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James T. Chiampi the EXEMPLARY CHAIM RUMKOWSKI in PRIMO LEVI's

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James T. Chiampi the EXEMPLARY CHAIM RUMKOWSKI in PRIMO LEVI's 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 426 James T. Chiampi a work that could manipulate attention in this way would be suffcient unto itself, autonomous of what lies around it, and, as a consequence, relentlessly ironic. To anticipate my theme: such irony does not lend itself to the establish- ment of certain moral judgments. The meanings produced in the esthetic experience are, in an ultimate sense, incomprehensible, in part because they can never be present, but also because the “refexive cross-references” of terms that cannot be fxed are potentially illimitable. Each manifold meaning infects and modifes the others. More- over, the self-transforming verbal artifact that does not permit the attention to transgress its borders for the corroboration of its truth by dull, referential meanings, satisfes—and stifes—the will in the play of its forms, hence stifing the activity of judgment. Thus does it preclude complete responsibility, how- ever that may be understood. Esthetic discourse would be profoundly different from, say, the discourse of history, which is ideally capable of falsifcation by an appeal to extramural fact. Vivas’s artwork dwells in secrecy. I would like to employ Vivas’s defnition of the esthetic as the terminus of a destabilizing epistemological iter in Primo Levi’s essay, “La zona grigia,” the second essay in his last major work, I sommersi e i salvati, which appeared in 1986. Levi begins his essay in the fuent, familiar style of saggistica, pro- ceeds to documentary history in a pivotal moment, and climaxes his essay in the esthetic, much as Vivas defnes it, with his description of the impotence that overcomes anyone who would judge a fgure as complex as his cho- sen example, Chaim Rumkowski. Put somewhat differently: the essay begins with pretensions to the propositional only to end in the esthetic and ironic.2 One consequence of this, I believe, is the deconstruction by the Rumkowski vignette of those parts of the essay that preceded and introduced it, as well as of those that follow it. As we shall see, the fgure of Rumkowski is far too vividly singular and fascinating to be contained by any propositional “gray zone,” whose secondary and derived example it could be claimed to be. In short, the example defeats its exemplarity. More to the point: in the literary artwork named “Rumkowski,” reference is directed forward to the new mean- ings it itself creates and not to any single preexisting, extratextual meaning. Accordingly, it refers more to itself than to any propositional nugget on which one might base an identity or a moral lesson. Rumkowski / “Rumkowski” dwells in secrecy. 2. Understand “ironic” as Cleanth Brooks defned it: “[The] obvious warping of a statement by the context.” (“Irony as a Principle of Structure,” repr. in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, rev. ed. [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992] 969). Chaim Rumkowski in Primo Levi’s “La zona grigia” 427 Primo Levi begins “La zona grigia” by restating his claim that the Nazi concentrationary system, with its confusion of boundaries and limits, was incomprehensible: Siamo stati capaci, noi reduci, di comprendere e di far compren- dere la nostra esperienza? Ciò che comunemente intendiamo per “comprendere” coincide con “semplifcare”: senza una profonda semplifcazione, il mondo intorno a noi sarebbe un groviglio inf- nito e indefnito, che sfderebbe la nostra capacità di orientarci e di decidere le nostre azioni. Siamo insomma costretti a ridurre il conoscibile a schema: a questo scopo tendono i mirabili strumenti che ci siamo costruiti nel corso dell’evoluzione e che sono specifci del genere umano, il linguaggio ed il pensiero concettuale. (12; emphasis added)3 3. (Turin: Einaudi, 1991). Hereafter, all citations to I sommersi e i salvati will be taken from this edition and noted in the text. On the notion of the “gray zone,” see Giorgio Agamben’s seminal essay in Quel che resta di Auschwitz: L’archivio e il testimone (Homo sacer III) (Turin: Bollati Borighieri, 1998); Robert S.C. Gordon, “‘Per Mia Fortuna . .’: Irony and Ethics in Primo Levi’s Writing,” Modern Language Review 92 (1997): 337–47 as well as his excellent Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). On exemplarity, see Andrzej Warminski, Read- ings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987); Irene E. Harvey, “Doubling the Space of Existence: Exemplarity in Derrida— The Case of Rousseau,” in John Sallis, ed., Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987) 60–70, her “Exemplarity and the Origins of Legislation,” in Alexander Gelley, ed., Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 211–54, and her excellent Labyrinths of Exemplarity: At the Limits of Deconstruction (Albany: State U of New York P, 2002); J. Hillis Miller, “Parabolic Exemplarity: The Example of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in Gelley, Unruly Examples, 162–74, and his “Derrida Enisled,” in W.J.T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson, eds., The Late Derrida (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007) 30–58. See also Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’ (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). On law and justice, see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority,’” Car- dozo Law Review 11 (1990): 920–1045; Dominick LaCapra, “Violence, Justice and the Force of Law,” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 701–14; Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992); and the always lucid and per- ceptive John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1997) and his Deconstruction in a Nutshell, A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham UP, 1997). 428 James T. Chiampi Only simplifcation, with its inevitable despoiling of the complexity of the meanings of the Holocaust, could render the Holocaust graspable. Therein lies both the crux of the matter and a paradox: if one must simplify to compre- hend, then to comprehend is to fail to comprehend. Simplifcation for Levi is accordingly irresponsible, because it requires a schema and strumenti; that is, the blunt tools of calculation. On the contrary, Levi understands responsibility to the coerced / infected of the gray zone as a kind of openness to a potentially infnite otherness. Moral judgment becomes the possibility of an impossibil- ity because it requires, yet forbids, mechanical adherence to a foreordained, mechanical program. In the spirit of Vivas, one might argue an aporia: respon- sibility requires that the concentrationary experience be understood esthetically in its “full presentational immediacy,” even though such fullness is perpetually à venir, that is, perpetually underway. Although Levi acknowledges the need of the immature for simplifcation, resulting in their Manichaean division of the world into good versus bad, he warns that expediency is not adequacy. The incomprehensible is an important theme in Levi’s writings from the very outset of his career. In his frst and greatest work, Se questo è un uomo, he recalled how Clausner, his fellow Häftling, scratched “Ne pas chercher à comprendre” on the bottom of his mess tin in order to dissuade both himself and anyone else who might read it from the futile attempt at fnding a rational explanation for any aspect of the Auschwitz experience: for Nazi race law; for the numberless rules that dictated the neatness of the Häftlinge in the stinking death camp; for the inhuman nonchalance with which the SS sent children, women, and men to an atrocious death.4 Ne pas chercher à comprendre: Levi is suggesting that any ethical schema that we might elaborate and apply to the men and women of the “gray zone” in a systematic way in order to assess the moral quality of their acts is ultimately ungrounded because incommen- surable—that is, lacking purchase—on a man such as Rumkowski.
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