Primo Levi's Narratives of Embodiment

Containing the Human

Charlotte Ross

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136868849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Italienische Literaturkritik

This innovative reading of Primo Levi's work offers the first sustained analysis in English of his representations of bodies and embodiment. Discussion spans the range of Levi's works — from testimony to journalism, from essays to science fiction stories — identifying and tracing multiple narratives of embodiment and disembodiment across his oeuvre. These narratives range from the abject, disembodied condition of prisoners in Auschwitz, to posthuman or cyborg individuals, whose bodies merge with technological devices. Levi's representations of bodies are explored in relation to theories of embodiment and posthumanism, bringing his work into new dialogue with critical discourses on these issues. Taking inspiration from Levi's definition of the human being as a constructor of containers, as well as from the recurring references to both material and metaphorical containing structures in his work, the book suggests that for Levi, embodiment involves constant negotiations of containment. He depicts the complex relationships between physical and social bodies, the material and the immaterial self, the conscious and unconscious subject, the organic and the technologically-enhanced body, engaging with evolving understandings of the boundaries of the body, the self, and the human.

Part I
Ontologies and Epistemologies

1
Containers and Their Contents

l’uomo è costruttore di recipienti; una specie che non ne costruisce, per definizione non è umana. (RS II, 958)

[Man is a builder of receptacles; a species that does not build any is not human by definition.] (OPT, 19)

In the late essay ‘Una bottiglia di sole’, which appears in the 1986 collection Racconti e saggi, Levi meditates on what constitutes a human being. If one only considers those alive today, there is, he feels, no ambiguity about which beings are human and which are not; it is only when we look back into the past that doubts spring up regarding the point at which we became ‘human’. Was it when our ancestors began to walk upright, or when the institutions of marriage and justice were established? In other words, is it a question of physiological evolution or of socio-cultural development? Rather than answering this question by recourse to Darwinian evolutionary theory, which we might have expected given his sympathies,¹ Levi provides the curious definition of a human being cited previously, that humans possess a unique ability and propensity to construct receptacles or containers. He goes on to explain that this activity is symptomatic of two vital human characteristics: the capacity to think of the future and the capacity to predict the behaviour of material placed within these containers.

Significantly, this was certainly not the first time that he had reflected on the importance of constructing certain types of container, which may serve to protect the self, enveloping the body and easing the mind. We might consider this observation from Se questo è un uomo, published nearly forty years earlier:

La facoltà umana di scavarsi una nicchia, di secernere un guscio, di erigersi intorno una tenue barriera di difesa, anche in circostanze apparentemente disperate, è stupefacente, e meriterebbe uno studio approfondito. Si tratta di un prezioso lavorio di adattamento, in parte passivo e inconscio, e in parte attivo … In virtù di questo lavoro … si riesce a raggiungere un certo equilibrio, un certo grado di sicurezza, di fronte agli imprevisti, ci si è fatto un nido, il trauma del travasamento è superato. (SQ I, 50)

[The human capacity to dig oneself in, to secrete a shell, to build around oneself a tenuous barrier of defence even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and merits a serious study. It is based on an invaluable activity of adaptation, partly passive and unconscious and partly active … By virtue of this work … one manages to gain a certain equilibrium, a certain degree of security in face of the unforeseen; one has made oneself a nest, the trauma of the transplantation is over.]²

As critics have noted, both Se questo è un uomo and other of Levi’s writings display a pronounced anthropological character, which here is articulated in the attention to the human capacity for adaptation (Belpoliti and Gordon 2007, 56).³ More specifically, it is an adaptation that involves negotiations of containment. If we look across Levi’s writings, the frequency with which he refers to containers, shells, barriers, boundaries, and niches, in relation to human embodiment and cultural practices, indicates that the allusion to containing structures here is not merely a casual observation; it is part of a discourse on contained embodiment, or embodiment as containment, that runs through his work and thought. Taking inspiration from Levi’s conviction, expressed previously, that this process deserves close attention, in this chapter I identify and discuss instances of container building and the container metaphor at work in Levi’s writing, in relation to his representations of human life, the body, embodiment, and humanity more generally. I begin by considering the concept of containers and containment as posited in Levi’s essay ‘Una bottiglia di sole’ and then move on to reflect more broadly on his testimonial writing and his essays. Throughout the chapter, I argue that Levi’s accounts of embodiment are multiple and potentially contradictory, displaying both materially bounded and postmodern, discursive characteristics, but that all relate to the human condition as one marked by negotiations of containment.

