ABSTRACT
The above discussion, in its persistent claim that historical practice is presentcentred and political, has been primarily concerned to suggest the contingency of historical truth. And in recognition of its own contingency my narrative has been made repeatedly ‘to reflect on itself’. Effectively, however, its selfreflection is a rhetorical device calculated to enhance the conviction of an argument which is no more objectively true or false than those it criticizes. I have employed this artifice to illustrate that, even as the ‘speaker’ of my narrative denies the possibility of objective truth, the narrative form functions to produce ‘truth effects’. By acknowledging the political predicates of my own position in an introductory discussion, then deferring substantially to a third-person narrator for whom no such admission is made, I have created, in a manner described by Roland Barthes in 1970, the illusion of objectivity. 1 Because the third-person narrative voice is self-concealing, its referent, the putative object of its discourse, appears to ‘speak itself’, independently of any authorial intent. Yet I am the architect of this commentary, the author of its intended meaning and I am therefore constrained to reiterate with all possible emphasis both its political conditioning and the provisional status of any truth effects it may gene rate. 2
