The Society for the Abolition of Footnotes in Novels (SAFN)
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
But let me continue ranting. A few months ago I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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
Interesting post, Amanda – even though I don’t agree with it!
I think the footnotes are part of the fun of reading Jack Vance: he often shoehorns little asides which aren’t part of the story but offer a different perspective on the narrative. Or sometimes they’re just plain fun…
The phases of Marune are, for me, an good example of when footnotes can work. The reader benefits from knowing (although it’s not essential, I think) when “chill isp” is, and the footnote is an efficient way of conveying the information. As a reader I’d rather have that than a conversation between, say, Efraim and Lorcas discussing the phases, or having Efraim read it in an almanack.
For me it comes back, indirectly, to “The Dogma of Showing”, that received creative writing wisdom that “showing” is always better than “telling”. It isn’t, and sometimes the author just needs to tell you something before moving on to the meat of the story.
Having said that, I’ve never put a footnote in any of my novels!
~Tim
Tim, you make some good points, and I wonder if it’s because I’m not a regular sci-fi/fantasy reader that I think differently. On your Marune example, say, I thought that actually it’s fairly important to know about the phases and it should be explained within the novel, rather than being a (potentially ignored) footnote – for me, as a reader, I would rather learning it through the characters somehow.
I guess in most of my reading, information that’s not worth the “effort” of “showing” isn’t worth putting in the story – but I can see how in sci-fi or fantasy then perhaps this doesn’t always hold true. I’ll be interested to see what others have to say. Thanks for your comments and great food for thought!
I think your point about sci-fi/fantasy is spot-on. In these stories the author often has to convey a great deal of information about their imaginary world which isn’t necessary in mainstream novels. Very often this is done through horribly creaky dialogue. Sometimes as a writer it’s better just to bite the bullet, and dip into an omniscient narrative voice for a few paragraphs and tell the reader what you need them to know.
Or, like Vance, you can put a little spin on it, like using footnotes. (In his Demon Princes novels, which I recommend, every chapter has in introductory plaything, maybe an interview or a magazine article: they’re little works of arts in themselves).
As a writer of sf/fantasy, though, I’d argue that you need to convey much less information to the reader than you might think. In how many science fiction stories do you really need to know how the spaceship’s engine works? If that’s the most interesting part of your story, you’ve got much bigger problems than quantum mechanics…
Tim, I’m still super-inexperienced in the sci-fi/fantasy realm – I’ve taken a lot of convincing to start reading in this genre at all – but what you say certainly makes sense, so perhaps I need to amend my attitude to footnotes!
But your final point about not needing to convey all that information is (from my limited perspective) absolutely right. I think that’s one of the factors that tends to put people like me off sci-fi in the first place – if I want to read a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo I’ll pick up a mechanical engineering textbook. What I’ve found from reading some good sci-fi (like Vance, if I swallow the footnotes, or my very first attempt, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, is that a good novel in this genre is just like what I usually read – with strong characters and an engaging plot. The sci-fi side of this (in my opinion) shouldn’t dominate – it’s just like changing the setting and a few of the rules on expectations.
If you are new to science fiction and fantasy, Jack Vance is a pretty good place to start: if he wrote in a more fashionable genre he would be much better known. If you like Marune there is plenty more to read!
In bad science fiction there is a tendency to concentrate too much on the science; in fantasy the writer may be tempted to retail their world-building at tedious length. But as you say, the essence of a compelling story is the same whatever the genre. If you ignore plot–and particularly characterisation–you are unlikely to produce work which captivates anyone other than yourself.
Good luck with your explorations in sci fi and fantasy–I’m sure you will enjoy Jack Vance!
Tim Stretton’s last blog post..
[...] funny thing is that after my long complaints about having footnotes in novels, especially in Pulitzer Prize-winning Oscar Wao, then Borders includes this as their fiction book [...]
Hi, Amanda.
I just wandered this way from Tim’s blog. I don’t have any great feelings either way for footnotes, so long as they’re kept to a line or two. Longer ones really suited the feel of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, a very literary, non SFFH book, but for me, although they were integral to the book (and her short stories, so I guess her style overall), they irritated the hell out of me (though not many other people I’m sure, considering how well regarded the book was) in Susanna’s Clarke Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Any great feelings towards brackets?
(Or emotions expressed using punctuation marks.)
Neil’s last blog post..Veggie Books: The Letters
Hi Neil,
“They irritated the hell out of me”, great to hear. Maybe you do have strong footnote feelings after all.
You make a good point about brackets. (I use them a lot, too!) But when they start stretching more than a paragraph I get into the same question mode as for footnotes – if it’s not essential information, why is it there at all. Maybe I’m too obsessed with the “make every word count” idea. Perhaps some words are just to fill space …
[...] wanted to avoid – was barely there at all. (That’s excluding, of course, my problem with the footnotes in Marune – although I am almost convinced that this is acceptable in [...]
I’m a bit surprised about you being surprised that Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer. See, the Pulitzer goes to the most drearily pretentious, self important work by a tenured fat cat. Especially when they have some claim to victim hood, like that guy. As soon as I finished I knew it would win ten Nobel Prizes, because while it was agony for me, it was clearly a book that tells the pompous lit people exactly what they already know, and they can feel even more superior because they read LITERATURE with FOOTNOTES. As an American I know these things.
Thanks beeblebrox, now I understand what I have to do … go back to my novel draft and add footnotes!!! Just wait, readers, it’ll be torture …
Jack Vance is the master of footnotes; bizarre, dark, elegant, sarcastic, really funny footnotes.Some span a cross the whole novel telling a story of it’s own, some are parts of the larger puzzle of Vance’s universe.I have encountered very annoying footnotes in some novels but always attributed that to bad righting; maybe because i find so much delight in Jack Vance’s work.
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