Most books we read — whether textbooks, reference works, academic studies, histories, or fictional narratives — are organized into chapters. These divisions, as the scholar Nicholas Dames explains in his new book, The Chapter: A Segmented History From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, are “so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible.”
No one before Dames seems to have asked where this ancient and deeply established convention came from, or how it spread. Chapters, he shows, evolved “slowly with every shift in genre and technology of publication” for two millennia. Starting as a way to help readers find information in compilations, they evolved into a means of creating the sensation of time in narratives. Dames is a specialist in the history and theory of the novel, so he concentrates on “how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art.” He thereby transforms the chapter into an extraordinarily revealing object of both literary analysis and cultural history.
Many widely dissimilar textual units with disparate functions have been described as “chapters” over the centuries, and Dames refuses to impose strict criteria for inclusion in the category. Instead he insists that indistinctness is built into its evolution: “An essential element in how chapters have developed is toward a functional innocuousness, an insistence, in fact, on their own vagueness, flexibility, and resistance to rising to any flagrant notice.” The chapter not only seems superficial, indefinite, and unobtrusive, but actually is all of those things. It occupies a position in books between texts and what are called “paratexts,” like tables of contents and prefaces, features that appear external to the text itself.
Chapters are part of the surface formatting of a book rather than its contents, but even as containers, they lack a consistent size and shape. And unlike units that describe parts of a book in literary terms — scenes, summaries, episodes, adventures, climaxes, denouements, reflections — chapters have no specified contents: They might hold any or all of the above, and yet be coextensive with none. The chapter, Dames tells us, “is resistant to wholeness, autonomy, being excerpted; it prefers irregularity and elasticity.” And yet, we soon learn, the very things that make it conceptually indeterminant also make it ubiquitous and durable.
Within all of that muddling variety, Dames traces a “highly abstract” yet nevertheless definitive characteristic: “The chapter is a form of textual segmentation that articulates time.” Chapters accomplish that articulation by being both segments in an ongoing sequence and interruptions in its continuity. They give readers “a temporal experience, one that is organized into flexible but regular units, punctuated by breaks, and loosely, at times very loosely, tied in a developing sequence.” Chapter breaks are points of hiatus in a text, rifts in sequential reading that are nonetheless geared toward its resumption. Such pauses allow the text to “gently haunt us, to let it pass into our preoccupation.” Moreover, they create awareness of the time we have spent immersed in reading by linking it to time outside of the text. The sense of duration created by this segmenting and sequencing, which Dames calls “chapter time,” must stay elastic and adjustable in order to accommodate any content supplied. Thus, the deep significance of the chapter’s superficial shape-shifting, Dames argues, lies in its power to give temporal dimensionality to our reading experience.
Unlike units that describe parts of a book in literary terms — scenes, summaries, episodes, adventures, climaxes, denouements, reflections — chapters have no specified contents: They might hold any or all of the above, and yet be coextensive with none.
The Chapter deftly interweaves various modes of historical and literary studies. Subtle and intricate close readings of individual works combine with historical overviews of textual formats, publishing technologies, and reading practices. Dames ranges impressively over two millennia of Western literary history: An early chapter scrutinizes debates over medieval biblical editing, while a later one draws on quantitative analyses of hundreds of 19th-century novels. Indeed, the variety in his own chapters underlines Dames’s general point about the unit’s flexibility. The Chapter ranges from relatively obscure ancient works, like Arrian of Nicomedia’s 130 CE edition of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus’s Discourses, to numerous canonical 18th- and 19th-century novels, like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The book manages to combine insightful close readings with remarkable erudition.
Although Dames doesn’t claim to have written a comprehensive history of the chapter in every kind of book, one can hardly imagine a fuller record of the tradition that led to their use in the modern novel. Beginning centuries before the novel’s invention, The Chapter recounts the development of what Dames calls the “editorial chapter”: the segmenting of legal codes, philosophical treatises, scripture, and romances by scribes, editorial compilers, and early printers often long after the works were composed. Editorial chapters were not invented to mark time; the earliest of them were spatial indicators for finding information in books that were not intended to be read sequentially. Indeed, chapter divisions seem to have been among the oldest forms of textual segmentation, centuries older than the smaller partitions — like those between words and sentences — which might seem more obviously necessary to us. Not until late antiquity did scribes begin dividing texts into lines of sense to make sentences, and until the ninth century written lines were continuous chains of letters, without any breaks between words. They needed to be read aloud to be understood. The difficulty of finding information in such densely written texts led to their division into topical units, sometimes with descriptive headings, which could give users a map of the contents. It thus stands to reason that the earliest extant chapters can be found not in narratives but in ancient “legal texts, practical guides, and even more learned, information-rich miscellaneous compilations,” where users would seek specific material from a broad array of topics.
