THE PERIODIC TABLE (Il sistema periodico)

Memoir by Primo Levi, 1975

Perhaps the most brilliantly inventive formally of all of Primo Levi's works, Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table,1984), originally published in 1975, is a sort of personal memoir—not an autobiography but "in some fashion a history," as Levi himself puts it. It consists of 21 chapters, each of whose titles is one of the elements in the periodic table, the first being "Argon," and the final one "Carbon." Each chapter focuses on a major issue, event, or figure in his life, or some combination of these.

In the first chapter Levi constructs a sort of genealogy for himself as a man of words, an intellectual, and a Jew by reporting and reflecting on phrases associated with various of his ancestors from the time they migrated from Spain after the expulsion of 1492 up to the generation before his own. Each of the phrases he introduces connects with one phase or another of the experience of a Jew in a Christian world. The words and phrases show, in short, the pressure of social experience and are only intelligible given that context. The chapter is concerned as well with other marks of difference—dietary practices, for example. The tone is often wry and ironic but never unserious; in a way characteristic of Levi the account asks the reader to be ready to decipher fugitive and oblique clues to the experience of others, if we are ever to communicate with and to treat one another humanely.

The chapters that follow open sequentially on Levi's life from age 16 (in the second chapter, "Hydrogen") to past age 48 (where the reader finds him, in 1967, in the penultimate chapter, "Vanadium"). He does not deal at length with his time in Auschwitz. The chapter "Cerium" refers to that period, but Levi refrains from large and direct engagement with it here, remarking simply, "The fact that I, a chemist, have lived a different season has been narrated elsewhere" (referring to Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening ). But the whole book is pervaded by the approach to the experience of Auschwitz, its results in his life, and its traces in language and society more generally. Nowhere is this more evident than in the two chapters "Lead" and "Mercury," which were written before his capture and are here inserted into a book of retrospect. These chapters—one on a mysterious disease that causes early death generation after generation in a proud family of traders, the second a story of marriage—show the huge pressures about death within a genetic line and about marriage that the young Levi was feeling as the racial laws in Italy were taking effect.

Mixings and separations, then, are the constant theme of this book, as are the effects of trace elements in chemical (and social) experience. The point is made repeatedly that to understand we must decipher traces, reconstitute the combination of elements in which they had their original context, and study the effect to which (sometimes in the long term) they contribute. To forget, to lose a grip on the facts, and, worse, to practice "willed ignorance" of, say, conditions in Auschwitz, is, in Levi's view, to invite disaster in social reactions, just as such ignorance can lead to deadly explosions in chemical reactions; "Vanadium" is perhaps the most effective chapter in making this point.

The final chapter, "Carbon," is a small masterpiece on the importance of trace elements in the conditions of life. Levi is obviously thinking of the way in which Jews, and other minorities, relatively rare elements in the composition of society, nonetheless are indispensable as conditions of its possibility. That chapter takes up too a question that looms large in Levi's response to Auschwitz—the question of responsibility. What, is the question, is the relationship between materially determined chains of events and free choice, if it exists at all? Levi creates a mini-epic, an odyssey, that recounts the travels of an atom of carbon from its inert state "hundreds of millions of years ago" to the point where it powers mental synapses in himself as a writer, in a "labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos." In that process it also directs his hand as he writes The Periodic Table, whose last chapter he ends with a period, a dot of carbon ink, to which he calls our attention. His responsibility as a writer of witness and our responsibility as readers come together in our common attention to what is signified by the multiplied millions of traces of carbon that end here with that dot of ink.

—Ralph G. Williams