Just a Little Longer

I often return to an essay by Lydia Davis about an unusual experiment in translation. Better known for her work on French writers like Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot, Davis had in this case tried to translate a literary text, not from French but rather from English into English. The text in question was Laurence Sterne’s unfinished 1768 novel, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick. Even a glance at its first page suggests why the book might require translation. Here is how it begins:  

Unusual English, to say the least. Davis sought to do two things: to modernise the novel by translating its sui generis language into contemporary English; and to figure out, in the process, what exactly makes it so unusual in the first place. Guiding her translation, however, is a deeper question: Why is it that visual art from ‘the eighteenth century and further back, to the beginning of discovered painting, is readily available, at least in reproduction, and enjoyed by the general public, not just scholars or specialists’ – but not literature ‘before, say, Jane Austen’? Literature from before 1800, Davis notes, is ‘mostly unread, even by writers’, and while many English speakers will learn foreign languages, they do not also try to ‘cross the barrier to James Boswell’s English, or John Donne’s, or further back to Chaucer’s or Beowulf’s’. 

The results of this experiment are perhaps less significant than the theoretical speculation it occasions. Translating across the gulf of historical difference – what we could call ‘temporal translation’ – might actually be difficult because ‘the barrier is something other than the language’: ‘maybe it is the sensibility or the worldview that changes too much, as we travel back in time, for us to understand it, or, if we understand it, to feel any sympathy for it’. Sterne’s novel occupies the unusual and contradictory position of being at once proto-modern (or proto-modernist) and somehow, by this very stylistic prolepsis, archaic or antiquated. It seems to shatter our so-called modern conventions before they were even created.

A Sentimental Journey appears to begin in the middle of a conversation, but it is not exactly clear who is speaking or to whom they speak: dialogue is not clearly set out in quotation marks; dashes of different lengths are used expressively; and, finally, it is not organised according to legible chapters. Flipping through the first fifteen or twenty pages one sees instead repeated chapter titles: ‘Calais’; ‘The Monk | Calais’; ‘The Monk | Calais’ (again); ‘The Monk | Calais’ (once more); ‘The Desobligeant | Calais’; finally and somewhat belatedly, a ‘Preface | In the Desobligeant’; then, three pages later, ‘Calais’ (again). Such irregular chaptering produces an irregular experience of time, hence the comedy of the moment when Sterne’s hero, Yorick, is found rocking his horse-drawn carriage by the ‘agitation of writing a preface’ – a few chapters in.

Sterne’s indifference to normal chaptering only throws into relief the ordinary and invisible work that chapters do as literary infrastructure. As is so often the case, one only notices a convention when it’s violated. But it is equally true of conventions that they are made; they come from somewhere. Why is it that novels have chapters at all? This is the inquiry of The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century by Nicholas Dames, a professor of English at Columbia University who specialises in Victorian literature and culture. 

A book on chapters! I know. Stay with me. For this apparently technical question transforms into a historical phenomenology of literary time. In this sense The Chapter continues the inquiry Dames has been carrying out for the past quarter century in his scholarly work – the exploration of what he called, in Amnesiac Selves (2000), the ‘linguistic organization of temporal experience’, borrowing the phrase from the great German historian Reinhart Koselleck. In The Chapter, however, the scope has been radically widened, in part – one suspects – to make sense of the novel’s present fortunes. Dames declared in his previous book, The Physiology of the Novel (2007), the necessity of developing ‘nuanced and even-handed accounts of what I might call the social norms of cognition of given historical moments’, norms that are reproduced in large measure by the norms of writing. Enter the chapter. One of the basic structures of the book, the chapter is a ‘box of time’ that shapes the reader’s experience of temporality. As such, changes in chaptering present one way of exploring changes in the experience of time in literary history. How did time feel in late antiquity, or in fifteenth-century Burgundy, or to a former slave at the end of the eighteenth century? Studying the chapter might also tell us something about our experience of time now, in ‘the present’ – whatever that is – and the historical distance between our time and that of times past. 

