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Primo Levi and the genre of testimony

Richard Carter-White
Following on from spectral geographical studies of the disruptive aspects of memory, this paper further develops recent interest in the nonrepresentational and paradoxical dynamics of witnessing by drawing out the possibility of a historiography based on the capacity of testimony to interrupt and suspend representational closure. This possibility is posited in relation to the specic historiographical challenges posed by places and events of atrocity, whereby the extreme nature that makes these events so real threatens at the same time to render them the product of a self-enclosed, alien and absolutely distant world. Through a close reading of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, I argue that the genre of testimony is predisposed towards generating disruptive encounters that force the reader of such works to take co-responsibility in making sense of the text. Focusing upon Levis famous distinction between the drowned and the saved of the camp, and the multiple possible interpretations of this distinction, I further argue that by establishing a space of uncertainty in which audiences must make an interpretive decision about the text without authorial guarantee, the disruptive form of memory that characterises witness testimony has the capacity to cultivate a eeting recognition of a shared world between witness and reader, past and present. key words witnessing testimony Primo Levi literature trauma historiography

Geography, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon EX4 4RJ email: richardcarterwhite@gmail.com

revised manuscript received 20 April 2011

Introduction
Witness testimony has emerged as a genre of writing of increasing interest to geographers (see Carter-White 2009; Dubow 2007; Harrison 2007 2010; McEwan 2006; Romanillos 2010; Wylie 2007). Ostensibly premised on a positivist model of representation, recent work has emphasised the paradoxical and nonrepresentational dynamics of bearing witness (Dewsbury 2003). This paper further develops and considers some implications of this understanding through a close reading of the testimony of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. Levis writing exemplies a testimonial structure of complexity and indeterminacy hidden behind a seemingly straightforward constative relation to the events and places recollected and described. By highlighting the paradoxical dimensions of his witnessing I aim to emphasise the value of attending to disruptive moments in testimony and, ultimately, to move these debates forward by drawing

out the possibility of a distinct historiography based upon the capacity of testimony to suspend representational closure. The aim of afrming the disruptive dimensions of testimony takes its cue from recent geographical studies of memory, and the way they specically relate to the context of the Holocaust. Geographical engagements with Holocaust memory have often been concerned with the politics of memory enacted at sites of commemoration (see Azaryahu 2003; Charlesworth 1994; Cole 2004). While these studies uncover the domestication, manipulation and politicisation of memory, in this paper I follow the complementary geographical turn towards examining the disruptive faculty of memory. The recent interest in spectral geographies has foregrounded the capacity of places to generate affective encounters with memory that disrupt both the xity of space and linear orders of temporal succession (Pinder 2001), and in doing so resist the wholesale integration of the past as a closed and

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bounded entity into political narratives developed and inscribed in the present (Cameron 2008; Maddern 2008). This process of disruption has particular signicance for spaces of Holocaust commemoration (see Till 2005). Charlesworth and Addis note that as commemorative sites frame atrocious events in increasingly pre-determined and tightly managed ways, the cognitive space in which visitors to these sites might experience thought-provoking or exploratory encounters with the past is diminished (2002, 248). This concern reects the tendency identied in studies of Holocaust historiography more generally that, as the relationship of the present with horric pasts becomes ritualised into familiar historical narratives, the past takes on the character of a self-contained and alien entity (Bauman 2000). Recent work in Holocaust historiography has sought to interrupt this distancing process by developing modes of writing that evoke a sense of genocide as something that unfolds according to the same exigencies and chance occurrences that our own world proceeds by (Bernstein 1994; Friedla nder 2007; Stone 2004) in other words, historiographies that disrupt the smooth operation of reading and interpretation towards cultivating a sense of a shared world between the reader and these extraordinary, extreme and otherwise exterior events. It is within this historiographical context that I aim to locate the signicance of theoretical investigations into the disruptive capacities of memory, and specically witness testimony. Over the past 30 years, and commensurate with the growing incorporation of survivor accounts into studies of the Holocaust (Wieviorka 2006), witness testimony has become positioned as a problematic genre of writing, one that appears predisposed towards generating disruptive encounters. Recent philosophical work on testimony has identied a radical disjuncture between the event of witnessing in the past and the event of recollecting before an audience in the present (Lyotard 1988; Agamben 1999; Derrida 2000). This work has emphasised the contradiction whereby the referential status of witness testimony is founded upon the presupposition of an indivisible relation between these temporal poles, yet that same relation institutes a fracture in the witnessing subject. The witness that testies before an audience is required to communicate their knowledge of an event, utilising their mastery of language and memory in other words, the witnessing subject is privileged as a speaking and comprehending I (Lyotard 1988, 111). However,

this is a radically different subject position to the one assumed in the originary event of witnessing, in which the witnessing subject is dened precisely by not being an I, becoming instead a you one who is signicant only because they are addressed by an occurrence (ibid.), and who does not let their individual subjectivity and comprehension alter their perception of events in such a way that would differentiate their witnessing from anyone else in that same exact place (Derrida 2000, 41). According to this understanding of testimony, the fracture between these two instances will not necessarily be diagnosed by the presence of distorted or inaccurate witnessing, nor covered over by better testimony or more accurate recollection: rather, the point is that the witnessing subject who addresses an audience is simply not the same witness whose personal subjectivity was abolished in and by the instant of witnessing between the two there is an unbridgeable gap, a non-relation (Harrison 2007). What occurs in this passage between witnessing subjects is a mystery known to no one including, crucially, the witness, because there is no witness in the singular. Witness testimony is founded upon a cryptic relation, the exact nature of which is unknown. Whilst unknown, the constitutive secrecy of testimony makes itself felt in the act of reading (Lyotard 1988, 111). As Harrison writes, witness testimony emerging from the Holocaust is consistently characterised by instances that refuse to be incorporated into reading practices that attempt
to interpret, to analyse, to code, to transpose; to put these in-coming words in their context, in their place (in the social), and thereby nd their implicit thesis or rationale; their true voice and so their truth. (2010, 162)

