by Primo Levi
“There’s no issue of professional confidentiality,” he went on. “You’re a new arrival here, but the whole factory already knows the story, in fact, the whole town does. I should tell you that we used to make guncotton: in other words, nitrocotton. It was reckless, dangerous work, and the only ones willing to take jobs here were the hard-up, the crazy, and people who didn’t understand what was involved. Safety procedures were minimal—as far as I know, just a tub of cold water over the nitration tank. If the chemical reaction started to get out of hand, you were supposed to yank the chain, as in the lavatory, and get out of there, but fast. Nobody slept all that soundly, even in the guest quarters. No, it’s different now, all we do these days is dismantle surplus shells and grenades. To the eye and to the hand, nitrocotton is no different from ordinary cotton: it’s just a little rougher and warmer to the touch. It will explode only if it’s very dry and compressed; otherwise, it burns up in a flash, with a bright yellow flame.
“For a while Milio had been courting Marisa: he brought her gifts and made her promises. Marisa kept him on tenterhooks, never exactly telling him yes or no, because Milio was rich but he drank, and he’d been in trouble with the law on account of some stolen goods he’d bought. Then, one fine day, Marisa started to be seen with Clemente: Clemente was a handsome young man, but he was shy, and since he had a bit of a limp, he’d never been drafted. That was no time to get married, but Marisa and Clemente got married all the same: some said in a hurry, too. They got married and set up housekeeping, and after that Milio started drinking more heavily. Milio and Clemente were colleagues: they both made nitrocotton.
“There were shortages of everything; the warehouse full of cotton to be nitrated was guarded around the clock by a couple of sentries, but the sentries themselves stole cotton and sold it on the black market. The only one who didn’t steal was Clemente, and who knows why: perhaps he lacked the courage, or he had principles, or maybe just because he knew he wasn’t fast enough to get away. ‘You’re a sap,’ Milio told him. ‘Everyone’s taking cotton home to their wives to spin: your wife’s the only one who has to do without, and she’s pathetic, her stockings are full of holes.’ Clemente said he’d try, but he never seemed to make up his mind. So Milio told him he’d take care of it; but since he had vengeance in mind, he stole a wad of nitrocotton instead of regular cotton, and he gave it to Clemente, who presented it solemnly to Marisa, in good faith: ‘Get your spindle and distaff and spin it; then you can knit yourself a pair of stockings for the winter.’
“Marisa got busy spinning and knitting, and she made herself a pair of long stockings. They were a little itchy, but they kept her warm. The winter passed without incident; in late February Marisa crouched down in front of the fireplace to stir up the fire, a log dropped and sparks sprayed. In an instant, the stockings vanished in a burst of yellow flame, and Marisa fainted from the terror and the pain. Clemente found her when he got home from work, and he was even more frightened than she was. There was no trace of the stockings, not even inside her shoes, because nitrocotton burns even without oxygen.
“They brought her in to my clinic, and I’d never seen a burn anything like it. Her legs were nothing but raw flesh, from the tips of her toes to her crotch: the burn stopped there precisely, like a geographic borderline. I had to have her admitted to a hospital in Turin; luckily the head physician was a friend of mine, so I didn’t have a lot of trouble covering up the whole thing; at the time, there were German inspectors working at the factory, and they were pretty heavy-handed when they caught someone stealing explosives: Milio would probably have wound up in front of a firing squad. He certainly deserved to be punished, but not to that extent. He was no genius, and I questioned him pretty thoroughly; he had no idea of what he’d done, he meant it as a joke.”
“So what finally happened?” I asked.
“The girl was released after three months, but she’s not the same person. She’ll hardly eat, she can’t sleep, and every so often she runs away from home and they find her wandering through the woods, unable to remember her own name. She thinks someone cast a witching spell on her, as they say around here; or that God has punished her for her sins. For that matter, people are cruel: when she walks down the street, they point at her and laugh behind her back, and she notices it. As for the two men, I convinced them that the best thing for both was to get out of here until the end of the war; so they joined the partisans, but two different groups.”
