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Anthony Grafton and Bruno Latour may be considered as people of knowledge and education. They both were engaged in the process of knowledge acquiring and transforming it into their own ideas and new horizons of thought. For most aficionados, Princeton historian Anthony Grafton put the bon mot in play a few years ago in his elegant The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press). Now, however, in The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes (Invisible Cities Press), former Amherst College dean Chuck Zerby, in his odd doppelgnger to Grafton's volume, merely credits Grafton with reusing the line while stating (see backhanded compliment at Zerby footnote No. 31), "Grafton indicated that three other scholars have used the quip. " That is, before Zerby made it four (and your writer made it five). (1) But can we trust Zerby? His initial footnote to Grafton's book, on Page 13, gives the publication date as 1999.
By Page 55, the date reverts to 1997 (the correct year), where it remains in subsequent citations. Is this the Devil teaching Zerby manners, befouling his own Grafton footnote as punishment for the author's daring, as a mere freelancer, to zap our leading footnote-ologists? Another Zerby aside, commenting on a purportedly inadequate Grafton citation ("Grafton's annotation is not as fulsome [sic] as one might wish"), suggests that less preternatural causes, like carelessness, prompt Zerby's error. But this aggressive proponent of a footrace within the historiography of the footnote does remind us that Grafton's own crediting of the remark under whelms. The eminent Renaissance scholar points readers to a 1976 book, Cole Lesley's Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward, in which Coward "attributed a stronger version of the remark to John Barrymore. " (3) Any chance Barrymore stole it from Edwin Forrest?
Grafton begins his search with what prove to be two straw men: the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke and the late-eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon, who share the reputation of having perfected modern historical scholarship. Despite Ranke's impressive combination of narrative and analytical history and Gibbon's blending of massive knowledge and high style, neither, according to Grafton, was the first to practice the art and craft of documented, critical history. Behind both were ancient, medieval, and Renaissance prototypes, numerous historians who not only told stories but cited evidence as well. Among them were the Italians Bernardino Core, Leonardo Bruni, and Giannantonio Company; the Englishmen Richard White and Ben Jonson; and, most impressively, the great French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou. The latter wrote a "genuinely new kind of history" in what would prove to be the longest historical narrative before the twentieth century. (2) Other prototypes of modern scholarship included seventeenth-century church historians and antiquaries, particularly the German Jesuit Athanasius Kitchen, whose massive, illustrated study of ancient China marked the maturation of a tradition of historical documentation reaching all the way back to the fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius and the venerable eighth-century English monk known as Bede.
Here, too, one can find a combination of technical argument and deep documentation that anticipates modern historical scholarship. Also helping to make the primary source supreme within this tradition of scholarship were the bitter tracts of warring Protestants and Catholics. The seventeenth century was nonetheless a step up in historical scholarship because that century's church historians and antiquaries, as well as exceptional scholars like de Thou, subjected documents to a higher degree of scrutiny, allowing "the [prior] age of primitive accumulation of ecclesiastical-learning... to give way to one of analysis and investment. " (4) However, Mr.
Grafton again insists that the work of these scholars also provides an "insufficient" explanation for the rise of the footnote. So who, or what, in the end was the key player in the birth of the new professional scholarship the footnote came to represent? For Grafton, that honor belongs to a scholar and a work he first discovered as a college undergraduate: the great Dictionnaire of Pierre Bayle. "Swarming" with footnotes and irreverence, and aspiring to expose and correct all the mistakes then existing in other reference books, Bayle's dictionary is truly a young man's book. It was written against the background of the "deconstruction" of the scientific authority of the ancients at the hands of the new seventeenth-century scientists Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, and Robert Boyle. Here the modern "rules of scholarly procedure" and historical scholarship as we know them today finds their definitive statement. (3) Although Grafton proclaims Bayle's uniqueness, he diminishes it somewhat by his extensive honor roll of earlier prototypes and by the revelation that Bayle was not, as the Germans like to say, always sauber ("he silently abridged and consciously or unconsciously misread texts"). So, in the end, the hero of Grafton's story turns out to be far from indisputable.
If there is a failing in this very ambitious and informative little book, it is the absence of a discussion of what the "rise of the footnote" or modern scholarship has meant for the reading public outside the academy. Grafton writes about a very comfortable scholarly world that he obviously loves. The only discordant note he finds is arguably one only a scholar in such a position would take notice of and lament: the footnote's "stylistic decline to a list of highly abbreviated archival citations. " (4) A more interesting question is how the footnote has affected the scholars it obsesses. Is it also the source of inaccessible scholarship and academic cliques - networks of scholars who write primarily to and for themselves, aloof from the general, educated public?
Has the rise of the footnote contributed to that historical illiteracy and denial now rampant in many of our schools and universities? Could it be the footnote that has enabled so many scholars to walk away from their pedagogical responsibility to inform and enlighten their fellow citizens? There may be a larger, less abstract, and more important story still to be told about the modern footnote. (4) Any trusting and innocent soul who has taken hope from the many obituaries for post structuralism that have appeared in the last several years should read Aramis or The Love of Technology by Bruno Latour. Although some English departments are moving tentatively away from post structuralism, it is thriving in other quarter's freshman composition programs, sociology, and "science studies, " the field in which Latour is preeminent. This book, published by Harvard University Press in both cloth and paper covers and well advertised, is clearly expected to reach a large audience - not some tiny pedantic sect. If it does have a lot of enthusiastic readers, the intellectual world is in more trouble than most English professors dream.
Aramis is a post structuralist novel, a pastiche of different voices, set in different typefaces; the subject of the novel is the failure of the French to build a much discussed public-transportation system with detached cars linked by magnetism and run by computers. Latour says of the book: "a young engineer is describing his research project and his socio-technological initiation. His professor offers a running commentary. The (invisible) author adds verbatim accounts of real-life interviews along with genuine documents, gathered in a field study carried out from December 1987 to January 1989. Mysterious voices also chime in and, drawing from time to time on the privileges of prosopopoeia, allow Aramis to speak. " Aramis, the system, identifies itself with Frankenstein's monster, bewailing his abandonment by Victor Frankenstein. Latour's book is intended to reverse the meaning of Mary Shelley's, so that the real crime is not tampering impiously with nature, but abandoning the monster.
Latour asks us to give up our fund-dud...
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