Sterne comes up a lot in The Chapter, partly because his experiments in self-consciousness draw attention to the chapter’s conventionality, if only in the breach. In Sterne’s better-known novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), for instance, you might catch yourself in volume four thinking you had missed something as chapter twenty-three gives way to chapter twenty-five:  

If the book truly is ‘more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter’, that is because Tristram Shandy is a book about failure and errancy, where experiments with form and time are manifold. Notoriously it begins with Tristram’s attempt to narrate his life, but he prevaricates so long that he fails to get to any of the key points of his personal history. The preface again arrives late, in volume two; his birth only occurs in volume four; Tristram’s very name is an error, the intended birth name being Trismegistus. And what better expression of errancy than a gap in the novelistic edifice itself? Sterne also breaks off chapter nine of volume four, as Tristram’s father walks down a flight of stairs, and asks: ‘Is it not a shame to make two chapters out of what passed in going down one pair of stairs?’ There begins a ‘chapter upon chapters’, which Sterne calls ‘the best chapter in my whole work; and take my word, whoever reads it, is as well employed as in picking straws’. Picking straws: the very image of contingency. But with Dames’ theory of the chapter in mind, all this meddling with chapterisation, or capitulation (from the Latin capitulum, meaning ‘little head’), is not simply literary estrangement or satire. Rather it reflects, arguably even theorises, the function of the chapter – the presentation of time as an experience of unified discontinuity.

Dames illuminates Sterne’s eighteenth-century moment as one in which the novel chapter has lost ‘much of its original function without as yet having acquired a new one’, which makes it properly experimental. But the place of Sterne’s experiments in the history of the chapter belies the fact that Dames’ history is really an attempt to describe the genesis and function of a convention in its very conventionality – not the exceptions, but rather the rule. His attention is directed instead towards the ‘usual chapter and its almost unthinking repetitions of technique’. This is a more ambitious task than it might seem. A chapter is a ubiquitous part of novelistic architecture – so easily overlooked, as Dames notes, that it is difficult even to conceptualise as an object of inquiry. And although the chapter finds its most distinctive uses in the novel, which has the ‘unique ability to […] articulate how the experience of time is the experience of time’s segmentations’, it does not originate there.

If the enormous scope of this book invites comparisons with Erich Auerbach, then so too does its method, which similarly offers densely suggestive examples rather than an exhaustive historical inventory. Unlike Auerbach, however, Dames’ organisation of his material tends towards the taxonomic and schematising. He offers eight views of the chapter performing different functions at different historical moments: there is the ‘threshold’ of the classical heading, the ‘abstract syncopation’ of the Gospels, the ‘cut’ and ‘fade’ of medieval prose narratives – and so on, down to the ‘post chapter’ present. This is a longstanding ‘taxonomical urge’, as Dames termed it at the beginning of Amnesiac Selves, a habit that he picked up from his objects of study. Victorian theories of mind such as phrenology, for all their notorious problems, nonetheless ‘provided […] a useful interpretive model’ – in permitting its division ‘into distinct parts’, they rendered a newly ‘spatialized’ and ‘diagrammatic’ mind that was more susceptible of analysis. But in The Chapter there is perhaps a tension between the comprehensive ambitions of this ‘taxonomic urge’, and the suggestive but partial moments of Auerbachian literary history. You could say that the book makes a methodological wager that the nearly scientific goal of taxonomy – to encompass everything – can effectively be grafted onto an historicist hermeneutics constantly shifting its focus from part to whole and back again.

We begin in the second century BCE, with a tablet, known today as the Tabula Bembina, upon which are inscribed some Roman anti-corruption laws from the time of the Gracchi. This was a ‘public, technical matter, by no means literary’, but for Dames it captures the chapter’s characteristic early function – as a technology not of narrative, but of reference – that would eventually be imported into the codex. On the tablet, ablative Latin phrases designate the topics covered in the relevant sections (de nomine deferundo iduibusque legundeis or ‘concerning prosecution and the choosing of juries,’ for instance). At once ‘visual and analytic’, these create a sort of resting place for the eye, and they organise the information presented into a logical and navigable form.

But we are still very much in the realm of the heading; the tablet is a source of information. Jumping forward three centuries to the second century CE and to the work of the grammarian Aulus Gellius, Dames observes a new breadth in the headings of Gellius’s miscellany, Attic Nights, ranging from brief summary to something more authorial than a legal finding-aid: ‘How Publius Nigidius with great cleverness showed that words are not arbitrary, but natural.’ Yet a text like Attic Nights is still only something to be consulted partially, and on occasion, rather than read and absorbed line-by-line: ‘The text is not an experience’, but rather a ‘storage place from which information is extracted; the condensed summary is not only possible, but desirable’. However, one can begin to see the line of transmission; those ablative phrases of the Tabula Bembina are a precursor to the summative chapter headings of a novel like Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752): ‘In which will be found one of the former Mistakes pursued, and another cleared up, to the great Satisfaction of Two Persons; among whom, the Reader, we expect, will make a Third.’ And so, from the tablet, the chapter begins the migration it will be Dames’ project to track: out of its originary informational context and, slowly but surely, into the temporality of the novel.

