From Iair Kon’s Prologue:
“A pilgrim in search of other voices”
I started reading A book on Dialogue before Martin gave it to me, maybe even before he started writing it. I started reading it almost ten years ago, when I met Martin and learned with him that dialogue was not only a way of communicating but also a means that is a constituent of the bond between people and of people as individuals.
It seems to me that this book is only a part -and a part under construction- of what dialogue means to Martin. It outlines, with a path that follows the journey of a pilgrim, the meditation of a wayfarer, the core of a philosophy that he has been developing throughout his entire writing process. That core is, I think, what he calls “thinking about the relationship with the other lovingly”; and also thinking about that relationship from the perspective of literature, or simply, perhaps, from the perspective of writing, because, as Barthes said, “writing is not subjected to the requirement of truth”.
The dialogue of which this book speaks has its roots, precisely, in the concept of polyphony postulated by Bakhtin -an author of whom Martin could teach an entire course-, who develops the idea of a plurality of voices that need to be governed by the principle of horizontality, of coexistence without hierarchies. The way in which the book is articulated is consistent with this idea, which, as I said, evokes the writing of a pilgrim who narrates his journey and, therefore, his encounter with other voices.
Some time ago, when this book was already in the presses, Martin told me that he was reading Matsuo Bashō’s Travel Diaries, which I later read thanks to him. I don’t know how Bashō’s book ended up in Martin’s hands, but the harmony between the two, written four or five centuries apart, was apparent to me. In Martin’s book, as in that of the master of haiku, there is a reflection on dialogue that is a reflection on the encounter with the other. That is why, I don’t think it is a coincidence that the theoretical essay is articulated in a journey with multiple stopovers and multiple encounters, through which Martin builds a polyphonic writing, essentially dialogical and explicitly, I would say, anti-monologue.
“Words flow like the sea of poetry. Everything else is rust.”
A book on dialogue
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