There are books that reaffirm the power of literature, always disruptive, never reflective of anything. In a publishing market saturated with replicas, the appearance of ‘Say the margins. Conversations with Muriel Chazalon’from the poet and philosopher Chantal Maillardan implosive, revealing work.
There are books that reaffirm the power of literature, always disruptive, never reflective of anything. In a publishing market saturated with replicas, the appearance of ‘Say the margins. Chantal Maillard. Conversations with Muriel Chazalon’.
“Apart from me, you know, I babble. The poetic voice sometimes intuits and says more than I can know” (Chantal Maillard)
‘Leave everything and run to read Chantal Maillard’s book.’ That’s what I told my friend Mamen Camacho. ‘No, you better not run,’ I told him; she ‘go slowly, take the book and go read it in a place where silence is possible’.
As the poet and philosopher Maillard says: “Create silence is now more important than ever…” Although perhaps, increasingly, silence can only be found in the margins. “The silence from outside, of course – silencing stimuli of all kinds, not just auditory ones – but, above all, the inner silence. Creating silence does not mean inventing something new, it means eliminate, clear, empty. Contrary to what we usually think, accumulation is not wealth, but impoverishment, and there is greater wealth in an empty space than in a full one. The stillness is immeasurable as is the state of peace, a good that has always been scarce among humans,” points out the poet and philosopher.
This thread of intense conversations invites us to enter many forms of margins. Beyond the absolutism of the center, the margin opens, like Chantal Maillard’s literary idea, a multiplicity of paths. If you look closely, one margin will probably lead to another margin. And this idea, even typographically, is offered in this book. Its very structure is an edge map. Among the themes that Muriel proposes, we find fragments of the work of Maillard and illustrations by Chazalon herself. The careful edition of Gutenberg Galaxy It allows the reader to get closer to this conversation, giving them the feeling that the flow of the words is happening live.
Maillard observes Maillard through the intermediation of Chazalon
The work contains nine chapters (or possibilities): Margins, Hunger, The Similar, Monsters, Fictions, In-meaning, Mute, The Method and The Animal-in-Me. In the preamble, titled ‘Lending Bat Ears’, Muriel Chazalon states: “One of Chantal Maillard’s strategies has been to make the margins the very center of her writing, transforming them into a place of possible narration. I want to think that these conversations “They point to the target of her work.” In these pages Maillard observes Maillard through the intermediation of Chazalon, making the reader discover or review key aspects in the literature of one of the most important poets and philosophers of this time.
Throughout the conversations, both artists reaffirm the importance of listening. Ear and look, the contemplative notion in the work of Chantal Maillard. “I hope you, reader, dare to enter this book like someone who enters a storm, hearing something that cannot be caught –saisir– with and in the concepts, something that, even staying on the sidelines –in portrait – of language, encourages you to think in company, to weave fictions or intone some of the sound flashes heard in these margins of the audible”, proposes Muriel Chazalon.
With the authors’ intention or not (sometimes literature takes on a breath of its own), this is a book that try to regain your senses, return to the point where we look sick. The realization of this work is a tribute to intelligence and beautyboth complementing each other in a vital balance for the reader.