Before the migration is complete, though, we have a centuries-long period of terminological and conceptual confusion as various terms, referring to both the textual unit and its title, are used: capitulum, kephalaia (‘head’), titlos (‘title’), argumentum and breviculus (summaries used to aid the inspection of a text) – these terms are all tangled together. One of the most inspired interpretations of this conceptual history is Dames’ rereading of the Confessions by the fourth-century theologian Augustine. Amid a spiritual crisis, Augustine overhears some nearby children crying ‘take it and read’, and, turning to a random section of the Bible, resolves to read ‘the first chapter [capitulum] I might find’. This is pivotal in converting Augustine to Christianity, for his eyes fall upon what a modern reader of the Bible might know as Romans 13:13-14, a caution against revelry that urges one away from ‘rioting and drunkenness’, exhorting instead that its reader ‘put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof’. Or at least, that is how it reads in the Oxford edition of the King James Bible I have just taken down from my shelf (slightly hungover, I confess, and thus moved and gently interpellated by its message), navigating with relative ease to Romans 13. But this was not Augustine’s experience, for his Bible had no chapters; his capitulum refers to the general ‘head’ or topic of the passage. The meaningful unit discloses itself ‘out of an unmarked stream’. 

The organisation of the Bible into ‘chapter and verse’ dates from well after Augustine’s time – chapters in the thirteenth century, and verses in the sixteenth – and though this format has to a large degree been naturalised by convention, it was not for this reason free of controversy. Early modern intellectuals like Robert Boyle and John Locke would even rail against Biblical chaptering: Boyle complained of its ‘inconvenient Distinction’, which ‘hath sometimes Sever’d Matters that should have been left United’; Locke for his part despaired that the system of chapter-and-verse left scripture ‘so chop’d and minc’d […] so broken and divided’ that not only do the ‘Common People take the Verses usually for distinct aphorisms’, but even the educated have their powers of memory enfeebled. Yet not even the complaints of Boyle and Locke could overturn the chapter’s ‘embeddedness in biblical textual tradition specifically and literate culture generally’. (To this ‘antichapter’ tradition we might add Donald Trump, who, when asked during an interview in 2015 to name a favourite bit of scripture, replied: ‘The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.’)

Christian scripture is a key site of this transformation of the classical heading, indexing discrete topics in a text, into something whose purpose is story-driven and temporal. The Gospels are, after all, narratives, demanding ‘a new method’ for their organisation. Surveying six competing divisions of the Gospels across ten centuries, Dames describes a project of ‘containerization’ in which the chapter becomes capable of holding a wider variety of topics without being ‘tailored’ to the shape of its content. But it is in the late twelfth century that the ‘modern’ system of Biblical chaptering is inaugurated. Usually associated with the medieval Paris Bible, the origins of this chapter system have long been tied to the work of the English theologian Stephen Langton (c. 1150-1228), who sought more accurate methods of citation for the university classroom. Despite the fact that not all that much evidence binds Langton to the creation of this chaptering technique, this historical account has long been the dominant one: ‘a creative and practical-minded English churchman, steeped in the chaotic environment of a cosmopolitan academy, takes on the chaptering of the Bible’ to improve his pedagogy. This story, however, has been challenged by the discovery of the earlier Saint Albans Bible (1180), named for the Hertfordshire abbey where it was produced, which contains Hebrew calligraphy and thus suggests the possibility not only of a Jewish scribe, but also perhaps an immersion in medieval rabbinical practices. In this view, the objective of the chapter was not scholarly and citational but monastic and oriented towards ‘communal reading tied to a ritualized calendar’. Whether first conceived for the ‘classroom or the chapel’, what Dames calls – in the spirit of historiographic compromise – the ‘Langton-Saint Albans model’ of chaptering affords a new experience: the ‘private continuous reading of narrative texts,’ the glorious fact of silent reading.

Of course, a whole host of other transformations were needed to make such reading possible: the scroll is first divided into the codex; ancient continuous script is split into discrete words, which are themselves separated uniformly into paragraphs only in the early modern period. Transformations like these are usually treated by book historians as a ‘Babel allegory’, as Dames put it in The Physiology of the Novel, where the historical development of the book as a technology is told as the story of its fragmentation into smaller and smaller parts (which is often a narrative of progress, too: smaller units make reading more accessible and democratic). The Chapter takes this story of fragmentation one step further: part of Dames’ interest is motivated by the chapter’s final dematerialisation and its lingering power as metaphor. The chapter has ‘become a metalanguage’ that describes the different rhythms of social life, from clock time to the lived cadences of the body. One speaks of a new chapter in one’s life – not a new paragraph or a new sentence or, indeed, a new clause. But: ‘If it still works for us this way,’ Dames asks, ‘for how much longer?’ Here, we might be prompted to ask: who in fact is left in this us? Viewed in the less generous glare of media history, and from the perspective of a present less and less oriented towards reading of any kind, the answer is doubtful. If the members of an increasingly postliterate society still measure out their lives in chapters, this may only be a matter of mere habit or convention – in the way that a car’s engine capacity continues to be measured in horsepower.