Harrison follows the work of trauma theorist Caruth in identifying a referential dimension in testimony that survives not despite the presence of these disruptive instances, but because of their impact. At least with regard to testimony towards traumatic events, it is in the jarring disruption of knowledge and comprehension in the text, and the disorientation this induces in the reader, that some trace of the event as a rupturous phenomenon perseveres (Caruth 1991, 187). While these disruptive, non-representational dynamics have become increasingly recognised and established as an important aspect of testimony, in this paper I aim to build upon this recognition by

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formally conceptualising the capacity of witness testimony to disturb and interrupt processes of comprehension and interpretation as entailing a specic and positive form of historiography. My argument is that the instances of uncertainty generated by witness testimony work to counteract the potential historiographical consignment of the extreme reality of Auschwitz into an alien historical realm utterly separated from our own. As illustrated by my encounter with the writing of Primo Levi, the indeterminate structure of witness testimony can achieve this by highlighting the readers co-responsibility for whatever insight they derive from the encounter, because this structure defers the possibility of arriving at a denitive conclusion. By making explicit the individual labour of the reader in reaching over to the events depicted and arriving at a decision about the text, there exists some eeting recognition of a shared world between witness and audience, past and present. In relation to a place like Auschwitz, the reality of which is so distant in so many ways that it puts this shared world into question, I argue that this constitutes a historiographical insight. This argument is developed through a close reading of Levis testimony. After a brief introduction to his life and writing in the second section, in the following two sections I explore a key testimonial refrain of Levis: the distinction he drew between the drowned and the saved as a way of categorising and conceptualising two different responses evident among prisoners to the extreme adversity of Auschwitz. This refrain provides the lynchpin for my reading, in that it gets to the heart of Levis style and appeal as a witness to the dehumanising logic of Auschwitz, while simultaneously opening a rupture in his testimony that, in my own particular engagement, incessantly defers resolution. This interruption in the representational consistency of the text provides a catalyst to develop an alternate reading of his testimony over the course of the fth and sixth sections; and further, as I conclude in the nal section, in the resounding absence of authorial guarantees I am made to take co-responsibility for this reading, and it is here that a distinct testimonial historiography of disruption begins to emerge. Crucially, this historiographical insight dwells not in the result of my particular, deconstructive reading, but in the aporetic encounter, or decision, from which this reading emerged. It is thus that I seek to move debates in the literature beyond the key readings that position testimony as exceeding a positiv-

ist underpinning, to consider how these insights might be used historiographically.

Primo Levi
The writing career of Primo Levi is bookended by two masterpieces of witnessing. Levi composed his rst book, If this is a man, immediately after returning from Auschwitz, where he was imprisoned between February 1944 and January 1945, following his arrest in December 1943 for resistance activities. Finished in 1946 but not receiving widespread publication until 1958, it is today celebrated as a restrained but uninching depiction of the camp. Levis nal work, The drowned and the saved (2004 [1986]), was completed one year before his death in 1987, and in it he expanded on the recollection of his own experiences and analyses of the concentration camp phenomenon, as well as providing inuential theoretical reections on witnessing (see Agamben 1999). Yet while Levis achievements and status as a witness to Auschwitz are difcult to overstate and, with his suicide at the Turin apartment block where he spent the majority of his 67 years and the retrospective commentary it has cast over his work (see Stille 2005), even harder to avoid, Levis oeuvre is more varied and sophisticated than the witness label allows. If Levis fame is largely due to his witnessing a task he continued with his second book, The truce (2005a [1963]), which recounts his protracted journey home from the camp an even more enduring preoccupation, and one that is present throughout all of his writing, is chemistry. Levi graduated as a chemist in 1941 from the University of Turin, and his love of scientic discovery and dedication towards understanding the world structures The periodic table (1986 [1975]), a part-autobiographical text that nonetheless refrains, for the most part, from dealing explicitly with the camp. After his return from Auschwitz, Levi worked as an industrial chemist, and this occupation sets the tone for The wrench (1988 [1978]), a collection of stories in which Levis narrator acts as sounding-board to the tales of Faussone, the gregarious rigger into whom Levi channels his admiration for the practical intelligence of homo faber. The movement of Levis writing towards ction was completed with the publication of If not now, when? (1995 [1982]), his only novel, before his nal testimonial return to Auschwitz. In the veritable library (Wieviorka 2006, 21) of commentary on his witnessing, Levi has become

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renowned as an author of lucid, concise testimony towards an experience that shattered the comprehension of so many others who underwent it. His writing is characterised by a consistent effort to analyse, divide, compartmentalise and understand the world around him, even especially the world of Auschwitz (Farrell 2004b; Gordon 2003), in the clear and comprehendible manner of a scientist. Levis rational disposition was above all geared towards the primary task of understanding and communicating the ordeal he experienced to outsiders, for
We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing (Levi 2005a, 93)

the isolation, degradation and, as implied by the title, dehumanisation of prisoners, and in doing so illustrates the spatial logic of mass murder deployed in the camp. Recent writing on the spatial logic of the camp, following on from Agambens writing on sovereignty and biopolitics (1998), has emphasised its signicance as a complex topological gure: an exceptional space that is both outside the law and yet totally determined by sovereign power. Levis testimony adds to this analysis a sensitivity to the internal spatial dynamics of the camp, and the signicance of these dynamics in determining the fate of individual prisoners. Upon entry to the camp, Levi, an Italian Jew, found himself at the bottom of a complex prisoner hierarchy that was spatially enforced and articulated:
our Lager is a square of about six hundred yards in length, surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one carrying a high tension current. It consists of sixty wooden huts . . . In addition, there is the body of the kitchens, which are in brick; an experimental farm, run by a detachment of privileged Ha ftling; the huts with showers and the latrines, one for each group of six or eight Blocks. Besides these, certain Blocks are reserved for specic purposes . . . Block 7, which no ordinary Ha ftling has ever entered, reserved for the Prominenz, that is, the aristocracy, the internees holding the highest posts; Block 47, reserved for the Reichsdeutsche (the Aryan Germans, politicals or criminals); Block 49, for the Kapos alone. (Levi 2005a, 379)

