Christian Salmon is a writer, essayist and columnist at Mediapart. After having been Milan Kundera’s assistant, in 1993 he founded the International Parliament of Writers and the Network of Cities of Refuge. He is the author of numerous books, including Storytelling, The story-making and mind-shaping machine (The Discovery, 2007).
“At each of the stages that led from the First World War to the current hypercrisis (sanitary, climatic, economic, geostrategic), whole sections of the knowledge accumulated over centuries have collapsed, plunging into silence and night the human experience All modern literature testifies to this history of silence.
From Nicolas Gogol to Franz Kafka, from Hermann Broch to Witold Gom-browicz, from Danilo Kis to Milan Kundera, from Don DeLillo to Antoine Volodine, literary history speaks to us of the same problematic experience. No longer that of the omniscient narrator who embraces human life in its complexities, but that of a narrator confronted with the destruction of the conditions of a possible experience and the growing difficulty of narrating.
Far from the pathos that coated it throughout the 20th century, the silence of writers is not a pathological symptom, it is the very heart of literary experience. Silence removes language from codified ways of seeing and thinking and makes perceptible forces hitherto mute, forms carrying other possibilities of life. (Presentation of editions The links that liberate)
BOOKS CHRONICLE by Baptiste Touverey: “Why is Gui Minhai still in prison?”
Seven years ago, Chinese agents kidnapped Swedish publisher Gui Minhai. Since then, his daughter has moved heaven and earth to obtain his release. This is counting without the intimidation of Peking and the pusillanimity of Stockholm.