct from his writings.
A Franciscan monk and, later (at the age of forty), a medical student and physician at the hospital of Lyon, a publisher of scientific books and popular almanacs, a scholar of law, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, a tireless traveler, an astrologer, a botanist, an archeologist, a friend of Erasmus, a forerunner of Vesalius in his use of human cadavers for the study of anatomy; a remarkably freewheeling writer, and at the same time the curate of Meudon, who enjoys for his whole life the reputation of a pious and god-fearing man—nonetheless, he leaves a portrait of himself (deliberately, one would gather) as a silenus, if not actually a satyr. We are a considerable distance—indeed, at the opposite extreme—from the Stoic wisdom of righteous moderation. Rabelais’s lesson is one of extremism, the virtue of excess: not only are Gargantua and Pantagruel giants but the book itself is gigantic, in heft and in impulse; gigantic and fabulous are the exploits, the ribaldry, the diatribes, the travesties visited upon both mythology and history, the detailed lists.
Gigantic above all else is the capacity for joy to be found in Rabelais and his creations. This disproportionate and luxuriant epic of the gratifications of the flesh reaches heaven, unexpectedly, by another path: because a man who experiences joy is like a man who experiences love—he is good, he feels gratitude to his Creator for having created him, and therefore he will find salvation. As for that, the carnality described by the deeply learned Rabelais is so naïve and inborn that it will disarm any intelligent censor: it is healthy and innocent and irresistible, like a force of nature.
Why do we feel that Rabelais is close to us? He certainly doesn’t resemble us; in fact, he’s rich in the very virtues lacking in the man of today—so beaten down, hampered, and weary. But he feels close to us as a model, in his cheerfully curious spirit, his jovial skepticism, his faith in tomorrow and in man; and again for the way he writes, so alien to categories and rules. Perhaps we can trace back to him, and to his Abbey of Thélème, via Sterne and Joyce, the now triumphant style of “writing however you like,” without doctrines or precepts, pursuing the thread of imagination exactly as it unspools, by spontaneous demand, different and surprising at each turn, like a carnival parade. He is close to us, mainly because in this outsized painter of worldly joys we sense the firm and enduring awareness, ripened through a long succession of experiences, that there is more to life than this. It would be hard to find a single melancholy page in his entire body of work, and yet Rabelais was familiar with human misery; he is silent about it because, a good doctor even when he writes, he refuses to accept it, his impulse is to heal it:
Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escrire
Pour ce que rire est le propre de
l’homme.
* Here, and throughout Other People’s Trades, an asterisk indicates that the word or phrase is in English in Levi’s original text.
The Moon and Us1
More complex, precise, and costly than a modern-day army, the vast machinery of Cape Kennedy ponderously rumbles toward the critical moment. Within eight days, at an instant and a place that have been predetermined with great accuracy, two men will set foot on lunar soil, marking a singular date on mankind’s calendar, and translating into reality something that in every previous century had been considered not merely impossible but the paradigm, the customary synonym for impossibility.
It will become necessary (or rather, it ought to become necessary: common parlance is conservative, we still use terms like a quattro palmenti, a tutto spiano—literally, “with four millstones,” and “full ration,” both meaning “all out”—even though no one any longer knows the ancient references contained in these metaphors), it will become necessary, then, to renounce the “world on the Moon” taken as a symbol of vain fantasies, as a non-place; and yet it’s amusing to remember that, just twenty years ago, we spoke of “the far side of the Moon” as a typical instance of an inaccessible reality, essentially unobservable. Even to talk about it was pure futility: like debating the sex of the angels, or the Talmudic bird that Isaac Deutscher2 mentions, which flies around the Earth and spits on it every seventy years.
So we’re about to take a big step: whether or not our legs are long enough is something that for now remains to be seen. Do we know what we’re doing? A number of indications suggest that we have every reason to doubt it. Of course we know, and we tell each other, the literal—I was about to say, the athletic—meaning of the undertaking: it’s the most daring, and at the same time the most meticulous, operation that man has ever attempted; it’s the longest journey, it’s the most foreign environment. But why we’re doing it we couldn’t say: the motives that are offered are too numerous, intimately intertwined and yet mutually exclusive.
Beneath them all, at the base of them all, we can glimpse an archetype. Beneath the intricacy of the calculation lies perhaps our obscure obedience to an impulse that comes into existence when we are born, and is crucial to life itself, the same impulse that drives poplar seeds to wrap themselves in cottony tufts so they can waft great distances on the breeze, that drives frogs after their final metamorphosis to migrate obstinately from pond to pond, at risk of their lives: it is the drive to disseminate and diffuse one’s kind over as vast a territory as possible, since, notoriously, it is the “little plot of ground” that make us fierce, and the proximity of our neighbors that unleashes in us humans, as in all animals, the ancestral mechanisms of aggression, defense, and flight.
Even less do we know, in spite of the claims of the brave new science of “futurism,” where this next step will take us. The great technological leaps of the past two centuries (the new metallurgies, the steam engine, electrical power, the internal combustion engine) have all triggered profound sociological transformations, but they did not shake the foundations of human nature; in contrast, at least four major new developments of the past thirty years (nuclear power, solid-state physics, anti-parasitics, and detergents) have brought about consequences much vaster, and of a very different character, than anyone might have dared to predict. Of them, at least three gravely threaten the equilibrium of life on the planet, and are forcing us to engage in some hasty rethinking.