It is Levis status as a modest, unassuming witness committed to making the camp comprehendible to his audience that makes his testimony ideal for my purposes in this paper. For despite being an ostensibly easy read (Giuliani 2003, 2), even Levis testimony retains the capacity to disrupt the smooth operation of interpretation and meaning-making through paradoxes that run to its core. My encounter with the hidden ambiguity of Levis testimony is not presented as exhausting the potential of this writer to surprise and disturb, nor to stand in for all the possible ways in which witness testimony can generate a disruptive encounter with the past for readers of this genre; it is, however, signicant for taking place at the scene of one of his most well-known testimonial insights, the distinction he draws between the groups of prisoners he terms the drowned and the saved.

The drowned and the saved

The refrain of the drowned and the saved rst appears in Levis writing as the title of a central chapter in If this is a man (2005a). The title refers to Levis analysis of two distinct human types revealed by imprisonment in Auschwitz, and as such this cleavage among the prisoner population opens onto and encapsulates Levis abiding concern: the manner in which the gigantic biological and social experiment (2005a, 93) of the camp functioned by putting the status of the human into question, and the signicance of this interrogation. Over the course of the book Levi constructs a picture of Auschwitz as a system geared towards

The most populous members of the Auschwitz hierarchy were political prisoners, ordinary criminals, asocials and Jews. In addition to this the prisoner body was composed of many different nations. Although these social identities offered the possibility of solidarity, Levi notes that one failing to nd comfort in stratications of language, social background, nationality, race or prisoner status would likely collapse upon receiving the aggression and derision of their fellow prisoners (Levi 2004, 245; 2005a, 97). The spatial design of the camp was geared towards generating this type of inter-prisoner hostility: the intense cramming of prisoners ensured a complete absence of personal space (2005a, 65), and with the ensuing pandemonium of languages and customs (2005a, 44; Gutman 1998) and the excremental assault (des Pres 1980; Levi 2005a, 678) borne of lthy living conditions, bodily boundaries were subject to constant transgression and provocation.

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Reeling from the perpetual assault on their bodies and denied help from others, these prisoners would inevitably fall foul of the camps labyrinth of regulations and demarcations (Levi 2005a, 41). The transgression of these boundaries was unavoidable the tautological structure of punishment required, for example, that prisoners subjected to lthy conditions would be judged according to their hygiene and punished accordingly but nonetheless Levi emphasises that for those prisoners in a position to learn from others, and with the requisite mental and physical resources, it was possible to discern and avoid contact with the majority of these rules (2005a, 39-41). But the rest, oblivious of transgressions for which they are brutally punished and consequently weak, exhausted and all the more incapable of adapting to rules they do not understand, would suffer an accelerated multiplication of pain and degradation. In Levis account, the logic of the camp was to isolate and utterly destroy the physical, social and psychological defences of individuals incapable of adapting to its myriad assaults, and this system was further formalised in the camps spatial division of labour. Prisoners able to draw on contacts within the camp hierarchy, able to devise some kind of strategy, or otherwise able to make themselves useful could secure for themselves indoor work; Levi for example, by luck rather than initiative (see Giuliani 2003, 4753), was employed for the latter part of his imprisonment as a chemist, and this shielded him from the harsh conditions of outdoor work. Perversely, it was the weakened, emaciated, uncomprehending majority, those least able to physically withstand it, who were condemned to exhausting outdoor work, often in freezing conditions. The asymmetry continues as prisoners engaged in relatively non-strenuous labour, for example in the kitchen, would enjoy privileges that allowed them to develop unofcial lines of solidarity with night-guards, hut leaders, and others able to make life in the camp more bearable (see Levi 2005a, 8990). But prisoners subjected to deadly labour in appalling conditions, miserable and emaciated to extremes (2005a, 60), with help from nobody and an inability to adapt to a system of theft and favours, could do nothing to prevent the journey to the bottom (2005a, 323). Levi presents the camp as a complex topological network, constituted and fractured by the interplay of multiple social and physical boundaries, of which the perimeter fence is only the most obvious.

Levi condenses and articulates this system with his own distinction between the drowned and the saved:
There comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men the saved and the drowned. Other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above all they allow for numerous and complex intermediary gradations. (2005a, 934)

The majority of the chapter is dedicated to Levis description of the saved: prisoners who managed to function within the camp thanks to some quality that ensured their usefulness within the camp structure and with it their survival. In opposition to this exceptional population, Levi populates the drowned with the masses of deportees who refused or were unable to adapt to the working of the camp. Unlike the saved, Levi does not characterise the drowned with the exploits and idiosyncrasies of specic individuals; they are categorised as drowned precisely because, under the excruciating conditions of the camp, these people completely lost their individuality and their capacity to relate to others:
To sink is the easiest of matters . . . All the musselmans who nished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from selections or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand. (2005a, 96)

Signicance and uncertainty

The signicance of this chapter can be registered in several ways. Levis later writing on the grey zone of collaboration between prisoners and perpetrators

