A sombra dos submersos

Abstract

The division between the drowned and the saved is the key division of Primo Levi's worldview. The “internal submerged” (Di Castro) present in every survivor unfolds in the submerged as Doppelgänger, an internal voice oscillating between the metaphor of a persecutory shadow (present in his poetry) and the representation of his brotherly friend Alberto.
The urgency of the testimony is faced with the question of how to represent the drowned, the only ones who  could return a truly comprehensive testimony. However, the writer finds a “surviving word” (Derrida) to probe the facets of shame, interrogate the ghosts of guilt and outline the “grey zone”.
Despite this insurmountable wound, Levi refuses the idea of ​​a deserved privilege, nor does he need the comfort of divine providence: several factors contributed to his salvation, but the forces at work are chance and luck. Since Fortuna, as Robert Gordon points out, is a mythical force that our culture has always used to deal with the incomprehensible and uncontrollable reality, in the case of the survivor it fills the distressing absence of explanations; in Levi it ​​becomes a support point to combat the feeling of guilt and to compose the literary representation of events.
Survival is, therefore, something "strange". Origin, evolution, adaptation, natural selection, clash between order and chaos converge in the short story “Carbono” and demonstrate that, after all, the pole of greatest attraction of all his production is the question: who survives and why?