The Devil's Details

by Chuck Zerby

  And in fact Experience is just the book with which to start off the new millennium; its notes are as numerous as they are artful and dramatic. A simple example: Amis, well into the book, takes a look at the correspondence that passed between his aging father and the poet Philip Larkin and assesses their relationship. Kingsley Amis, novelist, and Larkin, poet, had a long, complicated, and competitive friendship. “But what stays with you is the sense that the two of them … are at last transparent to each other. They are finally equal, equal before God and a godless death, and also physically and—for the first time—sexually equal.”8 An asterisk takes us to a note that begins: “In all likelihood this question deserves more attention than the longish footnote I am going to give it.”9 The “longish” note continues for another 323 words, not one of which is wasted. We learn of Nabokov’s division of all people between those who sleep well, “complacent dopes,” and those who are “great twisting insomniacs (like himself)….”10 We hear a character in one of the many novels of Martin Amis’s father divide humanity into the attractive and the unattractive; and we are presented with a Larkin unpublished poem that rings changes on the theme of “good-looking girls”; and then, and only then, we come to The Nation, The National Review, has failed to turn up any similar sputters; it is to be hoped that the liberal reputations of The Times and the Globe, and the cantankerous reputation of Kingsley Amis’s wintry remark: “I am getting ugly now because I am getting old.”11

  But Martin Amis is not done yet; his annotating art is sly. On the next page he quotes a letter of his; the name Sally12 appears in it unadorned except for an asterisk. Below we find simply: “My sister,”13 the shortest note of the book, and perhaps an unnecessary one—the information could have been supplied within the text, certainly. But a neat comic effect results in the short note coming after the long and winding road of the previous one, and after a long note that complains it may be in fact too short. In the silent movies a baggy-pants man or a beautifully polished grand piano may bump down a long, twisting staircase and come banging to a stop at the bottom step. A pause. Dead quiet. The pause stretches out. Then the man or piano bumps to the floor with one last, tired bang.

  Amis is a self-conscious practitioner of his craft. He worries that life is “amorphous” and he admits to a “novelist’s addiction to seeing parallels and making connections.” That and “an inner urgency,” he hopes, will allow Experience to “give a clear view of the geography of a writer’s mind.”14 Raw experience pulled into the mind is to be given shape; and what is revealed is the shape of the mind in the way molten ore reveals the mold into which it is poured. But Amis is not foolish enough to let it rest at that; he alludes parenthetically to his need also for footnotes “to preserve the collateral thought.”15 Bayle and a thousand other earlier annotators should be imagined in the heavens above singing hosannas when they hear those words: collateral thought, exactly.

  The mind may give shape to experience but it is not a mold, it is not neat, it never settles down; it disorganizes as it organizes; and, having blazed one trail, it instantly takes off in another direction. Its mother’s milk is mixed metaphors, oxymorons, red herrings, the bumping into hornets’ nests, and the stepping on toes. Footnotes can represent that trait of mind; in that sense footnotes represent organized confusion.*

  To appreciate fully the art of Martin Amis’s annotation, we must force ourselves to look squarely at a sad and fearsome event in Amis’s life. A cousin of Martin’s, Lucy Partington, to whom he was very close and who was a remarkable woman by all accounts, disappeared when she was a young woman. For some twenty years her fate was unknown; then police discovered she had been grotesquely murdered by a serial killer, “… one of the most prolific … in British history ….”16 Amis was deeply affected by the disappearance and the murder, and now is compelled to write about it. But how? How do you bring attention to the cousin you loved and the fearful facts of her death without ceding to the killer a tabloid prominence that overshadows the cousin and the grief? (Don’t most news accounts of murder end up paying more attention to the grisly details of the murder scene than to the life of the victim and even more attention to the murderer than to the victim?)

