The Reawakening

In the third and last installment of the Rome Book Club series about Primo Levi, Professor Barry McCrea’s discussion focused on the final chapters of the Truce. In his thought-provoking lecture, McCrea explored the notion of home-coming and reawakening as key narrative moments in the novel. The conversation went on to analyze the nature of Primo Levi’s book as a document that lays between a memoir of actual events and an account of the author’s psychological journey from death on the camps back to life. Finally, McCrea described the role of significant characters, in Levi’s narrative, who symbolize failed attempts at returning to life, such as Avesani, whose self-devouring anger prevents him from overcoming the trauma of the concentration camps. The discussion was followed, first, by a lively Q&A session that touched upon key takeaways of the novel; the audience then gathered in virtual break-out rooms, where the conversation about the Truce was resumed in smaller groups.

The discussion began by investigating key lessons derived from the novel. “This book in particular” maintained McCrea “is about learning. What we have in a concentrated, in ways disguised, form is a compendium of all that Levi learned on his journey after the war.” (3:31) In his lecture, McCrea highlighted how the account of Levi’s homecoming is a statement to the futility of the notion of coming back “no one is the same at the end of a journey as they were starting out the idea of a return itself is an illusion the house may be the same the house may still be standing but the traveler is not the same person who started out so the idea of a return in that sense is an illusion we only move ahead we never move back” (05:09). A further lesson concerned Levi’s notion of reawakening, that encompasses a more immediate meaning of moving out of some sort of slumber but also “a waking up to something difficult, to difficult things that will have to be faced and accepted. The first of these, the most important of these, is the fact that experiences cannot be narrated away, and they cannot be wished away. All experiences, whether we want them to or not, become part of ourselves we carry them within us forever”. (8.42)

McCrea went on to contextualize the genesis of the Truce in order to understand the novel’s nature and significance. Written in its almost entirety seventeen years after Levi’s homecoming, the novel, according to McCrea, does not simply account the momentary truce of the journey home from Auschwitz. Instead, the book tells about this voyage of several years, a distance “that Levi has traveled in his mind” (11:50) that allows him to draw a fundamental lesson “ the necessity, after a disaster or a traumatic interruption to life, of a truce. We need to have a ceasefire in order to begin life again after it has been interrupted.” (12:20)
In the concluding section of his lecture, McCrea invited the audience to pay particular attention to the chapter titled “the dreamers” in which the narrator, as a survivor, provides a “series of examples of people who are lost in the psychological woods, who are stuck on their psychological, journey home” (15:22) This characters include Trovati, a paranoid who replays over and over again the trail of an early trauma, as if in a loop, suggesting that the drama of persecution the sense of being persecuted needs to be laid aside this doesn’t mean that people in order to survive. Other specimens of individuals who, unlike Levi, were not able to make their psychological journey home include Avesani, who lies in permanent anger on his bunk in the middle of the room. According to McCrea, the character’s inability to move, to move on, is connected to anger “here again we can see the importance of a truce the reason why a truce a mental ceasefire a suspension of judgment and blame is necessary it’s because anger ultimately is always turned upon oneself” (17:55). The description of Levi’s characters and their failed attempts at returning to life went on to address the pauses, silences, and the impossibility of narrating traumatic events experienced many times in the book “the whole of this novel is about is one of these pauses. the Truce is like one of these pauses in which huge things, griefs, and confusions that are too vast to look at head-on, at least right away, are confronted under the surface, in the margins, and indirectly.” (23.01)