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.
Jean, the Pikolo of the barrack charged with implementing and coordinating its routines, suggests Primo be his assistant in carrying the daily rations to the barracks. The sunshine and fresh air fill the men with memories of life before their internment. The walk is just a half a mile but on their return they have to carry a huge pot of soup supported by two poles, weighing over a hundred pounds. During the hour’s journey the two men speak of their homes in Strasbourg and Turin, the books they read and their families. Dante’s Divine Comedy comes to Levi’s mind and he starts to recount the lines from the Canto of Ulysses. The task of transporting Dante’s words into the camp takes on a frantic sense of urgency:
“Here, Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to understand, for my sake: ‘Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance/Your mettle was not made; you were made men/To follow after knowledge and excellence.’ As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like a blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forgot who I am and where I am.”
The lines are not only a reminder of the life he had before but also that human communication could be concerned with such things as books, thinking and a search for beauty and knowledge. It is a reminder that he and Pikolo are not mere Häftlings defined only by the number inscribed on their skins and that there is a universe and a time before and beyond the barbed wire. He continues: “Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received my message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for soup on our shoulders.”
It is not just that Primo Levi needs to speak of these things, neither is it a matter of Pikolo yearning to grasp Dante’s meaning. The two men in that moment furnish their world anew if only for the hour it takes to deliver the soup. The process summoning the lines from Primo’s memory involves both men. Their shared labour enacts a line of communication and communion in the midst of the barbarism and inhumanity of the camp. Speaking and listening here is collective, social and ethical. Studied hearing is a humane disposition practised by Levi inside the camps as a survival strategy but also as a means to remain connected to the past and indeed to the future.
Although an engaging broadcaster, Studs Terkel’s gift was his ability to share time. He was an amateur sociologist in the best sense, an enthusiast, rapt in his attention to the voices of people but often ham-fisted in his attempts to record them. He told Tony Parker: “I don’t know how a tape recorder works. Not even the simplest one that’s ever been invented ... I don’t know how to open it, I don’t know how to put in the cassette, which way up it goes, how to close the lid when it’s in, which button to press to get it to start recording, which is the button to press to make it stop. None of it, I don’t know any of it ... what am I describing? I‘m describing one of my biggest assets. Its name is ineptitude. Why’s it an asset? Well, would you be frightened of a little old guy who wants to tape-record a conversation with you – and he can’t even work his tape recorder? ... I am not a Messiah with a microphone, I’m just another human being.”
Stud’s ineptitude was a part of his skill. This charismatic clumsiness enabled him to connect with people and gain their confidence. The hours of tape-recorded interviews that were transcribed verbatim formed the basis of his books that documented a forgotten America like Division Street (1967) and Hard Times (1970), or provided a compendium of unappreciated contribution to the society like Working (1974) or invited Americans to speak about taboos and open yet public secrets like his book simple entitled Race (1992). For him, the tape-recorded interview is conversation, not an inquisition aimed at facilitating the speaker to tell him “what happened” and then “what happened next”. Towards the end of his life Terkel was still incredibly prolific and he published four books after turning 90. This coincided with the demise of his greatest asset – his hearing. After Terkel’s death in 2008 friend and associate Garry Wills reflected: “Bad as this would be for any of us, it was a special blow to Terkel, whose speciality was hearing others tell about themselves. I have been in cabs with him and wondered at his ability to elicit the driver’s whole life story before we reached our destination.” He kept the conversation going with his former interlocutors even when he could no longer hear human voices, an ethos captured aptly in the title of his last book, P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening (2008).