CONTAINING THE UNCONTAINABLE

Despite the assured tone of the definition of a human being that Levi gives in ‘Una bottiglia di sole’, it is far from watertight, since, as he admits, this does not constitute clear grounds on which to distinguish us from animals: bees, ants, and some birds also make containers. However, he argues that humans are set apart from these species by virtue of the great leaps we have made in our technical ability to build specialized containers, while the bees are still reproducing the same traditional form. Levi then proceeds to list various and vastly diverse types of human-made container which boast a range of characteristics, from openness of access (a bag or a basket), to the facilitating of certain processes (such as a cooking pot), to necessary impenetrability (as, for example, required by a lead capsule containing radioactive waste). It becomes clear through his comments that Levi has deliberately drawn together a class of objects that, like animals and plants, defy the categorization we instinctively wish to impose upon them. Thus, just as it is impossible to provide a definite chronological borderline that delimits or contains the advent of human life as we know it, the containers we construct—in a process which apparently renders us human—defy containment.

The infinitely diverse nature of the containers described enables them to permeate the boundaries of kind or type; they share characteristics with the selectively permeable recipients Levi subsequently enumerates, such as mosquito nets, water filters, and window blinds. Thus the category of ‘container’ acts as an epistemological meta-container which itself might form part of Levi’s list—a postmodern, self-conscious, self-reflective category of receptacles that invite critical interrogation of both their validity as ‘containers’ and of the very process of systematic classification. By indirectly highlighting the difficulties of categorization, Levi’s list shares qualities with Jorge Luis Borges’ discussion of an entry in a Chinese encyclopaedia which divides animals into apparently random, highly idiosyncratic categories, such as the fabulous; the innumerable; those that have just broken a vase; those that from a long way off look like flies (Borges 1964). Borges’ list was cited as a key inspiration by Foucault in his Preface to The Order of Things (2000), a text that reflects critically on genealogies of classification. Foucault relished the list for the disconcerting way in which it juxtaposed ‘real’ with ‘imaginary’ categories, containing the uncontainable in the only place this tenuous containment can work: ‘in the non-place of language’ (Foucault 2000, xvii). As explored in Chapter 3, Levi was similarly fascinated by the myriad ways in which language functions to contain meaning, or in which meaning transcends the limitations of words themselves, which might also have figured on Levi’s list of semi-permeable containers.

While Levi’s engagements with categorization evoke the work of thinkers such as Borges and Foucault, his definition of human beings as the makers of containers may seem particular to him; indeed, in her biography Carole Angier suggests that it is uniquely his (Angier 2002, 684). However Levi’s definition resonates with other earlier and contemporary analyses of human life, to some of which he briefly or obliquely alludes in ‘Una bottiglia del sole’: for example, Levi’s comparison of the building abilities of humans and bees recalls Marx’s distinction between bees and architects, on the grounds that the latter plan their buildings before erecting them while bees do not (Marx 1976, 284). Levi also asks whether the label of ‘Homo’ began to apply to us when we developed the ability to make tools (RS II, 958; OPT, 19), evoking the term homo faber, which for Hannah Arendt describes humans as fabricators of human art, craft, and technology (Arendt 1958, 80).⁴ This point has been argued by anthropologists who have defined the human being as ‘a social animal, distinguished by “culture”: by the ability to make tools and communicate ideas’ (Oakley 1967, 1). In line with such arguments, Levi’s containers can be seen as a delimited subset of the generic category of ‘tools’; yet for Levi, as for Marx in his discussion of architecture, tools or constructions are not simply implements that enable individuals to complete a task in the present moment, to serve an immediate need, but rather they are designed around the capacities for future planning and prediction which until recently were held by scientists to be particular to human beings.⁵ Containers created by humans reveal a sophisticated understanding of, and an ability to predict (to a greater or lesser extent), first, what changes may occur in external circumstances which might render a container necessary, and second, what kind of relationship there might be between substances within these containers and the material of which the receptacle is made, which would affect the type of material employed or eventual reactions between the two substances.

