See Ulysses in relation to cycle in Romanticism: alienation, desire, transfiguration. Journeying for him is a way to transfigure

To whom does Ulysses speak to?

Is Ulysses a heroic poem? Or, is it selfishness?

Tennyson drawing from Dante's Ulisse?

Return of Ulysses (old age) to his kingdom, Ithaca. Even after returning home, he wants to explore.

Fuck!

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

Levi returned on a handful of occasions elsewhere in his work to Dante’s Ulysses, for example in another text written at the same time in 1946, the poem ‘Ostjuden’ (‘Padri nostri di questa terra, | Mercanti di molteplice ingegno, | Savi arguti dalla molta prole | Che Dio seminò per il mondo | Come nei solchi Ulisse folle il sale’ (OC II, 690)) (for more on this, see also this annotation).

In fact, he was as much, if not more drawn to the Homeric figure of Odysseus, regularly evoking his intelligence, his powers of narration and speech, and of friendship. He includes a proud speech by Odysseus in his anthology of formative books, La ricercar delle radici (OC II, 27-29).

Another poem, Partigia (1981), mentions Ulisse as a nom de guerre of an anti-Fascist Resistance partisan (‘Dove siete, partigia di tutte le valli, | Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulisse?’, OC II, 722).

RG

Levi made direct reference to Ulysses also in the poem ‘Ostjuden’, collected in Ad ora incerta (1984; OC II, 530) but composed on February 7, 1946, while he was also working on SQ. As in the chapter, the cunning Homeric hero is a figure of Jewish people, in the poem of Eastern European Jews specifically.

Ostjuden

Padri nostri di questa terra,

Mercanti di molteplice ingegno,

Savi arguti dalla molta prole

Che Dio seminò per il mondo

Come nei solchi Ulisse folle il sale:

Vi ho ritrovati per ogni dove,

Molti come la rena del mare,

Voi popolo di altera cervice,

Tenace povero seme umano.

7 febbraio 1946

EL

Ulysses can be considered as an alter ego of Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ and other passages of the writer’s works. By considering the nature of the link between the author and the classical hero, we can also clarify the reasons behind Levi’s choice of presenting to Pikolo the core episode of canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. Levi himself connects his experience to that of Ulysses in a 1973 interview, where he states: ‘[M]i ero reso conto che proprio il canto di Ulisse era abbastanza importante, perché è un’evasione anche quella: cioè ero evaso raccontando di un’altra evasione. Questo Ulisse che si strappa dalla vita quotidiana per fare un viaggio che non ha ritorno: mi sembrava che avesse una vaga analogia con la [mia realtà]’ (OC III, 988).

First, Levi underlines the parallel between his condition of deportee and that of Ulysses, driven by his nature and fate (‘fortuna’?) to embark on a journey without return. On a smaller scale, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ we also find one of the few physical movements in SQ – Primo and Jean’s trip to collect the soup. The chapter also represents a textual journey, where, while reading about Primo translating and interpreting Dante’s canto for Jean, we follow the path towards knowledge of the two characters. Finally, we can read it as a sentimental journey: the chapter is a nostos, a (temporary) memorial homecoming of the two protagonists to their homes and pre-Auschwitz lives. In the chapter, there is a constant superimposition of the experience and memory of Dante’s Ulysses with those of Levi (and Pikolo). Far from his home and family, Dante’s character sees Mount Purgatory in the distance before the shipwreck; this episode triggers in Levi the memory of the Piedmontese Alps he used to see on the horizon while going back home by train: ‘E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano…le montagne…oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’

When we consider the presence of Ulysses in Levi’s works, we should not only think of the Commedia. We must consider Homer’s Ulysses too, a character appreciated by Levi since his high-school years and often remembered in his writings and interviews. If we analyse Levi’s quotes from the Odyssey, we can find further points of contact emerging between Levi and his alter ego. We can start with the episode of Ulysses’ deception of Polyphemus, quoted explicitly in the chapter ‘L’ultimo’ in SQ. Here Levi narrates that as he was leaving the shower, ‘un fiduciario del Block si installa sulla porta, e tasta come Polifemo chi esce per sentire se è bagnato’. Primo and Alberto manage to trick the guard and even gain a generous amount of bread from their kombinacja. The common ground between the Greek hero and Levi are versatility and resourcefulness, the most famous traits of Homer’s Ulysses.

Levi considered this episode of the Odyssey crucial and included it also in his auto-anthology La ricerca delle radici with the title ‘Un uomo da nulla’. First of all, the physical description of Ulysses in the passage quoted in La ricerca delle radici – the hero is described as ‘un uomo da nulla, slombato, piccino’ – recalls Levi’s aspect in SQ. More importantly, the whole passage quoted by Levi revolves around the double name and identity of Ulysses. Introducing the excerpt, the writer notices that, while talking to Polyphemus, Ulysses ‘è fiero del suo nome, che finora aveva taciuto’. The name Nobody, chosen by Ulysses to fool the cyclops, recalls the loss of individual identity and the attribution of a new name (the number tattooed on the forearm) to Auschwitz prisoners.

In this sense, Ulysses can be seen not only as an alter ego of Levi, but also as an allegory of the Jews detained in Lagers. This is true also for some aspects of Dante’s Ulysses, as we can read in Levi’s comment to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in the notes to the school edition of SQ: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra il naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”’. In his narration of Ulysses’ shipwreck, Dante tells us that everyone on the boat is punished and dies. If we go back to consider the story of Homer’s Ulysses instead, the character could instead be an example of being ‘saved’. Having wandered for ten years, he was finally able to return to Ithaca, just as Levi managed to go back to Turin. Ulysses’ fellows represent instead the ‘drowned’, just like the majority of the prisoners detained in Levi’s barrack.

