The plausibility of this way of seeing texts as forms of (deconstructable) rhetorical play, however truth-telling in intention, was greatly reinforced by the thesis, inherited from Nietzsche and a reading of Plato, that right through language (including the most ‘realistic’ parts of George Eliot) the apparently literal is also really metaphorical. Philosophy and history (neither any longer to be privileged as literal, or truth-telling, discourses) can
