Wallace, then, was forced to give his readers the choice as to whether or not they would embark upon his endnotes, though clearly he really, really wanted every one to be read. Of course, each of the endnotes corresponds to lines in the poem, so the reader does go back and forth in that section, but this is very different from the dynamic of footnotes, which create dual narratives that are experienced, as much as is possible, simultaneously.ĭavid Foster Wallace, the reigning champion of footnotes, decided to use endnotes for Infinite Jest for practical as well as aesthetic reasons, as a way to All of which means that Pale Fire employs academic techniques to create two separate reading experiences: first, the poem, and then the commentary. Kinbote’s notes don’t correspond to numbers inserted into the poem, suggesting that Nabokov wanted the reader to read Shade’s poem without interruption. Nabokov’s Pale Fire consists of a Forward written by the fictional Charles Kinbote, a 999-line poem called “Pale Fire” written by the fictional John Shade and then a section called Commentary also written by Kinbote, who we soon come to realize is a lunatic who believes himself to be the King of a country called Zembla. The distinction may seem facile, but endnotes leave the text clean and present the reader with a different kind of choice as well as a very distinctive reading experience. What Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest have are endnotes. Two of the most famous novels to use footnotes actually contain no footnotes at all. But it would take a couple hundred years until writers again took up the footnote for other, more artful purposes, discovering in this tiny technique emotional and intellectual depth far beyond the realm of the merely experimental. For centuries, then, the footnote existed as a blunt instrument, wielded by pedants and populists alike, primarily for the transmission of information, but occasionally to antagonize opponents with arch rhetorical asides. Ever since David Hume noted that, while reading Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, “One is also plagued with his Notes, according to the present Method of printing the Book” and suggested that they “only to be printed at the Margin or the Bottom of the Page,” footnotes have been the hallmark of academia.
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