The learned footnote

To be able to write a book is one thing but to attempt a book with footnotes is a different matter altogether. While the footnote may just be a distraction to the reader, it releases the writer into a terrain policed by ruthless academic vigilance, a site of bitterness, enmity and malice, says SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI.

FOOTNOTES may seem to the uninitiated the seal of scholarship. How often have we retreated, awed or repelled, from the massive array of pedantry in small type crowding the bottom of pages or the ends of chapters in scholarly books? To be able to write a book is one kind of achievement: to be able to write a book with footnotes quite another, a professional distinction placing one in a category unapproachable by the merely literate. Yet, as those who write such books know to their cost, footnotes are dangerous. They release you into a terrain policed by the most ruthless academic vigilance, a site of enmity, bitterness and malice. There are people out there waiting to get you through your footnotes, pointing out errors and inaccuracies, noting omissions and misreadings, and ultimately reducing your book to just another footnote reference in their books.

Is it possible, then, to write a book about a footnote? To do so may seem a form of revenge for the more common and merciless relegation of a book to a footnote. Anthony Grafton, a distinguished Renaissance historian who has also written on forgers and literary frauds, seems to have some such revenge in mind in his monograph The Footnote, (The Footnote: A Curious History, Anthony Grafton, Faber and Faber, 1997) recently reissued in paperback and simultaneously printed in German and French translation. In the former language it was beguilingly titled The Tragic Origins of the German Footnote, thus reminding the reader of two classic German works, Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and Walter Benjamin's Origins of German Tragic Drama. The learned reader, scouring her memory, might also remember that these two great works are largely unfootnoted. In French, Grafton's book was called The Tragic Origins of Scholarship. Armed with these fascinating preliminaries, I was prepared for Grafton's book to probe the unplumbed depths of a tragic conspiracy designed to keep scholarship within the academy by making it repulsive and impenetrable to outsiders.

My expectations were not entirely belied, though Grafton's book offers nothing so straightforward as a narrative account. Indeed, in its erudition and idiosyncrasy, its combination of narrow- mindedness with bewildering detail, its allusiveness and irony, and its substitution of the personal and particular for the general, the book is much more like a collection of footnotes than a history. (Moreover, actual footnotes make up about a third of Grafton's text.)

In fact, Grafton does not begin, as indeed he might have done, with the whole apparatus of annotation and reference which was used to gloss the great works of antiquity in the West as in our own scholarly tradition. The work of glossators and scholiasts marks the progress of learning in virtually every textual culture. It is from these products of estimable pedantry that we learn the trick of dividing a page between text and references, and convert the act of reading to a more laborious getting of knowledge. It is true, though, that there is a difference between marginal glosses and appendices provided for established texts (like Mallinatha's tikas for Kalidasa) and footnotes composed for one's own work. In this special sense the historical antecedents of the footnote are unmistakably European. Looking at the new Oxford translation of Rabindranath Tagore's writings on language and literature the other day, I was struck by the complete absence of notes in the original, an absence now consciously redressed by the editors of this translation.

Footnotes were largely introduced into historical scholarship by Edward Gibbon, whose notes to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire constitute one-seventh of the total work, and were notorious for their religious and sexual irreverence. Gibbon was celebrated for his mastery of the footnote as a form of literary composition, a subtext constantly entering into all kinds of subtle and ironic relations with the main body of the narrative. Nevertheless, in his Memoirs he regretted having yielded to "public importunity" (actually only the philosopher David Hume's advice) in printing them at the bottom of the page, instead of at the end of the volume. As a stylist, Gibbon was extremely conscious of the distraction to the reader posed by a body of foreign matter at the foot of each page. He sought to solve the problem by making the footnote itself an instrument of wit, not only supporting but subverting "the magnificent arch of his history."

In the 18th Century, when Gibbon wrote, the footnote was coming into its own as a form of art. Originating in the humanist scholarship of Renaissance Europe, with its new concern for authenticity and credence, the footnote was distinct from more ancient forms of commentary such as glosses and marginalia. It located the body of the text in time and space by showing the process of research that made the argument possible. "The text persuades, the notes prove". Enlightenment history, wedded to Cartesian ideals of reason, clarity and proof, brought in its wake a Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, with text and notes telling a distinctively modern, double story. The narrative seeks to convince us of its necessity; the notes tell us that it is a historically contingent, dependent and circumstantial product.

Modern history owes its footnoting practice to the 19th Century founder of "scientific history", Leopold von Ranke. Ranke was in love with the archive; an early infatuation with Sir Walter Scott yielded to a much more romantic affair with the library's inmost sanctum. Concerned to represent history "as it really happened", Ranke laid down for his contemporaries the importance of sources, documents, citations. Yet even Ranke worried about the intrusion posed by the footnote on the reader's attention; for him the ideal was still the clear and elegant narrative of a classical historian such as Thucydides. Ranke's citations are notoriously short and incomplete; in old age he refused to be convinced of the need to do his readers' work for them. He had supplied the hint; it was for them to read up the sources.

Nothing could be further from the situation that now exists in most academic disciplines. Derided and unloved, yet triumphantly paraded, the footnotes that crowd the bottom of each page are designed to tell in exhaustive detail the entire story of the author's labour. It's not what they contain that counts; it's what they prove (apparently) about the researcher. An important element in training a Ph.D. candidate is teaching her "footnote style". Influential guides, such as the MLA Handbook or the Chicago Manual of Style are very largely devoted to providing this instruction. Indeed, a thesis may often enough stand or fall by virtue of its footnotes; how often will an examiner return a dissertation because the notes are unsatisfactory!

Having been initiated into footnote-writing by these rites of passage, the accredited scholar is then determined to prove her worth by the number of footnotes she can display on the bottom of each page of her first book. The excitement of doing this is not likely to last. Soon the scholar will be found complaining about the burden of citation: "everything's done but the notes", she will say, and the notes may take much longer than the article itself.

What about the reader? Noel Coward one remarked that having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door in the middle of making love. Many non-academic readers, of course, will scarcely bother with the notes all. But notes always have a palpable design on us. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way poets like Ben Jonson and Alexander Pope annotate their own works, demolishing enemies and critics through a savage display of erudition. Nearer our own times, T. S. Eliot filled up the slender volume of his 1922 "Waste Land" with a mystifying array of notes. They were intended to reduce the obscurity of Eliot's poem by fleshing out its intricate web of allusion. Many have felt that they only make the poem a much drier and more pedantic affair than it is.

The story of the footnote reveals the intricacies of a struggle for power within the academy, a war fought over the archive, over the truth-claims of "scientific history". Despite much mockery of footnotes in academic satires, as in pseudo-academic manuals such as Stephen Potter's Gamesmanship, most scholars are deadly serious about footnotes. Blood is spilt in the sacred groves of academe over errors of reference, plagiarism and deliberate fraud, all recurring features of scholarly footnotes.

Many researchers while away the tedium of their labours by spotting footnote errors in well-known books; many scholars use slighting footnote references to demolish their rivals. Grafton has entertaining examples of the disputes thus generated. But I have myself noted several omissions in the Index to his book, and at least one footnote error. Is there a moral in this? l

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