A final, crucial shared aspect linking Levi to Homer’s Ulysses is the narrative ability and the urge to relate his misadventures to others. The ethical need to share with others the trauma of Auschwitz is strong in Levi already during his detention and impelled him to write SQ. In the 1976 Appendix to the book, he remembers that ‘era talmente forte in noi il bisogno di raccontare, che il libro avevo incominciato a scriverlo là’ (OC I, 281). Levi will reconsider his previous accounts of the Lager from a new perspective in the 1970s. On several occasions, he compares the urge to communicate his experience of the concentration camp to Ulysses’ narration of his decade-long wanderings at the court of Alcinous. In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi adopts this comparison as the opening of the chapter ‘Stereotipi’, writing: ‘[È] bello sedere al caldo, davanti al cibo ed al vino, e ricordare a sé ed agli altri la fatica, il freddo e la fame: così subito cede all’urgenza del raccontare, davanti alla mensa imbandita, Ulisse alla corte del re dei Feaci’. Ulysses is seen here as a prototypical model of the oral narrator and the founder of the genre of the memorial accounts of the survivor (‘reduce’) of traumatic events. Thus, an alter ego not only of Levi as a character but also of Levi as writer.

MM

While referring principally to the hero of the Homeric epic, ‘Ulisse’ also represents the kind of moniker that could serve Italian partisans as a nom de guerre. In his 1981 poem Partigia, Primo Levi enquires into the fate of his companions in the Resistance: ‘Dove siete, partigia di tutte le valli, | Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulisse?’ Historian Sergio Luzzatto reports that Levi’s 1946 application for recognition as a partisan listed his own code name as 'Ferrero' (Luzzatto 2016, 165-66).

PB

Despite this and other gaps in his recall, Levi actually succeeds in reconstructing just under half of Dante’s narrative of the encounter with Ulysses in Inferno 26, wholly or almost wholly recalling (a notable) 26 out of 58 verses (24 complete verses, two partial) - and with remarkable accuracy.

The verses shown in bold below from Inferno 26 (85-142) are the ones Levi remembers. To explore this comparison for yourself, jump to the Dante tab.

KP

The chapter ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ ends with a shipwreck. Levi closes the chapter with the same line that Dante uses to conclude Inferno 26, ‘Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso’. (As Alberto Cavaglion has pointed out, the citation contains a significative lapsus: ‘rinchiuso’ instead of ‘richiuso’.) How should we interpret this ending? I would like to offer a creative reading that plays on the metaphorical meaning of navigation and shipwreck in Western culture.

In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg argues that humans have sought to grasp the movement of their existence above all through the metaphor of the perilous sea voyage. As the reverberations of the Greek idea of the κυβερνήτης (governor) show, navigation is a widespread metaphor for politics, philosophy, and life itself. Among these reverberations we find an ancient motto that is particularly interesting for its ambivalence and paradoxical structure: naufragium feci, bene navigavi. This motto was first mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, but we find multiple versions of it throughout European culture. To cite a couple of examples from the Italian context, I would recall Leopardi’s ‘naufragar [...] dolce’ (‘L’infinito’) and Ungaretti’s Allegria di naufragi.

How can we interpret the seeming contradictoriness of this motto? The motto calls into question the idea that shipwreck is the sign of bad navigation. On the contrary, there is a mutual implication between good navigation and shipwrecking. This is made explicit by Erasmus in the Adagium 1878:

Nunc bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci (Now that I am shipwrecked, my navigation has gone well/I’ve learnt how to navigate)

Here shipwreck is not in contrast with navigation, but is rather a necessary passage, something without which we cannot have a full and proper ‘navigation’. To put it a different way, only when we have experienced shipwreck can we claim to have navigated well. On the one hand, ‘shipwreck’ is an enriching experience, a possibility that gives meaning to every metaphorical ‘navigation’. On the other hand, in our human existence, it is impossible to navigate without ever experiencing shipwreck. In our finite, imperfect world, shipwreck is ultimately unavoidable.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest that we could read ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ through the prism of the motto naufragium feci, bene navigavi. I am not arguing that this is what Levi intended to say, but simply that this is one of the ways of reading the text. If we see ‘texts and readers as co-creators of meaning […], [whereby] interpretation becomes a co-production between actors that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meaning or representational failures’ (Felski 2015, 173-74), ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ could be read as a (metaphorical) navigation on three levels. First, Levi and Pikolo’s journey to get the soup is a navigation through the camp that provides a ‘moment of reprieve’. Second, Levi’s translation of Dante is a metaphorical navigation in the labyrinth of memory, an attempt to trace a route through a sea of oblivion. Finally, Levi’s translation is also a ‘metanavigation’, for it concerns another navigation and shipwreck, that of Ulysses. By overlapping his navigation with that of Ulysses, Levi raises crucial questions regarding the human condition and the fate of the Häftlinge in the Lager.

As in the case of Ulysses, each of the three levels of navigation ends with a shipwreck. But is Levi’s translation of Dante really a failure, or could it be read as the sign of a good navigation? In the Preface to SQ, Levi argues that when the idea that ‘every stranger is an enemy’ becomes the ‘major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The whole Lager could indeed be read through the curse of the Tower of Babel (see ‘Una buona giornata’). Translation is therefore a way of countering this course, a way of reining in the effects of Babel by restoring the humanity of the stranger and building a bridge through language, as Levi argues in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’. By translating Dante to Pikolo, then, Levi is not just recovering fragments of memory. He is countering the logic that lies at the root of the Lager and restoring – if temporarily – his and Pikolo’s humanity. The translation ends with a shipwreck, yes, but that experience – the attempt of ‘enacting’ the human through a navigation – is a good shipwreck: naufragium feci, bene navigavi.

SB

Levi wrote some brief explanatory notes of his own for a Schools edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1973. Most of these are linguistic, translating foreign words and phrases, or simply explanatory. The note here to ‘il perché’ has more substance, but has also been treated tentatively by critics, as it seems somewhat partial or incomplete as an explanation of this remarkable, climactic moment. Levi writes: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”, Ulisse per aver infranto le barriere della tradizione, i prigionieri perché hanno osato opporsi a una forza soverchiante, qual era allora l’ordine fascista in Europa. Ancora: fra le varie radici dell’antisemitismo tedesco, e quindi del Lager, c’era l’odio e il timore per l’“acutezza” intellettuale dell’ebraismo europeo, che i due giovani sentono simile a quella dei compagni di Ulisse, e di cui in quel momento si riconoscono rappresentanti ed eredi’ (OC I, 1417-18).

