Abstract

The difference between Poe's and [Paul] Valéry's theory of notes—between a theory that emphasizes the nonsensical unpredictability of notes and a theory that discovers in notes the essential logic not only of all reading but of the mind itself—cannot be resolved. To some extent, perhaps, it derives from a conflict between two genres: marginalia, and the marginal gloss. Marginalia—traces left in a book—are wayward in their very nature; they spring up spontaneously around a text unaware of their presence. Nor could they have been considered publishable until the Romantic period had encouraged a taste for fragments and impulses, the suggestive part rather than the ordered whole. Significantly the term was introduced by Coleridge, that great master of the fragment; and Poe himself was the first author ever to publish his marginalia. The charm of such notes depends on their being on the edge: the borders of intelligibility or consciousness . The reader catches an author off his guard, intercepting a thought that may scarcely have risen to formulation. At their best, marginalia can haunt us like a few passing words overheard in the street; all the more precious because the context remains unknown. Lawrence Lipking, professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University, is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Modern Literary Criticism 1900-1970. Some of the material in this article is drawn from a book currently in progress, The Poet-Critics, a study of the relations between poetry and criticism in the work of authors who have excelled in both. "Arguing with Shelly" appeared in the Winter 1979 issue of Critical Inquiry