From Muteness to Witness: Primo Levi’s Narrative Salvation through Dante’s Inferno

The Loss of the Human Word as a Result of Trauma

Survivors of Nazi concentration camps, when returned to their lives outside imprisonment, must carry an indelible consequence, that of having to bear an unbearable trauma (Berger, 2000). Critics such as Nadal and Calvo (2014), Horowitz (1997) and Steiner (1985) describe trauma as an experience defined by muteness, resulting in narrative challenges. Other critics like Peron (2012), Patruno (2005) and Kay (2022) agree on identifying the problem of expression and representability as dominant in the testimonial work of the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. This article explores how Levi copes with the silencing consequences of trauma and overcomes the problem of representability in If This Is a Man.

Trauma’s irremediable effects stem from its "unspeakable" and "unrepresentable" nature (Nadal & Calvo, 2014, p. 5). Holocaust survivors experience the loss of the self and of the human word, hindering proper witnessing (Horowitz, 1997, p. 99). George Steiner (1985, p. 145) famously stated that "The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason", agreeing on the silencing nature of trauma that causes the loss of words. He called it the "temptation of silence" (Steiner, 1985, p. 145), well expressing the dilemma between the need to testify and the difficulty in doing so. Sarah Horowitz develops this concept further by introducing the paradox of trauma where survivors, despite the loss of speech, try to recover it: "Atrocity unmakes the self, unmakes the world, and thus undoes the very possibility of coherent testimony […] Impossibly, the self unmade by atrocity is called upon to narrate its own unmaking, its own inability to narrate" (Horowitz, 1997, p. 99).

Storytelling is therapeutic to trauma because of its ability to rouse empathy from the reader, and because it allows the traumatised to talk through it, investigate its meaning, and eventually cope with it (Kostova, 2014, p. 163). Most trauma scholars argue that dealing with trauma implies a certain degree of interaction between the present and the past: "present and past intertwine in the narratives the wounded person builds up to make sense of the aggression s/he had" (Murlanch, 2014, pp. 116-117). So, struggling with the tension between the loss and the recovery of the human word is the present way for the traumatised to deal with the past, to "master the unmasterable" (Berger, 2000), and eventually find a meaning to their atrocious experience.

Figure 1: In a 1984 interview, Levi said that, in Auschwitz, the will to tell the story, to write, had kept him going (Svilova, 2017).

The "self unmade", the consequent loss of speech and the search for a new vocabulary that can express the atrocity find evidence in If This is A Man where the inmates soon "became aware that [their] language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man" (Horowitz, 1997, p. 30; Levi, 2005, p. 23). Both as a prisoner and as a writer, Levi finds that the words of human language are not sufficient:

Just as our hunger is not the feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say "hunger", we say "tiredness" "fear", "pain", we say "winter" and they are different things. They are free words, created by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer, a new harsh language would have been born. (Levi, 2005, p. 110)

While acknowledging the duty to witness and the inadaptability of words to do it, Levi proposes the hypothesis of a new language, of which he now feels the need for to cope with his trauma. Levi believes in the power of literature and expression and, despite the difficulty, he takes on the challenge of looking for the right language and filling the traumatic void of muteness (Horowitz, 1997, p. 115; Kay, 2022, p. 89). To fight the work of "bestialisation" triggered by the Nazis in the Lagers, Levi both as a prisoner and then as a witness finds a salvific function in the recovery of speech and the memory of Dante’s literary milestone (Belpoliti & Gordon, 2007, p. 52).

Figure 2: If This is a Man - 1947 edition (Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi, 2022).

The Reduction of the Human Word to Dantean Animal Verse

In front of the "unspeakability" of the atrocities he experienced, Levi "turns to Dante for help and direction" (Patruno, 2005, p. 35). Dante represents for Levi a "grammar, an interpretative key, […] an author who helps him to articulate" (Kay, 2022, p. 67) and that, in front of the challenge of language and representation, helps him to fulfil his responsibilities on witnessing. Especially in If This is A Man, Levi draws from Dante’s Inferno the degradation and reduction of the language to animal verse, hence inhuman and bestial to express the "demolition of a man" (Levi, 2005, p. 23) and the "self unmade" (Horowitz, 1997, p. 99).

