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Once you start exploring Levi’s work with this thread of sensory attention in mind, a remarkable array of material emerges. Following on from “The Mnemagogues”, for example, the sense of smell is a regular resource for Levi’s storytelling and reflections on Auschwitz. This is perhaps not surprising in an ambit – that of Holocaust testimony – so intensely weighed down by the dynamics and problematics of memory. In a remarkable short essay called “The Languages of Smells” – not as far I know published in English – Levi reflects on the sensory impact of a rare return visit in the 1980s to Auschwitz:

the smell of Poland, innocuous, unleashed by the carbon fossil used for heating in the homes, struck me like a blow: it reawoke in an instant a whole world of memories, brutal and concrete, that were lying dormant in me, and it took my breath away. (“Il linguaggio degli odori”, p. 840; my translation)

This sensory hit not only prompts in his memory a link between to the present and Auschwitz, though. In a chain of senses of memories of senses, he also recalls how back then, in Auschwitz in 1944, the smells of home and of outside erupted into his prisoner’s memory with unbearable force:

With the same violence, “down there”, occasional smells from the free world troubled us: hot tar, the smell of boats in the sun; the breath of the woods, with the smell of mushrooms and musk, sent our way by the Carpatian wind; the perfume of soap in the wake of a “civilian” woman encountered during our working hours (“Il linguaggio degli odori”, p. 840; my translation).

The same dynamic is recognisable in an important passage of If This is a Man on the two types of dreams Levi shared with all his fellow prisoners: first, dreams of return, and the terror of being ignored and disbelieved back home; and second, dreams of the smells and the tastes of food, of home, of friends and family, impossibly vivid and agonizingly out of reach.

Indeed, it is not only the second of these dreams that has a sensory dimension: the first too is linked to a sense of sound, to hearing, in its anxiety of literally not being listened to, not being heard.

Sounds also operate on the dual axis of memory, from now back to the camps and from the camps out to a lost world of home and security. Here is Levi in If This is a Man on the blaring marching songs that woke him every freezing dawn in Auschwitz. One morning he is in the grim camp hospital and hears those awful songs from his bed:

we all feel that this music is sent from hell … The [marches and songs] lie engraven on our minds and will be the last thing in Lager we shall forget: they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution by others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards. (If This is a Man/ The Truce, p. 57)

As with Montesanto, Levi’s sensitivity to sounds, to music, is full of careful distinctions and precision, but also open to the dangers of giving in to the invasiveness of the senses. His task is to listen acutely, but also to transform the perception into “useful” understanding:

one had to escape from the enchantment, to hear the music from the outside, as happened in Ka-Be [the hospital] and as we think back now, after the liberation and the rebirth, without obeying it, without enduring it, to understand what it was, for what meditated reason the Germans had created this monstrous rite, and why even today, when we happen to remember some of those innocent songs, our blood freezes in our veins and we become aware that to escape from Auschwitz was no small fortune. (If This is a Man/ The Truce, p. 57)

Already, then, within Levi’s account of Auschwitz, the sensitivity to, the dynamics of recollection of, and the risks and violence of smell, taste, and sound are central to his efforts to draw ethical light out of this darkest of places.

Moving beyond this founding text, other chemical-ethical turns to the senses are to be found in The Periodic Table. We can usefully point to just two instances of many, two striking examples of the resonance that Levi’s tales of chemistry and the senses in that book bring with them, for both Levi’s experience and understanding of Auschwitz and for the general ethical dimension of his writing. Both have something to do with the sense of taste, explored in the creatively metaphorical manner familiar from The Periodic Table’s general reimagining of the chemical elements themselves in its conception and structure as a work of chemical autobiography.

The first is from the chapter “Iron” (pp. 37-49), and Levi’s portrait there of his taciturn fellow chemistry student, Sandro, who for Levi embodied the stern, silent, and dignified, adventurous and practical, and quite masculine, virtues of the laboratory struggle. Sandro, though, was most importantly of all Levi’s mountain-climbing companion and it was up in the mountains above Turin, getting lost and stuck for freezing nights, fending for themselves, struggling against the elements of the weather as they would against the elements of the “periodic table” in the lab, forging friendship, that Levi sees the deepest lesson and legacy left to him by Sandro. All this baggage of intimacy and legacy is captured for Levi in one vivid phrase, a mountaineer’s phrase and a metaphor for the harsh but maturing experience of the mountain, of chemistry, and of the suffering of war and deportation that was to come for both Sandro and Primo. To taste such hard, formative adventure is, for Sandro, to taste “bear meat”: though rarely noted in commentaries on this powerful chapter, Sandro’s and Primo’s “bear meat” is rooted in a metaphor of the senses, of taste.

