Marginalia as a Social Practice
Sam Anderson writes about his practice of writing in the margins of books as he reads them:
But it quickly began to feel, for me, like something more intense: a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane.
His choice of words - “collaborate”, “mingle” - suggests that he views the practice as a type of conversation, a connection between himself and the writer. But in this piece, Anderson doesn’t limit this connection to just something between the reader and the author. He also suggests that marginalia can be a way to communicate to others, as well.
Anderson dives a bit into the history of marginalia, back to the 1700s and 1800s, and connects its roots to the present, writing:
The practice, back then, was surprisingly social — people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers. Old-school marginalia was — to put it into contemporary cultural terms — a kind of slow-motion, long-form Twitter, or a statusless, meaning-soaked Facebook, or an analog, object-based G-chat.
Anderson uses social media as an argument for the practice of marginalia to be adapted into electronic form. In the present day, with information coming at us from all directions constantly, culture is about response. “Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions.”
Marginalia is the informal, off-the-cuff response to the work of another. But if we expand that meaning, we can see that the act of creating itself is an act of expanding on the works of others. Creation and marginalia is a type of call-and-response that makes the audience the creator, the creator the audience.
Yet, what Anderson sees is marginalia evolved past even that point, where marginalia responds to marginalia. He envisions the experience of reading a book being shared in a communal space.
Right now, I am reading S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The concept of this novel is that the physical book is a novel called Ship of Theseus by fictional author V.M. Straka, and this copy has been annotated by two people, who have added their own slip-ins, letters, post-cards, photographs, etc. The annotators - a grad student and an undergrad - pass the book between each other and form a relationship from the conversations they have on the pages.
While I haven’t finished the book yet, what I’m finding is that the two characters, through their shared experience which is made tangible via their annotations to each other, forge a kind of intimate connection.
Mark O’Connell argues that it is precisely the intimate nature of marginalia that will keep it from being a social expression. Personally, while I agree on O’Connell that it is an intimate practice, that is precisely why I believe Anderson’s vision pulls so strongly with the current generation of readers. As Anderson writes:
…books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social — and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states.
see also
references
- Anderson, Sam. `What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text`. New York Times Magazine, 6 Mar. 2011, [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06Riff-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=magazine].
- O'Connell, Mark. `The Marginal Obsession with Marginalia.` The New Yorker, 26 Jan. 2012, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-marginal-obsession-with-marginalia.