Abstract
Auschwitz has often been thought of as an indescribable event that is beyond all possible linguistic means of representation. Italian author Primo Levi (1919-1987) attempted to address this problem revealing the aporetic (and paradoxical) nature of the process of elaborating a literary testimony: impossible, but necessary. This article aims to analyse some of the ethical and epistemological issues that testimony of a traumatic event can raise for literature. The hypothesis is that the testimony, as Levi elaborated it, contains a lacuna or a void, which is in fact what constitutes it: while witnesses present the limit-experience out of obligation, they cease to convey others due to inability or incapacity. The argument here is that what makes a testimony on a traumatic event possible is its incomplete nature, which gives strength to the process of communicating limit-experiences.
Highlights
In Nazi extermination camps (Lager), prisoners lived in “incommunicability in a more radical manner”, according to Primo Levi.[1]
This article aims to analyse some of the ethical and epistemological issues that testimony of a traumatic event can raise for literature
The hypothesis is that the testimony, as Levi elaborated it, contains a lacuna or a void, which is what constitutes it: while witnesses present the limit-experience out of obligation, they cease to convey others due to inability or incapacity
Summary
In Nazi extermination camps (Lager), prisoners lived in “incommunicability in a more radical manner”, according to Primo Levi.[1]. That explains the difficulty – or even certain impossibility, as some authors have already affirmed survivors had in conveying the experience of the camps to the world, despite their obvious feelings of obligation.[2] In the attempts to represent the "unspeakable",3 one can find ruptures in the language, especially in literary expression.[4] This fact reveals the insufficiency of language to express trauma[5] and social suffering.[6] Based on this concern, this article aims to establish the types of problems that testimonies on a traumatic event can pose for literature as one possible mechanism for representing the past. Taking his writing as an x-ray of the experience in concentration camps, the objective of this paper is to reflect further, but not exhaustively, on the ethical and epistemological tone of his narrative works based on the issues raised by the author himself
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