Simpson, l’astuto e l’ingenuo: per una critica del surrogato in Primo Levi

At the end of the story Potassio in the collection Il Sistema periodico, the narrator comments: «I thought of another moral, more earthly and concrete… : you must not trust the almost- the-same…, the practically the same, the nearly, the or, any surrogates or stopgaps». This very moral can be profitably applied also to the character of Mr. Simpson, the sales agent and recurrent character of Storie naturali. He sells futuristic machines and unsettling contraptions patented by the NATCA corporation. The inventions he proposes to his clients can be seen as sophisticated instruments of imitation and replacement, even of translation. These objects surrogate human features, actions, functions. The «last machine», the Torec, is a universal surrogate that substitutes life itself. The narrator reflects on these machines: what does it mean to replace and reproduce almost-the-same objects? What are the moral consequences of these actions? What are their collateral effects?