James T. Chiampi
THE EXEMPLARY CHAIM RUMKOWSKI IN PRIMO LEVI’S “LA ZONA GRIGIA”
n his essay “A Defnition of the Esthetic Experience,” Eliseo Vivas offers this Idescription of the signifying effect of art on the perceiving mind: “An esthetic experience is an experience of rapt attention which involves the intransitive apprehension of an object’s immanent meanings in their full presentational immediacy.”1 Vivas continues,
[“Intransitive”] means to signify that attention is esthetic when it is so controlled by the object that it does not fy away from it to meanings not present immanently in the object; or in other words that attention is so controlled that the object specifes concretely and immediately through refexive cross- references its meanings and objective characters. And thus we may contrast esthetic with all other modes of attention by noting that other modes of atten- tion discover in objects not immanent but referential meanings, which is to say, meanings which carry us beyond the object to other objects or meanings not present upon it. (408–9)
This experience of concentrated and contained attention is a creative fascina- tion in which meanings, detached from circumambient referential meanings, are reforged. In the novel, self- renewing literary artwork, the endless possible variety of meanings in combination and recombination, in their manifold dense allusivity, all present and absent even in a single reading—these “refex- ive cross- references”—set the esthetic object in unceasing semantic fow. Thus, only homonymy would bind the esthetic and extraesthetic word. Such mean- ings, which refuse reduction to the univocal, clearly cannot be captured all together at once either in the moment of consumption, or in retrospect. Nev- ertheless, for Vivas, the experience is one. If each meaning is inscribed in the others that constitute it, what moment could be encapsulated in the defnitive paraphrase that might adequately render it to the extraesthetic world? Such
1. In Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger, eds., The Problems of Aesthetics: A Book of Readings (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1966) 408. My concern in this essay is obviously with the literary artwork.
The Romanic Review Volume 101 Number 3 © The Trustees of Columbia University