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in the camp (Levi 2004, 2251), and on the implications of the radical divergence in the experience of deportees for the authority of witnesses (2004, 634), revisit the themes of dehumanisation and adaptation formalised here. The discrete categories of drowned and saved have also been used by commentators to conceptualise Levis own biography in different ways. Levis ability to look back retrospectively to the camp and conduct perspicacious analyses helps justify the interpretation that he belonged to the saved, as one who is not too tired to understand and who therefore resisted dehumanisation. Throughout his testimony Levi emphasises the importance of his chemists training to his survival, whether in terms of securing indoor labour or providing a scientic mindset through which to discern and adapt to the logic and rules of the camp (see Pytell 2005). The scientists principles of reason, objectivity, detachment and curiosity in the world are equally embodied in Levis style of testimony, and hardly depict a crushed individual swept along by the misery of his situation. By contrast, Levis suicide provides for the alternative reading that, more than 40 years after the event, Auschwitz had claimed another victim and Levi, through depression and survivors guilt, in fact belonged to the drowned (see Stille 2005). The existence of these divergent interpretations testies to the powerful hold this refrain has exerted over Levis audience. Above all however, the original chapter encapsulates what is distinctive and special about his testimony: with this refrain he succeeds in reducing the complex internal dynamics and logic of dehumanisation of Auschwitz down to an essential and comprehendible core, one that is no less disturbing for the process of reduction. Yet it is at this location, where the appeal of Levi as a reliable witness to an event of numbing incomprehension can be seen most clearly, that his testimony takes on the character of a mystery. Because although Levi is rightly regarded as much more than a reporter, there nonetheless remains the implicit presence of a historiographical core to his testimony in the traditional, juridical sense, to the extent that If this is a man commences with an authorial disclaiming promising as much (Levi 2005a, 16). In other words, when he writes there comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men the saved and the drowned, it is a sympathetic move to interpret this as an actual, historical distinction

between two types of men revealed by the extreme circumstances of the camp. Debates within the secondary literature about whether Levi belonged to the saved or the drowned, or perhaps elements of both, strengthens the interpretation that this distinction pertains to two historical categories of the human, and therefore that Auschwitz had the power to produce this kind of revelation about the essential nature of humanity. While in keeping with Levis assertion that even the vast experiment of Auschwitz has something of value to be understood, this is a conclusion that I nd difcult to accept. Although not formally articulated by Levi, one immediate implication of reading the drowned and the saved as an actual historical distinction is that the saved were revealed as an inherently superior type of human by the context of the camp; that, effectively, their naturally heroic disposition was certied and sanctied by Auschwitz, in a situation that simply drowned and dehumanised the weak and nonadaptable. Read in this way, the refrain of the drowned and the saved, in describing the machinery of genocide, appears to conrm the ideological principles of the perpetrators: that there is a hierarchy of humanity that can be revealed under the correct circumstances. The notion that Levi invented this gure in order to provide a vocabulary through which to comprehend the truth of Nazi ideology is unacceptable and absurd, and therein lies the mystery: what is it doing? Elsewhere in his writing, Levi provides so much material that refutes this appalling proposition that it becomes untenable: in numerous places he denaturalises his survival by emphasising its contingency (see Giuliani 2003, 4753). Given his further efforts to undermine his privileged status as a witness (Gordon 2003, 199; Levi 2004, 63), his repeated disgust at the notion that his particular survival was a matter of fate or providence (Levi 2004, 62; 2005a, 135), and his insistence that survival in Auschwitz was no cause for sanctication (2004, 59), the stark distinction drawn by Levi between two discrete groups of prisoners and their innate properties in this brief chapter appears perhaps as an anomaly, in which Levis determination to understand Auschwitz momentarily fractures his humanist values (see Farrell 2004a). Yet it is impossible to write off as a mere anomaly a refrain that has held such inuence over both audiences and author, one that Levi retained as the title of his nal book. Alternatively, we might interpret this

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puzzling situation as an intentional device of Levis, designed to ward off premature assumptions of knowledge on the part of his audience, against any simplications or comparisons that would lessen the distance between the outside world and Auschwitz, and with it the extreme reality of the camp. As Harrison writes, moments in Levi where he asserts the inadequacy of his words to meet the reality of the camp take their place alongside other well-known instances in the eld of Holocaust testimony that reveal unbridgeable distances between the referent and reality, between representation and experience and, perhaps rst and foremost, a gap between the addressor and the addressee (2010, 162). But there is nothing in that central chapter of Levis key testimonial work that suggests he is trying to open in his readership a heightened awareness of the extreme nature of his experiences by introducing a rupturing inconsistency in the totality of his text the truly jarring dimension of this disruptive moment is that there is no such sign-posting to indicate, acknowledge and guarantee its status and purpose as a moment of disruption. Compared with the instances of refusal noted by Harrison (2010), what makes Levis refrain a distinctive form of testimonial disruption is that it undertakes its work of disturbance while being presented simply as a troubling but unproblematically historical piece of information. Despite wholeheartedly rejecting hierarchies of victimhood throughout his writing, and displaying a keen awareness of the key roles that arbitrary segregations between the prisoners played in propelling the murder process of the camp, at a central moment in his testimony Levi unproblematically deploys a hierarchical distinction of his own. At this moment my reading of Levi conceived as a relation of comprehension leads into an aporia, because I do not have a denitive resolution to this situation. Instead, to my mind there are two possible directions. The rst is to disregard the disturbance and retain that which is certain: Levi used this refrain as a gure to describe the murder process of Auschwitz in a vivid and comprehendible way, and this simplied gure leads to interpretations, 60 years after the event, that he did not intend. This rst direction is tied to an emphasis on the intentioning subjectivity of the witness; on the I of witnessing. By contrast, the second depends explicitly on the witnesss absence, dwelling in the constitutive uncertainty or you of wit-

nessing. In the next section I follow the second option by developing a reading of the drowned and the saved based on a logical connection between Levis analysis of survival in the camp and his theoretical reections on writing. This connection exists entirely in my interpretation of the text, with no guarantees whatsoever from the intentions of the witnessing subject it is a reading that emerges from a contingent encounter, not a durable subjectivity. I then go on to discuss the implications for the genre of testimony of pursuing a reading that separates the text from the life of its author in this way, and, more importantly for my main aim of conceptualising a testimonial historiography, of being faced with this decision in the rst place.

