Abstract
Although much has been said of Primo Levi’s use of language, its epistemological and ethical bases, and its negotiation of that which is unspeakable, his attempts at a performative mode have not enjoyed the same critical attention.1 My chapter focuses on performance and its place in and its relation to Levi’s work. The motif of performance in Levi’s prose narrative has received some critical attention and the performances of Levi’s works adapted for the stage have also enjoyed some critical consideration. Performances of Levi’s work in other media, however, and especially for the radio, are as yet under-studied. In this chapter, I bring into proximity these varied types of live performance (as opposed to cinematic adaptation) to interrogate the shifts that these generic differences impose on linguistic codes and contexts. After investigating some key examples of theatrical performance in Levi’s prose narrative, I focus principally on performances of his work that took place during his lifetime, and primarily on performances of Se questo è un uomo (Survival at Auschwitz).2 I will have occasion, toward my conclusion, to briefly discuss Sir Antony Sher’s 2004–2005 performances of his dramatic one-man show, Primo.
I can say without fear of exaggeration or flattery that the television and especially the radio versions of my work have been of great importance to me, because they filled a void that I had never filled before, the space of live representation, of the theatre, that I have scarcely touched on, of cinema that I have never encountered. The experience of reaching an audience directly, not through the medium of the pages of a book, but through the eye and the ear, was extremely stimulating to me.
—Primo Levi, “The Little Theatre of Memory”
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Notes
For Levi’s language, see Marco Belpoliti and Robert S. C. Gordon, “Primo Levi’s Holocaust Vocabularies,”, The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi ed. Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 51–65.
Cesare Cases, “L’ordine delle cose e l’ordine delle parole,”, Primo Levi: Un’antologia della critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1997) 5–33.
Sander Gilman, “The Special Language of the Camps and After,”, Reason and Light, ed. Susan Tar-row (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1990), 59–81.
Lawrence Schehr, ‘Primo Levi’s Strenuous Clarity,’, Italica 66, 4 (1989): 429–43.
Primo Levi, Other’s People’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 174 (emphasis added).
See Primo Levi’s, The Black Hole of Auschwitz, ed. Marco Belpoliti and trans. Sharon Wood (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 37–38.
Tadeusz Kowzan, “The Sign in the Theater: An Introduction to the Semiology of the Art of the Spectacle,” trans. Simon Pleasance, Diogène 61 (1968): 57.
See Lina Insana’s Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
See Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography (London: Viking, 2002), 558–64.
Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 315–19.
Levi’s own thoughts about the production are found in “Note to the Theater Version of If This is a Man,” in Levi’s The Black Hole of Auschwitz, 23–27. On Holocaust drama in general, see Claude Schumacher, ed., Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Christian Rogowski, “Teaching the Drama of the Holocaust,”, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (New York: MLA Press, 2004).
Lina Insana, “In Levi’s Wake: Adaptation, Simulacrum, Postmemory,” Italica 86, no. 2 (2009): 212–38.
Peppino Ortoleva, “A Geography of the Media Since 1945,”, Italian Cultural Studies, ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 185–98.
Peppino Ortoleva, “A Geography of the Media Since 1945,”, Italian Cultural Studies, ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 185–98, and E. Menduini, La radio nell’era della televisione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994).
See Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). esp. 13–20.
Fabio Girelli-Carasi, “Italian-Jewish Memoirs and the Discourse of Identity,”, The Most Ancient of Minorities, ed. Stanislao Pugliese (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 191–99.
Levi’s materials in the Einaudi archives include a typescript of Il sesto giorno [The Sixth Day], the creation story in play form, published in 1966. The manuscript is dated 1957 but is believed to have been written a decade earlier, making dramatic dialogue part of Levi’s earliest genres. For a complete assessment of the variants and editions of Se questo è un uomo, see Giovanni Tesio, “Su alcune giunte e varianti di Se questo è un uomo” in Studi piemontesi 6 (1977): 270–78.
This passage comes from the British translation of Se questo è un uomo: Primo Levi, If this is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Orion, 1960) 150.
In addition to Puppa, see also Robert Gordon, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues. From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 284, for a consonant reading of the importance of these moments in The Reawakening.
Cf. Amy Hungerford, “Teaching Fiction, Teaching the Holocaust,”, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (New York: MLA, 2004), 182.
Much of the tension concerning cinematic representation of the Holocaust has centered on Roberto Benigni’s 1997 La vita è bella [Life is Beautiful], which closely adheres to a sense of theatrical decorum handed down since the Renaissance: gross atrocities are not witnessed by the audience but, rather, are declaimed and described by the actors: they are oscena, ob-scena meaning destined for representation off-stage. See also Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz, esp. 77–78; Sander Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Winter 2000): esp. 291–93.
Maurizio Viano, “Life is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter,” Annali d’Italianistica 17 (1999): 155–72. See also Levi’s thoughts on the mini-series Holocaust in The Black Hole of Auschwitz, 59–66.
For the kinesthetic sign as illustrated by the actor’s body see, among others, Jean Alter, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theater as a Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance (London: Routledge, 1991).
Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
See Primo Levi, Opere, ed. Marco Belpoliti, intro. by Daniele Del Giudice (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 2:1531–32.
Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 31.
John Reeves, “If This is a Man,” CBC Times, January 23–29, 1965.
See Guido Davico Bonino, “Primo Levi, come per caso, a teatro,”, Primo Levi: Il presente del passato, ed. Alberto Cavaglion (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1991), 141–46.
Robert Brustein, “Primo Levi: The Staged and the Damned,”, Millennial Stages. Essays and Reviews 2001–2005 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 245–49.
See also Millicent Marcus, “Primo Levi: The Biographer’s Challenge and the Reader’s Double Bind,” Italica, 80, no. 1 (2003): 67–72.
Susan Melrose, “Theater and Language,”, A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 51.
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© 2011 Risa Sodi and Millicent Marcus
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Nerenberg, E. (2011). Mind the Gap. In: Sodi, R., Marcus, M. (eds) New Reflections on Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119673_13
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