LA MEMORIA ED I RICORDI ATTRAVERSO L’OPERA DI PRIMO LEVI SE QUESTO È UN UOMO
MEMORY AND MEMORIES THROUGH THE WORK OF PRIMO LEVI, IF THIS IS A MAN

Summary/Abstract: Levi feels the urgency of telling what he experienced in Auschwitz and writes his first work to free himself internally from the memory of the trauma which is, itself, traumatic (Levi, 1991, 14). In his fellow prisoners he observes the same need to transmit his own experiences, «to make the ‘others’ participate» (Levi, 1989a, 9). Among the elementary needs he lists “to return; eat; tell” in a verse of the poem Alzarsi (Levi, 1984, 16), written immediately after his return from Auschwitz at a time when, he explains, “I was still under trauma and dreamed at night (and sometimes even during the day) of returning to the field” (Poli, Calcagno, 2007, 205). In that period he wrote «disorderly page after page of the memories that poisoned me» (Levi, 1994, 156), «trapped into an endless pattern of narrative re-enactment» (Woolf, 2007, 39), similar to what happens with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, forced to tell stories without stopping. For Levi, memory is created based on the observation of what happens in the concentration camp. The author says he spent the period of imprisonment in a particularly lively state of mind which allowed him to carefully observe his environment. With an almost scientific attitude, the author worked to imprint the observed phenomena in his memory, create memories and, if he survived, transmit the experience he was experiencing. While working in a laboratory, in the last months of his imprisonment, he had access to a notebook in which he made notes which he immediately destroyed because it was too dangerous to write. In the face of dehumanization, memory can be the bearer of culture and remembering can mean reclaiming one’s identity. In one of the best-known chapters of If This Is a Man, The Song of Ulysses, the protagonist recites verses from Dante’s Inferno to a companion with whom he is going to the kitchen to get soup. The question posed for this research article: How are memories and memory represented in the novel “If This Is a Man” by Primo Levi?

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