The writer and the witness: a distinction that disappears

At no point does Levi frame his scattered remarks on literature and writing practices in general in relation to his key testimonial refrain. But despite the absence of authorial guarantees, in the following reading those theoretical reections not only powerfully resonate with Levis analysis of prisoner responses to the ordeal of Auschwitz; they do so in a way that offers a different understanding of how that analysis works and what else it might do. Further, the bare existence of these divergent understandings offers an insight into the historiographical potential of testimony as a genre. Part of Levis appeal as a witness to atrocity is his ability to write in an unobtrusive and relatively dispassionate style, and this style can be attributed to his somewhat puritanical position on writing in general. Although inconsistent on this count (see Anissimov 2000, 302), Levi went to various lengths to distinguish his testimony from literature, or at least from a certain conception of literature, going so far as to label himself the writer who is not a writer (2005b, 101). Levi considered himself under an obligation as a witness to communicate clearly and concisely, akin to the neutral and objective transmission of a scientist:
[while] emphatically renouncing any regulative, prohibitive or punitive claim, I would like to add that in my opinion one should not write in an obscure manner, because a piece of writing has all the more value and all the more hope of diffusion and permanence, the better it is understood and the less it lends itself to equivocal interpretation . . . writing serves to communicate,

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transmit information or feelings from mind to mind . . . If [the reader] did not understand me, he would feel unjustly humiliated, and I would be guilty of a breach of contract. (1991, 159) I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, not the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. I thought that my account would be all the more credible and useful the more it appeared objective and the less it sounded overly emotional; only in this way does a witness in matters of justice perform his task, which is that of preparing the ground for the judge. The judges are my readers. (2005a, 382)

Richard Carter-White

Levis views on writing recall his drowned-saved distinction in that his ideal of writing the achievement of clear, useful communication between rational, comprehending subjects derived from the scientic training that enabled him to survive. As Levi put it,
I write because I am a chemist. My trade has provided my raw material, the nucleus to which things join . . . . Chemistry is a struggle with matter, a masterpiece of rationality. (Levi 1976, quoted in Anissimov 2000, 316)

This is communication as exclusive to the saved, delivered by science and reason and this was precisely the principle that separated that group from the drowned. With the drowned there was no communication since the rational subject capable of intending and achieving the transmission of information was absent, lost to the immediate environment, whereas between the saved there was something there to be shared and the capacity and will to share it. And just as Levi articulates his own writing practices according to an ideal constituted by the dening characteristics of the saved of Auschwitz, his description of the opposite of this ideal, obscure writing that is predisposed towards disaster, is clearly reminiscent of his depiction of the drowned of Auschwitz:
he who is not understood by anyone does not transmit anything, he cries in the desert . . . . It is not by chance that the two least decipherable German poets, Trakl and Celan, both died as suicides, separated by two generations. Their common destiny makes one think about the obscurity of their poetry as a pre-killing, a not-wanting-to-be, a ight from the world of which intentional death was the crown. (1991, 15961)

Levi was inconsistent on this matter: despite labelling himself a non-writer, he nonetheless produced an entire volume on the literary inuences

on his writing (Levi 2003). But this equivocation only reinforces the comparison I am trying to make, because, likewise, the strict division between the drowned and the saved was something Levi contradicted throughout his testimony. The key point is that Levi provided the framework to interpret his writing in terms of a hierarchy of rational, intentional and objective communication as proper to the saved, and irrational, obscure writing as symptomatic of the drowned. Indeed, in places this framework has been used to conceptualise Levis status as a pre-eminent witness to the Holocaust; a reliable witness who, compared with writerly witnesses who lose their minds in the drift of language or whose testimonial accounts are compromised by over-aestheticisation (see Clendinnen 1999, 245), is able to occupy a space untainted by the supplement of ction, which is instead delegated to the strictly ctional genre of his short stories and novel (see Lang 2003, 130). As in the original context of this testimonial refrain, Levis placement on the drownedsaved schema helps to reinforce that refrain as a hierarchy of two discrete categories. There is, however, another possible reading of the phrase the writer who is not a writer and its abstract recapitulation of Levis drownedsaved distinction, and it is one that, although lacking in the authorial guarantee and intentionality boasted by the previous interpretation, makes sense in terms of the experience of reading his work, as well as offering a different starting point for understanding Levis recurring refrain in its original, testimonial context. It can be summarised as: the clarity and objectivity of Levis testimony, its effect of guaranteed witnesshood, is dependent upon superb literary composition. This is not to say that Levis self-description is wrong, but that it is a dense formulation that can be unravelled in a different way to how the witness himself intended. Compared with survivors whose testimony is compromised by artice and invention, Levis portrayal by himself and others as the writer who is not a writer presents his work as a rational, objective discourse with an indivisible connection to authorial intentions, unaffected by the dangerous presence of writing as a force that effaces and diverts clear relations with the world. But presented in such an uncompromising way, this demarcation collapses: the historical function of If this is a man works precisely because of the