Perhaps it is the inevitable fate of any convention, but literary history does not, it turns out, have many examples of people appreciating great chaptering. In The History of English Prose Rhythm (1912) – one of the sources for James Joyce’s virtuosic-or-unreadable parodies of the evolution of English prose in Ulysses – George Saintsbury remarks on Thomas Malory’s decision to insert a chapter break at a decisive moment in his fifteenth-century Morte d’Arthur. At the end of chapter ten of the Morte, Lancelot rides into a castle, having slayed its gatekeeper, only to hear from the castle’s residents ‘in doors and windows that said “Fair Knight: thou art unhappy.”’ Saintsbury praises Malory’s sense of timing here. The chapter break introduces a pause, leaving those words, as Dames puts it, ‘hovering in the air’. The next chapter begins with Lancelot successfully freeing captives from the prison; as such, the chapter has served to elongate the narrative incident and heighten the tension.

The only problem is that this was not Malory’s division, but rather one added by the printer William Caxton (c.1422-92). This fact was only discovered in 1934 when an edition of the Morte predating Caxton was discovered at Winchester College. As it turns out, the Winchester version had no chapters. The modulations of time are the work of Caxton’s specific ‘remediation’. He creates an ‘artful segmentation, a resonant silence, in the printed volume’s visual patterning’. Caxton is paired in this chapter of The Chapter with the anonymous fifteenth-century remediators who transformed Chrétien de Troyes’s great twelfth-century Arthurian verse into prose. Unlike Caxton’s their results are not acclaimed; like the authors of movie novelisations today, they are vulgarisers, profaning the sacred bonds between form and content. In their hands, Chrétien’s flowing verse – praised in Mimesis by Auerbach as ‘light and almost easy’ – is not only segmented with red ink, but also crowded with insistent explanations in the register of narrative history (‘How the king kissed Enide’). Again, in the manner of movie novelisers, moments of introspection are reduced while battle sequences are dilated with a vigour that may equally be judged ‘clumsy technique’ or ‘daring maneuver’. More charitably, we might say these remediators practise what Dames calls, after Roman Jakobson, ‘intralingual translation’ – a phrase that calls back to mind (there it is again!) Davis’ experiment with Sterne. Like Davis, the remediators are working across an historical gap between time-feelings, transforming the internal temporality of Chrétien’s verse to fit their own prosaic times. Dames speculates on the reasons for this transformation. Could it be that the new and uncertain ruling clique in Burgundy – ‘freshly arrived at what would be its historical apex’ – preferred these ‘modes of intense now-time’ to the subtle continuities of Chrétien’s verse? Admitting the possibility of such an ‘ideological effect’, Dames also notes that it is equally likely that these ‘new temporalities’ were simply an ‘accident’. 

Here one notices a difference between Dames’ previous books and The Chapter, whose broader subject matter perhaps helped it to become a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. As brilliant works of literary history, Amnesiac Selves and The Physiology of the Novel both have the density of specialist knowledge and the sensitivity of immersive textual studies. Each book reconstructs a forgotten discourse: the first book reassembles the understanding of memory in the Victorian period, as explored through close readings of key Victorian novelists and scientific writers; the second builds on this interest by turning to the forgotten paradigm of ‘physiological’ novel theory and its exemplars, the philosopher-scientist-critics GH Lewes, ES Dallas, and Alexander Bain, who explored the embodied rhythms of reading. The physiological basis for a literary theory of form was ultimately swept away by more abstract formalisms espoused, on the one hand, by Henry James and his acolyte Percy Lubbock, and, on the other, by the practico-critical poetics of IA Richards (who effectively banished the novel from the classroom). Though Dames’ close readings in The Chapter are no less attentive and sinuous than in these earlier books, they are perforce more limited by the widened scope. I don’t intend to downplay the brilliance of Dames as a reader of individual texts or as a literary historian. However, as the study twists and turns, the density of historical detail together with the vast scope can at times induce a kind of mental torsion, with the dual impulses to historicise and taxonomise pulling in different directions.

