WHETHER THE WRITER self-consciously recuperates or invents usable precursors is, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, beside the point. The writer's medium requires it, no matter whether he or she intends it. As a phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty generalizes about all speaking subjects; as a literary critic, I want to specify particular works and consider how they “implant onto each other,” how they construct the “becoming of truth” that Merleau-Ponty describes. I agree with Merleau-Ponty that all cultural texts are intertexts, but writers and readers respond to their textual traditions in different ways and for different purposes, often according to the importance given by a culture to its own history and the history of its interactions with other cultures.