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artistry of its composition. The literary space of Levis testimony denigrated by Levi in the previous instances in order to conceptualise the quasiscientic work and value of his witnessing cannot be separated and destroyed without the work itself lan. losing its historiographical e If Levis work manages to create a space of rational, unsullied testimony, that is because it has been composed in such a way. If this is a man is dense with literary techniques: deriving its structure and a constant reference point from Dantes Inferno (Farrell 2004c; Pugliese 2005), Levis classic qualities of economy, lightness, formality and symmetry (Giuliani 2003; Misurella 2005; Thomson 2004) and his use of varied narrative tenses and multiple vocabularies (Belpolito and Gordon 2007) add up to a highly literary verbal texture which nonetheless produces an impression of limpidity and transparency (Lepschy and Lepschy 2007, 133). Given the combination of these literary techniques towards an effect of realistic depiction, White (2004) labels Levis style gural realism, in that his use of poetic images imbues his descriptions with the emotional power, precision and moral charge that would be absent from an impersonal registration of the facts. If this is a man is a work of tremendous composition: Levis literary gift is in dissimulating the effort and craft behind this composition, such that it reads with all the lightness and transparency one would expect of a witnesss testimony. Levis writing is no less a product of artice and technique than less celebrated witness-writers, or even the drowned authors named previously: he is simply very skilled at dissimulating that artice. He is a good enough writer not to appear as such within a genre that demands that absence; his writing works as testimony because of its literary devices, compared to which other witness accounts can appear clumsy, obtrusive and writerly. These observations are not new or groundbreaking; Levis literary prowess is well-recognised in the secondary literature. I simply want to make the point that these literary techniques inevitably exceed the boundaries and intentionalities of the author, because he is, to be sure, a writer, whose testimony works upon the literary recognition and engagement of the audience. From this perspective, Levis self-description as the writer who is not a writer is not wrong, but its truth is paradoxical: Levi enters into literature in order to produce a concise, articulate and forceful account capable of

saving testimony as a neutral and rational endeavour; he becomes a writer so as to disappear as one, in a context where the term writer has negative connotations of artice, obstructive poeticism and inauthenticity. Levi may have believed, ideally, in the distinction he sets up between writers and non-writers, but his performance of that distinction undermines that ideal even as its effects conrm its truth: his testimony appears objective and even positivist on the condition that those principles are utterly undermined. Thus, according to his own strict criteria, Levi is saved as a witness on the condition of rst having drowned as a writer. The historical content of Levis witnessing of Auschwitz is populated by descriptions of spatial segregations that are constantly transgressed as an integral part of their operation. What this diversion into the literary status of Levis writing demonstrates is that the performance of his testimony is likewise structured by a demarcation between two discrete spaces that is constantly transgressed: If this is a man is driven along not by the discrete separation of writing and witnessing, but by the paradoxical relation between the two. Whether Levi intended it or not, what I have encountered in my engagement with his testimony is a landscape of paradoxical distinctions and oppositions. In the next section I use this insight to re-read his most famous distinction, between the drowned and the saved of Auschwitz. This insight derives not from the I of witnessing, but from the indeterminate you without guarantee, without certainty, and thus, in taking responsibility for whatever comes of this, without alibi (Derrida 2002).

The drowned and the saved: a hierarchy without basis

Transplanted into the context of Levis writing practices, the previous section developed an understanding of the drowned and the saved as articulating a paradoxical relation which structures the performance of Levis testimony, where two terms that are presented as discrete and oppositional witnessing and writing contaminate and collapse one another. This understanding converges with Levis emphasis on the role of lines, boundaries and segregations in propelling the murder process of Auschwitz: in his depiction of the camp, the different kinds of demarcations he highlights are deemed signicant not because they simply hold apart, but because they are transgressed in the

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nn whose individual defences shapeless Muselma have been dissolved; in the excremental assault upon corporeal boundaries and personal space; in the overdetermined networks of rules and regulations that are designed to be broken; in the grey zone between perpetrators and prisoners. Whether intentional or not, a consistent insight emerging from Levis testimony is that demarcations do more than simply separate. From the contents of his historical descriptions through to the structure of his writing practices, Levis testimony forms a landscape of transgressed boundaries and paradoxical oppositions. It is with this in mind that I return to the original context of his most famous demarcation, that between the saved and the drowned of Auschwitz. In a famous passage (see Agamben 1999), Levi clearly separates himself from the drowned:
I must repeat we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion, of which I have become conscious little by little, reading the memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose dispositions would have a general signicance. They are the rule, we are the exception. (Levi 2004, 634)

and severity: the instinctual survival of the saved is characterised by various active programmes of manipulation, violence and insanity (2005a, 99106). Even more striking is the rhetorical style adopted by Levi in describing these characteristics: as White (2004) has observed, the highly charged and sometimes lurid gures deployed to illustrate this type have little to do with scientic observation, and everything to do with Levis own feelings about the nature of salvation in Auschwitz. These poetic utterances on the experience of enduring the camp offer a more referential account than any attempt at a literal description would be (White 2004, 122). In this spirit, while Levis discussion of four individuals characteristic of the saved is perhaps intended to literally describe four means of survival in the camp environment, what it performs is a deep distaste towards the act of preserving oneself in such a place as Auschwitz, the condition of becoming proper to Auschwitz. Levi reinforces this interpretation when he reects on the ambivalence of salvation:
The saved of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good; the bearers of a message. What I had seen and lived through proved the exact contrary, preferably the worst survived, the selsh, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the grey zones, the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were none, nor are there certain rules in human matters), but it was, nevertheless, a rule. I felt innocent, yes, but enrolled among the saved and therefore in permanent search of a justication in my own eyes and those of others. The worst survived that is, the ttest; the best all died. (2004, 63)

Reading this paragraph in isolation, the implication is clear: those who, like Levi, were not completely broken and somehow saved some aspect of their humanity did not witness Auschwitz in its entirety, were not drowned by the experience, and so cannot claim to be complete witnesses. Levi explicitly nner who distances himself from the Muselma occupy the extreme pole of the drowned, whose intrinsic inability to survive is brought about by the experiment of Auschwitz. This distance from the complete gure of witnesshood is generally understood as a guarantee that Levi, in disqualifying himself from the ranks of the drowned, acknowledged the facticity of his own salvation, and additionally, in relation to my concerns here, the discrete opposition of these two categories. Yet if this statement serves as negative proof of his salvation, Levi does a more thorough and consistent job of separating himself from the saved. When he reects explicitly on the individuals belonging to that category, he does so with distaste

