On Listening

Les Back discusses listening in the work of Primo Levi, Walter Benjamin and others

Primo Levi

The American author and poet Henry David Thoreau once wrote that it takes two to tell the truth, one to speak and another to hear. 3 Quarks Daily has published an excerpt from Les Back's recent essay in the New Humanist, extolling the virtues of 'paying attention'. Back refers to numerous writers, poets and critical thinkers, beginning with a reflection on the work of Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi:

You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice," writes philosopher Simone Weil. To turn a deaf ear is an offence not only to the ignored person but also to thinking, justice and ethics. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is cursed because no one will listen to his story. The Italian chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi was preoccupied with this fable because of his fear that on returning from Auschwitz people like him would be either ignored or simply disbelieved. Regardless, listening gets a very mixed press amongst critics and intellectuals. There is a suspicion of "wistful optimism" or the quasi-religious appeal to "hold hands" and play priest at the confessional. These qualms miss the centrality of listening to a radical humanism which recognises that dialogue is not merely about consensus or agreement but engagement and criticism. This is something that Primo Levi understood.

Faussone, the hero of Levi's novel The Wrench, is a difficult man. An itinerant rigger, he spent his life travelling the cities of the world operating high-rise cranes. Despite the dramatic nature of his adventures Faussone is not a natural storyteller. The novel's narrator comments on how tempting it is to interrupt him, put words in his mouth and spoil his stories before they have even been told. He comes to realise: "Just as there is an art of storytelling, strictly codified through a thousand trails and errors, so there is also an art of listening, equally ancient and noble, but as far as I know, it has never been given any norm." The quiet patience required to invite the story's telling makes an important contribution to its content. For, as Levi writes, "a distracted or hostile audience can unnerve any teacher or lecturer; a friendly public sustains." The listener's art for Primo Levi is practised through abstaining from speech and allowing the speaker to be heard. Listening is active, a form of attention to be trained rather than presumed.

In his famous essay on the storyteller, Walter Benjamin lamented the loss of attention to stories and tales which could be "woven into the fabric of real life" as wisdom. The profusion of talk and information inhibits social transactions of understanding. Our ears become soundproofed, double-glazed like our homes to keep out the noise of the city.

Levi was arguably the most astute witness to the Nazi holocaust, and his commitment to listening derives from his experience of being a witness and survivor, but it is also an essential part of his skill as a writer. [Read more]

Les Back, 'The Listeners'
New Humanist, 4, 2010
Reprinted in Eurozine, 3 August 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Primo Levi on Translation
• Primo Levi on Shame
• Primo Levi on Dante and Arachnophobia
• Sic!

Primo Levi on Translation

Challenges and difficulties

Writer and chemist Primo Levi conveys some of the central difficulties of translating texts from one language to another:

Translation is difficult work because the barriers between languages are higher than is generally thought ... knowing how to avoid the traps is not enough to make a good translator. The task is more arduous; it is a matter of transferring from one language to another the expressive force of the text, and this is a superhuman task, so much so that some celebrated translations (for example that of the Odyssey into Latin and the Bible into German) have marked transformations in the history of our civilisation.

Nonetheless, since writing results from a profound interaction between the creative talent of the writer and the language in which he expresses himself, to each translation is coupled an inevitable loss, comparable to the loss of changing money. This diminution varies in degree, great or small according to the ability of the translator and the nature of the original text. As a rule it is minimal for technical or scientific texts (but in this case the translator, in addition to knowing the two languages, needs to understand what he is translating; possess, that is to say, a third competence). It is maximal for poetry [...]

In David Mendel, 'Primo Levi and Translation'

Bulletin of the Society for Italian Studies, 1998

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Primo Levi on Shame
• Primo Levi on Dante and Arachnophobia
• Sic!

Primo Levi on Shame

An excerpt from The Drowned and the Saved

Primo Levi discusses the complex emotional implications of being a Holocaust survivor:

After my return from imprisonment I was visited by a friend older than myself, mild and intransigent, the cultivator of a personal religion, which, however, always seemed to me severe and serious. He was glad to find me alive and basically unhurt, perhaps matured and fortified, certainly enriched. He told me that my having survived could not be the work of chance, of an accumulation of fortunate circumstances (as I had maintained and still maintain) but rather of Providence. I bore the mark, I was an elect: I, the non-believer, and even less of a believer after the season of Auschwitz, was a serious person touched by Grace, a saved man. And why just I? It is impossible to know, he answered. Perhaps because I had to write, and by writing bear witness: wasn't I in fact then, in 1946, writing a book about my imprisonment?