In any case, the taxonomic conclusion Dames draws from the Burgundian remediators of Chrétien is that while their clumsy cuts are just that – cuts in a continuous weave – Caxton’s interventions are more like the ‘fade’, offering ‘aeration’ to the narrative text. In this respect Caxton’s edits are oriented not towards reference, but ‘narrative progression and rhythm’. The paradoxical outcome of this intervention is to unify Malory’s text precisely by dividing it; the Morte now comprises ‘semi-discrete moments in a single process, rather than entirely different moments’. Unification-through-division of this sort highlights two logics of narrative time: discontinuous and immersive reading. Chaptering itself comes to generate a ‘feeling of presentness’ by adding white space, a species of visual fermata between narrative actions – ‘emptiness [with] a temporal intensity.’

In their evocation of ‘presentness’, blank intensities of this kind recall a much longer-running theological dispute – between Augustine and the great English theologian Bede – on the divisibility of time. Where, after all, is the present? For Augustine, it is impossible to isolate something like ‘presentness’, for it is composed – as he put it in the Confessions – of ‘fugitive moments’, suspended in the future or always being sucked away into the past. The present is thus not measurable by a distinctive unit. Bede, in his eighth-century work The Reckoning of Time, argued to the contrary that there is a ‘minimal’ or ‘atomic’ unit of time. He made his case through a thought experiment. Say you are just about to be punched in the face. As a reflex, you flinch and close your eyes. Between these two moments – that ‘tiniest interval of time in which the lids of our eyes move when a blow is launched’ – is where ‘Bede’s present’ may be found: the atomic unit of presentness. Dames’ point is not that this theological argument directly influenced Caxton and the Burgundian prosateurs, but rather that the disagreement between the two great theologians reflects different investments in literary forms and their relationships to subjectivity in time. For Augustine a poem ‘held entire’ in the mind of a reciter approximates divine omniscience; for Bede, meanwhile, the atomic present is best accessed via a ‘punctuated continuity and directionality’ that might just be the hallmark of well-divided prose – consequently it is ‘seriality, not the transcendence of seriality, [that] is our access to the divine’. It is only in interrupting the present that we are able to perceive it.

But it is left to the early novel (as an historian of the form, Dames is candid about this bias) to develop fully the space between Augustine’s durationless void and Bede’s serial present. Leaping forward another two hundred-odd years, then, Dames shows this binary of discontinuous and immersive reading exploding into an array of conceptual possibilities. ‘The eighteenth-century synthesis’, as Dames calls it, spans the period from the picaresque to the first flourishing of the English novel in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the antics of Sterne and Henry Fielding. Functions inherited from older reference-based chapters are here experimentally set in tension with the narrative innovations first explored in the fifteenth-century remediations: the eighteenth-century chapter struggles with the relationship between the strange and the commonplace, the ‘striking and singular’ and the ‘categorizable’. Hence the initial distinction between discontinuous and immersive reading turns out to contain other oppositions that structure it in turn: between space and time; and between the time narrated and the time it takes to narrate or read.

Figuring all this is that moment on the staircase from the middle of Tristram Shandy, a kind of novelistic freezeframe, in which Sterne fixes Walter Shandy in place to reflect upon chaptering. In Dames’ account, this metachapter makes explicit the chapter’s full conceptual field: it has a direct address; it narrates both an incident and an interruption. What stands out as the real ‘heart’ of the metachapter is the staircase itself, which serves as a kind of symbolic definition of the chapter’s function. The staircase ‘captures the chapter’s double chronometry, that tension expressed by the simultaneous binaries of space versus time and narrated versus narrating times’. Fielding famously compared his chapters to inns along the road of a long journey, where the reader may ‘stop and take a glass’, but Dames thinks the staircase a better figure. Fielding’s coach trip is merely ‘linear, starting and stopping’; Sterne’s staircase, on the other hand, ‘unpacks two complementary but opposed dimensions’. Walter and Toby head down the stairs, troping narrative progress, while at the same time the sequence of steps and landings displays the segmentation of linearity ‘into discrete stages’. Sterne’s novel is a kind of ‘funhouse mirror’ of temporality: instead of proceeding steadily along a horizontal axis, our temporal schema is thrown down the stairs.