RG

In Inferno 26, Ulysses recounts how, as he was approaching the safety of a mountain-island in the middle of the ocean, a sudden whirlwind plunged his ship into the abyss, drowning him and all his mariners – ‘com’ altrui piacque [as pleased Another]’ (141), he comments. Reflecting on this ending, Levi lists, among the thoughts he desperately wants to share with Pikolo, the ‘cosí umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo [so human, so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism]’ that is implied in it. This is most likely the fact that, in Dante’s account, the Greek hero is struck down by the will of a god who belongs to a different time order. Perhaps, however, Levi’s ‘anachronism’ is more significant.

Odysseus, the Homeric hero, displays two contrasting impulses that drive him forward. One is his desire to return home, his nostalgia for Ithaca, his family and peace after ten years fighting the Trojan war and ten more trying, though not always convincingly, to return home. The other is his yearning to explore new lands and gain knowledge of unknown, undiscovered peoples. These impulses push him in opposite directions, keeping him wandering all over the Mediterranean for ten years. In the end, however, the centripetal force wins, and Odysseus returns home to resume his role as king, husband, father and son.

Dante is unlikely to have known the Odyssey but, being aware of the two impulses, he comes up with a concept that is absolutely brilliant. He collapses one impulse into the other – Ulysses’ desire for home, the known, and the past into a yearning for distant lands, the unknown and the future. He gives Ulysses a new, obscure but powerful purpose that urges him not back in, towards Ithaca, but out, in search of a loftier centre and home, an uninhabited world (mondo sanza gente) that he has never seen but that he, with his extraordinary intelligence, intuits must exist.

Though it may sound somewhat fanciful, Dante’s innovation is consistent with the medieval notion that a destiny is inscribed in the very name of the Greek hero. Uguccione da Pisa’s dictionary, among others, states that the name ‘Ulysses’ derives from olon xenos, an expression denoting ‘the wise man who inhabits this world as a pilgrim, a stranger’. To this information, Uguccione (d. 1210), whose work Dante knew, adds, quoting St Paul’s authority (Hebrews 13. 14), a crucial comment: 'non enim hic habemus manentem civitatem sed futuram inquirimus [For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come]'. Accordingly, Ulysses may be viewed as an exile and a pilgrim in this world, who uses his genius to seek, in Pauline terms, his true home. Coming in sight of the ultimate centre, paradise on earth, he almost breaks into the world of the Christian myth. To his eyes, it is the only land where, after five months on the open sea, he might escape death, but it belongs to another time, another space and another moral order. No wonder that he is struck down, ‘as pleased Another’. He dies tragically, while exercising the genius that defines him. He dies in a manner that is unexpected and mysterious for him, though not for Dante and his readers, who watch his final exploit knowing full well that no one may reach earthly paradise before Christ re-opens its gates. Indeed, when Ulysses’ ship crashes against the storm, something truly awesome happens: two different eras, two different ethical orders and two poetic worlds intersect and clash – the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Christian, the Homeric and the Dantean. By attempting to land on the shore of the earthly paradise before it is re-opened, Dante’s Ulysses is trying to break through the laws of time to reach an impossible destination that is in the future. The anachronism consists not just in his being stopped by the Christian God, as Levi suggests, but in his yearning to reach that God.

But then, how can Ulysses be guilty and why should he be stopped if he is searching for the supreme good? What kind of transgression has Ulysses committed? The answer comes from Thomas Aquinas who, writing about the fall of Lucifer, makes a very chilling point:

The devil sinned not by desiring something evil, but rather by desiring something good, viz., ultimate beatitude, but not in a fitting manner, that is, not in such a way as to attain it by God’s grace. (Quaestiones disputatae de malo, qu. 16, art. 3).

So, one can find damnation while looking for something good, be it knowledge, as Adam and Eve did, or power, as Lucifer did. This is Ulysses’ case as well. The difference is that Lucifer, Adam and Eve knew, Ulysses doesn’t: they are acquainted with God, Ulysses isn’t. However, Ulysses’ subjective innocence does not make him objectively less guilty. His mistake is wanting to reach God without God. A pagan and a sinner, Ulysses attempts to reach the sacred mountain by means of intelligence and strength alone. However heroic and noble, his attempt is destined to fail. Eternal bliss cannot be conquered by intelligence, nor even by virtue, for it is not enough to seek, one must be sought. As the choir of the Proud, on the first terrace of Purgatory, prays: ‘Vegna ver’ noi la pace del tuo regno, | ché noi ad essa non potem da noi, | s’ella non vien, con tutto nostro ingegno’ [May the peace of your kingdom come to us, | for we cannot attain it of ourselves | if it come not, for all our striving] (Purg. 11, 7-9).

By underlining the anachronism of Ulysses’ death, Primo Levi points the finger at his extraordinary relevance for us. Dante’s Ulysses is endowed with the mind of one whom Horkheimer and Adorno would call a follower of the Enlightenment, a free thinker, a modernist; and, while being intellectually fascinated by him, the poet shows that he runs to his undoing. His tragedy is a warning to all humans, Dante included, not to trust their intelligence alone, ‘perché non corra che virtù nol guidi [lest it run where virtue does not guide it]’ (Inf. 26, 22) – something that is becoming more and more evident in our time, when the vulnerability of modern society to its own inventions is becoming more apparent every day.

LP

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

This is a powerful moment of connection between Ulysses and Primo Levi, both in Hell for having followed their belief: Ulysses for his desire for knowledge, Levi for his rebellion against the RSI and the German occupiers. For more on this, see Giovanni Pietro Vitali’s essay, ‘Le ultime lettere di Primo Levi e i suoi compagni ad ogni passo verso Auschwitz’ (in Garullo, Rigo, Toppan 2020, 209-69).