Such an opinion seemed monstrous to me. It pained me as when one touches an exposed nerve, and kindled the doubt I spoke of before: I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another; I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed. The 'saved of the Lager were not the best, those predestined to do good; the bearers of a message. What I had seen and lived through proved the exact contrary. Preferably the worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'grey zones', the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were none, nor are there certain rules in human matters), but it was, nevertheless, a rule. I felt innocent, yes, but enrolled among the saved and therefore in permanent search of a justification in my own eyes and those of others. The worst survived - that is, the fittest; the best all died.

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Also on A Piece of Monologue:

• Primo Levi on Dante and Arachnophobia
• Sic!
• Claude Lanzmann's liberated memories

Writers interviewed in The Paris Review

Now available to read online

I've spent most of the morning perusing the vast online interview archive of The Paris Review, which spans back to the early 1950s. Here are just a few of the names that caught my eye:

• Paul Auster
  
• J. G. Ballard
  
• Jorge Luis Borges
  
• Anthony Burgess
  
• William Burroughs
  
• Don DeLillo
  
• Ralph Ellison
  
• Allen Ginsberg
  
• Primo Levi
  
• Joyce Carol Oates
  
• Harold Pinter
  
• Alain Robbe-Grillet
  
• Barney Rosset
  
• Philip Roth
  
• Salman Rushdie
  
• Susan Sontag
  
• George Steiner
  
• Elie Wiesel
  
• Jeanette Winterson

Click here to view the full archive.

Claude Lanzmann's liberated memories

Frederic Raphael on the director of Holocaust documentary, Shoah

Frederic Raphael of the TLS has written a retrospective piece on documentary-filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. The article traces the history of Lanzmann's life to reflect on his childhood, his philosophical interest in Sartre, and the European reception of Shoah upon its release:

The voluble author would amount to little more than a footnote in the épopée Sartrienne were it not for one masterpiece: Shoah. After seeing the film, Jean Daniel, the elegant editor of the Nouvel Observateur, told its maker: “Cela justifie une vie”. Less directed than compiled, the film lasts nine hours and, for all the flair, persistence and courage involved in its composition, remains sui generis: to call it a work of art, as flatterers have, claims too much for its formal qualities and too little for its unblinking uniqueness. No other documentaries on the Holocaust (Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard of 1956 was the first and, in its tact, the most artful) can match Shoah’s implacable pursuit of the witnesses of what Raul Hilberg (an inspiring source) called, in his pioneering 1960 history of mechanized mass murder, “The Destruction of the European Jews”. Avoiding rhetoric and discounting the agony of the victims, Hilberg adopted Primo Levi’s tone, that of a “factory report”, and concentrated on the German organizational apparatus.

Lanzmann cleaves to a similar line, but holds tight to real people rather than to statistics. The (sometimes hidden) camera lingers, sometimes unsteadily, often artlessly, on faces and places, while the microphone picks up speech that, by its raw flow or sudden caesuras, reveals what was for so long unseen and unsaid. The horror grows and grows, unalleviated by sententious phrases or clever montage. Lanzmann’s thorny genius expressed itself, over a decade of assembly impeded by lack of funds, by threats and actual incidents of violence, and by the difficulty of locating survivors and killers, bystanders and escapees, in a work which at once bears a single signature and carries no evidence of having been rigged by a selfconscious auteur. Want of tact (even with regard to the bladders of the spectators) and unevenness of texture make Shoah a film that is never a movie. Not all memory’s children are muses.

Frederic Raphael, 'Claude Lanzmann's liberated memories'

Times Literary Supplement, 8 July 2009

More on Claude Lanzmann:

• Masters of Cinema trailer for Shoah
  
• Claude Lanzmann interviewed by The Guardian in 2001
  

Giorgio Agamben on Kafka and The Trial

An extract from Remnants of Auschwitz

From Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive:

In 1983, the publisher Einaudi asked [Primo] Levi to translate Kafka's The Trial. Infinite interpretations of The Trial have been offered; some underline the novel's prophetic political character (modern bureaucracy as absolute evil) or its theological dimension (the court as the unknown God) or its biographical meaning (condemnation as the illness from which Kafka believed himself to suffer). It has been rarely noted that this book, in which law appears solely in the form of  trial, contains a profound insight into the nature of law, which, contrary to common belief, is not so much rule as it is judgment and, therefore, trial. But if the essence of the law - of every law - is the trial, if all right (and morality that is contaminated by it) is only tribunal right, then execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct and lose their importance. "The court wants nothing from you. It welcomes you when you come; it releases you when you go." The ultimate end of the juridical regulation is to produce judgment; but judgment aims neither to punish not to extol, nether to establish justice nor to prove the truth. Judgment is in itself the end and this, it has been said, constitutes its mystery, the mystery of the trial.

