What if a Chemist Told Stories?
WADE, ALAN
What if... a Chemist Told Stories The Sixth Day and Other Tales By Primo Levi Translated by Raymond Rosenthal Summit. 222 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Alan Wade Free-lance writer When, some...
...Only in "Angelic Butterfly," about a mad Nazi scientist who tries to transform humans into a higher form of life, does Levi create an effect of real horror...
...And I have listened to mathematicians and physicists heatedly argue that their fields have the same relation to our age as dramatic verse did to the Elizabethan age...
...This fascination with the fruits of scientific progress is a thread running through much of the book...
...This is not a very original lesson, to be sure, but in most cases Levi concocts his fantasies cleverly and with enough patiently worked-out detail to give them weight and memorability...
...Leavis' rejection of Snow's claim that the second law of thermodynamics is as central to our culture as Shakespeare may have been unusually vituperative, but it was hardly unique...
...Yet it is tempered with an awareness that the acquisition of novel technologies can be a Faustian bargain...
...In "The Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge, " a woman frozen in 1970 is thawed out periodically over the ensuing years, supposedly for her own enjoyment and instruction, but sometimes for the sexual pleasure of her custodians...
...In "Some Applications of the Mimer," one of the machines falls into the hands of a man who takes it a step farther and copies his wife...
...game with great imagination and often achieves hilarious results, it is a limited fictional device...
...The author finds humor and menace in the natural world as well, imagining trees that talk and move and are planning a rebellion against man, dragonflies trained to pick blueberries, and tapeworms whose cellular structure is deciphered and found to be a kind of language in which poetic and philosophical messages to the host are encoded: "Be benign with me, oh powerful one, and remember me in your sleep...
...What Levi seems to be telling us in these tales is that science and technology race ahead of man's ability to control them...
...In"Seen From Afar," the earth is described in a scientific report by moon-dwellers, with the cities appearing as crystalline structures, sports stadiums as volcanic craters, and so forth...
...In "The Sixth Day," a celestial panel decides after endless and pompous debate that the best blueprint for Man is without question that of a bird, but it is overruled at the last minute by a higher power...
...Take "Excellent Is the Water, " a story in which the rivers and lakes of Europe turn viscous, threatening all animal and plant life...
...Next to Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, Levi's overpowering memoirs of the Holocaust, and The Periodic Table, his literary masterpiece, the little fables in this volume are fivefinger exercises...
...What little drama the story attains arises from the fear of the young scientist who first discovers the viscosity that his unsympathetic superior won't believe him...
...I never dreamt about duplicators...
...And in "For a Good Purpose," a European telephone network begins to act like a huge brain...
...Such wouldbe jeux d'esprit are too predictably developed to be very compelling...
...What if pain were pleasurable...
...His irresistible writing in several previous books about his own field of chemistry made it clear how close good science is to poetry...
...What if a Xerox machine could copy in 3-D...
...Or: What if Man had been designed by committee...
...The sciences and their technological offspring now dominate our world to such a degree that Leavis' anger seems somewhat quaint in retrospect...
...A few of the stories don't amount to much more than longwinded jokes...
...It starts by ringing up people on its own, then eventually takes over the Continent's service completely—connecting and disconnecting, recording conversations, and ordering the expansion of its own lines...
...Many of them are elegant versions of the woolgatherer's favorite game, "What if...
...Snow launched the debate about the relative importance of science and the humanities with his "two cultures" lecture, the reactions of partisans on both sides were vehement...
...Levi draws out the possible consequences, which are sometimes funny and sometimes ominous...
...Order on the Cheap" introduces an American manufacturer of electronic marvels, including a Versifier, a Turboconfessor ("approved by Cardinal Spellman"), and a Mimer...
...Soon, however, the narrator is compulsively experimenting on dice, diamonds, a spider, a lizard, his lunch, and so on, with giddying success...
...That is a scary premise, but the execution is perfunctory...
...The gap of mutual incomprehension between the two cultures yawns as wide as ever...
...The domestic difficulties that result are neatly resolved when the man climbs into the machine and duplicates himself...
...It should be in everyone's beach bag...
...The cautionary tales in this volume about the dangers of playing God in the laboratory are a reminder of how crucial it is that science be informed by humane values...
...Although Levi plays the "What if...
...The firm's salesman exuberantly trumpets each new invention as though it were the first wheel: "'Here it is,' he said triumphantly...
...In "Versamina," a chemist concocts a drug that turns pain to pleasure, with awful results: Rabbits chew wires until they bleed, a dog wags his tail while a cat claws at his eyes, soldiers allow themselves to be killed in battle...
...Anyone can think of a Mimer or a chemical that turns pain to pleasure...
...Still, the issue is hardly dead...
...Even in a minor mode, however, Primo Levi is a livelier companion than most writers...
...Indeed, the matter and methods of science seemed to inspire Levi as much as nightingales and mountain storms did the Romantic poets...
...She is finally rescued from her cold-storage prison in 2115 by a young man who falls in love with her during one of her brief thawings...
...May you live long and in good health...
...It is also disappointing that when writing in a more serious vein Levi sho ws little interest in creating the feelings of terror or dread that a seasoned science-fiction writer might wring from the same material...
...A three-dimensional copier, the Mimer is intended to reproduce documents with a fidelity unmatched by previous photocopying machines...
...It's the Mimer: the duplicator we' ve all dreamt about.'" "Sorry, Simpson," replies the narrator sensibly, speaking for everyone who thinks himself immune to the lure of gadgetry...
...I have heard writers dismiss the entire enterprise of modern science as being of some ludic interest, and occasionally productive of a useful machine, but of no great importance to the human soul...
...Forinstance: What if there were people on the moon...
...As an ambassador from the sciences to the humanities, Levi is unsurpassed...
...it takes a scientist's knowledge to lend these inventions verisimilitude...
...Your food is my food, your hunger is my hunger...
...Reviewed by Alan Wade Free-lance writer When, some 30 years ago, C.P...
...Part of the pleasure of reading this newly translated collection of stories by the late Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi comes from being in the presence of a mind that easily bridged the gap...
...But even he is seduced by the machine's power...
...And as an antidote to this season's ghastly crop of movies, The Sixth Day is just the thing: fairy tales that stimulate the mind rather than lulling it...
Vol. 73 • August 1990 • No. 10