The boys are stuck in the mountains overnight. Nearly frozen to death, they only make it back at dawn – Levi’s dawns are often moments of acute sensory intensity – reaching a small shelter in a bedraggled state, much to the amusement of the old innkeeper:

This was it – the bear meat; and now that many years have passed, I regret that I ate so little of it, for nothing has had, even distantly, the taste of that meat, which is the taste of being strong and free, free also to make mistakes and be master of one’s destiny. That is why I am grateful to Sandro for having led me consciously into trouble, on that trip and other undertakings which were only apparently foolish, and I am certain that they helped me later on.

They didn’t help Sandro, or not for long. Sandro was Sandro Delmastro, the first to be killed fighting in the Resistance with the Action Party’s Piedmontese Military Command. (Periodic Table, p. 48)

The second example also evokes the sense of taste and smell, this time through the visceral dynamics of its etymological opposite, the profoundly important universal human impulse of disgust.¹⁰ The chapter is “Nitrogen,” and Levi and a friend are busy trying to make some money extracting make-up from excrement:

far from scandalizing me, the idea of extracting a cosmetic from excrement, that is, aurum de stercore, amused me and warmed my heart like a return to the origins, when alchemists extracted phosphorus from urine. It an adventure both unprecendented and gay, and noble besides, because it ennobled, restored and reestablished. That is what nature does: it draws the fern’s grace from the putrefaction of the forest floor, and pasturage from manure … (Periodic Table, p. 81)

There is a playful comedy to the episode, but also a deep lesson. Levi frames it as a lesson both from chemistry and by analogy also from Auschwitz, a lesson in overcoming disgust, in turning it to good use – and, he implies, in not ceding to visceral hatred or exclusions:

The trade of a chemist (fortified in my case by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions, that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable … (Periodic Table, p. 180-81)

Thus far, we have been drawing on examples principally linked to smell, hearing, and taste, since these senses are often neglected compared to the others; and it is telling to see Levi paying careful attention to all of them, perhaps a distinctive feature of the laboratory chemist. There would be a great deal to add also on sight and touch, but in moving towards the final part of this chapter, I want to dwell on just one thread of Levi’s deployment of all the senses that links Auschwitz to his science-fiction stories. The thread is the strangely compelling force for Levi of what he called the “deception of the senses”.

Levi – and the chemist in him above all – knew that if our senses are useful, indeed essential tools in our engagement with and understanding of the world around us, a surplus of both data and applied intelligence, they are also dangerous and potentially deceptive. The dreams of food and friends in Auschwitz were excruciating because so seemingly real and yet empty, not “nourishing”. Perhaps the most devastating page in Levi’s entire oeuvre is that which closes his second book The Truce (1963); it contains that very phrase “deception of the senses”. When, after his epic journey home to Turin, back with those very friends and family he had dreamed of in Auschwitz, he suffers from another, even more terrifying dream, or rather dream-within-a-dream, in which he dreams of suddenly waking up, once more at dawn, back in Auschwitz:

… and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: “get up, Wstawać”. (If This is a Man/ The Truce, p. 379-80)¹¹

The paradoxes and twists and turns of this deception of the senses are picked up on and explored in one of Levi’s most remarkable science-fiction stories, entitled “Retirement Fund” (Sixth Day p. 107-25). In this story, Levi’s hapless inventor-salesman Simpson convinces the narrator of the story – a figure for Levi himself – to try out his latest machine, the so-called TOREC, what we would call a virtual-reality machine that allows the viewer to experience someone else’s pre-recorded actions and sensations. Levi might call it a “deception-of-the-senses” machine. The narrator tries out several TOREC tapes: He scores a goal for AC Milan; he is an immigrant beaten up by racists; he is a female model waiting to have sex with her lover; he is dying of thirst and then drinks desperately; and finally, he is a bird of prey soaring at two thousand metres before swooping down to kill a hare. He also plays one tape – of a parachute jump – backwards, feeling as though he is being sucked up from the ground back through the sky into the mouth of an aeroplane (echoing a famous passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5, about the Allied bombing of Germany).

These mini-narratives are intensely sensory; but they do not only offer an anthology of specific sensory experiences and impulses – of touch, vision, impulses of thirst and hunger, sexual desire and violence, flight, and hatred – and allow the narrator to observe himself as he experiences these sensations. They also particularly imagine altered, inverted, or heightened senses: the transexual experience of another sex’s desire, the enhanced vision and instinct for violence of a bird of prey, the refined physique, eye, and touch of a professional footballer, the reverse flight of the parachutist. The experience of other people’s or other animal’s lives is one of other senses, of impossible sensations, of going beyond the limits of the self, even the physical skin of our own bodies.

But the end of the story takes us straight back to Montesanto and his Mnemagogues, to their cautionary tales of the seductive and addictive dangers of mere sensation, of the thirst for more and more experiences of the senses. We learn at the end of the story that Simpson is devoured by a strange addiction to the ersatz TOREC experience of recorded sensation, which, however, has no pay-off in learning, understanding, or memory. Every time a tape plays, the sensation is as it was recorded, as it was the first time, always new. Without reflection, analysis, heuristic elaboration, the senses are useless simulacra, a circus-ground sensorium, and the virtues of the laboratory are nowhere to be found.