On Rational Traumatic Memory in Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Other Works

This chapter seeks to investigate Primo Levi’s style of restraint. Unlike the restraint we identified in Appelfeld, here it comes to rein in powerful feelings resulting from experienced trauma, feelings of pain, rage, and anxiety. In Levi’s case, it is a rational memory that produces a mode of distancing, leading to a type of poetic testimony unlike what I have described so far. I will start with a biographical outline and discuss Levi’s cultural origins. Subsequently, I will examine the way the rational restraint mechanism functions when Levi writes about trauma, showing how the use of reason enables him to produce a self-moderating system addressing his emotional response. I conclude with a consideration of the cracks in this system, the points at which his textual defenses failed, and the relation of these moments to his tragic death.