There would undoubtedly be disagreement among Levi’s readers
if they were asked to rank his best or most original or most compelling
writings, and it would be difficult to achieve a consensus on what criteria to
apply even in attempting such a judgment. There would be much less dispute,
however, about which among Levi’s writings were distinctively his - that is,
that would have been unlikely, certainly less
likely, to have been written by anybody else. Even if that standard may not be
very informative, it seems relatively uncontroversial that The Periodic
Table would stand foremost in this respect.
Other writers, including some with greater standing than
Levi as scientists, have brought scientific analysis and narrative to life,
with Darwin a ready example here. But the imaginative structure that finds the
table of physical elements informative about the reach of personal history has
few if any predecessors or competitors in the literary or scientific or
historical worlds. The Periodic Table
is clearly a literary work, not one primarily of either science or history; literary
not only in the sense that the narrative voice has a significant presence in
the exposition (as it often does even in writing that purports to block it, a
common feature of standard scientific writing) but that the voice is also a
subject of the writing. This is a common feature of the memoir as a genre, but
it would be difficult to mistake The Periodic
Table for a memoir; the inventiveness of the narrator’s voice reveals it
not as “remembered” but as a feature of the literary present.
It is difficult to find precedents or competitors for a work
in which science and history, used as grist for a personal literary narrative,
yield The Periodic Table’s
combination of adventure and moral instruction.
It is not only that a few readers and authors would even think of the
possibilities inherent in the qualities of the elements: that “Distilling is
beautiful” (“Potassium”) or that zinc is a “boring” element – or that argon,
one of the inert, noble and rare gases, bears a striking resemblance through
those qualities to Levi’s Piedmont Jewish ancestors. But readers also learn more
about those ancestors to support the claim of resemblance, with some striking
asides about the individual ancestors and others about the Hebrew inlay in the
Piedmiontese dialect that produces such charms, among the clothing merchants,
as na vesta a kinim for a polka-dot
dress: kinim being a reference to the
lice memorably known as one of the Ten Plagues inflicted on the Egyptians to
pressure Pharaoh to permit the Exodus.
The constant moral presence in Levi’s writing does not rely
on implication, since Levi speaks of it explicitly, in broad as well as limited
strokes. He writes in “Potassium,” for example, about the periodic table,
chemistry more generally, and his reasons for placing himself close to them: “Chemistry
led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the
Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy.” The background to such a claim, like
its justification, was taken for granted by Levi. Fascism had looked to the
tradition of philosophical idealism for its rationale, to thinkers like
Gionvanni Gentile and the early Benedetto Croce for whom “mere” science and its
assumed materialism were subordinate to the reach of the ideal or spirit that,
in their view, was not only prior but a source and in effect a lawgiver. The
horrific consequences of its actions make it easy to forget that fascism had
looked to philosophical idealism as its conceptual forebear: not only to non-materialism,
but to anti-materialism, an applied
form of practical and conceptual reasoning that provoked Levi’s lifelong
opposition.
Primo Levi; The
Matter of a Life by Berel Lang
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