Cavalieri d'industria. Giuseppe e MacWhirr

This essay discusses two fundamental typologies of characters that recur in Primo Levi’s work: the Joseph-type and the MacWhirr-type. The Joseph-type comes from the mythic hero of Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph und seine Brüder, and the MacWhirr’s type has been shaped on Joseph Conrad’s captain of Typhoon. I argue that, while the MacWhirr-type starts to appear mostly in Il sistema periodico and then in La chiave a stella (that is in the narrative that deals with science and technique), the Joseph-type comes earlier, and it shapes the figures of Pikolo, Henri, Alberto and Primo Levi himself in Se questo è un uomo. The essay then analyzes what happens when these two types (or matrixes) meet and interact, and how they influence each other.