The idea that Faulkner’s long parenthetical sentence became Wallace’s long footnotes and endnotes, but that maybe footnotes are working their way back into the body of the text.
Possibly the footnotes have become the main text (the footnote having replaced the footnoted?), possibly the footnotes are italicized in the main text or been made equivalent to it in other ways (the distinction between what is essential and what is by-the-way having been blurred or obliterated?), possibly the footnoted has been, as it were, impregnated with the footnote, so that the footnote exists within the footnote as something implied. (Question: is a footnote a mark of writing not thoroughly thought through in advance, either as a positive –stream of consciousness– or a negative? Is the very idea of the footnote one of ‘afterthought’?)
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