Røgilds’ method is to record taped interviews, or dialogues as he calls them, and then painstakingly transcribe each tape himself, a task taking many months. Each tape is subject to repeated re-listening in order to find the resonance in each of these slices of time. Through such a method he has written books that range from postcolonial London like Rytme, Racisme og Nye Rødder: En bro mellem sorte og hvide? [Rhythm, Racism & New Roots: A Bridge Between Blacks and Whites?] (1988) to the last days of apartheid South Africa in I Elefantfuglens Land: Sydafrikanske Stemmer [In the Land of the Elephant Bird: South African Voices] (1991) and the cultural bridges being built between immigrants and young Danes in Stemmer fra et Grænseland: En bro mellem unge indvandrere og danskere? [Voices from a Borderland: a Bridge Between Young Migrants and Danes?] (1995). What these books demonstrate is that listening is not something that we can rely upon as an automatic faculty. Hearing needs to be worked for and worked at, an achievement and not a given. There is something in Røgilds’ method that I think is the very best of what might be called “tape recorder craft”. The result is a kind of sociological poetry achieved through curating talk like a collector choosing to assemble meaningfully a compendium of human wisdom and insight.
There are important lessons to be learned from the examples of Levi, Terkel and Røgilds. The first relates to politics. Our political debates do not suffer from too much doubt but from too much certainty. The task of thinking is to live with doubt in the service of understanding, rather than living with certainty in the preservation of ignorance. Name-calling is not thinking. The temptation to dismiss the view of one’s opponents as “drivel” or “rubbish” is strong but misguided for two reasons. Dismissing racist views, for example, as drivel does nothing to evaluate and understand their resonance or reach. It is for this reason that, though I’ve spent much of my adult life fighting against racism, I no longer subscribe to the “no platform” argument with regard to racists. We need to know what a racist argument sounds like. This is not the same as saying that organisations like the British National Party or the Danish People’s Party or JOBBIK in Hungary should be given a comfortable seat at the debate table. Rather, it means paying close attention to what they say and subjecting these sentiments to critical judgment. For reducing opposing views to rubbish produces encamped positions that actually stop listening. It forecloses criticism – they simply need no further attention other than being consigned to the category of waste to be disposed.
Politicians like to threaten us with listening. Tony Blair was very fond of this and part of the problem with the very idea of listening is that there is something very New Labour about it. It was strategist Philip Gould who made the “focus group” a strategic resource for New Labour. Political focus groups aren’t really about the kind of attention I am arguing for. Their function is to “sound out” the voters in order to fine-tune party political rhetoric in order to manipulate very select groups of the electorate to do the politician’s bidding, i.e. vote for them. It is fitting that Blair’s successor Gordon Brown was ultimately undone by the ear.
Our second lesson is that we must strive to develop a prosaic and everyday ethics of attentiveness. Inspired by Primo Levi, this entails tuning our ears differently. A good starting point would be to stop talking over each other. Listen to your own voice and develop a mild aversion to it. Hearing yourself recorded on tape is a good way to achieve this. It may produce a situation where we become more judicious, careful and measured in what we say, and more able to stop talking and listen. Like Levi’s narrator we must resist the temptations of interjection or ventriloquism.
The main lesson offered by the examples discussed here is that listening is not merely the instrumental extraction of information or a matter of “ticking the box” of consultation. What is animated in the “Canto of Ulysses” is an alternative way to live, achieved through two people hearing each other. This active listening creates another set of social relations and ultimately a new kind of society, if only for an hour.
This is not about making people “nice”, although it might make those who like to parade their superior intelligence less insufferable. Rather, it is a way to develop a more searching critical engagement with the kinds of human beings we have become. When Studs Terkel was asked if he had any advice to pass on to would-be journalists or interviewers, he replied: “The first thing I’d say... is ... ‘Listen’. It’s the second thing I’d say too, and the third, and the fourth. ‘Listen... listen... listen... listen.’ And if you do people will talk. They’ll always talk. Why? Because no one has ever listened to them before in all their lives. Perhaps they’ve not ever even listened to themselves. You don’t have to agree with them or disagree with them, all of that’s irrelevant. Don’t push them, don’t rush them, don’t chase them or harass them with getting on to the next question. Take your time. Or no, let’s put it the right way: let them take their time.” Yeah...
Illustration by Gary Neill