Later, in what JGA Pocock once called the ‘second eighteenth century’, the so-called Age of Revolutions, the chapter mutates again. Now ‘elongated’, the chapter is studied in two works that each seem in different ways to dissolve its earlier functions. In The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789), the famous autobiography of a Nigerian slave who eventually regained his freedom and lived in Britain, Dames observes a mismatch between the protocols of chaptering and the life that these protocols divide up. Equiano’s chapters offer extensive summaries in the manner of a picaresque novel, but seem at the same time to show the inefficacy of that paratextual structure for capturing the experience of domination and eventual manumission. ‘How then to describe the chapter in Equiano, or more bluntly, why bother to do so?’ It is perhaps relevant precisely because the apparent orderliness of chaptering – its ability meaningfully to sculpt time – is shown, against the absolute alienation of slavery, to be unfit for its usual purpose of segmentation. Thus, the intensively expository chapter summaries of the Narrative not only fail to coordinate with the abbreviated summaries in the table of contents, but they also introduce chapters of far greater length (on average, Dames tells us, these are 6,500 words: up to four times longer than is typical for this period). So, then, what is the meaning of this technical decision? ‘To say,’ Dames writes, coming perilously close to ventriloquising Equiano, ‘a life cannot be measured this way, not this kind of life.’

As the self-testimony of a former slave, published in the same year as the storming of the Bastille, Equiano’s Narrative is certainly a sign of the times. It is perhaps as iconic a testament to the ‘new epoch’ of the nineteenth century as Girodet’s portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former slave from Saint-Domingue who would eventually be elected to the French National Convention. ‘New epoch’: this is the legendary, and perhaps apocryphal, phrase of Goethe, uttered in response to the defeat of the Prussians at Valmy in 1792. ‘From this place and from this day a new epoch in world history begins and you can say you were there to see it.’ We might observe that he, for one, did not reach here for the metaphor of the chapter – too ‘partial, fleeting, unhistorical’, according to Dames, to register this period’s epochal shifts. In Goethe’s Wilhem Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96), for instance, the chapter becomes even more elongated (one of them is 20,000 words!), doubling in size in the novel’s second half, which was composed after Valmy. Wilhem Meister’s Apprenticeship is a ‘triple turning point’, tying together ‘a world-historical transition, a maturational transition’, and a ‘career transition’ as Goethe, now older and on the other side of the revolution, has to produce fresh material rather than merely revising old writing. It is the very incongruity and ‘dilation’ of the chapter that ‘itself is historical’. Jane Austen’s career is also adduced as an example of the eighteenth century’s passing into the nineteenth, with the three youthful novels drafted in the 1790s averaging chapter lengths of around 2,000 words, while the ‘mature’ novels of the 1810s are nearer 3,500.

However sceptical we might like to be about periodisation, and nasty but inevitable grand narratives, it’s observable that history has, well, happened; historical experience makes ‘norms’ normal, and it is potentially why – to return to Davis’ question with which I began – more people still read Austen for pleasure than Smollett, Fielding, Defoe, or, um, John Bunyan. Not unrelatedly, I recently invited some students to read paragraphs from the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (respectively, Margery Kempe, Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, and Sterne: I welcome criticisms of my selections) and one of them said, in so many words, ‘Perhaps some things are forgotten for a reason.’ Perhaps. But we might also wonder: to what extent do novels instruct their readers in how to think, feel, and act? 

This has been one of the questions that Dames has posed most insistently across his career, with a special emphasis on the contributions of the Victorian novel to readerly subjectivity. At the end of Amnesiac Selves, he speculates on the way that Victorian fiction inculcates a special kind of nostalgia – its warm selective memory is the flipside of the alienating nausea of the historical difference that makes you want to throw a book out the window (or, in homage to Sterne, down the stairs). Yet, as Dames noted then, the cultural prestige of Victorian fiction is ‘increasingly seen in an elegiac manner, as a strange fact that, as the twenty-first century begins, will not last much longer’. As the nineteenth century disappears further and further from view, ‘the Victorians will eventually, if belatedly, make Victorian fiction stranger and less attractive’. Since the publication of Amnesiac Selves in 2000, the Victorians have only receded further away from us in time.

It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background. It is this very tacitness that secures the permanence of the chapter as a blank, unmarked, and ordinary vehicle for reflection. Surveying Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867), Dames distils the repertoire of the chapter into another taxonomy of five key functions: the signal or incantation; the crossing of a threshold; the ‘suspended revelation’; the ‘tense use’, which adjusts the temporal frame of narration; and the modulation of point of view. Together with Elizabeth Gaskell – whose Wives and Daughters (1864-66) is shown virtuosically to assemble all five of these ‘tacit’ operations, in a careful and naturalistic counterpart to the brazen theatrics of Sterne – the chaptering of Tolstoy presents a study in indistinctness.

