Primo Levi's Chernobyl: Ecology and Trauma in The Reawakening

IF 0.8 2区文学 0 LITERATURE

New Literary History Pub Date : 2021-08-12 DOI:10.1353/nlh.2021.0015

A. Slater

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Abstract

Abstract:This essay follows Primo Levi's journey home to Italy after the liberation of Auschwitz, as narrated in his 1963 memoir The Reawakening [La tregua]. Levi's repatriation convoy bound for Italy under Soviet guard traveled inexplicably east instead of south, traversing and being detained within the landscape of the Pripet Marshes. As Europe's largest wetlands, the nearly impassible Pripet Marshes had stalled a Nazi advance into Russia and saw partisan fighting in both World Wars. This essay examines Levi's journey into the Pripet Marshes through two temporal frames--both its haunted legacy of genocidal pogroms, as well as its near future: the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Traumatic overlays resonate across Levi's memoir of the cease-fire interval after the war, an uneasy peace Levi terms a "parenthesis of unlimited availability" (p. 206). Thinking through Levi's writing on the afterlife of trauma, Freud's concept of the "uncanny" is employed alongside trauma theory to illuminate a traumatic anamorphosis emerging from Levi's text. This essay pursues an ecological reading of trauma to gather traces strewn across human, nonhuman, and inhuman landscapes of annihilation.

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普里莫·李维的切尔诺贝利：觉醒中的生态与创伤

摘要：这篇文章讲述了普里莫·李维在奥斯威辛解放后回到意大利的旅程，正如他1963年的回忆录《觉醒》所述。李维的遣返车队在苏联的护卫下前往意大利，莫名其妙地向东而不是向南行进，穿越普里佩特沼泽并被拘留在那里。作为欧洲最大的湿地，几乎毫无生气的普里佩特沼泽阻碍了纳粹向俄罗斯的推进，并在两次世界大战中都发生了党派斗争。这篇文章通过两个时间框架来审视李维进入普里佩特沼泽的旅程——既有其种族灭绝大屠杀的遗留问题，也有其不久的将来：1986年切尔诺贝利灾难的发生地。创伤的叠加在李维关于战后停火间隔的回忆录中引起了共鸣，李维将这种不安的和平称为“无限可用的括号”（第206页）。通过李维关于创伤的来生的写作，弗洛伊德的“不可思议”概念与创伤理论一起被用来阐明李维文本中出现的创伤变形。这篇文章追求对创伤的生态解读，以收集散布在人类、非人类和非人类毁灭景观中的痕迹。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

New Literary History LITERATURE-

CiteScore

1.50

自引率

11.10%

发文量

期刊介绍： New Literary History focuses on questions of theory, method, interpretation, and literary history. Rather than espousing a single ideology or intellectual framework, it canvasses a wide range of scholarly concerns. By examining the bases of criticism, the journal provokes debate on the relations between literary and cultural texts and present needs. A major international forum for scholarly exchange, New Literary History has received six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.