PRIMO LEVI
27
the shape of his body, his way of speaking, laughing, gesticulating.
not even here , ever, due to the essential inadequacy ofour expressive
means , is
mimesis
attained . The movies and television attain it with
closer approximation ; in fact the fUmed takes of dead people move
us to a much greater degree than written portraits. They perturb us:
the man whom we see move and speak on the screen really is not
completely dead. And if holograms will make us the gift of a third di–
mension , our perturbation will be enormously greater, it will strike
us as black magic . Trying to compete with such media is for a writer
a waste of time.
But the impossibility of creating a character from nothing
seems to me just as iron-clad. I already said that inevitably the
author transfers into it (knowingly or not, willingly or not, some–
times becoming aware of it only when rereading his pages years after
having written them) a part of himself; but the rest, the not-self, is
never completely invented.
It
swarms with memories: these too,
conscious or unconscious , voluntary or not. The character that you
naively believe you have manufactured in your workshop reveals it–
self to be a chimera, a mosaic of tesserae, of shots snapped at some
mysterious time and relegated to the attic of memory . In short a con–
glomerate that you will have the merit to have brought to life and
made credible; but I do not believe that one can lay down rules for
this art of producing an organism from a pile of odds and ends.
One can enunciate negative rules; it is not necessary for your
character to be virtuous , attractive, or wise, nor is it necessary for
him to be consistent with himself; indeed perhaps the contrary is
true . The too-consistent character is predictable, that is, boring: he
does not have impulses, he is programmed, he doesn't have free will.
He must be inconsistent as we all are, have changing moods, make
mistakes , get lost, grow from page to page, or fade away : if he re–
mains the same he will not be the simulacrum of a creature but the
simulacrum of a statue , that is, a double simulacrum.
Of course, beneath this inconsistency there is a deeper con–
sistency, but to define it is beyond my abilities; whether it has been
respected one knows afterwards when the page is written, and the
signal is given by the reader's blood which for a few minutes cir–
culates a trifle warmer and a trifle faster.
III.
It
often happens that a reader, usually a young person,