But these early divisions — called “capitulations” for the “caputs,” or headings, they used — were more than just spatial indicators, according to Dames. They already implied the text’s temporal dimensions by acknowledging the implied reader’s limited time. Capitulations let readers extract meaning faster, even scan to locate particular passages. Thus, as an early technology to accelerate information retrieval, they foregrounded the element of time. Moreover, even though the texts were not being read seriatim, the visibility of segment headings, which sometimes took the form of short precis, indicated the extent of the whole. They lifted the contents from the literality of the unbroken textual chain to the more abstract level of general concepts, and those moments of rising above the text to label or comment on it also helped bring the seriality of reading itself into view.
The chapter’s temporal functions become more evident in narrative texts, which assume chronological order and sequential reading. Early narrative chapters, we learn, were the products of editors rather than authors, frequently imposed after the fact to improve readability. The Western narratives that were the most intensively and repeatedly segmented were the four Gospels of the New Testament. Each of the Gospels began as a single continuous text, which Christian Bible editors subsequently broke into short sections to cross-reference and compare the four different accounts of Jesus’ life. Like the capitulations in classical texts, these segmentations ostensibly made it easier to find certain kinds of information. But since the material was narrative, the divisions often also highlighted story-telling features. From the third to the 12th century, Dames shows, Gospel editors devised numerous ways to divide the texts into narrative units, placing breaks at the ends of completed actions, the beginnings of new intentions, changes of place, introductions of new characters, and so on. The capitulators seemed to be trying to make their very short segments correspond to particular bits of dramatic content: actions, scenes, persons, movements, or conversations.
In the 13th century, a shift in Gospel editing practices occurred that Dames considers the beginnings of a modern conception of the chapter. As the Biblical book divisions still in use today began to develop, chapters grew in size (although they still seem quite short compared to modern chapters). These new chapters tended to emphasize the places and days of the action, giving an impression of objective narrative distance. Merely containing the assorted happenings of a place and time without corresponding to any particular narrative content, the chapter form of the Gospels, which was soon adopted for the Bible as a whole, became a mode of abstraction from the action. In this way, the Gospel capitulators of the 13th century, in Dames’s view, inaugurated the abstracted model of the narrative chapter. Their divisions seem unresponsive to human agency; they don’t emphasize the rhythms of intention and action, but instead mark the ongoing sequence of changing days. Despite the fact that the Gospels tell the story of God’s redemptive time, the very essence of Christian kairos, Dames notes that the temporality prevailing in the chaptering is that of chronos, the more impersonal regularity of mundane time.
Early narrative chapters were the products of editors rather than authors, frequently imposed after the fact to improve readability.
What later narratives inherit from the “chapter time” of the gospels is an abstract independence from the particular dramatic stages and rhythms of the story. Think, for example, of the break in Dickens’s Great Expectations between the chapter in which Pip fights with Herbert Pocket and the one in which he attempts to wash the blood off his clothes. The chapters are separated simply by nightfall, indicating no change in the story’s movement; the break merely signals that the world turns, impersonally and incessantly, no matter what state of continuing agitation the hero inhabits. This diurnal mode of chaptering removes us from the heat of the action, creating a sense of what Dames calls “aloofness.” He identifies such divisions as an emanation from “the realm of the Author, the Narrator, the Arranger.”
This brings us, finally, to the novel, to which Dames devotes the third section of his book. Early novelists, he points out, were reluctant to use chapter divisions, perhaps because they were still associated with their functional use as a finding tool. Since novels were entertainments with no citational or informational value, new reasons for segmenting them needed to be given. Thus 18th-century novelists often called considerable attention to chapter divisions: “Those little spaces between our chapters may be looked upon as an Inn or resting-place,” announces the narrator of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1743). Tristram Shandy (1759) even satirizes the practice by including a “Chapter on Chapters.”
