We live in a textual reality

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Texts, I am suggesting give meaning even to the contingent and fleeting events of our lives, and that is one reason why we value them. But the conditions of our being come to us already scripted, textualised, shaped in patterns into which we fall, almost like actors given a script that they must follow. The human condition is a condition of textuality.

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What we call realism, then, in literary works may be nothing more than a reading of those “scenes of language” that shape the actual world and turn its inhabitants into characters upon a textual stage. That is, literary realism may be most real when it represents events that are already “scenes of language.”

The Reading the World chapter in Robert Scholes’s The Crafty Reader is a reminder to read and reread Barthes and Baudrillard. Scholes’s book has acquired more substance during subsequent contemplation.