MJ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_U._S._Grant

Early precursor to the sort of publishing and marketing work of James Patterson?

While referring principally to the hero of the Homeric epic, ‘Ulisse’ also represents the kind of moniker that could serve Italian partisans as a nom de guerre. In his 1981 poem Partigia, Primo Levi enquires into the fate of his companions in the Resistance: ‘Dove siete, partigia di tutte le valli, | Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulisse?’ Historian Sergio Luzzatto reports that Levi’s 1946 application for recognition as a partisan listed his own code name as 'Ferrero' (Luzzatto 2016, 165-66).

PB

In Inferno 26, Ulysses recounts how, as he was approaching the safety of a mountain-island in the middle of the ocean, a sudden whirlwind plunged his ship into the abyss, drowning him and all his mariners – ‘com’ altrui piacque [as pleased Another]’ (141), he comments. Reflecting on this ending, Levi lists, among the thoughts he desperately wants to share with Pikolo, the ‘cosí umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo [so human, so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism]’ that is implied in it. This is most likely the fact that, in Dante’s account, the Greek hero is struck down by the will of a god who belongs to a different time order. Perhaps, however, Levi’s ‘anachronism’ is more significant.

Odysseus, the Homeric hero, displays two contrasting impulses that drive him forward. One is his desire to return home, his nostalgia for Ithaca, his family and peace after ten years fighting the Trojan war and ten more trying, though not always convincingly, to return home. The other is his yearning to explore new lands and gain knowledge of unknown, undiscovered peoples. These impulses push him in opposite directions, keeping him wandering all over the Mediterranean for ten years. In the end, however, the centripetal force wins, and Odysseus returns home to resume his role as king, husband, father and son.

Dante is unlikely to have known the Odyssey but, being aware of the two impulses, he comes up with a concept that is absolutely brilliant. He collapses one impulse into the other – Ulysses’ desire for home, the known, and the past into a yearning for distant lands, the unknown and the future. He gives Ulysses a new, obscure but powerful purpose that urges him not back in, towards Ithaca, but out, in search of a loftier centre and home, an uninhabited world (mondo sanza gente) that he has never seen but that he, with his extraordinary intelligence, intuits must exist.

Though it may sound somewhat fanciful, Dante’s innovation is consistent with the medieval notion that a destiny is inscribed in the very name of the Greek hero. Uguccione da Pisa’s dictionary, among others, states that the name ‘Ulysses’ derives from olon xenos, an expression denoting ‘the wise man who inhabits this world as a pilgrim, a stranger’. To this information, Uguccione (d. 1210), whose work Dante knew, adds, quoting St Paul’s authority (Hebrews 13. 14), a crucial comment: 'non enim hic habemus manentem civitatem sed futuram inquirimus [For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come]'. Accordingly, Ulysses may be viewed as an exile and a pilgrim in this world, who uses his genius to seek, in Pauline terms, his true home. Coming in sight of the ultimate centre, paradise on earth, he almost breaks into the world of the Christian myth. To his eyes, it is the only land where, after five months on the open sea, he might escape death, but it belongs to another time, another space and another moral order. No wonder that he is struck down, ‘as pleased Another’. He dies tragically, while exercising the genius that defines him. He dies in a manner that is unexpected and mysterious for him, though not for Dante and his readers, who watch his final exploit knowing full well that no one may reach earthly paradise before Christ re-opens its gates. Indeed, when Ulysses’ ship crashes against the storm, something truly awesome happens: two different eras, two different ethical orders and two poetic worlds intersect and clash – the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Christian, the Homeric and the Dantean. By attempting to land on the shore of the earthly paradise before it is re-opened, Dante’s Ulysses is trying to break through the laws of time to reach an impossible destination that is in the future. The anachronism consists not just in his being stopped by the Christian God, as Levi suggests, but in his yearning to reach that God.

But then, how can Ulysses be guilty and why should he be stopped if he is searching for the supreme good? What kind of transgression has Ulysses committed? The answer comes from Thomas Aquinas who, writing about the fall of Lucifer, makes a very chilling point:

The devil sinned not by desiring something evil, but rather by desiring something good, viz., ultimate beatitude, but not in a fitting manner, that is, not in such a way as to attain it by God’s grace. (Quaestiones disputatae de malo, qu. 16, art. 3).

So, one can find damnation while looking for something good, be it knowledge, as Adam and Eve did, or power, as Lucifer did. This is Ulysses’ case as well. The difference is that Lucifer, Adam and Eve knew, Ulysses doesn’t: they are acquainted with God, Ulysses isn’t. However, Ulysses’ subjective innocence does not make him objectively less guilty. His mistake is wanting to reach God without God. A pagan and a sinner, Ulysses attempts to reach the sacred mountain by means of intelligence and strength alone. However heroic and noble, his attempt is destined to fail. Eternal bliss cannot be conquered by intelligence, nor even by virtue, for it is not enough to seek, one must be sought. As the choir of the Proud, on the first terrace of Purgatory, prays: ‘Vegna ver’ noi la pace del tuo regno, | ché noi ad essa non potem da noi, | s’ella non vien, con tutto nostro ingegno’ [May the peace of your kingdom come to us, | for we cannot attain it of ourselves | if it come not, for all our striving] (Purg. 11, 7-9).

By underlining the anachronism of Ulysses’ death, Primo Levi points the finger at his extraordinary relevance for us. Dante’s Ulysses is endowed with the mind of one whom Horkheimer and Adorno would call a follower of the Enlightenment, a free thinker, a modernist; and, while being intellectually fascinated by him, the poet shows that he runs to his undoing. His tragedy is a warning to all humans, Dante included, not to trust their intelligence alone, ‘perché non corra che virtù nol guidi [lest it run where virtue does not guide it]’ (Inf. 26, 22) – something that is becoming more and more evident in our time, when the vulnerability of modern society to its own inventions is becoming more apparent every day.

