an existence entirely given over to literature...

"Although the texts on which it is based [Dr Henri Mondor's biography of Mallarme] - letters for the most part - seem destined, both as writing and by virtue of the life which they reflect, to obscure what makes Mallarme, Mallarme, namely an existence entirely given over to literature (and thus to nothingness), on the contrary they 'throw extraordinary light on the destiny of that Prince of the Mind'. But what sort of light, other than the ordinary light of the world, can biography shed on the writing of a man who sought to withdraw from the world? "

from Meetings with Mallarme, From Crisis to Critique Mallarme for Blanchot,
by Michael Holland p.81

... 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

The Sheltering Sky

"Out here there was no sound but the wind blowing around his head on its way from one part of the earth to another. Whenever the thread of his consciousness had unwound too far and got tangled, a little solitude could wind it quickly back. His state of nervousness was remediable in that it had to do only with himself: he was afraid of his own ignorance. If he desired to cease being nervous he must conceive a situation for himself in which that ignorance had no importance."

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, p.131

Herzog

"He might once have had the makings of a clever character, but he had chosen to be dreamy instead, and the sharpies cleaned him out."

"He dreaded the depths of feeling he would eventually have to face, when he could no longer call upon his eccentricities for relief."

"Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression "the fall into the quotidian." When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?"

Saul Bellow, Herzog, pages 3, 10, 49.

Walking my riddels

"Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same.

I dont think it makes no diffrents where you start the telling of a thing. You never know where it begun realy. No moren you know where you begun your oan self. You myt know the place and day and time of day when you ben beartht. You myt even know the place and day and time when you ben got. That dont mean nothing tho. You stil dont know where you begun."

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker p.8

always escaping

"At such a distance, the swimmer was always escaping him. He would see him, then lose sight of him, though he had the feeling that he was following his every move: not only perceiving him clearly all the time, but being brought near him in a completely intimate way, such that no other sort of contact could have brought him closer. He stayed a long time, watching and waiting. There was in this contemplation something painful which resembled the manifestation of an excessive freedom, a freedom obtained by breaking every bond."

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, from The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, p.57.

unconceptualisable

"While Saussure had gone to great pains to show that language in its most general form could be understood as a system of differences, 'without positive terms', Derrida noted that the full implications of such a conception were not appreciated by either latter-day structuralists, or Saussure himself. Difference without positive terms implies that this dimension in language must always remain unperceived, for strictly speaking, it is unconceptualisable."

John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers, Jacques Derrida p107.

"... break the barrier."

"Pursewarden once, speaking about writing, told me that the pain that accompanied composition was entirely due, in artists, to the fear of madness; 'force it a bit and tell yourself that you don't give a damn if you do go mad, and you'll find it comes quicker, you'll break the barrier.'"

Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar, p.15.

"... for nobody knows of me..."

"Nobody will read what I write here, nobody will come to help me; even if there were a commandment to help me, all the doors of all the houses would stay closed, all the windows would stay closed, all the people would lie in their beds with the blankets drawn over their heads, the whole earth one great noctural lodging. And there is sense in that, for nobody knows of me, and if anyone knew of me he would not know where I could be found, and if anyone knew where I could be found he would not know how to help me. The idea of wanting to help me is a sickness, and it has to be cured in bed."

Kafka, The Hunter Gracchus, from Description of a Struggle and Other Stories, p.91

"...she is about to say something..."

"... she is about to say something which her mind has already formulated but which has so far only reached the eyes."

Lawrence Durrell, Justine, p117

"...lack of protection."

"He lacked the sort of protective carapace that other people have, but one has to add that his achievement wouldn't have been possible if he'd had that carapace. So that the lack of a carapace was intimately related - was the same thing, almost - as his talent and his vision and his originality. It's as though in the remorseless tide of life, as he saw it, there are moments of respite, when some small hope can be constructed, some exchange can take place and the poignancy of this also comes from this lack of protection."

John Berger on B S Johnson, from Like A Fiery Elephant, The Story of B S Johnson by Jonathan Coe, p.415

"... a splintery self ..."

Million a tesserae was shattered he
no possible,no with together putting
back . Front,sides,of splinters a spintery
self,remainder of a,a window shutting -
glass that so fell smashed and out look ! fuck damn
on stones the there lay if as malevolent
bare feet for unnoticing - with a slam
eh ? what ? a pieces in man,in a meant
fragments,heart,rags skin instead of a .
Overcasing the state ? was he ? know,you -
mosaic means bits. So do tesserae
before done the work, to make them,what ? do
things together ? Is a ? make do ? to whole
(denied a man in love fragments his soul) .

Ali Smith, The Accidental, p169

for no reason, in no particular order

"A great deal has yet to be told, some of it recent and some still to come, and I need time. But even not knowng what is to come, I do know that whenever the moment arrives I will go on telling it as I have until now, for no reason and in no particular order, without making an outline or seeking coherence; what I tell will not be guided by any author, fundamentally, though I am the person who tells it; it will not correspond to any plan or be ruled by any compass, or have any reason to make sense or add up to an argument or plot, or answer to some hidden harmony, or even be a story with its beginning and its expectation and its final silence. I don't think this is going to be a story, though I may be mistaken since I don't know its ending which may never be put into writing because it will coincide with my own, some years from now, or so I hope."

Javier Marias, Dark Back of Time p.335 (Translated by Esther Allen)

nothing is more foreign to the tree

"Mallarme does not want "to include, upon the subtle paper... the intrinsic and dense wood of trees." But nothing is more foreign to the tree than the word tree, as it is used nonetheless by everyday language. A word which does not name anything, which does not represent anything, which does not outlast itself in any way, a word which is not even a word and which disappears marvelously altogether and at once in its usage: what could be more worthy of the essential and closer to silence? True, it "serves." Apparently that makes all the difference. We are used to it, it is usual, useful. Through it we are in the world: it refers us back to the life of the world where goals speak and the concern to achieve them once and for all is the rule. Granted, this crude word is a pure nothing, nothingness itself. But it is nothingness in action: that which acts, labours, constructs. It is the pure silence of the negative which culminates in the noisy feverishness of tasks."


Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p39/40.

kicking all support away

"Ondaatje's novels ... use the scaffolding of conventional narrative and then kick all support away to discover what can stand alone and what is manifested in new form."

Alan Warner on Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero, Guardian Review 1.9.07

talking to yourself

"When the American poet John Ashbery was asked why his poems were so difficult he said that he noticed that if you go on talking to people they eventually lose interest, but when you start talking to yourself they want to listen in."

Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Prynne Collected p.322