Primo Levi on Dante and Arachnophobia

Excerpt from Primo Levi's short essay, 'Fear of Spiders'

From Primo Levi's short essay, 'Fear of Spiders':

As for my personal and slight phobia, it has a birth certificate. It is the etching by Gustave Doré which illustrates Arachne in the twelfth canto of Dante's Purgatory, and with which I collided as a child. The young girl who dared challenge Minerva in the art of weaving is punished by a foul transfiguration: in the drawing she is 'almost half a spider', and is brilliantly depicted as utterly frantic, with full breasts where one would expect to see her back and from her back have sprouted six legs, knotty, hairy, painful: six legs which, together with human arms that writhe desperately, add up to eight. On his knees, before the new monster, Dante seems to be contemplating its crotches, half disgusted, half voyeur.

Primo Levi, 'Fear of Spiders'

in Other People's Trades (translated by Raymond Rosenthal)

Sic!

'[What] a subtle pleasure one can still experience when one can get his hands on an elegant and rare quotation!'

Primo Levi, 'Sic!'

I first began keeping an online diary when I was sixteen years old, or thereabouts. I used it as a means to express my frustrations, publishing them online to appease the narcissist in me. (How little things have changed!) It provided a much-needed vent for my adolescent thoughts, and allowed me to feel a sense of community in others who felt the same way. The desire to write in this way persists even now, and I don't think I would be the person I am today without this lovely and convenient outlet.

One of the things that made my blog postings distinctive at the time was my use of quotes to introduce each topic. Whether the quote was from a writer I admired, or the lyrics of a song, I thought the quotation added a certain novelty appeal to my journal, and I would sometimes spend hours searching out the appropriate words.

I suspect now that my habit stemmed from a fundamental insecurity. Afraid to show myself in a public light, I would use the words of the great and good as a means to defend and sustain myself. The quotations became a means by which I could identify myself publicly, but also offered a convenient mask to hide behind; the words, after all, were never my own.

In a short observational essay by Primo Levi, the status of the quote is explored with a few insightful comments. To begin with, Levi confides the comfort and reassurance of a good quote, and the 'sincere enjoyment at finding oneself so completely in agreement with a great author as to be able to insert a shred of him in one's own fabric.' This is the enjoyment of identification, where we can read a book or a poem for what it can express to us about ourselves.

''What else have you underlined?'

''What everybody underlines,' she said. 'Everything that says 'me'.''

Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound

Primo Levi suggests that this public invocation of the great names in literature can be interpreted as arrogant, or snobbish. Often, he says, it is 'a less noble pleasure; it is like saying to the reader, 'You see, I draw from sources that you do not know, I know something that you do not know, and so I stand a grade higher than you.' This is an excellent point, and I have no doubt it's the reason thousands of people have a Bartleby on their shelves.

But Levi goes one step further, and suggests that the act of quotation can serve just as much to undermine as to reinforce its author's position or argument. He states that including the expression 'sic.' in a quotation can have a 'striking effect' on its meaning and effect, and can destabilize the authority of its author. It undermines the quotation by presupposing

'an error on the contender's part. It may be a venial error, a grammatical or even orthographic oversight, but the sic, this hiccup of virtuous and scandalised astonishment, blows it out of all proportion. [...] SIC: the man whom I quote and from whom I obviously dissent, is, my dear sirs, a dunce. [...] How can you trust him? He has put the subject in the objective case: thus every one of his statements is suspect, and every one of his opinions must be handled with tongs.'

This is a wonderful point, but I think one can easily apply this observation to Levi's first opening passages. There is an enjoyment in an identification with literary texts, and it is pleasant to see in something external something of oneself. Levi mentions the habit of some respected critics to invent quotations from 'none existent books by noexistent authors'. I would argue that a true identification with a passage or a line or text is, in a sense, also an 'invented quotation', in that it invents a new context and a new meaning for an altogether new purpose.

In a sense, identifying with any part of a text is to tear it from its original context. This in essence interprets the quotation in 'an incomplete and inexact manner', pulling it from its source and placing it among alien surroundings. And so: repeating a text is not simply a reinforcement of its meaning, but an active destabilization. With this in mind, perhaps all of our quotations should come complete with a 'sic', notifying us of their incompleteness.

But, for me, one of the greatest joys of literature is the licence to quote at will. If it's not loyal to its original context, if it undermines the intentions of its original author, then so be it. I think quotes exist to be wrenched from their original contexts, and invested with new meanings and new possibilities at all opportunities. Words can be reinvested and reinstated with a different emphasis and a different significance, and they become our own. And, most importantly of all, it can be fun!

You can read 'Sic!' among a collection of Primo Levi's essays and short stories, entitled The Mirror Maker.