The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays is an example of a central problem facing those who would dive into the world of literary analysis. Does one take the author’s word as the final statement or does one completely ignore it? On the basis of individual selections, there is really no question here: one ignores what the author intends because very often the best parts of a work of literature are unintentional expressions of lies behind the writer’s conscious purpose.
The nature of putting together a selection of individual pieces makes this a more difficult proposition. If the collection features writing from various chronological epochs of the writer and is constructed with a thematic intent, then we’re back to saying to heck with that. But if the selections are merely a representative of linear chronology or—even more so—a completely comprehensive collection of a writer’s entire output—then it becomes much easier to follow his guidance. This question is raised for two reasons. One, The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays is a chronological collection. And, furthermore, it is divided into fiction and non-fiction. Secondly, the author introduces the collection with prefatory material slyly entitled “Premise” in which he directly addresses those who open the book:
“I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine.”
Okay, fair enough. Analysis will refrain from the imposition of any determinate message attached to the collection of short stories and essays contained within. That is not the same thing as finding a layering of thematic sensibility which may offer insight. The stories are very disconnected from the other stories and the fiction is disconnected from the essays. One cannot point to a single overarching theme that unifies and unites, but one can detect certain motifs. One of the most prevalent is the twist. Not the ironic plot twist of the type in which Norman Bates turns out to be the mother he’s been protecting, but a twist in the internal logic.
“The Interview” is, for instance, a story about the first contact between an alien life form and human beings. Normally, of course, a requisite can be expected here: a spaceship of some type and descriptions of an alien life form unlike humans in some way. Perhaps there will be space flight or an exploration of distant universes or perhaps the entire story stays earthbound. What one does not expect is the absence of all those tropes. Instead, what is offered in this first contact is a guy walking along a street who is contacted by a disembodied voice and interviewed. Nothing particularly science fiction-y occurs in this science fiction story. That is the twist.
Likewise in both the essay “The Man who Flies” and “The Moon and the Man” the concept of breaking the bonds of gravity and taking flight becomes not an issue of superhuman potential or jaw-dropping scientific achievement, but something much more mundane. Both of these essays take on the concept of gravity pushing down upon us within the context of the astronaut, but not within the connotation of the astronaut as a pop culture rock star figure. In both, the extraordinary achievements being written about with hyperbolic awe by writers all around the world became, in the same instant, in the eyes of Levi, an exercise in the more prosaic qualities.
What is the consequence of man taking leave of the earth for the first time in history to journey through an atmosphere freed from the constraints of gravitational pull that led countless other writers to compose poetic visions of the supreme nobility of mankind’s supremacy and dominion over the world to Levi? “Nothing in our long evolutionary history could have prepared us for such an unnatural condition as nongravity.” The twist here is Levi’s astonishment not at stepping upon a heavenly body once known by man only from the greatest of distances, but now known as dust beneath his foot. It is that being unleashed from the forces of gravity had only the effect of “passing discomforts.”
Is there a message to be found in the multiple means by which Levi twist the logic and expectations of his stories and the topics of essays? Perhaps not and even if there are, perhaps it is better to take his advice and not conduct the search with too much zest. What is unmistakable from even a cursory reading of both the fiction and non-fiction in this collection, however, is that Primo Levi looks at the world through a perspective that it not universal. His is not the point of view of the collective. His gaze is that of the outsider who sees things not necessarily as everybody thinks they must be. Kind of like the view reflected in a mirror.
