A tale of two tool kits

I write this post recalling Patricia White's article "Black, White, and Read All Over: A Meditation on Footnotes." White claims that the fact that the footnote lies literally "under the text" deters the reader from regarding it highly; it's more like a fixture in a dark, dirty basement (I'm paraphrasing, wildly).

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The primary text of Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer is clearly a fiction. Within the first few books there are magic castles, sorcerers, prophecies, selectively-deadly sandstorms, and proto-Frodo rings. Southey, however, was not content to leave his tall-tale stand as such, but instead wrote extensive footnotes to act, following White's metaphor, not as a basement but as a foundation to the fantastic text. (The Fulford edition unfortunately knocks Southey's footnotes back to endnotes, and instead inserts Fulford's own notes as footnotes! But more on that shortly...) Southey's notes are often as fictitious as his poetry. The very first note explains that Southey could have had his Muslim hero recite lines from the Koran, but that said Holy Text's language was too dull and tautological and thus "I though[t, sic] it better to express a feeling of religion in that language with which our religious ideas are connected." This footnote, what I have called a "foundation," would not enforce the poem's claim to legitimate history, truth, or cultural survey.

Fulford's notes generally go to the fictitious (or, at least, arbitrary) quality of Southey's notes by pointing out the several variations Southey made to both his verse and his annotation. In many cases the Fulford-extended notes are even more outlandish than the vanilla-Southey.

To the point: if the Southey notes are to be tested against an ideal of historical accuracy or cultural understanding, they fail horribly. Thalaba is Orientalism through and through and for some, politically, this is reason enough to dismiss the poem. However, the standard of historical accuracy for the poem need not reign supreme. What if Southey's notes were not read as a historical foundation, but rather a fictional foundation-- or fictional buttress. What I suggest is that there is a moment of critical judgment to either read Southey's notes as lies, prejudices, and general false consciousness or as extensions of the fictive genre which most readers, I presume, would concede to be the mode of the verse.

The stakes for these two kinds of critical investments are various, but most immediately it suggests two different kinds of critical tool kits. If Southey's notes are considered "bad histories" then the critic must approach them with "good history" and Saidian know-how so as to dismantle and de-fang Southey's bad politics. If the notes are considered "(bad) fictions", then different tools are required: tools which suggest why such a kind of fiction fascinates, what fantasies it plays upon, and why it refuses history even under the fictitious guise of founding the poem upon history.