Footnotes and Narrative
Answering the question, 'what do footnotes do?' many scholars would argue instrumentally, stating that they document references, accumulate authority, and demonstrate scholarship. Yet to a reader, the footnote is quite a different sort of experience. As a reader progresses along a line of a sentence, their eye is caught by the superscript reference number. From this point, they have two options: to continue on to the next sentence, or to leap to the bottom of the page, or the end of the book, to another sentence. Hugh Kenner, a twentieth-century literary critic of the modernist canon, discussed this curious effect in this way:
The footnote's relation to the passage from which it depends is established wholly by visual and typographic means, and will typically defeat all efforts of the speaking voice to clarify it without visual aid. [...] The man who writes a marginal comment is conducting a dialogue with the text he is reading, but the man who composes a footnote, and sends it to the printer along with his text, has discovered among the devices of printed language something analogous with counterpoint; a way of speaking in two voices at once, or of ballasting or modifying or even bombarding with exceptions his own discourse without interrupting it. It is a step in the direction of discontinuity: of organising blocks of discourse simultaneously in space rather than consecutively in time.[1]
The footnote, this curious mechanism of discourse, performs an intriguing narratalogical trick, allowing the reader to choose a path to proceed along. The hyperlinks embedded in the hypertext protocol of the world wide web have an analogous effect.
There are those who dislike this quality, finding it distracting, and there are those who have used it to ill effect, belabouring the reader with blizzards of footnotes. Robert Connors observes:
Footnotes tend to invite readers to bifurcate their intentions into separated streams: the high street of the text, which is not supposed to be soiled with specific reference, and the alleys, closes, and mews of the notes, which carry on the necessary but less genteel business of citation and analysis.[2]
Connors's rhetoric suggests the footnote occupies a role akin to that of a service industry: the job of the footnoter somewhere between the night-soil man and the street-walker. In rendering this service, Connors observes, scholarly footnotes were often deployed in secretive and unhelpful ways, rendered obscure by incomprehensible abbreviation and Latinate citation jargon. Such footnotes were intended to alienate readers unaccustomed to the guild of scholars.
But the choice remains with the reader; to follow the text or to make the footnote jump: it is, as Connors suggests, an 'elective reading experience' – and as such, completely unlike the effect of parenthetical author-date citation systems, which intrude into the sentence in a wholly different manner.
Footnotes, literature, and literary theory
Many writers, both critics and novelists, have found creative potential in the footnote.
Benstock, Shari, 'At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text', PMLA, 98 (1983), 204-25
Derrida, Jacques, 'Living On: Border Lines', in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. by Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 75-176
Dunn, Mark, Ibid: A Life: A Novel in Footnotes (London: Methuen, 2005)
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara, On the Margins of Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)
Leader, Darian, Freud's Footnotes (London: Faber and Faber, 2000)
Nabakov, Vladimir, Pale Fire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962)
