The Footnote’s Triumph

Tony Grafton is one of those great ferreting historians who should be declared international treasures. Like astronomers who look a little to the side when viewing something like the Pleiades in order to see them better, in peripheral vision, he rumages through discarded and often ignored bits from the past and removes, from the detritus, a mirror. His Footnote: A Curious History is one such.

I picked up a book in the library the other day: Ibid: A Life, a novel in footnotes by Mark Dunn. The premise is that a manuscript gets destroyed by a careless editor and all that remains are the footnotes. I haven’t gotten very far, but this promises to be a great read. I’ll let you know.

Terry Pratchett, whom I’ve also been reading voraciously as I predicted, is a master of the device: a simple phrase such as “everything happened at once*” is turned into a chuckle or more by a simple asterisk. Gentle mockery of pedantic erudition doesn’t debase erudition itself. Where, for heaven’s sake, would we be without the philosophers?

Here’s my plea for the continuation of the footnote, which I will lay at the feet of the sages of the marketing departments of university and other presses, who maintain doggedly that footnotes frighten people off with their terrifying “ibids,” their ghoulish “see alsos,” their scary “this practice is not unknown in the culture of X”s. If a note’s worth putting in at all, put it at the foot of the page. Don’t bury it in the back where we have no way of knowing whether it’s just an ibid or something really juicy. We can decide for ourselves whether to ignore it or not, rather than get paper cuts scratching through the “notes to chapter 6,” spilling our tea and fumbling with crumpets and losing our original places in the process.**

Look at us, people. We write our blogs every day, splashing links to this and links to that throughout like insects to toil and moil on our behalf to say look! and see this! and that too!—the link in the blog has not only brought the footnote into its own, but is practically its raison d’etre. We’re now grown up enough, I think, to be able to deal with footnotes. What say you?***
——*“This is not precisely true. It is generally agreed by philosophers that the shortest time in which everything can happen is one thousand billion years” (from Mort).

**Though having just divulged the fact that I’ve borrowed a book from the LIBRARY, not paid $22 for it, will no doubt render my opinion worthless to said sages.

• A bit of gratuitous pseudo-Elizabethan English designed to raise the level of diction in an otherwise prosaic paragraph, repeated TWICE by the Lord Aragorn (Pippa and Fran, you must have been really tired that night) to the King of the Dead and his mates in the film version of Return of the King, but too Falstaffian for anyone including the King of the Dead to respond any way at all other than by guffawing. Speshly when you say it THREE TIMES. (This is of course why Peter Jackson cut away from the scene without letting you see it.)