classification. The distinction between primary and secondary "texts," or between facts and ... illegitimate. Max Beerbohm once parodied Joseph Conrad's fondness for dismissing the world of fact as ... textual, only a little more so. Barth's Lady Amherst states the matter reasonably when she says ...

not seem as important as the fact of its happening, and this fact, as we saw, is already accepted in ... one of his trenchant essays, we cannot think without lan­ guage," and language makes only ... matters further, we generally locate origins before be­ ginnings, since the Origin is a state from which ...