A conversation based on A Silver Martian, Normality and Segregation in Primo Levi's Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge by Paola Mieli, (CPL Editions, 2015)

With Paola Mieli (psychoanalyst) and Joan Acocella (writer and critic).

Film screening: excerpts from Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge, directed by Massimo Scaglione (RAI, 1978), a television short produced in collaboration with the author (Italian w/English subtitles)

Written as a short dramatic sketch, the story looks to a science of the future that is almost upon us. Patricia is a pioneering subject of cryogenic frozen in 1975, whom we encounter in 2115. She has aged, or lived, less than one year, being unfrozen only on her birthday or to witness what are considered to be important socio-historic events. Patricia becomes the sexual object par excellence, for the scientists and men who surround her, controlling and documenting her every move. Asides from the abuses, she regrets her original decision to be frozen, acknowledging that this is part of the deal she struck to gain eternal youth by daring to go beyond the limits of organic human life. The drama offers moments of bleak comedy and satirical lightheartedness, but is ultimately driven by Patricia's desire to escape her technological imprisonment. [R.S.C.Gordon]

In Mieli's interpretation, through surreal inventions, Levi pointed to a disquieting continuity between past aberrations and present normality, showing beyond any doubt how the present is subtly interwoven with the logic of the past. In his short story, Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge, Levi describes with great acumen the ways in which normality, and the tranquility of a prosperous life, are the product of a bio-political normativity, universally accepted with careless complicity. Read

PRIMO LEVI'S COMPLETE WORKS

Readings from Primo Levi's Complete Works began, on October 15th at the 92Y, introduced by the writer's son. For Renzo Levi it was not only a rare New York appearance, but, most remarkably, the first public reflection on his father's oeuvre.

PRINTED MATTER | LISTENING TO SILENCE

Uri Cohen, Tel Aviv University

Visiting the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, one is struck by the silence. It is not real silence, after all the birds go about their business and so do the cars, most likely it is the kind of silence emulated by the knowledge that in this place, so and so years ago a "thousand suns" burned the image of man into the stone.

Perhaps the skeletal remains of the iconic A-Bomb Dome in the distance create this silence, perhaps it is the garden itself, an art distinctly Japanese of containing the proximity of life to death as the essential nature of being. It is in a sense much like visiting a concentration camp, you lend your ear, but the silence is overwhelming and all that can be heard is the sound and fury piled on by the living over the silence of the dead. Hearing silence is always already slightly shameful, always on cue, always at the right place at a time that if never quite wrong, then never really useful.

Primo Levi did not write much about the atom bomb, surely the daughter of Rokhele in If Not Now When is born on the day of Hirsoshima's bombing, and certainly there is meaning to that.

And yes he did discuss Oppenheimer with Tulio Regge, but it doesn't seem to have troubled Levi as much as the "slow systemic oppression" of the "conventional" murders in Vietnam and in Cambodia.

A short time before the end of his life, Levi wrote the following in the introduction to The Drowned and the Saved: "I have almost exclusively confined myself to the National Socialist Lagers because I had direct experience only of these; I also have had copious indirect experience of them, through books read, stories listened to, and encounters with the readers of my first two books. Besides up to the moment of writing, and not withstanding the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shame of the Gulags, the useless and bloody Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide, the desparecidos of Argentina, and the many atrocious and stupid wars we have seen since, the Nazi concentration camp still remain a unicum, both in its extent and its quality." (The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 21).

It was almost the end of the cold war when Levi wrote this introduction, and though the specter of total human annihilation by the nuclear arsenal of the superpowers is present, it has no privileged place. What is unique about the experience of the Lagers compared to other forms of genocide and annihilation remains elusive. Yet Levi is honest enough to admit that perhaps it is he himself that is "confined" to his own experience (limitato...). This is as good a point as any to notice that Levi will never be the saint we sometimes would like him to be. He was all too human, bound by his own experience of which he gave us the most lucid and truthful account. On the subject of Hiroshima Levi did not know anything we don't, and we must ask if his experience gave him insight into the matter that goes beyond what might be possessed by any of us. Read

CPL EDITIONS | DOWNLOAD YOUR APP!

And enjoy CPL EDITIONS books and our online monthly Printed_Matter. The App is free from iTunes and Googleplay.