Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

And the digressions, footnotes? The antepenultimate footnote is actually about footnotes—and full of digressions even then—as if a coda to the whole. It’s long. Midway through he says this: [Boswell and Gibbon] loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics . . . that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, a gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. . . . They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not . . . The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries . . . Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough . . .