The Cause After the Comma

The short phrases in an index are blunt. After a name, a single comma can add a cause. When Oldmixon made the index for Echard’s History of England, he wrote after Richard Nelthorp: “a Lawyer hang’d without a Tryal”: hanged without trial. It did not write another chapter in rebuttal. It merely stayed beside the page number, as brief as a lookup instruction.

The comma does not pause for long. It only lets the name bend slightly, and the phrase after it is pasted on. If the main text wants to change a person’s position, it usually has to lay out dates, events, responsibility, tone, as though assuming the burden of explanation. The index has no such patience. It lines up the names, brings the phrase close, then places the page number beside it. The reader’s eye is already accustomed to this arrangement.

There is a politeness in this arrangement that makes people lower their guard. It does not ask you to believe, only to keep looking things up; it does not raise its voice, only puts the words in a fixed place. Many dangerous judgments do not barge in. They are typeset so conveniently, like a small shim slipped between surname and page number.

A long sentence demands rebuttal; a short phrase only asks the eye to keep searching for the page number. The cause sits too close to the page number, as if it too were part of the route. If that sentence were placed in the body text, it might meet explanation, deletion, revision, denial; at the very least, it would appear to require responsibility. Placed at the back of the book, it is first treated as something that helps one find a place. Responsibility grows lighter, and attachment becomes faster.

Swift feared readers would use it to cheat. Fuller feared the opposite predicament: a large book without clues would trap even the diligent. Both anxieties still linger at the entrance. By the time one reaches Nelthorp’s line, the index no longer waits for the reader to choose how to enter the book. The name comes first, the cause after the comma; the page number seems almost incidental.

This is not to say that the body text is naturally cleaner. The body text can stay silent, can skirt the cause of death, can use a long narration to wear down the sting of a short phrase. The back of the book is not necessarily more just; it has merely seized the case name with shorter sentences.

Nelthorp, Richard, cause listed separately; not authorized by the body text.

The most unsettling thing about this line is precisely that it does not look like an accusation. It has no long plea, nor does it set itself up as another lectern. It remains flat, remains short, remains like a tool serving the reader. But a tool’s expression can also seize a name. It lets a person first be encountered as a case, and only afterward sought as a figure in the body text.

Those who enter from the back of the book think they are merely saving themselves a few pages. When they turn to the page number, they run into a cause the body text has not authorized.