4 - Sisyphus, Levi, and Job at Auschwitz
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
What would Sisyphus do, who would Sisyphus be, at Auschwitz? One wants to say Primo Levi, but that doesn't quite work. Sisyphus, at least as interpreted by Camus (1955, 123), is the hero capable of creating meaning out of the absurdity of his own situation. This was widely held to be Levi's achievement as well. As one critic said, Levi's is:
…a triumph over the experience of Auschwitz.…Levi has given us the sense of what it was to survive, not as victims, but “as men made to follow after excellence and knowledge.”
The internal quote comes from “The Canto of Ulysses,” a chapter in Survival in Auschwitz (1996), in which Levi struggles to translate a passage from the Divine Comedy into French as he walks through half a mile of snow with Jean, the Pikolo (or youngest inmate), to collect the day's soup ration for his work group. The publisher's blurb on the jacket of The Drowned and the Saved (1988), in many ways an even darker book, goes further:
A wondrous celebration of life…a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit and humanity's capacity to defeat death through meaningful work, morality, and art.
No wonder Levi's suicide was such a shock. As Elizabeth Macklin (1987) said in The New Yorker, “our fear was that the efficacy of his words had somehow been cancelled by his death – that his hope, or faith, was no longer usable by the rest of us.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- After the HolocaustThe Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction, pp. 94 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009