Marco Belpoliti (1997) compiles a list of the animals mentioned by Levi that includes "dogs, horses, spiders, butterflies, fleas, crickets, beetles, seagulls, ants, moles, mice, snails, oxen, flies, camels, crows, cats, rabbits, hens, chickens, snakes and many more". Belpoliti and Gordon (2007, p. 52) agree in interpreting this strong animal presence in Levi’s writing as a communicative tool that helps draw parallels from the behaviours of animals and to communicate the bestial condition of the inmates. Like Dante, Levi too uses animals’ metaphors to express what he would otherwise not be able to say.

In Inferno XXXII, Dante faces the challenge of the ineffability of the horror of the bottom of hell and he adopts an animalistic language referring to animals to describe the inhumanity of the damned in Cocytus, reducing the assembly of dehumanised sinners to a bestial state (Kay, 2022, p. 76). Levi similarly defines the Nazi camp as "A great machine to reduce us to beasts" (Levi, 2005, p. 35). In the Lager, like at the bottom of Dante’s Inferno, the inmates are unmade and reduced to a bestialised state of existence expressed through an animalistic language that draws from zoological terminologies (Kay, 2022, p. 76).

Figure 3: The Inferno, Canto 32 (Doré, 1857).

Dante warns that there are no such harsh and clucking rhymes as to be able to express conveniently that dreadful reality: "Had I the crude and scrannel rhymes to suit / the juice of my conception would be pressed / more fully; but because I feel their lack, / I bring myself to speak, yet speak in fear" (Inf. 32.1-4), which also reminds the "harsh new language" that would have born in the Lager, had they lasted longer (Levi, 2005, p. 110). Subsequently, Dante invokes the help of the Muses and uses precisely those harsh and animalistic rhymes, used earlier by Pluto "with his clucking voice" (Inf. 7.1), as a stylistic tool to express in a truthful way that extreme degradation, estrangement, and inhumanity that occurs in that place: "so that my tale non differ from the fact" (Inf. 32.12) (Alighieri & Chiavacci Leonardi, 1999, p. 554).

Moreover, Dante juxtaposes the despicable people, the "rabble ill" (Inf. 32.13) with "goats or sheep" (Inf. 32.15). These animals, as Leonardi (1999, p. 556) notes, are "brute animals, without the light of reason". Levi expresses something similar when, in an attempt to enclose his entire experience in an image, he chooses that of "a gaunt man with a bowed forehead and hunched shoulders, on whose face and in whose eyes no trace of thought can be read" (Levi, 2005, p. 86). What these two worlds, the river of Cocytus and the hell of Auschwitz, have in common is the profound inhumanity in the deprivation of man’s faculty of thinking, of Leonardi’s "light of reason" (1999, p. 556), whose traces cannot be seen on the inmates’ eyes.

The inanimate eyes of the internees that Levi describes, however, are not the same as those of Dantean stooped sinners who from their eyes bear witness to their wickedness: "from eyes the doeful heart / […] witness of itself procures" (Inf. 32.38-39). The fundamental difference that distinguishes the hell of the Lagers from that of Dante is the absence of the divine or any other kind of justice. The "bestialisation" of Auschwitz prisoners, their dehumanization, is meaningless (Belpoliti & Gordon, 2007, p. 52). In the eyes of the inmates, there’s no wicked, "doeful heart" (Inf. 32.38) to be seen, but there is nothing, no "trace of thought" (Levi, 2005, p. 86).

Figure 4: A Muselmann (Ryn, Z. J., Klodziński, S., 2017).

Levi draws from Dante for the dehumanisation of the internees which in fact resembles that of the sinners from the bottom of hell. But at the same time, it differentiates from Dante’s providential picture of a just hell that punishes the sins committed and tells of an unjust system, where the innocents are punished (Sodi, 1990, p. 3; Thomson, 2005, p. 49). As he states in an interview with Ferdinando Camon (1987), Levi rejects the presence of God: "There is Auschwitz, hence there can be no God".

