Primo Levi's Hesitation

Uri S. Cohen (University of Tel Aviv) discusses his work in progress on Primo Levi at the Bookhouse.

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“Hesitation is the mode of reading and approaching the text, chosen to confront complexity and consider truth not as the opposite of lies but of certainty. Hesitation is recommended by Primo Levi in the very first pages of If This is a Man. It is ensconced in the strange claim, for 1947, that his book will add almost nothing to the subject:

Hence, as an account of atrocities, this book of mine adds nothing to what readers throughout the world already know about the disturbing subject of the death camps. It was not written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a detached study of certain aspects of the human mind.

Hesitation begins with what is being avoided – certainty and a dogmatic form of thinking about the camps. That is not the story is trying to tell. Perhaps, addressing the risk of titillation, Levi forgoes atrocities or rather, offers a different aspect of the atrocious facts.

Hesitation is then not the absence of certainty, but rather the result of countering certainties. In the humanistic tradition, hesitation is sometimes thought of as what comes before action, or tragedy, as in the case of Hamlet. Levi read and understood Hamlet well, and the ironies of the closing lines where Hamlet commands Horatio to tell his story aright to the unsatisfied are not lost on him:

I am dead, Horatio.—Wretched queen, adieu.—
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time (as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest), O, I could tell you—
But let it be.—Horatio, I am dead.
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

This is the penultimate speech by Hamlet and shakes the very foundations of representation. Hamlet abruptly breaks the third wall and addresses the audience and Horatio with some of the most beautiful phrases ever crafted. Most striking is the implication— if not affirmation— that the story just told was not aright. Some will always remain unsatisfied; every testimony is partial, and each of us, at least those of us who tremble, carry the duty to bear witness. Yes, we are all implicated subjects of this hesitation – we are required to consider, charged with the duty to attempt telling the story aright; at least to consider what it might mean to tell this story aright. “