Contemporaneità and Ecological Thinking in Carlo Levi’s Writing

Abstract

At the core of Carlo Levi’s 1950 novel The Watch (L’Orologio) lies the Anarrative and theoretical principle of contemporaneità, or temporal coexistence, which Levi presents as a corrective to the abstract notion of mechanically measured time. Levi first introduces this concept in a discussion about the realist novel and its impossibility after the historical tragedies of the twentieth century. As the character, Casorin, provocatively asks, “What sort of novel do you want after Auschwitz and Buchenwald?” (Watch 56). The Nazi extermination camps are, for Casorin, the inevitable endpoint of the processes of modernity, which isolate the individual from the world and turn him into an object: “A piece of soap that is the body and soul of a man” (56). The story of this soap no longer fits in the orderly world of the realist novel, which has dissolved into the fragments of modernist prose. The Watch’s meandering structure, which defies linear temporality, represents Levi’s challenge to the possibility of an all-encompassing rational account of human experience.¹ Casorin opposes to the realm of the isolated and abstract individual2 the more authentic awareness of the connection between humanity and its environment, described through an analogy with the forest as complex ecosystem: “There isn’t just one blade of grass in a meadow, there is not one tree but a forest where all the trees stay together, not one in front of the other but merged, big and small, along with mushrooms, bushes and rocks, dry leaves, strawberries, myrtle berries, birds, wild animals, and perhaps fairies and nymphs and boars and poachers, and wanderers who have lost their way, and who knows how many more things. There is the forest” (57).