Marginalia

A few weeks ago in class we brought up the subject of marginalia and how, perhaps, reading a used book with highlighter already in it, underlines, and notes in the margins can screw one up in her reading of a text. I found this conversation interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I always write in my books. I write margin notes; I write in the front covers; I underline; I circle and box around things that I think are important. (I do not, however, underline. It's too difficult to write with a highlighter.) I think that reading a used book can be a help and a hindrance depending on the previous owner's intelligence and her book-writing-in habits. If there are only a few marks and underlines, it often doesn't bother me. But, I do think that every mark that is made in a book becomes a part of the text. It reminds me of the deconstruction tenet that any conversation about let's say Orality and Literacy become a text in itself to be closely analyzed. I find often that if I am reading a text that has been written in by a stranger, I ponder their markings. To mark in the text is to put precedence of one piece of information over another. Sometimes that screws me up. Maybe I don't think the sentence that Kaitlin marked with a star is particularly important or interesting...it's already marked and now I have to think about why.

I found Dr. Sexson's story about a conversation in the margins interesting because, while I think I have some intelligent thoughts in my marginalia, I am slightly uncomfortable with the idea of letting people read my copies of books if they are all marked up. Those are usually my initial responses, questions, and epiphanies and, to me, those seem pretty personal. I don't go back and erase or scratch out those initial markings so, even if my ideas have evolved, the original ideas are still in my text.

In a way then, isn't text changeable? To change a text would, of course, mean passing along the same book from person to person, but if the marginalia are to be counted as a part of the text, perhaps the words in books are not quite as concrete as we thought.