Against Pain
Many, perhaps all, adolescents are suddenly shaken by an anguished doubt: “Everything I know about the world has reached me through my senses: what if my senses are deceiving me, the way they do in dreams? What if the stars, the sky, the past that I reconstruct through evidence and artifacts, the present that I perceive, the people I love and the ones I hate, the pain I feel, what if all those things were the product of my own unwished-for invention, and nothing existed but me? What if I were at the heart of endless nothingness, uselessly populated by the phantoms I rouse? Look, I close my eyes and cover my ears, and the universe is annihilated.”
As we know, this hypothesis is logically irrefutable. It is internally consistent, it contains no contradictions, it has been upheld by philosophers (but whom were they trying to convince of this, since each of them believed that he was the only worm in some vast apple?), and it has even been given the illustrious name of solipsism. Its countless inventors end up sooner or later abandoning it (or simply forgetting it) for practical reasons; in fact, it would lead to behavior that is as dangerous to the individual as to his fellow men, that is, to inertia, an abdication of influence upon the reality in which we are immersed. Moreover, we quickly come to the realization that this hypothesis, defensible though it may be, is highly unlikely: it is unlikely, for example, that by pure chance my body is unvaryingly identical to the bodies of the individuals who populate the “dream” of my daily interactions. In the same way, the hypothesis that Earth is the immobile center of the cosmos is not contradictory, but it is improbable.
These centripetal considerations came back to me while I was reading an article advocating the protection of animals by Enrico Chiavacci, a moral theologian. I am eager to subscribe to his conclusions, but some of his arguments leave me dubious. He allows for a certain degree of suffering inflicted on animals simply because “every animal is at man’s service”; in fact, all creation is “God’s gift to man.” Even the Pleiades? Even the Orion nebula? A gift made to man fifteen billion years before he came into existence, and destined to survive at least as long after even the memory of our species is extinct?
Animals must be respected because “God finds all creatures good,” and “provides them with food, protects them”—but how can we overlook the cruel and patient ambushes laid by spiders, the refined surgery by means of which (vivisection pales in comparison!) certain wasps paralyze caterpillars, depositing a single egg inside them, and then go off to die elsewhere, leaving their larva to devour the still living host bit by bit? Can we claim that here, too, God “readies (for animals) a place to rest”? And what can we say about cats, magnificent killing machines? And the treacherous cunning of the cuckoo, which murders its newly hatched foster siblings? Certainly not that these creatures are “wicked”: but it seems clear that the moral categories of good and evil are not suited to subhumans. The gigantic bloody competition that began when the first cell came into being, and that is still raging all around us, falls outside, or beneath, our standards of behavior.
Animals must be respected, that much is true, but for other reasons. Not because they are “good” or useful to us (not all of them are) but because a rule engraved within us, and acknowledged by all religions and codes of law, requires that we avoid creating pain, either in humans or in any other creature capable of feeling it. “All is mystery except our pain.”1 The layman has few certainties, but the first is this: it is acceptable to suffer (or to cause suffering) only if doing so prevents greater suffering.
This i
s a simple rule, but its ramifications are complex, and everyone knows that. How can we measure the sufferings of others against our own? Still, solipsism is a puerile fantasy: “other people” exist, and among their number we should count our traveling companions, the animals. I don’t think that the life of a crow or a cricket is worth as much as a human life; it’s even doubtful that an insect feels pain the same way that we do, but birds probably feel pain and mammals certainly do. It is the difficult task of all humans to reduce as much as possible the tremendous volume of this “substance” that poisons every life, pain in all its forms; and it is strange, but wonderful, that we can arrive at this imperative even when we start from radically different assumptions.