Levi was guilty of none of the crimes or vices he attributes to the saved; his survival was through fortune, if that word has any sense here: I was a guiltless victim (2004, 32). But either way, salvation is not synonymous with moral superiority. It arrives either through luck, as in Levis case, or an ability to function in the camp environment. The four typologies of the saved may have survived materially but, as Giuliani (2003, 578) observes, theirs is an instinctual adaption, achieved by throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the demands of a struggle of all-against-all, as if it was in Auschwitz that they found their true calling. Those who drowned because they lacked this identication with a system of corruption and oppression, those who were utterly incompatible with it, were saved from adapting to a space of death. In Levis typology, to join the saved is not a platitude, it is a condemnation: the guilt of adapt-

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ing to a situation in which ones survival necessitates the death of another. In these meditations on the meaning of salvation, Levis placement on the drownedsaved schema, and with it the binary structure of that refrain, depends upon what is understood by the phrase enrolled among the saved. The best died or were otherwise rendered unable to witness, their virtuousness having made their adaption impossible; drowned, they are saved from the corruption of actively nding within themselves an ability to survive in such an environment. Levi is not of this category; yet his blamelessness, his survival through sheer fortune, distances him from the worst excesses of the saved, whose salvation is, in his account, achieved by an active submersion in corruption. Levi is only, tangentially, associated with or enrolled among the saved by dint of his survival; he is among the saved but distinct from that qualication. On only one occasion did Levi commit to paper an unambiguous category of the saved, in If not now, when?: his solitary work of novel length ction:
The sentry killed by Mottel was lying in a pool of blood, his throat cut. Mottel displayed his famous knife: If you want to make sure they dont yell, you have to do it like this, he said to Mendel with professional gravity, cut immediately, here under the chin. It was only then that they realized the ghting had been witnessed: about ten human forms had come out of the Lager buildings at the racket of the shots and explosions, and now they stood there in silence, watching, behind the barrier of barbed wire. In the glow of the searchlights, they seemed haggard, their gray-and-blue striped uniforms tattered, their faces black from smoke and unshaven beard. We must free them, kill the German, and go, Piotr said. Gedaleh nodded his assent. Mottel went towards the fence, but Mendel restrained him. Wait: it could be electried. He moved closer and saw that between the stakes and the wire there were no isolators. He wanted to be surer: he looked around, he saw a piece of an iron rod on the ground. He drove it into the earth near the fence, then he pushed one end against the wires with a stick. Nothing happened; Mottel and Piotr, with the butts of their guns, knocked down a stretch of fence, making a breach. The ten prisoners hesitated about coming out. (1995, 174)

This story centres around a group of Jewish partisans, each of them strong, witty and virtuous. It is as if only in an institutionalised and self-acknowledged work of ction could Levi manage to narrate an unambiguous category of the saved, and even then, all but one of his protagonists have no experi-

ence of the camps, and we can see how much of a struggle it is to encourage the inhabitants of the concentration camp world to enter this heroic scene. Here, he lends his voice to the saved, in the same way that, in The drowned and the saved, he lent it to the drowned: saved, drowned, by proxy (2004, 64). When read in the context of his wider body of work, the terms drowned and saved are not discrete: the drowned are saved from the ignominy of preserving themselves against the backdrop of Auschwitz; the saved are distinguished by their capacity to function in a place of drowning. Levi may have believed in the values of salvation so often attributed to that term, but in his actual text he stops short of establishing them as the basis for superiority and sanctity. Even more explicitly, we can now see that Levi withdrew himself from the distinction that he elsewhere described as all-encompassing (2005a, 934), as if, in that instant, he was not there: for the purpose of this testimonial refrain, he abdicates the biographical authority that sustains his witnessing. Through this reading, the original testimonial refrain of the drowned and the saved merges into the landscape of paradoxical oppositions and collapsing distinctions present throughout Levis writing. In doing so, it takes on some new functions that question its status as a straightforward historical description. Although the act of simplifying and communicating something of the differing responses to extreme adversity displayed by different prisoners and the manner in which this was exploited by the system of mass murder remains central to Levis witnessing task, it simultaneously works as a rebuttal against the tendency towards closure and simplication that he was wary of (see Levi 2004, 128). Speculating further about why Levi would consistently deploy a distinction that he would undermine so thoroughly, we can take the use of this refrain as an ethical scene of resistance to the principles of fascism and racism: Levi goes to great lengths to present an implicit hierarchy of humanity a presentation that is central to his testimonial task while at the same time showing it to be inconsistent, paradoxical and ultimately selfundermining, as if to actively perform the baselessness of the hierarchies that nonetheless do manage to murder and destroy. Levi reconstructs the Nazi atrocity but in a manner that challenges and refutes its very basis. By incorporating the logic of the drowned and the saved into the expression and

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content of his work, he provides an insight into how the death camps functioned; by letting it unravel over the course of his writing, he makes the ethical gesture of undermining the ideological core of that system. With this second interpretation in place, I will now conclude by discussing the implications of this reading for a testimonial historiography.

