Confessions of a Footnote Fetishist
December 16th, 2008
I was thinking about the late David Foster Wallace (hereinafter, “DFW”) today, which is to say that I was thinking about footnotes.
There are two rival schools of thought on the issue of footnotes, each of which may be summarized as follows:
1) Do or do not: there are no footnotes.1
2) DFW: “Reality is fractured—at least the reality I live in.” 2
- If it wasn’t important enough to include in the main body of your argument, why are you shrinking it down to 8-point type and squeezing it in a single-spaced box at the bottom of the page? Nobody wants to read your stupid little thought droppings, Poindexter. [↩]
- Footnotes, endnotes, and other marginalia are therefore “a way to speak to this essential fracturedness without creating a text that is unreadably fractured in and of itself.” [↩]