  Amis’s moral and artistic dilemmas are solved by footnotes. Lucy Partington’s disappearance is brought up early in the book; the killer’s name, Frederick West, is briefly mentioned. From then on, as Lucy reappears in the text in many situations and under many lights, poignant and witty, counselor and tease, her killer for the next 120 pages or so is mentioned only in footnotes and only as a killer. And then, and only then, a chapter opens with: “1995 did not stand on ceremony. It announced itself, on the first of January, with the prison suicide of Frederick West. (And in death, as it were, he drifts up from the footnotes and into the text.) …”17 (The ellipsis is Amis’s as his voice trails off.) From then on the killer again is allowed a place only in footnotes.

  The clear usefulness of footnotes that Amis has demonstrated has stimulated reviewers other than those in The New York Times to make special notice of them. In the London Review of Books John Lanchester, a novelist himself, mentions “… the antic parade of footnotes ….” found in Experience.18 And sure enough, Lanchester employs his own asterisk; his note below begins, perhaps a trifle optimistically: “There are a lot of footnotes about at the moment, and I thought I’d hop onto the bandwagon before it gathered any more speed.”19 And sure enough again: The footnote’s subsequent mention of Dave Eggers’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, brings us a second asterisk and a simple note below the first one: “To be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of LRB.”20 No footnote devotee would want to shove anyone off any bandwagon, but Lanchester’s enthusiasm should be greeted with some skepticism.

  The “antic” possibilities of footnotes have blinded John Lanchester to their wide-ranging, serious, dramatic capabilities. “The footnotes in Amis’s book,” he writes, “are often short diversions into memory or literary criticism away from the main emotional axis.”21 No, this is to entirely miss the painful story of Lucy Partington and the importance of footnotes to its proper telling. Lanchester continues in his note with a mini review of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in which—he claims—footnotes are used “to deflect, or escape from, the strength of [the narrator’s] own feelings; which isn’t a zillion miles away from Amis’s use of them.”22 The hyperbole of “zillion” suggests an unease on Lanchester’s part, a need to shout when a quiet statement would do; and his unease is justified. Not only has he mischaracterized Amis’s annotation, but he has overstated Eggers’s use of them as well; a careful examination of A Heartbreaking Work has turned up only two footnotes, one of which is marginal at best.* Two footnotes! The “footnotes” of Lanchester’s review barely earns its plural designation.

  Lanchester includes footnotes among the “huge repertoire of Post-Modern tricks”23 used by Eggers; and certainly the Postmodern sensibility delights in double narrative, second thoughts, multivoice effects, palimpsests, distancing devices, disjunction, irony, and the jokey, all of which the footnote certainly facilitates. This tendency of the Postmodern to do the double take becomes “hyper” when it hooks up to computers with their frightening power to redo and undo, pop in, pop out, and pop up, and digress and wander. As the footnote reconfigures itself for the digital world, opportunity and danger are waiting side by side for it.

  FORGET FOOTNOTES. HYPERLINK.24 is the headline of the ever-alert New York Times; a subheading adds: OLD MEDIA, MEET NEW MEDIA. The alarming headline is somewhat misleading, though the reader is quite accurately informed that some publishers had been scrubbing their books clean of “messy” footnotes. “Annotation was out; breezy uninterrupted prose was in.”25 The reader has also been accurately informed that, after this cleansing had gone on for some time, a Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. And because of that strange invention, Ms. Bader thinks she can say: “Soon the missing footnotes would have a home.” Now that the “old media
” has met the “new media,” the footnote, when evicted from the book by publishers and lazy scholars, is not to be out in the street. No, it is to move into a nice tract house on the Web; it is to spend the new millennium sitting in an armchair in front of a warm fireplace, children’s voices drifting down from upstairs, and reading a newspaper—The New York Times, presumably. The years ahead for the footnote are going to be the 1950s—but wired.

  A couple of paragraphs later the confusion is compounded and, at the same time, explained. “Indeed the Web has not only revived the footnote, it has spawned a cross-referencing craze that renders the formerly complete media event into a reference-laden, link-dependent, list-spewing, wallflower waiting to be courted by the next available annotator.”26 The actual footnote,* the numbered or asterisked citation or bit of commentary, can be used on the Web, and can be called “footnote” without fostering confusion even if it is accompanied by bright colors, illustrations, and the constant clicking of mice.

