Alain, quoted in the Robert Dictionary, cited in Gérard Genette*, Paratexts, page 319, note 1:
"A note is the mediocre attached to the beautiful."
Recounted in Anthony Grafton*, The Footnote:A Curious History, pages 69-70 and footnote 16.According to Cole Lesley, John Barrymore's biographer, "Barrymore expressed the opinion that having to look at a footnote was like having to go down to answer the front door just as you were coming." (Cole Lesley*, Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward, page xx)
from Rodger Beehler*, "In Editing a Good Novel, the Best Footnote is0":"Two paragraphs of incomparable text. Thirty lines of print in the edition under discussion. Thirteen superscript numbers from our learned editor, requiring one to struggle constantly against the intrusive visual static to capture the sense and cadence of Dickens's language. This gives new meaning to the idea of wrestling with a text. . . ." (page B14)
"One is compelled to wonder if those learned editors—and the publishers who recruit and pay them—actually read books. Have they any feeling at all for the enterprise of reading?" (page B15)
from Patricia S. White*, "Black and White and Read All Over," pages 84-85:An image from Gaston Bachelard's* The Poetics of Space might help us to understand the reader's evaluation of footnote position. It seems to me that the controlling aspects of a page of text are verticality, contrast, and shape. In speaking of verticality Bachelard uses the figure of the house and describes its rise from cellar to attic as being central to the house's usefulness as an imaginative device. Along the vertical axis of the imagined house, we collect in memory and in poetry a body of information or ideas. Bachelard suggests that on the level of poetry, of dreams and memory, we look to the attic for pattern and framework, and for things which are rational and clear. In contrast, the cellar contains irrationality; it shelters the things which breed in darkness. The structure of a page of text, with its vertical polarization between primary text and textual notes, contains its own attic and cellar. Intuitively, the reader's evaluation of the placement of text on the vertical axis of the page tends to valorize the text on top.
In The Footnote: A Curious History, Anthony Grafton* documents how, for a long time, the writing of footnotes involved particular, uncommon skills and was even considered a special artistic talent. For the most part, this isn't the case now.
Gérard Genette*, appropriately in a footnote, quotes a clever disparaging remark about footnotes from the French writer Alain. In his poem "The Scholars," William Butler Yeats* contrasts "young men, tossing on their beds" and writing poems inspired by passionate emotions with the "old, learned, respectable bald heads" of their editors and annotators. (Yikes! Don't look at my photo.) And, sustaining the unlikely combination of footnotes and beds, Anthony Grafton relates a wonderfully witty quip from Noel Coward – to the effect that having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while making love. (In a footnote – where else? – Grafton notes that Coward attributed a stronger version of the remark to John Barrymore.)
Scholars have talked about footnotes in various ways. Patricia White* uses Gaston Bachelard's* phenomenological account of space, in which the attic represents pattern and framework and the cellar stands for irrationality, to account for our tendency to value the text on the top of a page to the detriment of the footnote at the bottom. John Lavagnino* neatly captures the sense of frustration that footnotes can elicit when he talks about what he calls commentary's "social ineptitude": it is never there when you want it, invariably there when you don't. Demonstrating how hot and controversial a topic annotation currently is, in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education Rodger Beehler* gives several examples of intrusive footnotes as part of his claim that modern annotation "gives new meaning to the idea of wrestling with a text."
Over the centuries, novelists and poets have used footnotes in their works in both respectful and ironic ways.
|
Screens in This Section
|
Footnotes' Negative Image
|
|
Sections
|