‘I Will Slice Open My Head For You’
David Foster Wallace and the Art of Footnotes
by Julia Wick
Footnotes are notoriously embattled. They are often decried as boring, tedious, and pedantic. Noel Coward once quipped that “having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love,” and the footnote-as-interruption complaint is quite a common one. But David Foster Wallace’s trademark footnotes have the opposite effect: instead of pulling the reader away from the page, they seem to bring us further into Wallace’s head, as if we are being beckoned and whispered to and suddenly privy to the marvelous pleasure of his private thought process. To read his footnotes is to swing elegantly from a trapeze above a churning wild of information, occasionally dipping close to the abyss but always somehow contained.
Wallace is more or less credited with popularizing footnotes in fiction, but the modern scholarly footnote (as we know it) was devised in the seventeenth century. Anthony Grafton — who wrote a wonderfully enlightening history of the footnote — posited that the seventeenth century emergence of modern footnotes resulted from “an effort to counter skepticism about the possibility of attaining knowledge about the past.”
To read [Wallace’s] footnotes is to swing elegantly from a trapeze above a
churning wild of information, occasionally dipping close to the abyss but always somehow contained.
The eighteenth century was an apex of sorts for footnotes, where they were “used to great intellectual and literary effect,” according to Grafton. The century’s footnote zenith was the publication of English historian Edward Gibbon’s six-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which traced the history of Western civilization from the height of the Roman Empire to the fall of Byzantium (the first volume was published in 1776, the last in 1789, and footnotes accounted for nearly a quarter of the work). The Boston Globe once called Gibbon “English literature’s all-time Footnote King,” and his notes did more than just provide detailed sourcing: they were also funny, idiosyncratic, wryly judgmental, and quite impertinent at times.
Much like Wallace, Gibbon’s footnotes offered not just a window into his powerful intellect but also a taste of his personality (“to know Gibbon’s footnotes is to know Gibbon the man,” noted Chuck Zerby in The Devil’s Details.
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Scholarly footnotes serve two main purposes: they are typically either bibliographic (citing a source) or explanatory (building on or jumping off from a point). “The Art of the Footnote,” a 1983 appreciation from The American Scholar, provided perhaps the best definition of a footnote’s function, when G.W. Bowersock (who declared Gibbon’s masterful footnoting to be “a work of art and an instrument of power”) noted that:
“A superior footnote presupposes a superlative text. Although the note should justify or illuminate the text in some way, it will evidently contain such alien matter as would disfigure the text in some way if it were embedded there. The text is a continuous thing — everything in it has a context; but the footnote is more or less free. It is connected, obviously, to what stands above it, and yet its contents need not fit seamlessly into a fabric of sentences. It is like a variation on a theme.”
In reading about footnotes, a frequent analogy one will come across is the idea of a compendium of footnotes as a kind of intellectual map, a marking of the writer’s meanderings through sources, thoughts and series. In this way they offer a guide to more than just where an author is headed, but also all the places he has been. Another possible image-metaphor could be that of scaffolding: the footnote as a structure that exists beyond and alongside the edifice of text, holding it up in places. And like any carefully constructed structure, there is far more than meets the eye. The average reader is likely unaware of the vast politics of academic footnotes, and the kind of invisible chess game of flattery and insult that they can sometimes represent. David Margolick expanded on this in The New York Times in June 1990, explaining that “footnotes provide an easy way to butter up colleagues. For junior professors, they win friends and influence people — particularly people on tenure committees.” Grafton provided a fantastic detailing of the manner in which expert users can quietly employ footnotes as little daggers, aimed at their colleagues. There is actually an entire etiquette to this that varies from country to country, according to Grafton:
Historians may simply cite a work by author, title, place and date of publication. But often they quietly set the subtle but deadly “cf.” (“compare”) before it. This indicates, at least to the expert reader, both that an alternate view appears in the cited work and that it is wrong. But not everyone who reads the book will know the code. Sometimes, accordingly, the stab must be more brutal, more direct. One can, for example, dismiss a work or thesis, briefly and definitely, with a single set-phrase or well-chosen adjective. The English do so with a characteristically sly adverbial construction: “oddly overestimated.” Germans use the direct “ganz abwegig” (“totally off track”); the French, a colder, but less blatant, “discutable.”
But back to Wallace, whose beloved footnotes are especially pervasive — and wonderful — in Infinite Jest, as well as in his two nonfiction collections, Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Asked about his use of footnotes in a 1998 interview with Tom Scocca, Wallace explained that “the footnotes were an intentional, programmatic part of Infinite Jest,” and then he found himself “sort of addicted to ‘em.” Many of his nonfiction pieces with particularly noteworthy footnote usage were “written around the time that I was typing and working on Infinite Jest, and so it’s just, it’s a kind of loopy way of thinking, that it seems to me is in some ways mimetic.”
“I don’t know you,” Wallace continued, “but certainly the way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it’s not orderly, and it’s not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops. Most of the nonfiction pieces are basically, just, look, I’m not a great journalist, and I can’t interview anybody, but what I can do is kind of, I will slice open my head for you.”
Julia Wick lives in Los Angeles and is an editor at Longreads.