  On the other hand, the art of annotation is stretched into shapelessness when made analogous to the exuberant cross-referencing, list making, and site linking that occur on a Web crisscrossed with blinking, neonlike come-ons for insurance companies and astrologers and auctions and weather reports and everything else under the digital sun.

  The footnote either becomes so new an entity on the Web that it ceases to be a footnote or stays so much the same old footnote that it is likely to be overlooked amid the digital glitter. One can find on-line, for example, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—and the novel has a particularly appropriate title for our first venture into cyberspace. This version of the novel is intended for high school students or college freshmen, some of whom may be part of Ms. Bader’s generation of children who happily make their way deep into hyperlinks.

  They will find this stopover at Heart of Darkness a bit tame, though it is useful, and it is tastefully done. The illustrations and the text glow with a peaceful and welcome daisy yellow; the words in the text that occasion notes are discreetly underlined; if the print of the text is a trif le small for the easiest reading,* the “footnotes,” reached with a simple click, make fine reading. Click on the novel’s first mention of Kurtz, a central figure in the story, for instance, and a bar at the bottom of the screen shows three paragraphs of careful description of Kurtz, the words set against a restful blue background. The note is carefully labeled CHARACTERS to alert you to the fact that other characters in the story can be “accessed.” You can also click to THEMES IN HEART OF DARKNESS, which instantly appear against a soothing green—and high school students and college freshman can use soothing often, maybe even continually.27 The footnotes act like nothing so much as a discreet butler bringing you a note on a silver tray.

  But what if Bader’s Web-experienced children go to www.yahoo.com instead of www.acsu.buffalo.edu/csicseri/.com? A big red YAHOO! greets them. Intense blue lettering is everywhere: YAHOO MAIL. YAHOO! DOMAINS: CLAIM YOUR NAME. GET THE Y! STOCK MARKET TOOLBAR. YAHOO! SHOPPING: FROM APPAREL TO TOYS. Rhymes and exclamation marks are everywhere.

  And so many times, at so many places, your cursor turns unbidden into an eager hand with an exclamation point after it—as if grasping a bright future for you. A news box has: JERUSALEM CAR BOMB INJURES ONE. A Marketplace box has: BID ON A CELEBRITY SMOOCH: ELTON JOHN…. Perhaps not such an attractive smooch choice for our teenagers. Well then: Britney? There is a list of people to smooch.

  And that’s without going to the serious stuff, the Arts and Humanities section, the Society and Culture section … or going to the Fantasy games including Survivor and Extreme Football … or going to local Yahoo!s in China or San Francisco Bay … and so on and so forth.

  The conventional footnote is in trouble. Going to acsu.buffalo. edu is going on a nature walk with your eighth-grade class; www.yahoo.com is hanging out with your friends at the mall.

  We know annotating is never going to win if it has to compete with shopping. Moreover, we know footnotes like anything else on the Web can go poof! and disappear. Li and Crane in Electronic Styles: A Handbook for Citing Electronic Information give fair warning. Again and again the model citations they supply end with “Available” and then the date the site was last accessed. Web sites, like milk cartons, need expiration dates.

  And like “the mall,” the Web is educating our preteens, tweens, and teenagers—and our college students. “The Effect of the Web on the Undergraduate Citation Behavior 1996-1999,” a thoughtful and alarming article, appeared on the Web some time before its publication in The Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences (JASIS). This writer and his readers have to be grateful for the Web: The article would not have been available in time for it to be quoted in this book if we had to wait for JASIS to arrive in the mail; moreover, the Web site has a color photo of the authors that shows them as youthful, friendly, and candid—and sets them looking perfectly at home in front of rows of computers. They are certainly not old fogies who have it in for the new, digital, bookless study hall. Such a photo and the information it conveys are not likely to make it into an academic journal. And it is useful to know they are still relatively young given the import of the article.

