La «tendenziosità» del gioco linguistico nel componimento leviano “Il primo Atlante”

Abstract

Starting from the analysis of some of the verbal and onomastic games sequences on which is built Il primo Atlante, a Primo Levi’s composition written in 1980 and later merged into the poetic collection of 1984, At Uncertain Hour, the paper, probing the more properly figurative outcomes of these linguistic devices intend to question the dynamics of a style, such as the Levian one, programmatically predisposed to formal clarity and to the argumentative intelligibility to detect semantic densities not always immediately explicit. In this sense, a text in many ways eccentric in Levi’s production, provides a heuristically useful trace to reread its work in the light of a potential «tendentiousness» that not only, as suggested by the Francesco Orlando’s Freudian lesson, “invents” «compromise formations», but creates «classes» (as another important Freudian lesson, the Ignacio Matte Blanco’s one, suggests) which symmetrize precisely where the language strives to identify with the greatest precision. Levi’s literary production, with particularly regard to the poetic works, shows, on the recurrence of paradigmatic constants structured by the etymological probe, a singular ability, together, to divide up and “infinitize”, thus giving voice and representation to the human mind «bi-modal» functioning. Then, the contribution proceeds to identify, describe and clarify the dynamics of the composition figurative signification through the solicitation of the «self-textual» dimension of Levi’s poetry and the comparison with other places of his works, attempting to highlight the profound «unity» of his perceptive dimension.