Intertextuality, Ideology, and Truth: Re-reading Kristeva through Roman Historiography

Abstract

mong current participants in the debates about historiography and intertextuality, there are those who claim that historical narrative and its interpretation constitutes a special case which must affect our understanding of the place and function of intertextuality in this genre.There are others who contend not only that historiography is to be considered as contiguous to other literary and especially poetic genres, but that this contiguity should profoundly influence our understanding of intertextuality in poetry.It is not that scholars of historiography should learn from critics of epic and elegy, but that these critics should take note of what emerges from the study of historiographic intertextuality and should enrich their practice accordingly.One reason for this is that the historiographical turn to intertextuality has considerably raised the stakes of a reading practice which, confined to the poetic genres, can too often become a selfsustaining and circular exercise.In historiography, discussions of intertextuality necessarily entail confronting the extent to which language is thought of as referential, and to what it refers.Here too participants divide between those who emphasis the historical text's relation to 'reality' or 'real life', and those who emphasise its relation to 'truth'.Although I will focus on 'truth' in this paper, I want to start from the valuable observations made by critics, starting from Cynthia Damon (), who demonstrated how, for historical agents, 'real life' is itself experienced through narrative and textuality, and is therefore inherently intertextual.The referentiality of language, therefore, is already made richer and more complex, not because the encounter with 'real life' is deferred, but because 'real life' constitutes materiality and agency activated by narrative and historical understanding.But by choosing to emphasise 'truth' and 'ideology' in the place of 'real life', I want to draw attention to two aspects of the narratives of real life, which are the vehicles of historical understanding, which activate agency in the material world, and which are re-represented through the historiographical text.The first has to do with the multiplicity of these narratives and their competition: as Will Batstone observes, 'we are all telling stories to serve our own interests'. The extent to which any narrative As suggested by Culler () .