As regards the second aspect of the anthropological definition, the communication of ideas, specialists have argued that, uniquely, we usually arrange our ideas into, or understand them as pertaining to, different categories. Indeed, it has been suggested that our tendency to compartmentalize information is the most significant characteristic particular to humans: ‘we are symbolic creatures … Only human beings, as far as we know, mentally divide up the world around them into discrete entities to which names are given’ (Tattersall 2007, 133). As suggested previously, these entities, classifications, or conceptual categories, may also be viewed as types of virtual container. In the essay ‘Una bottiglia di sole’, Levi’s definition of the human being is largely based on the containment of tangible objects (although light and air are also implicitly referenced as substances to be contained), distinguishing his approach from the symbolic imposition of conceptual categories on the world. However, the Borgesian quality of his list first evokes and then unravels the concept of symbolic classification by showing how the criteria for items included within a particular category may be based on a highly subjective logic—one that, in this case, includes as types of container everything from tins for conserving food, to letter boxes, to water filters, to barbed wire fences to prevent prisoners from escaping. Levi seems to be claiming indirectly that almost all the objects around us, from buildings to coffee pots, fall into the category of container. Indeed, he goes as far as to assert that the issue of containment has become a central defining concern of our epoch: ‘il nostro avvenire energetico, ossia il nostro avvenire tout court, dipende esclusivamente dalla soluzione di un problema di recipienti’ [our energy future, that is, our future tout court, depends exclusively on the solution of a receptable problem] (RS II, 961; OPT, 22, original emphasis). From the humble coffee pot to the ‘bottle of sunshine’ referred to in the title—a ‘container’ for the process of obtaining energy from hydrogen through fusion, which would probably be a magnetic field rather than any tangible receptacle—Levi sketches a view of human life as animated by the recurring challenge of containment. His examples range from banal but telling everyday items to the ‘bottle of sunshine’, which potentially threatens the survival of the human race. Despite this extreme divergence of implications, however, he suggests that we should view all the containers he mentions, from physical containers to conceptual categories, as forming part of a continuum, as different varieties of the same phenomenon.

In this vein, two thinkers who engage with the creation of symbolic categories as a uniquely human ability, but who root their remarks firmly in the material, are socio-linguists and cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. They argue that we constantly create metaphorical containers; indeed, ‘even when there is no natural physical limit which could help to define a container, we impose limits, dividing a territory in such a way that it has an internal part and an external surface’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 29). In their view, this is because the container concept is a vital heuristic device for understanding and coming to terms with ourselves as embodied beings. Significantly, Lakoff and Johnson trace the desire for delimited areas back to our engagements with our bodies, asserting,

Each of us is a container with a surface which sets its limits in an inside-outside direction. We project our inside-outside direction on to all other physical objects which are bounded by surfaces, and we conceive them as containers with an inside and an outside. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 29)

In this account of the body as a delimited phenomenon, the container model applies not only to our bodies, but also to houses, rooms, solid objects, fields of knowledge—the list is potentially endless and would include all the containers mentioned by Levi in ‘Una bottiglia di sole’, as well as the disciplinary fields of science and literature that he criticised as being arbitrarily and unhelpfully divided. Here, Lakoff and Johnson claim that our ongoing interest in identifying and creating containers stems from our conceptions of our physical selves; our view of the world is shaped by our perception of our bodies as bounded, with an inside and outside. Other critical views that resonate with and may have inspired this perspective include Douglas’ work on the boundaries of the body (Douglas 1970) and the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s concept of the skin ego: ‘a mental representation of the experience of the body’s surface used by the infant’s emerging ego in order to construct itself as a container capable of containing psychic contents’ (Lafrance 2010). Of course, contrasting discourses have emphasized not the boundedness of the body, but its openness to prosthetic extension or its unstable, postmodern, discursive, immaterial constitution (Howson 2004, 6). In my reading of Levi’s work, taking the essay ‘Una bottiglia di sole’ as a starting point, it is possible to trace the container metaphor through Levi’s writing, revealing sustained discourses on embodiment and human existence as negotiated containment, within which these differing theoretical views on contained and uncontainable embodiment jostle together. Significantly, while, on the one hand, I identify a varied panorama of potential modalities of embodiment, they all share a concern for the location and quality of the boundaries of, within, and around the body.

(UN)CONTAINED BODIES

Among Levi’s multiple narratives of embodiment, we might identify two broad, variegated strands. One strand describes the contained self as posited by Lakoff and Johnson, housed within the protective barrier of the body; but it also narrates how the self then replicates this barrier in the world around it to increase its security, or capacities, a process culminating in the incorporation of the tool into the body image as a ‘vital’ element of our embodied humanity. A second strand reveals Levi’s interest in the divided self, which may be a hybrid of two clearly distinct halves, a dual being, or a chaotic mixture of diverse elements in tension with one another. Both forms of self are also located within a context delimited by a variety of different boundaries, from the symbolic to the very concrete. In Levi’s writing, all of these containers can have negative repercussions or significance, when they function to imprison us or to curtail our freedoms; yet some of the containers that he evokes are further instances of the semipermeable containers listed in ‘Una bottiglia di sole’, since they allow, and sometimes even encourage, productive interactions between substances and individuals, between the body and the world.

Beginning with the broader context, Levi remarks that, as human beings, we are limited by our finite nature, penned into an imperfect present by the inevitable, delimiting boundary of death (SQ I, 11; IM, 23). Aside from our imperfect human condition, additional negative forms of containment are inflicted upon us; the most extreme example of this in Levi’s experience was physical imprisonment, which led him to state definitively that ‘...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
• Contents
• Note on Abbreviations and Translations
• Note on Terminology
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Ontologies and Epistemologies
• Part II Bodily Modifications and Mutations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index