The Footnote as Conversation

Most of us were taught to think of the footnote as a ledger. It records what you owe, to whom, and on which page. That's a respectable function, and I'd never argue against it. But I've come to think it's the least interesting thing a footnote can do.

A well-made note is closer to a murmur across a seminar table, the thing one says to the person beside you while the main speaker carries on. It is where a scholar lets slip what she half-believes.

The two voices

Notice that an argument with notes has two voices running side by side. The body text speaks in its public manner: clear, decided, a little formal. The notes speak more quietly and sometimes disagree. "This is the usual view, though I confess I'm not sure it survives a second reading." Here the writer is allowed to hesitate, to credit, to tease.

In my own work I've found that the notes are where the honest part of the thinking lives. The paragraph says therefore. The footnote says but I wonder.

A small demonstration

Consider a sentence from a lecture I might give: Readers have always annotated the books they loved most.[1] That is a plain claim, easy to state. Its note, however, says something quite different from a citation. It tells you where my confidence ends. A second sentence might add that a colleague has challenged the point.[2] A third might simply say thank you.[3]

You can see what has happened. The page now contains a conversation, with a speaker, a doubt and a rival. Take the notes away and you have a flat assertion. Keep them, and you have a mind at work.

Against the tidy page

Publishers sometimes tidy notes into the back of the book, where they sit in a kind of exile, and I understand the reasons: the page looks cleaner. But a note at the foot of the page is near the sentence it troubles. You glance down, and the argument glances back. Moving it to the end of a chapter makes the aside into an appendix, and the murmur into a memo.

Perhaps that is why I distrust writing with no notes at all. It can be very fluent. It can persuade. But I often feel that I'm being addressed by someone who has never once changed their mind in the margin.

What I ask my students to do

When they write, I ask for at least one note per page that disagrees with the main text. Not dramatically, just a little. A reservation, a counter-example, a half-sentence of doubt.

They find it hard at first, then freeing. It turns out that most of them have thoughts that don't fit the argument they're building, and the footnote gives those thoughts somewhere to live.

Notes

1. "Always" is doing too much work here. I can point to a few centuries of evidence, not to all of history, and I would cut the word if pressed.

2. My colleague's objection is that most annotation is housekeeping, a reader's tidy underlining rather than a reply. I think he is partly right and mean to say so in a longer piece.

3. With thanks to the student who first asked what the little numbers were for.