The absence of God in the concentration camps corresponds to a different kind of dehumanisation that the internees experience. Unlike Dantean sinners, they are not justly punished, and they are dehumanised even before being bestialised and reduced to subhuman.

We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat (Levi, 2005, p. 133).

Dehumanisation corresponds to uncivilization and degradation that reduces the inmates to ghosts as well as beasts, both meaning inhuman. The idea of bestiality is thus taken from Dante but converted to a worse subhuman condition, nullified in their humanity, and deprived of any "trace of thought" (Levi, 2005, p. 86).

As Levi puts it, Germans were "victorious" in their "work of bestial degradation" (Levi, 2005, p. 133), albeit hardy. "To destroy a man is difficult […], but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance" (Levi, 2005, p. 133). With these words, Levi emphasises the victoriousness of the Nazis and describes the situation of the internees in zoological terms: as "docile", caged beasts that do not attempt rebellion, but surrender to their state of objects of observation under their gaze.

Figure 5: KZ Mauthausen, Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene [Soviet POWs standing before one of the huts in Mauthausen concentration camp].

The Recovery of Speech and Memory albeit Painful

Despite Levi’s affirmation that the Nazis were successful in reducing the inmates to inhuman animals, he did not surrender and found in the recovery of Dante, of memory, and of speech a glimpse of salvation: "precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts" (Levi, 2005, p. 39). Levi reiterates the definition of the concentration camp as a dehumanising machine but appeals to rebel against it. His appeal echoes Ulysses' "little speech" (Inf. 26.122) to his companions: "you were not made to live your lives as brutes, / but to be followers of worth and knowledge" (Inf. 26.118-20). Ulysses rejects the condition of bestial unreasonableness of "brutes" and encourages his companions to "consider well the seed that gave [them] birth" (Inf. 26.118-20), that is their human origin and to follow "virtute" [virtue] that is the attribute of the vir [man], and "knowledge" (Inf. 26.118-20), emphasising what Leonardi claims to be an exclusively human faculty of reason and speech (1999, p. 556).

Levi identifies a glimpse of salvation: "even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness" (Levi, 2005, p. 39). Levi identifies in the recovery of Dantean memory and storytelling the means, and in the testimony the end of salvation. The Divine Comedy is a poem of active remembering and witnessing and as Thomson (2005, p. 46) argues, Levi as well was worried about remembering and like Dante, is called to "perform an astonishing feat of recollection". His memorial is the result of his success in witnessing as a survivor.

Memory is not only fundamental for Levi as a survivor, but it has also contributed to his salvation when still an inmate in Lager, albeit painfully. When admitted to the hospital, Levi experiences a sudden pause from all the labouring atrocities and he is left with the torment of the memory: "the pain of remembering, the old ferocious longing to feel myself a man, which attacks me like a dog the moment my conscience comes out of the gloom" (Levi, 2005, p. 166). The painful evocation of the consciousness that memories provoke catches him unprepared like a "dog", reiterating the animal communicative strategy (Levi, 2005, p. 166).

Figure 6: Paolo and Francesca (Doré, 1861).

Remembering is fiercely painful for Levi because it reminds him of the past time when he felt himself human, eventually happy. The atrocious remembering echoes Francesca’s sorrowful words of Inferno V: "There is no greater sorrow / than thinking back upon a happy time / in misery" (Inf. 5.121-123). Nevertheless, Francesca does not refuse to tell Dante her story and therefore, even if crying, recovers her memory and starts speaking. Similarly, Levi both as an inmate and as a writer, despite the pain, does not suffocate his urge to tell and, when triggered, he proves available to recollect his memory and speech to regain his humanity, albeit tragically.

When Levi tries to teach Pikolo Italian, once again he draws from Dante and, suddenly, he remembers the Canto and figure of Ulysses. The Greek hero is the figure of the storyteller and his sin –punished by eternal burning in a flame that has the shape of a lingua [tongue] (Inf. 26.89)– is also linked to language, storytelling, and the fraudulent use of speech. Storytelling is something forbidden in Lager and, when used deceitfully, a sin in Dante’s Inferno.  

