‘I was captured by the Faust Militia on December 13th 1943,’ so begins the testimonial narrative of If This is a Man which details the author, Primo Levi’s, imprisonment within Auschwitz; 1943-1944. In this essay by drawing from Levi’s account of his experiences and survival, I intend to present a discussion of the nature of testimony to traumatic events, how this relates and interplays with ideas of survival, witnessing and finally, of how such a relationship is portrayed through literature as literature.
It must be said with analysis of Levi’s testimony If This is a Man, that the text in and of itself is a narrative; a written account of connected events, and furthermore a victim’s narrative which details his and others brutal imprisonment at the time of the Holocaust. Levi’s writing of his
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There is failing of behalf of testimony as a process, characterised by structural impossibility; that the act of retelling such trauma through language fails the visceral experience of trauma on a fundamental level. In the shadow of the Holocaust, Levi’s account speaks both sub-textually and textually to the loss ‘of voice, of life, of knowledge…of truth… of the capacity to speak’ so ingrained within testimony. This inadequacy of language to such monumental trauma is one of the inbuilt problems of Levi’s testimony and in fact a representation of the failing of testimonial narratives throughout literature; the impossibility to chronicle retroactively the truth of the traumatic event. This failing on behalf of language and testimonial literature is detailed textually by Levi when in discussion with interviewer Phillip Roth he speaks of If This is a Man as a struggle ‘to explain to others and to myself the events I had been involved