Conclusion: a historiography of coresponsibility

This paper has revolved around a key refrain in the witnessing of Primo Levi, and the disruptive effect it exerted upon my reading of his testimony. This disruptive moment provided the catalyst to develop an alternative interpretation of Levis witnessing, one that is not founded upon the presumption that his writing works primarily according to a positivist mode of historiography. By maintaining an openness towards his testimony, and looking elsewhere in his writing for clues as to how the drowned and the saved might be interpreted, I came to an understanding of that refrain as an ethical scene of resistance to the principles and logic of Auschwitz. However, the aim of this paper is not to universalise the strategic moves that enabled this particular reading, or otherwise attempt to generalise a non-positivist approach towards witness testimony. To do so would mean remaining within the ground already covered by such theorists as Agamben, in their attempts to disrupt the traditional positivist underpinnings of testimony. I do nd my interpretation to be more in keeping with Levis writing as a whole than one that takes the drownedsaved distinction as a categorisation of two historical types of person; however, in terms of the main contribution of this paper to move the witnessing literature into considerations of how testimonys disruptive capacity may generate a positivist historiography the signicance of this situation is not in choosing one interpretation over another, but in the fact that, as an audience to this witness, we are presented with a decision. Derrida observes that to face a decision is to be inhabited by absolute uncertainty (1996): if a decision is known in advance, it is not a decision but merely the predetermined calculation of a procedure. Without any kind of guarantee as to which interpretation is correct, with no way of knowing what has happened in the passage between the originary event of witnessing and the subsequent event of recollection, the audience to testimony is

made to occupy a space of uncertainty, in the absence of totalising comprehension. The power of such disruptive testimonial moments as the mystery of the drowned and the saved is in highlighting this uncertainty; in my case, I was moved by a single paradoxical refrain to question the way in which Levis entire testimony works. What I have tried to demonstrate through my particular reading of Levi is that it is in such instances of distance, where it is made explicit that there can be no calculation or codication of a single authentic narrative, no absolute proximity to the experiences of the witness, that a particular historiography emerges. In the paradoxical situation whereby the traumatic dimension of extreme events that makes them so appallingly real equally threatens to make them unreal, as the product of an unrecognisable and alien world, totalising forms of knowledge that render the event transparent can inadvertently reinforce this process by bounding it as a consistent and selfcontained phenomenon. In this context, the constitutive indeterminacy of witness testimony acts as a circuit breaker (Harrison 2010). From a testimonial space of uncertainty, whatever knowledge is gained is revealed as unavoidably a product of individual labour my hope is that the idiosyncrasy of my reading of Levi, for which I must take responsibility, demonstrates this. There can be no delusions about the providence of any knowledge emerging from this labour I have had to move over to that world, to engage with and nd sense in it but without any possibility of closing the gap, such that I can make an interpretive decision. In relation to atrocious events such as the Holocaust, the capacity of any given witness account to present the reader with an aporia that requires a decision, regardless of the particular options that decision consists of and, written into the labour of making that decision, to force recognition of a shared world constitutes a minimal historiographical insight. By opening an unbridgeable distance within the text, the agency of the reader, and thus their relation to the abyssal event, is made explicit. This forced recognition of a shared world is, I argue, a historiography emerging from the disruptive type of memory that characterises and distinguishes witness testimony. It is not intended to replace more traditional forms of historiography; indeed, the disruptive dimension of testimony is utterly dependent upon such forms. It is a supplementary logic, and one that I feel is worth exploring further in the depiction of events that threaten to shatter spectatorial suspensions of disbelief.

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Derrida J 1996 Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism in Mouffe C ed Deconstruction and pragmatism Routledge, London 7788 Derrida J 2000 Demeure: ction and testimony Stanford University Press, Stanford CA Derrida J 2002 Without alibi Stanford University Press, Stanford CA des Pres T 1980 The survivor: an anatomy of life in the death camps Oxford University Press, Oxford Dewsbury J-D 2003 Witnessing space: knowledge without contemplation Environment and Planning A 35 1907 32 Dubow J 2007 Case interrupted: Benjamin, Sebald and the dialectical image Critical Inquiry 33 82036 Farrell J ed 2004a Primo Levi: the austere humanist Peter Lang, Oxford Farrell J 2004b Introduction in Farrell J ed Primo Levi: the austere humanist Peter Lang, Oxford 918 Farrell J 2004c From darkness to light: Primo Levi, man of letters in Farrell J ed Primo Levi: the austere humanist Peter Lang, Oxford 11739 nder S 2007 The years of extermination: Nazi Friedla Germany and the Jews 19391945 Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, London Giuliani M 2003 A centaur in Auschwitz: reections on Primo Levis thinking Lexington Books, Maryland MD Gordon R S C 2003 Primo Levis ordinary virtues: from testimony to ethics Oxford University Press, Oxford Gutman I 1998 Auschwitz an overview in Gutman I and Berenbaum M eds Anatomy of the Auschwitz death camp Indiana University Press, Indianapolis IN 533 Harrison P 2007 How shall I say it? Relating the nonrelational Environment and Planning A 39 590608 Harrison P 2010 Testimony and the truth of the other in Anderson B and Harrison P eds Taking-place: non-representational theories and geography Ashgate, Aldershot 16180 Lang B 2003 Act and idea in the Nazi genocide Syracuse University Press, New York Lepschy A L and Lepschy G 2007 Primo Levis language in Gordon R S C ed The Cambridge companion to Primo Levi Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 12136 Levi P 1986[1975] The periodic table Abacus, London Levi P 1988[1978] The wrench Abacus, London Levi P 1991[1985] Other peoples trades Abacus, London Levi P 1995[1982] If not now, when? Abacus, London Levi P 2003[1981] The search for roots: a personal anthology Ivan R. Dee, Chicago IL Levi P 2004[1986] The drowned and the saved Abacus, London Levi P 2005a[1945 1963] If this is a man The truce Abacus, London Levi P 2005b[2002] The black hole of Auschwitz Polity Press, Cambridge Lyotard J-F 1988 The differend: phrases in dispute University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN

Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of my PhD thesis, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (PTA-031-2004-00166). I would like to thank everyone who has commented on the different forms of this paper, especially Paul Cloke, Sean Carter, Paul Harrison, John Wylie and Mark Paterson, whose guidance and encouragement was vital in developing and clarifying my ideas. An early version of this paper was presented at the Geography and Literature session at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Boston, April 2008, and I am grateful to Jenny Carton, Jose Luis Romanillos, and the participants in that session. Thanks also to the three anonymous referees and to Alison Blunt for their extremely useful feedback.

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