The Exemplary Chaim Rumkowski in Primo Levi’s “La zona grigia”

In his essay "A Definition of the Esthetic Experience," Eliseo Vivas offers this description 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 fly away from it to meanings not present immanently in the object; or in other words that attention is so controlled that the object specifies concretely and immediately through reflexive 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 attention 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 fascination 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 "reflexive cross-references"--set the esthetic object in unceasing semantic flow. Thus, only homonymy would bind the esthetic and extraesthetic word. Such meanings, which refuse reduction to the univocal, clearly cannot be captured all together at once either in the moment of consumption, or in retrospect. Nevertheless, for Vivas, the experience is one. If each meaning is inscribed in the others that constitute it, what moment could be encapsulated in the definitive paraphrase that might adequately render it to the extraesthetic world? Such a work that could manipulate attention in this way would be sufficient 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 establishment 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 "reflexive cross-references" of terms that cannot be fixed are potentially illimitable. Each manifold meaning infects and modifies the others. Moreover, 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, satisfies--and stifles--the will in the play of its forms, hence stifling the activity of judgment. Thus does it preclude complete responsibility, however that may be understood. Esthetic discourse would be profoundly different from, say, the discourse of history, which is ideally capable of falsification by an appeal to extramural fact. Vivas's artwork dwells in secrecy. I would like to employ Vivas's definition 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 fluent, familiar style of saggistica, proceeds to documentary history in a pivotal moment, and climaxes his essay in the esthetic, much as Vivas defines it, with his description of the impotence that overcomes anyone who would judge a figure as complex as his chosen 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 figure 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. …