Side Notes

I'd like to expound upon the notion that Wimsatt and Beardsley brought up in the end of "The Intentional Fallacy" about the effectiveness/necessity/disadvantages of side notes within a written work. In their text, they discuss notes to support specific literary allusions, notes that "function as guidelines to send us where we may be educated" (817). In my experience (as was, too, the opinions of many of my English teachers through the years) these side notes, although often helpful, can create an outside intrusion on the text. And so I wonder does the use of side notes create more disadvantages to understanding the true truth, "vraie verite", of the text than it does advantages (813)?

Wimsatt and Beardsley talk a lot about authorial side notes, ones placed by the author himself. To me, these don't seem like a big of an intrusion, because the author should have the ability to discuss the intentions of his own work, though why he wouldn't opt to relay these intentions better within the work itself makes little sense. What's worse (in terms of bogging down the work0 is when the notes-as-guidelines are placed not by the author, not in the present in which the work was written, but rather by some outsider critic, explaining with his own intentional concepts post-work. This concept of work intrusion is muddled with "intentional fallacy", as an outside critic can't post guide lines to understanding allusions without imposing his owns ideas of intention.

Back in high-school, my English teacher forbid (or tried to) us from using Sparknotes, and at the time I couldn't understand why. How could it hurt to better understand a book? The problem is that "summary sites" like Sparknotes tell you the story not as the author intended for it to be told, in words the author didn't choose to use. Often, when one reads a book, they aren't doing so just to see what happens (this is a major difference between literary works and history textbooks), but also to see how the author relays what happens, how the story is told. Simplified summary guide lines can only tell you what happens in a story. And the more subjective they are, the further your understanding runs from the authors.

Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed that notes within and about a text could become "muffling" to a text, and this is true (817). When reading a literary work and constantly having to switch from the narrative to the guiding side notes, one doesn't read the work with the flow the author intended. The flow is chopped, stuttered. And although they may help one understand specific things like allusion, how can they begin to relay authorial intention? If meaning is relayed through side notes, whose meaning is it? The author's or the critic's, who just imposes his subjective intentional opinions, forcing the reader to interrupt the text with a "muffling" affect (as I often found was the case in Shakespeare handbooks and poetry). Let the reader interpret free from other's subjective impositions, even if they are often correct.

Yet sometimes side notes can be very helpful (I attempted to read Ulysses this summer and would have been completely lost without the guide to every excessive allusion). But they must be objective, or as objective as possible. The more subjective notes become the more they inhabit Wimsatt's and Beardsley's idea of "Intentional Fallacy".