This is the society I feel the urgent need to start today. Some days I’m just feeling murderous about people who misuse apostrophes or who say “bought” when they mean “brought”, but all of those sins are committed by people who are less able to do something about it. But when a novelist uses footnotes in a novel, they should know better.

The footnotes in novels that are annoying me

The reason I bring this up now is that I’ve been reading Marune: Alastor 993 by Jack Vance. This is the second time I’ve strayed into science fiction recently, but more on that another time. The point is, Marune has footnotes, and I don’t like it. A recent chapter I read had a long footnote explaining how the three suns on this planet give rise to all these different phases of the day, etc, etc, and I read it, because I soon realised that if I didn’t read it, I wouldn’t understand the rest of the novel when they mentioned these weirdly-named phases (as you can see I’m still dealing with my prejudices against science fiction!). My point is: if this information is important to the story, make it part of the story. If it’s not, leave it out.

But let me continue ranting. A few months ago I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I read it before it won the Pulitzer Prize and was a little surprised when it did. I already complained back then about the footnotes – and my argument is pretty much the same as for Marune – if the information is important, include it. Why should we all have to strain our eyesight to read footnotes, and strain our brains to decide if they’re worth reading or not?

Can I ever allow footnotes in novels?

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there are a whole lot more novels out there with footnotes. Even Wikipedia has a list of novels that use footnotes as a literary device. I guess I could stretch my imagination to think that there could be a place for footnotes in a very, very small number of situations, if they are truly used as a clever literary device to tell another story or give another viewpoint. But in that case, the writer is expecting that the reader will read them, whereas the whole point of footnotes for me – coming from the academic tradition – is that they’re there if I need to check a source or get some clarification about something but I won’t miss too much by skipping them.

Personally, I’m all for making every novelist on earth join my Society for the Abolition of Footnotes in Novels. If you can’t say it in the main text of a novel, then you shouldn’t be saying it at all. That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it, and I’m not even going to add a footnote to this blog post to explain it any further.

Thanks to Ruthieki for image via CC