Primo Levi, «Cladonia rapida» (“Storie naturali”)

Abstract

This article proposes a close reading of Primo Levi’s «Cladonia rapida», the fifth text included by the author in his first collection of science-fiction short stories, Storie naturali (1966). The text is a parody of technical-scientific language: it is constructed in the form of a divulgation article and is set in a fictional-technological scenario, in which the discovery of a plant parasite of cars becomes the pretext to illustrate certain characteristics of cars, represented as animate beings. The study is divided into two parts: firstly, the relationship between compositional structure and content is brought into focus in order to reveal how the topic of the article is developed; secondly, the formal elements that Levi imports from technical-scientific writing and their stylistic outcomes are analysed. Finally, in the light of the elements collected, an interpretative hypothesis on one of the possible communicative objectives pursued by Levi through the parodic manipulation of this type of specialised language is proposed.