LP

The chapter ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ ends with a shipwreck. Levi closes the chapter with the same line that Dante uses to conclude Inferno 26, ‘Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso’. (As Alberto Cavaglion has pointed out, the citation contains a significative lapsus: ‘rinchiuso’ instead of ‘richiuso’.) How should we interpret this ending? I would like to offer a creative reading that plays on the metaphorical meaning of navigation and shipwreck in Western culture.

In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg argues that humans have sought to grasp the movement of their existence above all through the metaphor of the perilous sea voyage. As the reverberations of the Greek idea of the κυβερνήτης (governor) show, navigation is a widespread metaphor for politics, philosophy, and life itself. Among these reverberations we find an ancient motto that is particularly interesting for its ambivalence and paradoxical structure: naufragium feci, bene navigavi. This motto was first mentioned by Diogenes Laertius, but we find multiple versions of it throughout European culture. To cite a couple of examples from the Italian context, I would recall Leopardi’s ‘naufragar [...] dolce’ (‘L’infinito’) and Ungaretti’s Allegria di naufragi.

How can we interpret the seeming contradictoriness of this motto? The motto calls into question the idea that shipwreck is the sign of bad navigation. On the contrary, there is a mutual implication between good navigation and shipwrecking. This is made explicit by Erasmus in the Adagium 1878:

Nunc bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci (Now that I am shipwrecked, my navigation has gone well/I’ve learnt how to navigate)

Here shipwreck is not in contrast with navigation, but is rather a necessary passage, something without which we cannot have a full and proper ‘navigation’. To put it a different way, only when we have experienced shipwreck can we claim to have navigated well. On the one hand, ‘shipwreck’ is an enriching experience, a possibility that gives meaning to every metaphorical ‘navigation’. On the other hand, in our human existence, it is impossible to navigate without ever experiencing shipwreck. In our finite, imperfect world, shipwreck is ultimately unavoidable.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest that we could read ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in SQ through the prism of the motto naufragium feci, bene navigavi. I am not arguing that this is what Levi intended to say, but simply that this is one of the ways of reading the text. If we see ‘texts and readers as co-creators of meaning […], [whereby] interpretation becomes a co-production between actors that brings new things to light rather than an endless rumination on a text’s hidden meaning or representational failures’ (Felski 2015, 173-74), ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ could be read as a (metaphorical) navigation on three levels. First, Levi and Pikolo’s journey to get the soup is a navigation through the camp that provides a ‘moment of reprieve’. Second, Levi’s translation of Dante is a metaphorical navigation in the labyrinth of memory, an attempt to trace a route through a sea of oblivion. Finally, Levi’s translation is also a ‘metanavigation’, for it concerns another navigation and shipwreck, that of Ulysses. By overlapping his navigation with that of Ulysses, Levi raises crucial questions regarding the human condition and the fate of the Häftlinge in the Lager.

As in the case of Ulysses, each of the three levels of navigation ends with a shipwreck. But is Levi’s translation of Dante really a failure, or could it be read as the sign of a good navigation? In the Preface to SQ, Levi argues that when the idea that ‘every stranger is an enemy’ becomes the ‘major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager’. The whole Lager could indeed be read through the curse of the Tower of Babel (see ‘Una buona giornata’). Translation is therefore a way of countering this course, a way of reining in the effects of Babel by restoring the humanity of the stranger and building a bridge through language, as Levi argues in ‘Tradurre ed essere tradotti’. By translating Dante to Pikolo, then, Levi is not just recovering fragments of memory. He is countering the logic that lies at the root of the Lager and restoring – if temporarily – his and Pikolo’s humanity. The translation ends with a shipwreck, yes, but that experience – the attempt of ‘enacting’ the human through a navigation – is a good shipwreck: naufragium feci, bene navigavi.

SB

Very often, when we think about ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we tend to recall only the most famous pages in which Levi tries to remember Dante’s canto. The depth and sense of urgency of the Ulyssean passages are so overwhelming and passionate that they may distract us from other elements in the chapter. However, if we go back to the text and read it closely, we cannot avoid noticing that, after a brief opening in which Levi introduces Pikolo and narrates how he came to be Pikolo’s ‘fortunate’ chaperone to collect the soup for the day, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ also dwells quite significantly on a moment of domestic memories. While going to the kitchens, Levi writes: ‘Si vedevano i Carpazi coperti di neve. Respirai l’aria fresca, mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’. This is the first moment in the chapter in which Levi refers to the mountains as something that revitalises him and makes him feel fresh and light, both physically and mentally.

This moment foreshadows another, also in this chapter, when Levi goes back to his mountains, those close to Turin, and compares them to the mountain that the protagonist of Dante’s canto, Ulysses, encounters just before his shipwreck with his companions:

... Quando mi apparve una montagna, bruna

Per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto

Che mai veduta non ne avevo alcuna.

Sì, sì, ‘alta tanto’, non ‘molto alta’, proposizione consecutiva. E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano... le montagne... oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino! Basta, bisogna proseguire, queste sono cose che si pensano ma non si dicono. Pikolo attende e mi guarda. Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare ‘non ne avevo alcuna’ col finale.

The significance of the mountains in Levi’s narration is confirmed in this passage. For him, the mountains represent his experience of belonging, his youthful years, and his work as a chemist – the job he was doing when he commuted by train from Turin to Milan. At the same time, Levi’s own memories of the mountains intertwine and overlap with another mountain, Dante’s Mount Purgatory. Here, a deep and perhaps not fully conscious intertextual game starts to emerge and to characterise Levi’s writing. The lines that Levi does not remember are these:

Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto,

ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque,

e percosse del legno il primo canto.