In spite of these doubts, and in spite of the catastrophic problems that assail the human race, two men are going to set foot on the Moon. We the many, we the public, are by now unsurprised, like spoiled children: the rapid succession of portentous exploits in space is deadening our capacity for wonder, although that is intrinsic to human beings, fundamental to feeling alive. Not many of us will be capable of reliving, in tomorrow’s flight, Astolfo’s feat, or Dante’s theological astonishment, as he feels his body penetrate the diaphanous lunar material, “shining, solid, firm, and polished.” Sadly, this time of ours is not an age of poetry: we no longer know how to create it, we don’t know how to distill it from the fabulous events that are taking place above our heads.
Perhaps it’s too early: we have only to wait, and a poet of space will surely come? There is no guarantee. Aviation, the next-to-last great leap, is now sixty years old, and it has given us no poets other than Saint-Exupéry and, one step down, Lindbergh and Hillary3: all three of them took their inspiration from the precarious, the adventuresome, the unpredictable. The literature of the sea died with the end of navigation under sail; there never has been, nor could we imagine, a poetry of the rails. The flight of Collins, Armstrong, and Aldrin is too safe, too well planned, not “reckless” enough to offer material to any poet. Certainly, we may be asking too much, but still we feel defrauded. More or less consciously, we’d like the new navigators to have this virtue as well, alongside the many others that distinguish them: if only they knew how to transmit, communicate, and sing what they see and experience.
It’s unlikely that this will happen, in the near future or later. Out of the black cradle primeval where there is neither up nor down, neither beginning nor end, out of the realm of Tohu and Bohu, no words of poetry have come to us thus far, save perhaps for a few naïve phrases uttered by poor Yuri Gagarin: nothing but the nasal sounds, inhuman in their chilly calm, of the radio messages exchanged with Earth, in accordance with a rigid protocol. They do not seem like human voices: they are as incomprehensible as space, motion, and eternity.
1. Published on the eve of the first human landing on the Moon, by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, July 21, 1969; while Aldrin and Armstrong spent almost twenty-four hours on the lunar surface, Michael Collins stayed in Apollo 11 orbiting the Moon.
2. Isaac Deutscher (1906–1967), a Polish historian.
3. Richard Hillary (1919–1943) is the author of The Last Enemy, an account of his experiences as a pilot during the Second World War.
Tartarin of Tarascon
I confess: this is only a partial “rereading.” After laying my hands, almost by chance, on a copy of Tartarin of Tarascon, which to tell the truth I had remembered with considerable accuracy, I lacked the courage to reread the other two books that make up the trilogy: Tartarin on the Alps (even though it ought to strike us today as a singular piece of reporting on the hotel-keeping customs of the Belle Époque), and the hypochondriacal and rheumatic Port-Tarascon. Tartarin celebrated its first centennial in 1969: a rare commemoration among books fortified by the passing centuries, and also among those which the centuries simply bury under new and incessant stratifications of printed paper, but it seems to me that Tartarin does not deserve the renown it still seems to enjoy, and that it remains exactly what it always was, a thin, facile, and basically jejune piece of writing. It’s time to state it clearly: this book, far too celebrated, and all too often proffered to young people as a first acquaintance with the French language, owes its reputation to little more than a crude and unreliable humorous vein. The place that Daudet assigns his hero (with not a little arrogance), midway between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, is decidedly a usurpation: Tartarin lacks the substance, the universality, not to mention the dignity of those two progeny of Cervantes, which comes from the clear consciousness each of them has (in his way) of his own worth. One need only skim the book to realize this, to sense that Tartarin is vile and small.
Just as quickly one notices that there’s “something not quite right” in the core, in the heart of the book, that is to say, in the relationship that joins the writer to his character. Daudet doesn’t love his Tartarin; indeed, he scorns and hates him. This, in my view, is quite a rare case in all of literature, because that love is necessary, indispensable to any poetic creation. It is a love unique unto itself, which allows Dante to love Malacoda, Manzoni the Griso, and Pasolini Tommasino Puzzilli; a pure and disinterested love, the love of Pygmalion, which binds a creator to his creation once perfected, or in the process of being perfected; a love t
hat must be present, because without love there can be no creation. By which I mean: without it, you cannot create characters, pierres vives (“living rocks”), human beings; instead, you create ghosts, marionettes held up by the force of words. That, in fact, is an apt description of this Tartarin, in my view.
Tartarin is a character out of a children’s comic book: he has two contradictory shortcomings—he is schematic and at the same time inconsistent. We know nothing about—and we could not even begin to imagine—the past or the background of this nebulous little man, wealthy but already idle at forty, without friends, without wit, without women. His obsession, hunting, is too petty a pursuit to serve as his soul: and so he is vacuous, he is a substrate for clichés and depressingly predictable adventures. At the same time, his characterization lacks a firm hand, like the buffoon you cast in any role that’s sure to get a cheap laugh. He’s a character of convenience: by turns, he is an experienced and thoroughly prepared hunter, and yet he has no idea where lions are found; he’s a bourgeois from the provinces who grew up on garlic, and he parades around Algiers dressed as a Turk; he’s a cowardly visionary, but he doesn’t think twice about waging battle unaided against the ship’s stevedores, whom he mistakes for pirates.