My point, originally, was in trying to come to terms with the way we read
and to ask if there is any distinction worth making between, say, annotation
and so-called 'extraneous' information ( such as that vis-a-vis Salut.) Of
course, one could hardly call the annotating of the Cantos or Anathemata
etc. as providing superfluous data not related to the poem ( assuming, for
the moment, that the poem is more than mere sound or letters successive on a
page - n. the reference to Serres.) The info. on Hartley that Mark Weiss
provided, once known, becomes a part of one's reading - as a knowledge (
equally 'extraneous') of many languages shall alter one's reading of the
Wake - I think all the foregoing is obvious. What, however, isn't so
straightforward is the nature of the information regarding Salut, which,
once read, makes the poem more occasional, fixes the 'title', the 'ivresse'
and suchlike - makes the poem a drama of an event ( yes, an event I only
know about through reading, but being your moderate realist - a read event
in flesh..) and thus alters my reading of it - whether it 'ought' to alter
is a separate question ( just like my Papist's knowing of the Mass alters my
reading of the initial pages of Ulysees inevitably - and, arguably, raises
problems merely spectral)
to that extent I am thinking about the ethics not of 'classical' annotation
( Rawthey=River) but of bringing in elements not simply outwith the poem in
the New Critical sense but rather, somehow - when once known- impinge on the
poem in the act of reading it...
Of course, there is another question in the difference between annotating
historical works ( and even the sort of padding annotation that Eliot gave
the Waste Land) and the annotating by authors of their own works, bringing
up the ? of the literary or non-literary status of those annotations etc.
ColinGHughes
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