‘[os mentis] mouth to mouth’ with Nicola Masciandaro

THE British playwright and wit Noel Coward once quipped that having to read a footnote was like having to go down stairs to answer the door while having sex; in fact, he didn’t say ‘having sex,’ he said ‘making love’ [i]. As if to further cement this distinction, in expressing his own trepidation at tackling the subject of ‘notes,’ in his work Paratext, the literary theorist Gerard Ginette described them as the ‘mediocre attached to the beautiful’ [ii]. ‘[O]ften so closely connected to a given detail of a given text,’ for Ginette, notes are ‘crumbly, not to say dust-like’ objects, with no autonomous significance; ‘hence,’ he suggests, ‘our uneasi-ness in taking hold of them’ [iii]. And yet ‘there is,’ for some, ‘no line of narration more concrete than a stream of dust particles,’ ‘each... with it[s] unique vision of matter, movement, collectivity, interaction, affect, differentiation, composition and infinite darkness’; the annotations of a text, in this respect, form ‘a crystallised data-base or a plot ready to combine and react, to be narrated on and through something’ [iv].