“Theres More Nothing to Say”: Unspeaking Douglas Barbour’s “Story for a Saskatchewan Night”

Abstract

This, then: My desperate plagiarism, my breaking & my entering, my speaking with/to the unspeaking & unspeakable in Douglas Barbour’s text. This, too, my exploration of the untenable text, my writing around that state of loss that follows the erosion of the (dreamed) “ultimate word” (Bakhtin 293). Reinscribing the space/place of the essay as a series of borders, blurred boundaries where text might meet an-other: text, or silence, or what cannot be spoken. Allowing this textual body its perforations, its occasional hysteria in the face of nothing, its desire.

With the writer of bliss (and his reader) begins the untenable text, the impossible text. This text is outside pleasure, outside criticism, unless it is reached through another text of bliss: you cannot speak “on” such a text, you can only speak “in” it, in its fashion, enter into a desperate plagiarism, hysterically affirm the void of bliss (and no longer obsessively repeat the letter of pleasure).

—Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text (22)