The Story of a Carbon Atom: Primo Levi’s Material Science

Abstract

Primo Levi was not only a Holocaust survivor and witness, he was also an industrial chemist by trade and a lifelong apologist for science as a vital part of an integrated culture. Yet, though few scholars or critics fail to mention that he was a chemist, or to add that his profession helped to save his life in Auschwitz, Levi the scientist and advocate of science remains a surprisingly neglected subject, especially when we consider that it was the publication in 1984 of the English translation of The Periodic Table that first established him as an internationally significant writer. In part, this neglect is due to that very lack of comprehension between the humanities and the sciences (sadly, often more evident on the humanities side) which Levi attempted to overcome. For example, Nicholas Patruno, keenly concerned with the history of the Jews, reads the whole of the “Carbon” chapter of The Periodic Table as an extended metaphor on that theme, making the unexamined assumption that Levi cannot really be writing about organic chemistry, a subject in which Patruno himself clearly sees little intrinsic interest:

Levi speaks of the “atom,” which, inserted as part of an architectural structure, is “subjected to complicated exchanges and balances”. By this he seems to mean the Jews and their history. … Levi’s description of how carbon is involved in the creation of wine and how it is stored in the human liver to be activated in exacerbated circumstances refers to how the Jews were destined to be abused and, in a sense, kept in reserve for those moments in history when the world needed to lash out at a scapegoat.²

I have often set foot on the bridges which unite (or should unite) the scientific and literary cultures, stepping over a crevasse which has always seemed to me absurd. There are people who wring their hands and call it an abyss, but do nothing to fill it; there are also those who work to widen it, as if the scientist and literary man belong to two different human sub-species, reciprocally incomprehensible, fated to ignore each other and not engage in cross-fertilisation. This is an unnatural schism, unnecessary, harmful … It did not concern Empedocles, Dante, Leonardo, Galileo, Descartes, Goethe and Einstein, the anonymous builders of the Gothic cathedrals and Michelangelo; nor does it concern the good craftsmen of today, or the physicists hesitating on the brink of the unknowable.¹