  The two authors may look friendly but they do not pull any punches. Undergraduate papers in microeconomics between 1996 and 1998 show a serious deterioration in the students’ citation behavior. Book citations have dropped dramatically; newspaper citations have increased. “Web citations checked in 2000 revealed that only 18% of URLs cited in 1996 led to the correct Internet document. For 1999 bibliographies, only 55% of URLs led to the correct document.”28 Students are becoming accustomed to Web “cites” and Web sites are going poof! left and right.

  One site, purl.access.gov/gpo/lps2768, may have been designed to make the same point. It is supposed to be home for a “Report of the Committee on Automatic and Technology’s Subcommittee on Policy and Programs concerning standard electronic citations, 1997”;* one would hope, of course, that the report would bring some reassurance that the problem of disappearing sites is being addressed. A search, though, brings forth: “The requested … has been deactivated and cannot be resolved.” Well, neither can the worry of conscientious annotators be resolved.

  Doubts of the permanency of virtual footnotes remain with this writer even though two experienced and inventive computer experts have offered reassurances. The first, John Blankenbaker, a longtime advocate of the computer who has been designated the creator of “the first commercially available personal computer” by The Computer Museum of Boston, speaks quite directly to the problem. “How permanent is the Web and the information that it has?” he asks. “I do not believe it is permanent,” he answers without blinking an eye. Even if Web sites (or Web cites, perhaps) are backed up by disks of one kind or another, technological changes can make them unreadable in the future: “Who can read a five-and-a-half-inch floppy disk now?” Mr. Blankenbaker asks rhetorically and then adds: Paper and microfilm “aren’t permanent either … the old vellum has stood the test of time better than anything … even … marble inscriptions are disappearing ….”29 The implication, of course, is that literacy, literature, scholarship, the footnote itself have survived the crumbling of marble, acid rain on paper, and the whims of publishers: Footnotes will survive the Web. I am not reassured.

  The second expert, John Laux, a digital technologist and theorist, offers a plan that I am going to call the Laux Redundancy Plan: Footnotes at one site could be also stored in, say, fifty other sites around the world. “So ten years down the line, if we lose twenty of them we can still retrieve your [footnotes],”30 a kind of safety net will be hung under the threatened footnote.

  We know we are going to want to preserve some footnotes for centuries; for these treasures, fifty backups seems a perilously small number. One hundred or even one thousand backup sites might be more sensible; we might indeed hope to keep a backup on microfilm or even vellum. Obviously what is called for at this historic juncture is a well-fun
ded, broadly representative international committee to explore and establish a policy for the encouragement and preservation of the venerable (and vulnerable) footnote. A first step toward such a committee might be an informal Web site to facilitate networking and planning; this Footnotes On Redundancy site, or FOR, should be simple and accessible; its address—if not already taken—should be www.footnoteredundancy.com.

  This site can begin the necessary organizing and people-to-people linking that a successful footnote movement will require. Success is not a certainty, but we can take hope from the long history of the footnote; the footnote is a tough old bird and is not going the way of the auk or the dodo; surely it is going to learn to fly once again in virtual reality—proud, virile, and redundant.

  Notes

  Chapter 1

  1. See M. H. Dodds, “Footnotes,” Notes and Queries, 19 October 1910. I have not located the actual footnote volume of the Reverend Hodgson.

  2. Mark Amory, ed., The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), p. 573.

  3. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 349.

  4. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), p. 7.

  5. H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 69.

  6. Edmund Lodge, Esq., K.H., Norroy King of Arms, F.S.A., Illustrations of British History, Biography, and Manners, in the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, & James I, exhibited in a series of Original Papers, selected from the Mss., of the Noble Families of Howard, Talbot, and Cecil; containing among a variety of interesting pieces, a great part of the correspondence of Elizabeth and Her Ministers with George Sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, during the fifteen years in which Mary Queen of Scots, remained in his custody (London: John Chidley, 1837), p. 316.