Perhaps the most ‘natural’ scheme for novelistic time is that of the day itself, which is what Dames shows to be at work in Charles Dickens and George Eliot, calling this the ‘suturing of story world and reader […] an alignment of times, a synchronization of light’. Epic heroes lived in a time supercharged with meaning – the time of kairos, or propitious instant of action, not the dun-coloured chronos, the everyday time of housework, care work, and all the other kinds of work. In contrast with epic, then, the diurnal frame of novelistic realism appears definitively chronological and quotidian – but it is, of course, a complex literary artefact, one that Dames explores using some old-fashioned counting. There are 146 narrated days in Middlemarch, though the novel covers some 1,000 days. That means around 15% of the total ‘days of our lives’ are narrated; of these, only 18 ‘peak days’ are extended over two chapters. If, in the time of Goethe and Equiano, the coordinates of day, chapter, and epoch fell helplessly out of joint – the chapter form desynchronised from life by historical forms of dislocation – it is the innovation of Eliot’s realism to realign life with text: ‘Neither wholly impersonal and public like the “day” nor intimately personal like the epoch, chapter time is, perhaps, something like an image of weak collective time’. 

Weakness is an important term, capturing the chapter’s ignorable yet undeniable presence – just like time itself – which is nonetheless experienced collectively. It also calls to my mind Walter Benjamin’s famous evocation of the ‘weak messianic power’, the spark of redemption glowing however faintly in the present. There is something of that melancholia in this history too. As Dames wonders, ‘When you share time, what is it you share?’ A book? A memory? A moment? Or perhaps one shares nothing, for the whole point of fiction is that it is invented, nonactual, negative. The reader of a novel, as Benjamin put it, ‘is isolated, more so than any other reader’. Reading of fictional lives becomes a way of experiencing death before it happens to you: the characters in a novel make its reader ‘understand that death is already waiting for them’. In novelistic time, therefore, one feels in the fate of fictional beings the ‘warmth which we never draw from our own fate’. 

If chapters become, by the twentieth century, simply ‘embarrassing’, subject to two equal but opposing modernist processes – autonomisation (à la Joyce’s almost freestanding stylistic excursions) or decimation (as in Samuel Beckett where it is obviated entirely) – these new formal strategies do not get around the fundamental matter of finitude that is immanent to the chapter as a vehicle of time. A key transitional figure here is the Brazilian novelist Joachim Maria Machado de Assis, whose experimental fiction of the late nineteenth century seems to repudiate the tacit chaptering of realism in favour of something more akin to Sterne. Yet in Machado’s hands, the ‘Shandean chapter’ is no longer free-wheeling and free-associative, but decisively bound: if Tristram struggled to bring forth the story of his birth, the eponymous narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) is already dead. Speaking from beyond the grave in radically attenuated chapters, Brás Cubas adds a new note of disillusionment and pessimism that Dames calls ‘antique-diminutive’.

The diminution – decline? – of the chapter continues in twentieth-century avant-garde fiction and film: The Unfortunates (1969), by the British novelist BS Johnson, is not bound in a codex but rather packaged up as so many loose sheets in a box, becoming as a result a literal ‘box of time’. Consider, too, the ‘antique’ and self-conscious quality of the onscreen chapters in Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), tracking its protagonist minute by minute as she awaits the results of a cancer test. For all their apparently lively experimentalism, all three of these cases finally return to the negativity that attends the ‘linguistic organization of temporality’. Machado’s novel is narrated by a dead man; Johnson’s book in a box is about a dead man; Varda’s Cléo receives omens of death: these are texts ‘by, for and about the dead or dying’. Dames refers to these as expressing the ‘poignancy of sequence’, a term that names ‘the sensation of an end indefinitely, but only temporarily, held off’. This finally is ‘a melancholy purpose: to keep something going – a life, a form, a moment – just a little longer’. The chapter, then, not as inns on a journey, but halting steps towards the end.

Right at the beginning of the book, Dames recalls the remark of a ‘gifted analyst’ some years ago: ‘You’re starting a new chapter.’ Dames writes that this comment made him feel – quoting the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott – ‘held’. It also spurred the research and writing of this book. Although his analyst’s offhand ‘novelization’ of his life seemed perfectly to capture the subjective experience of temporal passage, Dames could not explain why it had this comforting effect on him. Despite being a ‘novel reader,’ he ‘had no idea why chapters existed – a historical question – nor what exactly they did to our sense of time, a theoretical question’. Guided by these questions, his journey backwards in time terminates in the continuous present with the novels of Uwe Johnson, Jennifer Egan and László Krasznahorkai. There is a chapter in Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) that is presented in the form of a PowerPoint presentation on ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses’. This is a ‘chapter on chapters,’ Dames notes, in the manner of Sterne but relocated into a wholly changed technological environment. These slides – presented in the novel by a twelve-year-old girl named Alison about her family – represent for Dames an effort to ‘understand the feeling of time passing, a feeling that is shaped by media’. If the project of The Chapter has been to coordinate the feeling of time passing with the changing mediations of that feeling, then it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the prevailing feelings in this study in turn is its melancholia, its very nearly depressive turns towards the experience of temporal passage.