1. A quotation from Giacomo Leopardi’s poem “Ultimo canto di Saffo” (“Sappho’s Last Song”).
About Obscure Writing
We should never impose limits or rules on creative writing. Those who do are generally obeying political taboos or ancestral fears. In fact, a written text, however it may be written, is less dangerous than is commonly thought; the famous opinion concerning Silvio Pellico’s My Prisons, to the effect that it did more harm to Austria “than the loss of a battle,” is sheer hyperbole. We know from experience that a book or a short story, whether the author’s intentions are good or evil, is an essentially inert and innocuous object; even in its most despicable incarnations (for instance, the hybrids of sex and Nazism or pathology and pornography), it can cause only minimal harm, certainly less than that caused by drinking or smoking or corporate stress. Compounding that intrinsic weakness is the fact that today every text is suffocated within the space of a few months by the mass of new texts pressing in from behind. Moreover, the rules and limits, historically determined as they are, tend to shift frequently; the history of all literatures abounds in episodes in which excellent and wonderful works have been opposed in the name of principles that proved to be much shorter lived than the texts themselves. We can deduce from this fact that many valuable books must have vanished without a trace, having emerged the losers in the never-ending battle between those who write and those who prescribe how one should write. From the vantage point of our permissive age, the trials (real trials, in court) of Flaubert, Baudelaire, and D. H. Lawrence appear as grotesque and ironic as that of Galileo, so great does the disparity in stature between those judged and those doing the judging appear to us nowadays—the latter prisoners of their era, the former living on into any foreseeable future. In short, passing laws for writers is useless at best.
Having made this point, and thus renouncing emphatically the idea of establishing standards, prohibitions, or punishments, I’d like to say that in my opinion writers should never write in an obscure manner, because writing is that much more valuable, and has that much greater chance of being read and remembered, the easier it is to understand and the less it lends itself to equivocal interpretations.
Of course, perfectly clear writing demands a perfectly knowledgeable and completely mindful writer, and that does not correspond to reality. We are all made up of ego and id, spirit and flesh, as well as nucleic acids, traditions, hormones, experiences, and traumas both remote and proximate; and so we are condemned to drag along with us, from cradle to grave, a doppelgänger, a mute and faceless brother, who is nonetheless partly responsible for our actions, and therefore for our pages, too. As we all know, no author fully understands what he has written, and all writers have had occasion to be astonished at the fine and horrible things that critics have found in their work, things they didn’t know they had put there; many books contain instances of plagiarism, conceptual or verbal, of which the authors claim ignorance in good faith. It’s a fact we’re helpless to dispute: this source of the unknowable and the irrational that each of us houses within must be accepted, and even authorized to express itself in its (necessarily obscure) language, but it need not be considered the sole or outstanding source of expression. It’s not true that the only authentic form of writing is that which “comes from the heart,” and which in fact comes from all the various ingredients that are mentioned above as distinct from consciousness. This opinion, though time-honored, is based on the presupposition that the heart that “dictates within us” is a different and nobler organ than that of reason, and that the language of the heart is equal for one and all, which it is not. Far from being universal in time and space, the language of the heart is capricious, adulterated, and as unstable as fashion, of which indeed it forms part, nor can we claim that it is the same in just a single country or period of time. In other words, it is not a language at all, and at most we can call it a vernacular, an argot, if not an individual invention.
Thus, those who write in the language of the heart may prove to be indecipherable, and so it is reasonable to ask what purpose they had in writing; indeed (it strikes me that this is a broadly acceptable proposition), the purpose of writing is to communicate, to transmit information or feelings from mind to mind, from place to place, and from time to time. Someone who is understood by no one transmits nothing, is only a voice crying in the wilderness. When this happens, the reader of goodwill should be heartened: if you do not understand a text, the fault is in the author, not in you. It is a writer’s responsibility to be understood by whoever wishes to do so: it is his profession, writing is a public service, and a willing reader should not go away in disappointment.
I confess that I have slightly idealized this reader—and I have the odd impression that he is beside me when I write. He is similar to the perfect gasses of thermodynamics, perfect only in that their behavior is perfectly predictable according to simple laws, while real gasses are more complicated. My “perfect” reader is neither erudite nor a fool; he reads not out of obligation, or as a pastime, or to show off in society, but because he is curious about many things, wants to choose among them, and is reluctant to delegate that choice to someone else; he knows the limits of his own expertise and education, and he guides his choices accordingly. In this particular instance, he has chosen eagerly to read my books, and he would feel uncomfortable or unhappy if he were unable to understand every word that I have written, in fact, that I have written for him, because the truth is that I write for him, not for the critics, or for the powerful of the earth, or for myself. If he did not understand me, he would feel that he had been unfairly humiliated, and that I was guilty of breach of contract.
