Wallace:David:Infinite Jest:Footnotes

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

wallace-l 29 April 1996:

Somebody wrote in last week that they hoped the footnotes did not represent Wallace simply "letting himself go." Our friend Steely from (and on) the Pynchon List also noted last week that the Village Voice Literary Supplement contained a review penned by DFW that contained more of his "annoying" or "distracting" (something like that) footnotes.

I thought I'd note that Wallace has been sort of testing out his use of footnotes in the manner they're used in The Jest for a while now. He co-wrote (with his college buddy, Mark Costello) a non-fiction book (kind of an extended essay) on rap, called "Signifying Rappers, about 5-6 years ago. This book contained very Jest-like footnotes. And, of course, his Harper's article from earlier this year about his experience on a Caribbean cruise was (hilariously) footnoted.

I guess what I'm suggesting is that the footnotes are not Jest-specific (though they might well be used in The Jest in some particular way or with a particular strategy). My impression is that Wallace is using footnotes to achieve a few different ends. First, they allow him to "go on" about something in greater detail without disrupting the flow of the "main text" itself. I realize that many would say that this is precisely what interrupts the text, but this seems to be a way of making some of his flights of fancy kinda "optional" for the reader -- and it certainly makes the order in which you get to these byways optional. Since the footnotes often cross-reference you to other notes or to other points of intersection with the main text, they also serve to subvert the pure linear narrative of the story, arguably generating a kind of low-tech hypertext. Also, since footnotes are typically associated with dense academic writing (law review articles, for example), his use of them to make fun and tell jokes seems like a new way of mocking the distinction between "high" and "low" writing. His all-time greatest footnote has got to be one from the Cruise Article where he tells us that a guy on the boat has his own skeet-shooting set-up in his back yard. You follow the note to the bottom of the page only to encounter "!".

I know that many have moaned about the notes in The Jest, but for me they're part of the great play of the book -- a pretty terrific jungle gym for this 35 year-old.

-- Will Layman

The same day:

I'm the one who wrote about the footnotes (well, endnotes, really) last week - I definitely don't find them distracting or unenjoyable, although having to constantly flip to the back of the book was annoying, but only an unfortunate side-effect of book technology (at least until I leveraged existing bookmark technology to mark my current place in both the text and the endnotes :-). I, as you can see, prefer parenthetical asides to any amount of foot- or endnoting.

I also agree that whether a character of Wallace himself is supposed to be the author of the footnotes, it is obvious that Wallace was enjoying himself in writing them. After all, towards the end of the book, there is at least one break between two sections in the text with a single endnote on an otherwise blank line referencing an entire multi-page chunk of text which could just as easily have been put in the text itself...

No matter who 'authored' the endnotes, though, their informal style still raises the point that Dan Schmidt and I were debating immediately after finishing the book - whether _Jest_ is as carefully constructed as a _Gravity's Rainbow_ or a _Ulysses_ or whether Wallace just sort of let it happen, which might account for some of the inconsistencies and errors which have been spotted. In either case, especially the latter, Wallace is a mad literary genius, but I think I'm more in the camp of mad literary geniuses who plan carefully than mad literary slacker geniuses.

  -Rich

From: Philip Costa/NORWELL/GIGA Philip95Costa@[omitted] Date: 29 Apr 96 15:53:02 Subject: wallace-l: more on footnotes

I think the endnotes (also called errata if I recall correctcly) were a fascinating and important part of the book. Three thoughts on them:

1) I, too, was forced to employ the high-tech strategy of multiple bookmarks. I even had a third for a while, marking the page where the order of the years is finally explained (224 if I recall correctly).

2) Sven Birkerts made what I thought was a great point in his Atlantic review. He suggested that the book models distributed systems like the Internet by scattering important information throughout the novel. A lot of REALLY key points get buried in otherwise digressive endnotes, and assembling them is part part of the work of the novel, what Wallace keeps talking about in his endless interviews.

3) Wallace is also parodying academics, I think, much like Swift was doing in his satires (e.g., Battle of the Books).