Dear Felix[1],
Thank you so very much for making, just for me, a footnote in your recent blog posting[2]. It’s just what I’ve always wanted for Christmas. Lest others doubt my sincerity in really, really wanting such a gift, here is just a taste of the fascinating history of the footnote from Chuck Zerby’s book on the subject [3]:
Gone is the time when the Reverend John Hodgson, the distinguished nineteenth-century historian, could unselfconsciously devote one quarto of his multivolume account of Northumberland County (England) to a single gigantic footnote on the Roman Wall.
… A stern, no-nonsense lecture on the eighteenth-century belief that the universe was a smooth-running machine is being delivered. Suddenly, from the bottom of the page, a voice whispers, “It should be pointed out, however, that de la Mettrie, the author of the famous book Man The Machine, died of over eating and gout; he stoked the machine too well.” The reader is intensely grateful for this human interruption.
Being human, authors sometimes miscalculate, of course, which is part of the charm of footnotes. That gentlest of philosophers, William James, once interrupted his discussion of the brain to reassure the reader. “Nothing is easier than to familiarize oneself with the mammalian brain,” he said. “Get a Sheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, and forceps…and unravel its parts.” Only a reader with a strong stomach will gain the assurance James intended.
… A scholar’s life is not for the timid. A somewhat sad illustration of this occurred many years ago. Historians were engaged in a furious conflict set off by a recently unearthed confidential memo submitted to the U.S. Intelligence Bureau during World War I by John Dewey, the philosopher and Vermonter. (The intricacies of the dispute are no more necessary for the general reader to grasp than a knowledge of how to load a musket is required by War and Peace.) A short volley of criticism, supported by fifty rapidly fired footnotes, was directed at one of the combatants by an inexperienced graduate student. The response was a barrage of eighty-four notes, at least one of which struck home. “Zerby,” the assaulted scholar’s note exploded, “misquotes me, accidentally, I suspect by substituting ‘which’ for ‘that’.” The wound inflicted should not be minimized. Grammar — despite the considerable evidence to the contrary — remains important to graduate students. The imputation that the error was an accident instead of a subtle tactical move seems to have been devastating: “that” graduate student’s name never appeared again in a scholarly journal.
… As tempting as it is to ascribe a hard-nosed, even commercial, motive to scholarly antagonism to footnotes, that is too easy. Anyone who has been around a practicing scholar knows there is more of the kid in his soul than the banker. (Many of them, for example, take summers off.) And always we should keep in mind that the footnote, like the haiku or terza rima, makes difficult and strict demands on the writer, however much pleasure it may give the reader. Impatience, even resentment, and certainly ambiguous feelings on the part of writers toward footnotes are to be expected.
… Scholars are often viewed as park rangers of footnotes; the notes are on their preserve and in their charge. But scholars are not entirely to be trusted. A notable example is the pioneering historian of the footnote, Anthony Grafton. His The Footnote: A Curious History is solid scholarship, an entertaining read, and a sophisticated defense of the footnote as scholarly tool. Alerted by our experience with McFarland to the fact that hidden and ambiguous feelings may be expressed in metaphor as they are in dreams, we can “psyche out” Grafton.
He turns out to be a terribly conflicted supporter of the footnote; his mind says one thing, his dreams something else. Early on a peculiar “low rumble” is ascribed to the footnote and the “rumble” compared to the dentist’s drill’s “high whine”; enthusiastic annotators then are compared to “dentists who have become inured to inflicting pain and shedding blood….” We leave the dentist’s office only to hear that the “production of footnotes” resembles “the disposal of waste products.” Next comes a comparison of the footnote to a fish that few readers bother to trawl for, then to a shabby podium, a carafe of water, a “rambling, inaccurate introduction.” That each of these comparisons is in the service of a legitimate insight and that each extends our understanding of the footnote does not conceal the “low rumble” of hostility emanating from this scholar’s prose.
It is true that when Grafton’s story reaches the eighteenth century, the seductiveness of that century’s footnotes moves him to say that “footnotes burgeoned and propagated like branches and leaves in a William Morris wallpaper.” A lovely comparison that is preceded, however, by a comparison of footnotes to the “impregnably armored bottom” of a tank and succeeded by a scholar who uses a footnote the way “the hockey-masked villain in an American horror film uses a chain saw: to dismember his opponents, leaving their gory limbs scattered across the landscape.”
Ermmm… that’s not quite going in the desired direction. Here is another source that gets right to the point:
In the hands of a master, the potentially pedestrian footnote is elevated to a rhapsodic grace note. It can inform and entertain, clarify and illuminate. The artful practitioner “knows how to instruct and to amuse,” writes Princeton history professor G.W. Bowersock in The American Scholar, “to unite utile with dulci in accordance with the unrivaled precept of Horace two thousand years ago.”[4]
Footnotes allow us not only to see the prejudices of old sources, but the biases and convictions of the footnoter himself. They provide readers with the intellectual map that the writer has used to arrive at her conclusions. If some see footnotes as tiresome road blocks, others more fairly view them as serendipitous detours that can lead to delightful and unexpected stops not on the original itinerary. Footnotes gave birth — after an extended gestation, mind you — to the hypertext links that are the vis vitae, the life force, of the Internet.[5]
In addition to crafting a lovely footnote for me, Felix has submerged the page — within which one finds inciteful insightful comments from the always-interesting Dr. C — in Growlery Green® so that, after you finish reading it all, and look away, everything looks pinque.[6] The gift of rose-colored brain cells. So thoughtful. Thank you, Felix.
Sincerely,
Julie
- Felix Grant, The Growlery, Bristol, UK
- Felix Grant, Notes from Dr. C, The Growlery, December 23, 2008
- Chuck Zerby, Chapter 1: The Endangered Footnote taken from The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes (Nov 1, 2007)
- G.W. Bowersock, “The Art of the Footnote,” The American Scholar (Winter 1983/84): 58
- Bruce Anderson, The Decline and Fall of Footnotes, Jan/Feb 1997 issue of Stanford Magazine
- Ray Girvan, Felix: “Nothing Propinques Like Propinquity” ; JSBlog, December 16, 2008
Coloring 