And yet even in the self-conscious capitulations of the 18th-century authors, chapters were not standardized into any one narrative function. They became longer and more heterogeneous over the course of the century, accepting “an invitation to experimental kinds of imprecision.” To illustrate this point, Dames cites Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: The earlier parts of the book, drafted in the 1770s and 1780s, are divided into short chapters, whereas the later parts, originating in the 1790s, have multiple narrators and much longer chapters.
Eighteenth-century novelists like Fielding and Sterne made chapters an expected feature of the form, so much so that by the 19th century they were familiar enough to be hardly noticeable. But, Dames reminds us, chapters were just one kind of segmentation common to 19th-century novels, which were also broken into volumes (usually three), monthly parts, or weekly numbers for serial publication. Chapters were the smallest of these partitions and were considered most effective when least noticeable. To make the breaks unobtrusive, writers varied their timing, generally keeping them separate from the rhythms of other narrative units, but also avoiding an impression of arbitrary or unexpected divisions.
Dames observes, for example, that both Leo Tolstoy and Elizabeth Gaskell resisted using chapters on the grounds that they were unnatural interruptions interfering with the flow of represented time. The flexibility of these authors’ chaptering, Dames shows, registered a covert subversion of their characters’ attempts to divide their lives into rigid epochs and episodes of transformation. In War and Peace, Tolstoy worked vigorously to de-regularize his chaptering so that all forms of temporal division would be seen as merely artificial. Gaskell’s resistance to chaptering took a passive form: she simply left the task to her editors. For Dames, both writers become object lessons in how novelists are forced to mark time even as they simultaneously imply the futility of doing so.
Most 19th-century British novelists, however, used a different way of keeping up the steady movement of represented time through chaptering: standardization to the natural temporal timer of the daily cycle. In one of the most interesting discoveries of the book, Dames uses quantitative analysis to show that, as the size of chapters held steady throughout the century and across publication formats, novelists created an expectation of a standard-length segment of narrating time. By the mid-19th century, novel readers could rely on a chapter providing an evening’s worth of reading material. Moreover, the time represented in those standard-length chapters is usually a single day. That combination of regularization and naturalization — the alignment of readers’ nightly leisure time to a diurnal schedule within the fictional world — minimized awareness of the chapter breaks’ artificiality, making them seem almost natural. That reassuring regularity was, of course, rejected in the next century by modernists and post-modernists, who reacted against these conventions: Think of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf indexing chapters to hours or years as opposed to days, or Samuel Beckett, in his late fictions, doing away with segmentation by chapters entirely.
Dames’s subtle and detailed examinations of the historic patterns summarized here are replete with fine-grained analyses and revelatory close readings of exactly how chaptering affects our experiences of reading novels. He demonstrates how, for example, a sense of collective temporal life is created by the dailiness of chapters in Middlemarch, and conversely, how the postmodernist B.S. Johnson leaves us isolated by refusing to sequence the separate chapters of The Unfortunates. One comes away from The Chapter with a new appreciation for the technical challenges of long fictions.
The fact that this is the first book on the history of chapters indicates how little interest we’ve taken in the formal features of textual length. The chapter’s semi-paratextual status — which places it on the borders of the semantic field, just outside most critics’ view — is only one of the factors that have kept it out of critical consideration. Another seems to be the difficulty of disentangling the concept of the chapter from that of the reader, that other literary entity so often taken for granted but seldom made a part of a formal analysis. Indeed, a certain kind of reader — one with limited time, a need to keep track of it, and a finite attention span — is implicated quite directly by the chapters of long texts. Chapters make the reader’s function as the text’s temporal operator more apparent. The chapter is the sign of that reader, a place where the text pauses to accommodate a time-bound consciousness, without whom the chapters wouldn’t be necessary.
One comes away from “The Chapter” with a new appreciation for the technical challenges of long fictions.
One might, to be sure, have wished for a fuller and more explicit thematization of the reader’s implicit presence, for that is often where the idea of “chapter time” seems to point. The Chapter goes so far as to show that there is an additional kind of time, inextricably connected to readers, and often in a productive tension with both the narrated and the narrating times. Are chapters, then, the textual traces of the reader’s time rather than aspects of narrating, as Dames sometimes implies? Although it doesn’t fully address that question, The Chapter reveals how much literary critics and scholars can gain by conceiving of form as a temporal experience. And it gives us essential new tools for understanding the reader as both a function of the text and a reminder of the time that is passing beyond its pages.