[LINK] John Moyer on the importance of the footnote in writing

[rfmcdonald]

Starting with a review of Erik Larson's very good The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, John Moyer goes on to write at length about the importance of the footnote.

Devil, as a work of non-fiction, relies heavily on sources and thereby on attribution. Larson has done his research and needs to display that in all its peacockian glory. But one of the failings of the book (and why any non-fiction I ever write will have three sales: myself and my parents) is that he eschews end notes in favour of a lumpy stew of references and citations shoved in willy-nilly at the back. Oh, there’s endnotes, but nothing in the text to indicate that (get out of here, “brackets”, you’re at best insufficient for this mighty work). For the majority of readers, I imagine that’s not a problem 4) but considering there are almost 30 pages of references, it clearly matters to some…but also considering this book is predominantly about 19th-century architecture, we can safely assume not too many people care about that either.

But the relegation of these endnotes to the mires near the “Acknowledgements” means that the connection between the work and the work, between the research and the words on the page, is lost. Academia uses footnotes for a (very) good reason, that being the work is as (or more) important than the final product. Anyone who’s read, say, Benjamin5, or, God help you, Massumi, knows that the final product is sometimes, er, opaque6, but no matter! The text is littered with helpful numbers, 1s and 2s and more that gently float above as little reminders that the work of research is as least equal to the writing of the text. Noel Coward said reading footnotes was like “having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love”, which suggests that “making love” is a foreign country to Noel (you get lost in the “midst” of a gallery or when returning home from the invasion of Troy, not in “making love”, but that’s the British language for you; why be accurate when you can be archaic), but also, a fundamentally wrong reading of footnotes (or, I’ll grant you, endnotes).