The Mysteries of Annotation

It may be a bizarre psychological by-product of being an academic, but I've developed a little database in my head that notes "items in need of annotation" whenever I read a nineteenth-century novel.  Someone reading purely for pleasure may enjoy a peaceful, unbroken textual surface, free of aggravating asterisks, daggers, and what-have-you.  But when you're teaching a novel to a room full of young adults, of whom some are a little iffy on the whole "Victorian" thing ("Chaucer was Victorian, right?"), then those pesky annotations become a little more...crucial. 

Take Dracula, for example.  (Comedian: "Take my Dracula! Please!") I've just finished rereading the novel in A. N. Wilson's World's Classics edition, and the book was a near-Edenic paradise of asterisk-free pages.  There are fifteen endnotes, most of which explicate literary or mythological allusions.  In some contexts, Wilson's sparse annotations are perfectly fine; in others, though, they could be frustrating.  Let's say you want to emphasize the clash between English "modernity" (something of explicit concern to several characters) and Dracula's primal evil, handed down in "superstitions" and "traditions" centuries old.  One of the things that a student might not realize is just how trendy the protagonists are.  We've got Harker and his Kodak camera, Dr. Seward and his phonograph, and Mina Harker and her typewriter; at one point, Van Helsing even breaks out some "small electric lamps" (ch. 19).  Characters know their Charcot, their Lombroso, and their Nordau.    It's as though somebody dropped the characters from CSI into a Freddy Krueger movie.  Stoker emphasizes "modernity" enough that readers get the point without the annotations, but (if you'll excuse the pun) without the annotations, it's a dulled point. 

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

But if you start to annotate everything that some reader might legitimately not get, you'll never stop. My inclination would be to regard these examples as useful opportunities for discussion, not worth disfiguring (or figuring) the text for.

[a Paperback Writer]

And that's why we take lit classes....
I remember years ago having someone explain to me what you've just said about the typewriter and the phonographs, how science contrasts so nicely with all the old superstitions in the book. Wow. It added layers to my understanding. But I probably wouldn't have read the footnotes at that point in my life.

Nowdays I LOVE the Broadview Press edition of Pride and Prejudice, edited by RP Irvine. The man goes nuts with explanations, but they really are wonderful --- now, past my MSc years even. I probably would've skipped them as an undergrad. But I would've listened to the professor explain such things in class.

[CCPhysicist]

I read "War and Peace" in a Norton Critical Edition. (Yeah, right, just what you want when you get to the end of that book, which I read at exactly 200 pages per day, there are several hundred more pages to read.) Are you suggesting they replace end notes with a chapter-by-chapter commentary giving those insights?

Your observation about Dracula is one of the motivations for "linked" classes and "learning communities". Is there a way to get the students in the frame of mind of Stoker's readers? (I forget, but even psychology was new at that time, right?)

One idea might be to get them to realize how that appears in film. Every movie or TV show seems to have the coolest accessories (kitchen, luggage, phone) of the day. Zoolander pushes it with a preposterously small cell phone. Fifteen years ago, you had to have one of those clunky early cell phones. In the 1950s, cop dramas often had key moments where radio or phone communication was critical rather than taken for granted. Why didn't Mina call for help on her cell phone?