Noted With Pleasure
Much as the press coverage
of "government" is in large measure coverage of politics, so also do
discussions of "language" get skewed toward issues of usage and etymology. In
language as in government, a vast and remarkable infrastructure--some of it
regulatory, some of it didactic--quietly shapes the world in revolutionary
ways. Yet most of us give little thought to how, say, there came to be spaces
between words, or why English has the letters that it does, or how the
mechanical means of writing affects the nature of writing.
From time
to time, however, language infrastructure pokes momentarily into public view. I
recall a heady few days in 1993 when a new reference work by Malcolm Parkes, a
lecturer in paleography at Oxford, enjoyed a certain modest vogue. This work
was Parkes' magisterial Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of
Punctuation in the West , a book that at last stripped the cloak of
anonymity from the important work of commas, periods, dashes, colons,
semicolons, and countless other full- and part-time functionaries. Several
times a day I still think of Parkes' disquisition on the now-obsolete
punctuation mark known as a percontativus , a question mark flopped
backward and used to indicate a question that is purely rhetorical. It is a
device we might usefully revive.
This fall another noteworthy volume on the apparatus of
written language has been published-- The Footnote: A Curious History , by
the Princeton University historian Anthony Grafton. The book seeks to explain
how footnotes became an essential element of the "narrative architecture" of
historical writing. This is not a reference book to be consulted but an
excursus to be savored, by a writer with a studied sense of style. "To the
inexpert," he writes in one place, "footnotes look like deep root systems,
solid and fixed; to the connoisseur, however, they reveal themselves as
anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity." Elsewhere he
writes: "Unlike other forms of credentials, footnotes sometimes provide
entertainment--normally in the form of daggers stuck in the back of the
author's colleagues. Some of these are inserted politely." He sympathetically
quotes Noel Coward's observation that having to stop for a footnote is
sometimes like having to answer the door while making love.
Although
Grafton does not mention the fact, or even allude to it, his book appears at a
momentous time in the life of the footnote. On the one hand, encouraged in part
by the cultural ascendance of irony, and by recreational obeisance to the
many-tiered nature of experience and truth, the noncitational or "literary"
footnote has become increasingly prominent in recent years in journalism,
criticism, and fiction. (For examples, see the effective but very different
techniques employed by Nicholson Baker in his novel The Mezzanine , and
by David Foster Wallace in the novel Infinite Jest and in the essays
collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .) On the other
hand, the footnote as scholarly reference tool or scholarly reference weapon
has never enjoyed more prominence than it does today--"each serious work of
history," Grafton notes, "must now travel on an impregnably armored bottom,
rather like a tank." In law, the analysis of footnotes even sustains a new
minor discipline, "citology." The next task for the footnote, scarcely begun,
is the mastery of electronic information, an undertaking that offers
opportunities for utility and mischief on an incomparable scale.
Where did the footnote come from? "Scholars,"
Grafton explains, "have placed the birth of the footnote in the twelfth
century, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth--never without
good reason but usually without attending to the other chapters in this story."
Grafton's book begins by considering the historians Edward Gibbon and Leopold
von Ranke, who in their own ways raised the historical footnote to a level of
high art both as a citational resource and a rhetorical outlet. Ranke, with his
avowed intention to show history wie es eigentlich gewesen --how it
really was--and with his ambition to put the study of history on a scientific
footing, doubtless had a more pervasive influence on the formal output of
generations of historians. But Gibbon's source apparatus and sotto voce
commentary in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remain more
accessible and entertaining to ordinary readers. Gibbon straightforwardly
observes at one point, for instance, that the emperor Marcus Aurelius thanked
the gods in his Meditations for giving him a wife "so faithful, so
gentle, and of such a wonderful simplicity of manners." Only in the annotation
does Gibbon add, "The world has laughed at the credulity of Marcus; but Madam
Dacier assures us (and we may credit a lady) that the husband will always be
deceived, if the wife condescends to dissemble." We owe a debt to the
philosopher David Hume for persuading Gibbon to take such notational material
out of the back of his volumes and to print it at the bottom of the relevant
pages--thereby turning end notes into foot notes, and allowing
Gibbon more effectively to drop the other shoe.
Neither
Ranke nor Gibbon invented the citational or literary footnote; Grafton slogs
back through time in search of antecedents. Medieval commentators ardently
"glossed" the margins of documents with references and asides. These, "like the
historian's footnote, enable the reader to work backward from the finished
argument to the texts it rests on." Religious writers in antiquity penned
notations that sometimes, we now know, were later absorbed wholesale into the
primary text itself. The structure of footnotes grew increasingly elaborate
mainly because of the rediscovery during the Renaissance of a wealth of old
documentary sources, along with the proliferation of new sources made possible
by the printing press and the modern archive. Some mechanism was needed to make
sense of it all. What is more, humanism and the Reformation set off a fight for
the ownership of truth, historical and otherwise--whence derived authority when
the higher Authority had been dethroned?--and the footnote became a marker of
legitimacy. As Grafton makes plain, the story of the footnote is in many ways
the story of historiography itself.
The story can get a little dense, although any reader
captivated by footnotes to begin with has already passed the first endurance
test. And Grafton enlivens his account with a sometimes astonishing array of
encylopedists, autodidacts, and polyhistors. The French philosopher Pierre
Bayle, for example, set out in the 1690s to produce a vast reference work,
Dictionnaire historique et critique ( Historical and Critical
Dictionary ), whose sole purpose was to point out the mistakes in all other
previously published reference works. This was a dictionary--a bizarre best
seller--in which even the footnotes had footnotes, and whose pages, Grafton
notes, "offer the reader only a thin and fragile crust of text on which to
cross the deep, dark swamp of commentary."
We smile, even as the
crossing becomes potentially harder with every day. Writing in 1824, Ranke
conjured a memorable image of the modern critical historian confronted by, and
determined to derive order from, the boundless quantities of available source
material:
Consider the
strange feelings that would arise in someone who entered a great collection of
antiquities, in which genuine and spurious, beautiful and repulsive,
spectacular and insignificant objects, from many nations and periods, lay next
to one another in complete disorder.
Does that sound anything like
the challenge posed by electronic media? (And where is a percontativus
now that I need one?)