For Dante’s Ulysses, Mount Purgatory signifies the final moment of his adventure and his desire for knowledge. The marvel and enthusiasm that Ulysses and his company feel when they see the mountain is suddenly transformed into its contrary. From the mountain, a storm originates that will destroy the ship and swallow its crew: ‘Tre volte il fe’ girar con tutte l’acque, | Alla quarta levar la poppa in suso | E la prora ire in giù, come altrui piacque’. Dante’s Mount Purgatory, so majestic and spectacular, represents the end of any desire for knowledge that aims to find new answers to and interpretations of human existence in the world without God’s word.

Going back to Levi’s text, we find that, instead, in a kind of reverse overlapping between his image and that of Ulysses, the image of the mountain of Purgatory suggests to Levi a very different set of thoughts that, although seemingly and similarly overwhelming, opens up new interpretations: ‘altro ancora, qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto, nell’intuizione di un attimo, forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. For a moment, it is almost as if Levi, a new Dantean Ulysses in a new Inferno, stands in front of Mount Purgatory and forgets the terzine and the shipwreck. Maybe Levi cannot or does not want to remember those terzine because the mountain in Purgatory represents something very different for him than for Dante’s Ulysses. Levi’s view of the mountain does not lead to a moment of recognition of sin, as it does in Dante’s Ulysses. For him, the mountain, like his mountain range, is the gateway to knowledge, enrichment, and illumination and to a world that lies beyond the imposed limits of traditional, constricting, and distorted views and that awaits discovery (‘qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto’). Something about and beyond the Lager.

To better understand how the mountains are central in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we have to remember that Levi’s view of the mountains strongly depends on his anti-Fascism, which he expressed particularly vigorously in two moments of his life: during his months in the Resistance, just before he was captured and sent to Fossoli, and, even more intensely, during the adventures of his youth, when he was a free young man who enjoyed climbing the mountains surrounding Turin. As Alberto Papuzzi has suggested, ‘le radici del suo rapporto con la montagna sono ben piantate in quella stagione più lontana: radici intellettuali di cittadino che cercava sulla montagna, nella montagna, suggestioni e risposte che non trovava nella vita, o meglio nell’atmosfera ispessita di quella vita torinese, senza passato e senza futuro’ (OC III, 426-27). Indeed, reports Papuzzi, Levi confirms that:

Avevo anche provato a quel tempo a scrivere un racconto di montagna […]. C’era tutta l’epica della montagna, e la metafisica dell’alpinismo. La montagna come chiave di tutto. Volevo rappresentare la sensazione che si prova quando si sale avendo di fronte la linea della montagna che chiude l’orizzonte: tu sali, non vedi che questa linea, non vedi altro, poi improvvisamente la valichi, ti trovi dall’altra parte, e in pochi secondi vedi un mondo nuovo, sei in un mondo nuovo. Ecco, avevo cercato di esprimere questo: il valico.

The heart of that epic story made its way into the chapter ‘Ferro’ in Il sistema periodico. The discovery of this (brave) new world, ‘mondo nuovo’, is an integral part and a direct achievement of Levi’s experience in the mountains. The mountains open a new understanding and a new perspective on the world.

Something that escapes common understanding is revealed through the experience of the mountains, both in Levi’s memories of his youth and in his literary recounting of Auschwitz. Reciting Dante in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ is therefore not only an intertextual exercise for Levi. Only by inserting Levi’s literary references in the complexity of his own experience – before, during, and after Auschwitz – can we fully capture the depth of his reflections. Levi mentally and metaphorically brought to Auschwitz not only Dante but also his ‘metafisica dell’alpinismo’. Together, they contributed to his attempt to come to terms with that reality.

VG

Levi wrote some brief explanatory notes of his own for a Schools edition of SQ, published by Einaudi in 1973. Most of these are linguistic, translating foreign words and phrases, or simply explanatory. The note here to ‘il perché’ has more substance, but has also been treated tentatively by critics, as it seems somewhat partial or incomplete as an explanation of this remarkable, climactic moment. Levi writes: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”, Ulisse per aver infranto le barriere della tradizione, i prigionieri perché hanno osato opporsi a una forza soverchiante, qual era allora l’ordine fascista in Europa. Ancora: fra le varie radici dell’antisemitismo tedesco, e quindi del Lager, c’era l’odio e il timore per l’“acutezza” intellettuale dell’ebraismo europeo, che i due giovani sentono simile a quella dei compagni di Ulisse, e di cui in quel momento si riconoscono rappresentanti ed eredi’ (OC I, 1417-18).

RG

Ulysses can be considered as an alter ego of Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ and other passages of the writer’s works. By considering the nature of the link between the author and the classical hero, we can also clarify the reasons behind Levi’s choice of presenting to Pikolo the core episode of canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. Levi himself connects his experience to that of Ulysses in a 1973 interview, where he states: ‘[M]i ero reso conto che proprio il canto di Ulisse era abbastanza importante, perché è un’evasione anche quella: cioè ero evaso raccontando di un’altra evasione. Questo Ulisse che si strappa dalla vita quotidiana per fare un viaggio che non ha ritorno: mi sembrava che avesse una vaga analogia con la [mia realtà]’ (OC III, 988).

First, Levi underlines the parallel between his condition of deportee and that of Ulysses, driven by his nature and fate (‘fortuna’?) to embark on a journey without return. On a smaller scale, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ we also find one of the few physical movements in SQ – Primo and Jean’s trip to collect the soup. The chapter also represents a textual journey, where, while reading about Primo translating and interpreting Dante’s canto for Jean, we follow the path towards knowledge of the two characters. Finally, we can read it as a sentimental journey: the chapter is a nostos, a (temporary) memorial homecoming of the two protagonists to their homes and pre-Auschwitz lives. In the chapter, there is a constant superimposition of the experience and memory of Dante’s Ulysses with those of Levi (and Pikolo). Far from his home and family, Dante’s character sees Mount Purgatory in the distance before the shipwreck; this episode triggers in Levi the memory of the Piedmontese Alps he used to see on the horizon while going back home by train: ‘E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano…le montagne…oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’

When we consider the presence of Ulysses in Levi’s works, we should not only think of the Commedia. We must consider Homer’s Ulysses too, a character appreciated by Levi since his high-school years and often remembered in his writings and interviews. If we analyse Levi’s quotes from the Odyssey, we can find further points of contact emerging between Levi and his alter ego. We can start with the episode of Ulysses’ deception of Polyphemus, quoted explicitly in the chapter ‘L’ultimo’ in SQ. Here Levi narrates that as he was leaving the shower, ‘un fiduciario del Block si installa sulla porta, e tasta come Polifemo chi esce per sentire se è bagnato’. Primo and Alberto manage to trick the guard and even gain a generous amount of bread from their kombinacja. The common ground between the Greek hero and Levi are versatility and resourcefulness, the most famous traits of Homer’s Ulysses.