It is also significant, I think, that a history concerned with the objective features of literary history has an important but just-visible subjective dimension – significant, that is, that the book began on the couch in analysis. I was struck, reading The Chapter, by its minimal but insistent evocations of finitude. This is a history of the novel that is partly a history of its death. In this respect it complements Dames’ other books that have told this story from a different angle, as when, in The Physiology of the Novel, he writes of George Gissing’s ‘depressive’ and ‘ambivalent’ relation to the novel form in an era of speed reading. ‘In many ways,’ Dames adds, ‘that depressive position has lingered for readers, writers, and critics of novels, to our own day.’ It has – and it perhaps accounts for the alternatingly depressive and wistful tenor of The Chapter, which reconstructs its object from the position of its catastrophic obsolescence. But Dames is not moralising about the decline of the novel or of the reading public. The conclusion of the study refuses any of what he has termed ‘the morality of attention’, remarking that even if the chapter is dispersed across ‘different media that weave in and out of the format of the book, [it] can express the disjuncture of time itself’ – the ‘disjuncture’, that is, between ‘our’ lives and any of the ‘rhythms – biological, cultural-economic, political, planetary – we live among but cannot manipulate’.

Yet I think this argument must be evaluated in light of the earlier claim in The Physiology of the Novel that one of the vulnerabilities of Victorian physiological theory was its transformation of readers and texts into technologies: ‘The more its findings turned both novel and reader into machines, the less necessary (or, for that matter, interesting) its procedures seemed, and the more ancillary to other technologies the novel became – a melancholy conclusion that cut short some of the theoretical innovations that the theory had promised.’ If in The Physiology of the Novel Dames was ‘implicitly arguing for the viability of an updated, historically aware version’ of nineteenth-century physiological theories of reading, then The Chapter strikes me as a now-explicit attempt to realise such a theory. In it, Victorian novels stand as the apex of a kind of felt and intuitive ‘chronocommunity’ in which picking up a triple-decker was a reliable way to plug into the interface of temporality that everyone shared. That now is perhaps lost, and the historian’s effort at understanding the genesis of a technical object like the novelistic chapter could be seen as some small recompense – for the lost ‘weak collectivity’ of an earlier period, but maybe, too, for the fearful lack at the centre of all reading. It is difficult not to think of this in Dames’ closing evocation of the chapter’s dispersal across the mediascape. That is, the ‘technical’ question of The Chapter serves to absorb a more basic anxiety: not only about the demise of the novel, but rather about the emptiness at the heart of reading itself.

I think here of Maurice Blanchot’s essay ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (1949) – translated, as it happens, by Davis, albeit in a more traditional manner – in which Blanchot writes of finitude as the inescapable meaning of literature. Language kills, and literary language most of all: ‘Language can only begin with the void,’ he writes, ‘no fullness, no certainty can ever speak; something essential is lacking in anyone who expresses himself.’ Questions like ‘What is literature?’ have received ‘only meaningless answers’ insofar as they fail directly to confront this negativity. ‘People can and do ask, “What is poetry?” “What is art? And even “What is the novel?”’ – but for Blanchot it is in the ineradicable ‘emptiness present in all these serious things’ that the impossible centre of literature consists, that empty heart ‘to which reflection, with its own gravity, cannot direct itself without losing its seriousness’. 

Another way of saying this is that The Chapter seems to me most fully to grasp its subject not when it considers the historical or technical question of chaptering, but when it turns from this to the lived experience of time, in which the collapse of literature as such figures the collapse of everything else. Perhaps the function of ‘the chapter’ in The Chapter is not so much a ‘point of departure’ as Auerbach once imagined it – in his phrase, a ‘handle […] by which the subject can be seized’ – but rather a point of return: an obsession, an idée fixe, or, in a more Freudian vocabulary, a reaction formation to the anxiety attending time’s ceaseless passage. Viewed in this gloomy half-light, it is possible to see how the most moving parts of The Chapter are those rarer moments in the subjective register that look right into the void at the centre of literary experience. It is, after all, to escape this emptiness that we write in the first place, even as the act of doing so can only return us to it.