The Exploration of the Unspeakable

I remember one of the term papers I wrote for a graduate class called “Marxism and Creativity” was about how certain events (in the case of that class specifically, 9/11) were unspeakable. I related this to certain texts on the holocaust (which, I realize now, almost nine years later, is something only a cocky young academic would do), including Levi, on how the only way to deal with these moments is to address them in a flat, observant style that does not seek to add imaginative details or language, because those flourishes make the event seem more than it is, and to do so makes in unspeakable.  I thought that labeling something unspeakable was more related to being unable to understand the experiences of others, to maintaining a “polite” society, full of whitewashing to overlook the horrors that occurred, to brush it all under the rug because we don’t want to deal with moments of horror in human history.

What I didn’t realize at the time that what was to label something unspeakable is to do so because we don’t have the words to encapsulate these horrors, or we lack the linguistic capacity to write about evil that becomes banal. It became clear to me reading this book, as it’s a concept that Levi returns to repeatedly. He showcases this when he writes:  “Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.” It strikes me that this is at the very heart of the text: giving the words that are able to express these moments of horror, so that we may examine them as a whole. After all, isn’t this what Levi means when he tells us early on that this book “adds nothing to what is already known to readers throughout the world on the disturbing question of the death camps . . . [and was not] written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind.”? The text is looking to speak that which there are no words for, and to let us witness the process which led Levi to those moments.

I came across a book, Primo Levi: A Matter of a Life by Berel Lang, over the weekend as I was trying to get these thoughts on the unspeakable into some functional order. In it, Lang writes, “The issue raised by [terms like unspeakable] involves the relation between language and experience or, more generally, between language and history: are there intrinsic limits to the capacity of language to represent personal or collective experience? All experience? The most extreme moments of types of experience?” Can anything be put into text as to encapsulate the horrors of places like the death camps? Can voicing these moments give us understanding into moments where evil becomes bureaucratic? Where unspeakable becomes more synonymous with being unimaginable or inconceivable?

It strikes me that is a question that Levi is wrestling with throughout the text, or at least the area that he is functioning in as a writer. We see this during constant examination of what it means to be a prisoner at the camp, both in relation to other prisoners (“There are few men who knew how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.” or “whoever thinks he is going to live is mad, it means that he has swallowed the bait, but I have not.”) and to his own state of being, specifically in the more personal examinations on life (“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.”). In speaking what was previously unspeakable, it must be imagined, acknowledged, conceived in a manner conducive to language (which, when you think about how Levi supervised the translations of the book, means that there had to be examination in multiple languages), and thus become able to be read, to be witnessed, to be examined for whatever meaning that may be gleaned from the experience of reading an experience.