Levi considered this episode of the Odyssey crucial and included it also in his auto-anthology La ricerca delle radici with the title ‘Un uomo da nulla’. First of all, the physical description of Ulysses in the passage quoted in La ricerca delle radici – the hero is described as ‘un uomo da nulla, slombato, piccino’ – recalls Levi’s aspect in SQ. More importantly, the whole passage quoted by Levi revolves around the double name and identity of Ulysses. Introducing the excerpt, the writer notices that, while talking to Polyphemus, Ulysses ‘è fiero del suo nome, che finora aveva taciuto’. The name Nobody, chosen by Ulysses to fool the cyclops, recalls the loss of individual identity and the attribution of a new name (the number tattooed on the forearm) to Auschwitz prisoners.

In this sense, Ulysses can be seen not only as an alter ego of Levi, but also as an allegory of the Jews detained in Lagers. This is true also for some aspects of Dante’s Ulysses, as we can read in Levi’s comment to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in the notes to the school edition of SQ: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra il naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”’. In his narration of Ulysses’ shipwreck, Dante tells us that everyone on the boat is punished and dies. If we go back to consider the story of Homer’s Ulysses instead, the character could instead be an example of being ‘saved’. Having wandered for ten years, he was finally able to return to Ithaca, just as Levi managed to go back to Turin. Ulysses’ fellows represent instead the ‘drowned’, just like the majority of the prisoners detained in Levi’s barrack.

A final, crucial shared aspect linking Levi to Homer’s Ulysses is the narrative ability and the urge to relate his misadventures to others. The ethical need to share with others the trauma of Auschwitz is strong in Levi already during his detention and impelled him to write SQ. In the 1976 Appendix to the book, he remembers that ‘era talmente forte in noi il bisogno di raccontare, che il libro avevo incominciato a scriverlo là’ (OC I, 281). Levi will reconsider his previous accounts of the Lager from a new perspective in the 1970s. On several occasions, he compares the urge to communicate his experience of the concentration camp to Ulysses’ narration of his decade-long wanderings at the court of Alcinous. In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi adopts this comparison as the opening of the chapter ‘Stereotipi’, writing: ‘[È] bello sedere al caldo, davanti al cibo ed al vino, e ricordare a sé ed agli altri la fatica, il freddo e la fame: così subito cede all’urgenza del raccontare, davanti alla mensa imbandita, Ulisse alla corte del re dei Feaci’. Ulysses is seen here as a prototypical model of the oral narrator and the founder of the genre of the memorial accounts of the survivor (‘reduce’) of traumatic events. Thus, an alter ego not only of Levi as a character but also of Levi as writer.

MM

Levi’s encounter with Ulysses in Auschwitz centres around his painful yet exhilarating struggle to reconstruct Dante’s text from memory. But when Levi talks of his hope that, despite his inadequate rendering, Pikolo ‘got the message’, he is pointing at something other than pure philology. Uttered in the death camp, Dante’s words shine through the dust of school commentary. This estrangement effect triggers a kind of epiphany: ‘ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’. The momentary sense of liberation Levi derives from owning and sharing Dante’s sublime language has been interpreted as a celebration of humanist values that however fails to recognise the way in which these values are entangled with the very structures of domination that created the Lager (Druker 2004). Yet Levi never provides a univocal interpretation of ‘the message’ of Ulysses’ story. In fact, the episode has had a ‘bifurcated’ critical reception and its meaning has been contested since the Middle Ages (Barolini 2018). Moreover, the figure of Dante in general and his figuration of Ulysses in particular became central to Fascism’s nationalist cultural programme, something Levi could hardly have missed.

As with other protagonists of the Inferno, the issue has been how to reconcile Ulysses’ heroic stature as a character with the fact that he is ultimately condemned as an unrepentant sinner. While the prevalent opinion among early commentators of the Commedia was that Ulysses was a transgressor, there were some who presented him as an admirable figure. Cristoforo Landino calls Ulysses’ speech ‘honest and honourable’. Bernardino Daniello notes that the ancient myth of the ne plus ultra was ‘a false and futile belief’. On the other hand, not all modern critics praise Ulysses’ daring. John Ruskin warily observes that humans are yet to learn the ‘danger of this novelty of wisdom’. Still, it is in the modern period that a more positive view of Ulysses’ intellectual hubris starts to gain traction.

The frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is often cited as the symbolic watershed between medieval deference to traditional beliefs and the modern project of exploration and innovation. This frontispiece depicts a ship which is about to pass through the pillars of Hercules, just like Dante imagined Ulysses and his crew dared to do. Another ship, near the horizon, is also approaching. Below the depiction of the ships, a Latin motto, taken from the Vulgate, recites: ‘Many shall pass through and knowledge shall be increased’. There is no indication of shipwreck; on the contrary, the ships move confidently ahead in full sail. The world has entered a new era and the ancient prohibition has become void: ‘these times may justly bear in their word […] plus ultra, in precedence of the ancient non ultra’ (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)).