Here an objection could be raised: there are times when one writes (or speaks) not to communicate but to relieve an inner tension, or a joy, or a sorrow, and therefore one might also cry in the wilderness, or moan, laugh, sing, or shout.
Those who shout, provided they have good reason to do so, deserve our understanding: to weep and to mourn, whether in a constrained or a theatrical manner, are helpful inasmuch as they alleviate our suffering. Jacob howls over Joseph’s bloodstained cloak; in many civilizations, cries of mourning are part of prescribed ritual. But the shout is an extreme reaction, as useful for an individual as tears, but inept and coarse if considered as language, because by definition it is something quite different from language: the unarticulated is not articulate, noise is not sound. For that reason, I have had enough of praise lavished on texts that (here I quote at random) “sound the very limits of the ineffable, the nonexistent, the animal howl.” I’m sick of “a dense magmatic impasto,” of “semantic refuse,” and of stale innovations. Blank pages are blank, and perhaps it’s best to call them blank; if the emperor has no clothes, the honest thing is to say that he has none.
Personally, I’m also tired of the praise lavished in life and death on Ezra Pound, who may well have been a great poet, but who in order to make sure he was not understood sometimes even wrote in Chinese, and I believe that his poetic obscurity had the same roots as his supermanism, which led him first to fascism and subsequently to self-marginalization: both grew out of his contempt for the reader. Perhaps the American court that judged Pound insane and unfit to stand trial was right: a writer by instinct, he must have been a ver
y poor thinker, and this is borne out both by his political actions and by his maniacal hatred of bankers. Now, people who don’t know how to think should be given proper care, and treated respectfully to the extent possible, even if, like Ezra Pound, they might have been persuaded to manufacture Nazi propaganda against their own country while it was at war with Hitler’s Germany; but they should not be praised or held up as examples, because it is better to be sane than insane.
The effable is to be preferred to the ineffable, human speech to an animal howl. It is no accident that the two least decipherable German-speaking poets, Trakl and Celan, both committed suicide, two generations apart. Their shared fate leads us to think of the obscurity of their poetics as a sort of pre-suicide, a will-not-to-exist, a flight from the world, ultimately crowned by a yearned-for death. They deserve our respect, because their “animal howl” was terribly justified: for Trakl, by the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire—something he believed in—into the maelstrom of the Great War; for Celan, a German Jew who miraculously survived the German slaughter, by uprooting and by anguish without remedy in the face of death triumphant. With Celan especially, because he was our contemporary (1920–1970), this discussion must be approached seriously and responsibly.
We can sense the tragedy and nobility of his song, but only vaguely: to penetrate it is a hopeless undertaking, not only for the average reader but for the critic as well. Celan’s obscurity is neither contempt for the reader nor inadequacy of expression nor a lazy surrender to the currents of the subconscious: it is truly a reflection of the obscurity of his own and his generation’s fate, and it condenses relentlessly around the reader, squeezing him in a grip of ice and iron, from the harsh clarity of Death Fugue (1945) to the grim and inescapable chaos of his final compositions. This darkness, increasing from page to page, up to the last disjointed babble, is as appalling as any death rattle, and indeed that is precisely what it is. It sucks us in, in the same way that a whirlpool does, but at the same time it defrauds us of something that ought to have been said but wasn’t, and therefore it frustrates us and keeps us distant. I believe that Celan as a poet ought to be the subject of reflection and mourning, rather than the object of imitation. If what he conveys is a message, it has been lost in the “background noise”: it is not a communication, it is not a language, or at most it’s a dark and truncated language, the language, in fact, of someone about to die, and alone, as we are all alone at the point of death. But because we are not alone when we are alive, we should not write as if we were. We have a responsibility, as long as we are alive: we must answer for what we write, word for word, and ensure that every word hits its target.