Nonetheless, Dante is presenting a heroic idea of the character who is discouraging the bestial conduct of his crew and leading it beyond the unknown, that is to set sail "where Hercules set up his boundary stones" (Inf 26.108), where one is not supposed to go. The Dantean boundary in Levi’s memorial is the cortina of the Lager, a "chain", a "barrier" that on that day –in which Levi feels "capable of so much"– he feels like "breaking" and "throwing [himself] on the other side of [it]" (Levi, 2005, p. 127), seeing a glimpse of a way out, of salvation.

Figure 7: A 14th-century miniature depicting Dante and Ulysses.

The recollection of the Canto of Ulysses triggers the Dantean enormous act of remembrance that makes Levi struggle with and worry about his memory (Thomson, 2005, p. 46): "A hole in my memory […]. Another hole. […] is it correct? […] but I cannot remember if it comes before or after" (Levi, 2005, pp. 128-129), and do so "in a hurry, a terrible hurry" (Levi, 2005, p. 129) because the urge to tell is extremely pressing. And then he suddenly remembers in the form of an epiphany, "like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of god" (Levi, 2005, p. 130) and "in a flask of intuition" (Levi, 2005, p. 134). The recollection of memories makes him realise that there is a way out of the brutalisation.

As Nicholas Patruno (2005, p. 37) puts it, "by the very act of remembering [Levi] is able to re-enter into the world of civility" and, as a glimpse of revolution, he recovers his humanity along with his speech and memory that makes him "forget who I am and where I am", and brings up memories from the past (Levi, 2005, p. 129). The sight of the mountain in the Canto of Ulysses reminds him of the mountains he used to see on his journeys on the train from Milan to Turin (Levi, 2005, p. 130).

In essence, teaching somebody else to be Italian and to fight for their identity becomes a way to lead Pikolo and Levi to the idea of hope in regaining the memory of human identity. Levi recovers his humanity and dignity again drawing from the "noble language and culture of Dante" (Patruno, 2005, p. 40). This time, Dante – not only an "infernal model" for Levi (Kay, 2022), "provides [him] with a Ulysses figure who gives him the strength to resist that hell" (Patruno, 2005, p. 39), he provides him with a glimpse of salvation that however dies shortly after when they arrive at the soup queue and everything goes back to "silence" (Levi, 2005, p. 133) and the sea closes up their heads (Levi, 2005, p. 134).

Figure 8: Ulysses: The Hero of Knowledge. (Lo Sbuffo).

Conclusions

After experiencing the loss of the self and the human word caused by trauma, Levi struggles in the search for an appropriate communication tool and finds a code in Dante’s Inferno and particularly in cantos XXXII and XXVI for the reduction of the language to animal verse and the salvific function of memory and literature (Kay, 2022, p. 67).

After acknowledging the inadaptability of the human language, Levi replicates Inferno XXXII’s reduction of language to animal verse. He uses that as a communicative tool to draw parallels with the bestial, thus inhuman world and convey the subhuman conditions he lived in when interned at Auschwitz. What differentiates Levi’s hell from Dante’s is the lack of justice and human reason. Whereas in Inferno XXXII the damned souls are reduced to beasts and deprived of the light of reason because they misused it in life, the Lager prisoners are like innocent "phantoms" (Levi, 2005, p. 133), punished there for what they are rather than what they did.

From the sudden remembrance of the "little speech" of Inferno XXVI, Levi finds a glimpse of hope, a way out of the bestial degradation actuated on him in the Nazi camp and out of the muteness and "temptation of silence" (Steiner, 1985, p. 145) triggered by trauma. So, Dantean memory and storytelling represent for Levi a means to overcome silence and compel his duty to bear witness. Recalling the canto of Ulysses means for Levi to deal with memory and its painful effect. Nonetheless, the mere act of remembering revives his humanity and overcomes the process of dehumanisation in the camp. In the aftermath of Auschwitz, Levi’s quest for the human word, lost in the atrocities, unfolds through Dante’s Inferno, revealing the salvific power of literature.

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