To Horkheimer and Adorno, Bacon is the ‘herald’ of the modern belief that ‘knowledge, which is power, knows no limits’ – a principle that, taken to its extreme logical conclusion, leads to the gates of Auschwitz. Had Ulysses gone under, as Dante decreed, the world would have been a better place. However, the postmodern critique of rationalism disregards another, parallel line that connects Enlightenment conceptions of the human to emancipatory discourses in both politics and aesthetics. The revolutionary and Romantic era gave us many versions of the self-sacrificing heroes of knowledge, striving for the emancipation of humankind. Shelley’s Prometheus ‘gave men speech, and speech created thought | Which is the measure of the universe. | And Science struck the thrones of earth and heaven | […] for which he hangs | Withering in destined pain’ (Prometheus Unbound). As Dante does with the Homeric story, Shelley rewrites and extends a classical myth in a way that challenges the idea that knowledge is sinful or transgressive. In the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley declares he would ‘rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley [eighteenth-century theologian] and Malthus’. Shelley also names Dante as one of the stylistic predecessors to his own use of imagery ‘drawn from the operations of the human mind’. In his readings of the Commedia, Shelley was particularly attracted to similes that illuminate ways of seeing and knowing. But a shadow of Dante’s ambivalence lingers in Shelley’s suggestion that his Prometheus is similar to Milton’s Satan, minus the ‘taints of ambition […] and personal aggrandisement’.

From his long English exile, the Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini contributed to making Dante into a national icon at the service of the Italian Risorgimento. In The Duties of Man, he defines humans as ‘creatures capable of rational, social, and intellectual progress’, warning his readers that ‘you descend to the level of brutes whenever you suppress, or allow to be suppressed any of the faculties that constitute human nature either in yourself or others’ (Mazzini 1892, 45). ‘Brutes’ (‘bruti’) is Dante’s term, and the passage as a whole reads like an extended paraphrase of Ulysses’ ‘orazion picciola’, whose rhetoric Mazzini puts to work here in support of ‘the emancipation of Woman [and] of the working man’ (146).

Mazzini’s duties of man were recast into the Fascist doctrine of the primacy of the state over the individual. The canto of Ulysses was similarly enlisted to the cult of Italian exceptionalism and imperial conquest. Responding to a survey to establish which was the most popular passage of the Commedia, Mussolini apparently nominated the line ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’. The quotation struck some as scarily apposite. In the clandestine paper ‘Il Ribelle’ of 31 October 1944, the anti-fascist priest don Giacomo Vender, writing under the pseudonym Sancio Empörer, used the same verse to expose il Duce’s seductive lies: ‘Fascism’s great accomplishment has been to dress its sick [‘folle’] idea of life, humanity, nation and religion in seductive attitudes. [Everything] was made into a wing to hurl ourselves […] beyond the pillars of Hercules…de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo’.

Levi leaves out the line altogether. His act of subversion is even more radical: as the Resistance fighters, he feels that Dante’s text is ‘about us’, but the role he chooses for himself is not that of the acquiescent victim, one of Ulysses’ anonymous crew. He writes himself and his fellow prisoner as the heroic, tragic protagonists of Ulysses’ ‘shipwreck with spectator’ (Blumberg). Far from being complicit with the master narrative of Fascism, Levi invokes Dante in the death camp to liberate and reclaim his words and restore to them all the force of their moral questioning.

RMuc

Levi returned on a handful of occasions elsewhere in his work to Dante’s Ulysses, for example in another text written at the same time in 1946, the poem ‘Ostjuden’ (‘Padri nostri di questa terra, | Mercanti di molteplice ingegno, | Savi arguti dalla molta prole | Che Dio seminò per il mondo | Come nei solchi Ulisse folle il sale’ (OC II, 690)).

In fact, he was as much, if not more drawn to the Homeric figure of Odysseus, regularly evoking his intelligence, his powers of narration and speech, and of friendship. He includes a proud speech by Odysseus in his anthology of formative books, La ricercar delle radici (OC II, 27-29).

Another poem, ‘Patrigia’ (1981), mentions Ulisse as a nom de guerre of an anti-Fascist Resistance partisan (‘Dove siete, partigia di tutte le valli, | Tarzan, Riccio, Sparviero, Saetta, Ulisse?’, OC II, 722).

RG

This is a powerful moment of connection between Ulisse and Primo Levi, both in Hell for having followed their belief: Ulysses for his desire for knowledge, Levi for his rebellion against the RSI and the German occupiers. For more on this, see Giovanni Pietro Vitali’s essay, ‘Le ultime lettere di Primo Levi e i suoi compagni ad ogni passo verso Auschwitz’ (in Garullo, Rigo, Toppan 2020, 209-69).

MJ

Levi made direct reference to Ulysses also in the poem ‘Ostjuden’, collected in Ad ora incerta (1984; OC II, 530) but composed on February 7, 1946, while he was also working on SQ. As in the chapter, the cunning Homeric hero is a figure of Jewish people, in the poem of Eastern European Jews specifically.

Ostjuden

Padri nostri di questa terra,

Mercanti di molteplice ingegno,

Savi arguti dalla molta prole

Che Dio seminò per il mondo

Come nei solchi Ulisse folle il sale:

Vi ho ritrovati per ogni dove,

Molti come la rena del mare,

Voi popolo di altera cervice,

Tenace povero seme umano.

7 febbraio 1946

EL

so strange... i was searching 'gold' and came across this phrase inverted as one of Leopold's musings. then i realized a version of this phrase — gold by bronze, or bronze by gold — recurs throughout the novel.

https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000781769

National Library of Ireland has digitised a first edition copy of Ulysses (Alan Clodd copy, number 120)

https://hellotimking.com/2020/05/bear-a-three-year-journey/

This seems a bit analogous to Peggy McIntosh's Backpack of White Privilege I was looking at yesterday.

cf. White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack' and 'Some Notes for Facilitators' | National SEED Project

Ulysses S. Grant

I have Enda Duffy's The Subaltern Ulysses from UCC Library. I intend to look for possible arguments or thesis ideas in his works, and perhaps I can see if there is a connection here between Wollaeger's mention of Spivak's subaltern argument.