Howard Jacobson: rereading If This Is a Man by Primo Levi

Primo Levi's account of his incarceration in Auschwitz should not be regarded as forbidding, argues Howard Jacobson. His subject may be humanity in extremis, but it is still humanity

The danger, as time goes by, is that we will tire of hearing about the Holocaust, grow not only weary but disbelieving, and that out of fatigue and ignorance more than cynicism, we will belittle and, by stages, finally deny – actively or by default – the horror of the extermination camps and the witness, by then so many fading memories, of those who experienced them. The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words "Never Forget" become irksome eventually. Again and again Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others, and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't.

The friendlier language to which enthusiastic publishers and reviewers sometimes have recourse is hardly more appropriate to the case. It means nothing to say of any writer that he is "readable" or "a page-turner", and Levi is certainly not one you read in a single sitting without pausing for breath. There is much that makes one pause in If This is a Man, the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.

But while it would be foolish to describe him as an entertainer, he nevertheless engages the reader's interest in a story and an illumination, in character, in description, et cetera, as any other imaginative writer does. His subject is humanity in extremis, but it is still humanity. He does not stand outside the compendious narrative of human life to which every writer is committed. Nor is he the end of the line. Things happen in If This is a Man that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in King Lear, or Conrad in The Heart of Darkness.

So if we approach If This is a Man expecting a historical investigation of the rise of Nazism and the potency of its appeal to the German people, or an inquiry into the origins and nature of evil, we ask both too much and too little of it. Levi is neither historian nor metaphysician. As a matter of honour, no less than as a matter of writerly decency – perhaps as a mark of respect to mankind – he refuses grandiose philosophising or theology.

"We do not believe," he writes, "in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilised institution is taken away … We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence."

The quietness of that "conclusion", so determinedly rational and even matter-of-fact, so calm in its rejection of the consolations of rage or blame or despair, is characteristically heart-breaking. "Reduced to silence" is a humane but terrible description of man's fate in the camps; it is inevitable, final, an attrition of spirit of which the beatings and the humiliations are just the foretaste, and which can only be atoned for, all round, by the opposite to silence. This is what the book is for. It must speak of what happened, of what it knows, for the very reason that silence – the removal of the will and wherewithal to speak, and the fear of never being listened to or believed – was the ultimate aim of that system of dehumanisation Nazism embraced, and the proof it had succeeded.

The subject of If This is a Man is not how could men do such things, but what was it that they did, how did it fall to some prisoners ("the saved") to endure it and others ("the drowned") not to, what is left when everything but the barest capacity to endure, the power only "to refuse our consent", is driven out, and by what means are some still able to impress on others the suggestion of a world "not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror … a remote possibility of good".

From the first pages of the book, the essential project of the camps is laid bare: it is, in Levi's words, "the demolition of a man". Through small and large acts of deprivation and destruction we follow the process: the removal of hope, of dignity, of luxury, of necessity, of self; the reduction of a man to a hoarder of grey slabs of bread and the scrapings of a soup bowl (wonderfully told all this, with a novelist's gift for detail and sometimes very nearly comic surprise), to the confinement of a narrow bed – in which there is "not even any room to be afraid" – with a stranger who doesn't speak your language, to the cruel illogicality of hating a fellow victim of oppression more than you hate the oppressor himself – one torment following another, and even the bleak comfort of thinking you might have touched rock bottom denied you as, when the most immediate cause of a particular stress comes to an end, "you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others".

With grievous amazement, never self-pitying but sometimes bordering on a sort of numbed wonderment, Levi records the day-to-day personal and social history of the camp, noting not only the fine gradations of his own descent, but the capacity of some prisoners to cut a deal and strike a bargain, while others, destined by their age or character for the gas ovens, follow "the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run down to the sea".

There are pages where, unexpectedly, amid the horror, a reader feels he has stumbled on a near-inconsequential diary entry. "It is lucky that it is not windy today," one such passage begins. The incongruity of anything being lucky in such a place strikes the diarist: "Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live." In this way, too, we come to understand how living is possible, how, if it is the small things that demean, it can also be the small things that sustain. Here, perhaps, is the advantage of Levi having written If This is a Man so close to his time in Auschwitz. Recollection has not been worn away by years and controversy nor subsumed under the necessity to take a long view of historical events. In much of this book, immediacy does the work of theorising and education.

The anger, also, is too close to the event to feel either tempered or cranked up. Seeing old Kuhn, a religious man, praying aloud and thanking God he has been spared selection for the gas chamber, Levi is furious that Kuhn does not realise it will be his turn next, that "what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory power, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again … If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer."

It is a bitterly ironic thought, God spitting at a devotee's prayers, as though in such a place, where such crimes have been committed, it is a blasphemy to be religious. A blasphemy, too, even to think of pardon or expiation.

Levi gave his life to considering the full extent of those crimes, for they did not stop at the gates of the camps. They would go on, if the guilty had their way, into the dreams of men like him, mocking them with the promise that they would never be listened to, and even where they did secure a hearing, would never be believed.

In a terrible dream, which he discovers he shares with fellow inmates, Levi is back home telling people of his experiences, but they are "completely indifferent … speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there". Here is the dread to end dreads – "the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story."

And so, of course, in many quarters it has turned out to be. Despite a testament as harrowing as his, and for all its meticulous refusal of melodrama, the Holocaust has become subject to sneering scepticism – now outright denial, now the slower drip of devaluation and diminishment. In later books, as he saw the thing he dreaded becoming a reality, Levi wrote of the "negators of truth", people who defame not only those who lived to tell the tale, but those for whom they speak as though "by proxy", the true witnesses of the abomination – that is to say, those who did not survive it and so cannot speak for themselves. Thus, in any of its forms, Holocaust denial kills the victims a second time.

Strong though the words of If This is a Man are, they are still weak before the will to deny or forget.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/05/rereading-if-this-is-man