How do you footnote or endnote a collection of personal-ish essays or a researched memoir? It’s a question I had to solve over the last couple of months, as I was going through the last stages of manuscript prep. My new book is as of last week typeset and at the printer. I probably bored my publisher senseless with my emails about the endnotes. Should the links be spelled out in the printed version of the book, or only embedded in the e-book version? Should I have the links at all, if say I’m referring to a newspaper article and the thing appeared in print? (Although that’s not always automatic anymore.) What should I do: traditional footnotes, traditional endnotes? Endnotes that refer back to the page on which they appear? Or endnotes, I proposed, of the Janet Ajzenstat type: no numbers in the text, no numbers in endnotes themselves, but endnotes appear in ENDNOTES in the same order they appear in the main text? I expect my editors had a voodoo doll of me at this stage, or their eyes in a permanent rolling mode. (I have stolen the voodoo doll joke from a Slavoj Zizek book intro. Which reminds me: do you provide references for borrowed jokes? In what format?)
Meanwhile the book itself will be classified as memoir. Why fuss over references in a memoir, even if it’s of the researched kind? You come out of grad school fussed over references, I suppose. And journalism adds more fussiness, even if or especially if you’re not doing day-to-day reporting and can take time with checking and re-checking. I never had much interest in purely personal essays (I admire Meghan Daum, for example, as a podcaster and public intellectual, but her personal essays, although among the most recognized in the genre, just leave me unexcited. I never got into the Joan Didion church either. I am a fan of Zadie Smith’s essays but they tend to be of the researched kind, and can’t help referring to other books.)
Another, more idiosyncratic, reason is that I fell in love with the aforementioned Janet Ajzenstat mode of endnoting, as demonstrated in The Once and Future Canadian Democracy. When you look at the endnotes there, they do follow the order of appearance in the main text, but they also have a life of their own. The endnotes in that book are, in a very significant way, a parallel text to the main text. A sort of its undercurrent. A running commentary. They have probably been written a bit later than the main text, and they’re looking back at it. “Here, I propose this, but I could have equally proposed this other argument too…” is the type of conversation and doubling of the authorial voice itself that’s just fascinating to read. She’s slightly more informal in endnotes too. And, unusual for a political theorist, she’s an exquisite raconteur.
So I wanted to try some of that. But my references are more formal and in the main not presented as a flow or a parallel essay. I do have fun at various points. “Don’t @ me” actually appears in a footnote about Mozart. (Why Mozart? Well, I write about the Enlightenment, how alive or dead the idea is, and Alasdair MacIntyre argued that two key figures of the Enlightenment, outside Scotland, he’d rush to add, were Mozart and Kant. So I tested this thesis against Mozart’s opus. Not all of his operas are particularly Enlightenment-y! Alasdair MacIntyre, a keen critic of liberalism, of course appears in a book that’s to a great degree about liberalism / liberal democracy. Ajzenstat and MacIntyre are probably the same advanced age or thereabouts. Some of the crucial elders are still with us—Charles Taylor too—although many have stopped writing and being active in the public life. I took great pleasure in this roll call of elder genius. We need to read our elders, people. I don’t spell this out in endnotes but I make it obvious, I hope.)
Another worry about fussy referencing comes from the recent developments in non-fiction book publishing, the Naomi Wolf affair for example which revealed that book publishing, no matter the size, does not do fact-checking to any significant degree any more. Or does not do fact-checking of its celebrity authors? Since the BBC journalist (himself a PhD in the history of Victorian England) Matthew Sweet politely fact-checked in a radio interview Wolf’s main legal concept in her book Outrages as misunderstood and therefore worthless, I’m sure a lot of non-fiction writers carry an evil/angel Sweet sitting on their shoulder, commenting their referencing. Is this argument open to Matthew Sweet-ing, one wonders as one writes? Have I triple-checked that this phrase that I’m taking for granted (oh, say, “death recorded”) means what it says or its opposite? (In Wolf’s case it was the opposite, reader. “Death recorded” meant “death sentence commuted” in the Old Bailey records of the era, and Wolf had built her entire argument about the repressive Victorian death penalty practices on the former meaning. Oops.) Dr Sweet has recently also fact-checked on Twitter Johann Hari’s much-promoted book about the “diminishing average attention span” Stolen Focus and discovered that the studies that Hari refers to in footnotes are either inconclusive or say the opposite of what Hari in the main text says they conclude. Both Hari and Wolf, mind, have had a history of sloppy referencing and theorizing before their most recent “best-sellers” so it’s no wonder they attract attention.
Then there are authors who bring the foot/endnote into the main text. When I say authors, I mean French philosophers of the late twentieth century, like Derrida, who wrote, say, Glas (’74) in two columns – one discussing Hegel, the other, in a different register, Jean Genet – and added his own marginalia and referencing in the main text. It’s a work that, as the Britannica says, “plays with juxtaposition to explore how language can incite thought”. The reading/thought takes place as the two or three columns of text interact in some way, or resist one another. Julia Kristeva did this too in her essay on the figure of the mother, Stabat Mater, which contains side by side the text on the notion and symbols of the maternal related to Mary over the centuries, and a more personal river of text on Kristeva’s own experience becoming a mother.
Strictly speaking, references are probably best kept short, to the point, boring and separate – in scholarly works. But in personal essays – and in works of political theory and philosophy, even, sometimes – I think they can be this lively electrical field that interacts with the main thing. So I tried something like that.
Those of you still reading after this very inside-baseball intro to the logistics of book writing: this is the book.
In a way, it’s my take on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art. The art of losing isn’t hard to master! And anybody can find themselves suddenly bereft of the major sources of meaning. What to do? Well… talk with the elders, is a good start. Beside Ajzenstat and Taylor, I am Virgil-ed about and out of some depressed impasses by Norrie Frye, Simone de Beauvoir, Richard Rorty, Mihailo Lalić and some others. There is a chapter that lists works of art that helped me find an in to Canadian culture (now that felt like an exercise in archaeology). There’s a chapter on free speech in Eastern Europe vs. free speech in Canada. There’s another one that argues that friendship is on its way out; we’ll lose the practice and the technology of friendship like we lost penny farthings and cycloramas and the habit of buying song sheet music to play at home. Official book description here.
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To the first five paying subscribers to Long Play, and you know who you are: you gave my confidence a boost. I packed up last week and flew to Edmonton to meet two super interesting people and interview them for this newsletter. I can’t wait to share their thinking with you all. I can see some further travel on the horizon, for the purpose of making this newsletter / one-woman media outlet as engaging and interesting as possible. I am lucky to have one heckuva sophisticated bunch of readers. Onward!