... the as-yet-unspeakable

"[Marcel Raymond's] From Baudelaire to Surrealism still informed Don's aesthetic views. For Raymond, the point of writing was not to represent the world as it is, but to engender startling new revelations. He called this activity "forc[ing]... the gates of Paradise." It happens, he said, when words "are no longer signs; [when] they participate in the objects ... they evoke."

Fourteen years after reading this sentence, Don would write, "[A] mysterious shift... takes place as soon as one says that art is not about something but is something ... the literary text becomes an object in the world rather than a text or commentary upon the world."

Raymond said that "obscurity" is an "indispensable element in a poetics" that hopes to rescue language from shopworn uses. Don revived Raymond's point in his 1982 essay, "Not-Knowing": "However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet-unspeakable, the as-yet-unspoken." Then he quoted Raymond on Mallarme: The poet's style is a "whisper... close to silence."

p.60 Hiding Man, A Biography of Don Barthelme, by Tracy Daugherty