Chapters why writers have them, and how we can read them

• Chapter 1    Why Chapters?

Russian and English agree in their metaphors. Chapters don’t in fact refer to girders or supporting walls or partitions, but to heads. Chapter comes from a diminutive of the Latin caput; глава is obviously a contraction of голова. So the word points to the heading of the chapter, and is extended metonymically to the whole. But perhaps in addition each chapter has a head, a mind, of its own, and develops its own set of thoughts?

Chapters have a long history, though not quite as long as written literature. The Iliad and The Odyssey are supposed to have been divided into their twenty-four books apiece about two hundred years before Christ. The subdivision of the books of the Bible was more complicated. The Hebrew Scriptures were originally divided into paragraphs for reading out loud, and the New Testament was divided in this way in 325 AD. In 1214 the same English Archbishop who wrote the Magna Carta divided Jerome’s Latin Bible into chapters which were then carried over into the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, and in 1560 another English Bible finalized the chapters and verses in a way which was adopted by the Greek Bible too. When the heads of Catholic Cathedrals met to read out a few of these chapters, they did so in a separate building, or as it were, chapter, of the Cathedral, which became known the Chapter House. Cervantes used them in his 1605 novel Don Quixote, and most novels have used them ever since. But why?

• Chapter 2    Resting Places

those little spaces between our chapters may be looked upon as an inn or resting-place where [the reader] may stop and take a glass or any other refreshment as it pleases him. Nay, our fine readers will, perhaps, be scarce able to travel farther than through one of them in a day. [In the inn, the reader may] consider of what he hath seen in the parts he hath already passed through; a consideration which I take the liberty to recommend a little to the reader; for, however swift his capacity may be, I would not advise him to travel through these pages too fast; for if he doth, he may probably miss the seeing some curious productions of nature, which will be observed by the slower and more accurate reader.

It’s worth therefore asking ourselves whether we actually read in chapters. Do we strongly prefer to finish a session of reading at the end of a chapter, or do we leave off simply when we are tired, or bored, or interrupted, or hungry? Any of the latter scenarios would be the equivalent of falling asleep under the stars, perhaps on a haystack, rather than pushing on to the next inn. And yet, I too benefit from the existence of chapters. For one thing, a vast featureless expanse of text can be as intimidating to the mind as a walk across an unpopulated tract of Siberian steppe to the traveller. Fielding says that ‘A volume without any such places of rest resembles the opening of wilds or seas, which tires the eye and fatigues the spirit when entered upon’. His comments apply, two centuries before the event, to those modernist novels which were written without chapter breaks any more visible than a small white gap. In Virginia Woolf’s The Waves we are truly out on the seas.

But seeing inns on my journey reassures me that I am making progress, that I am no longer in that place but this one. If the chapters are numbered, then it is as though the inns have in front of them stones indicating the number of версты that I have travelled, and if I have consulted the Contents Page’s map, then I know how many I still have to go to the end, to Vladivostok. (This article has five)

The inns also give me a reassuring sense that I am still in civilization - that I am not, in fact, trudging across Yorkshire in the depths of a late fourteenth century winter, or watching the shambles at Borodino on September 7^th 1812, or flying with Margarita over Moscow in 1937, or, visiting Dorothy Winshaw’s horrific pig farm in 1982. Rather, I am reading a novel, and at the inns the controlling presence of the author is reassuringly manifest. They remind me that what I am experiencing is not life but art, and that, however desperately problematic the real world in which I am now reminded that I am reading, it is a world which produces not only the industrial slaughter of pigs and men, but art such as What a Carve Up! and Война и мир.

Chapters can also create structures of a sufficiently small scale that their shape has something of the assimilability of a short story. Yet in practice most chapters do not have a story-shape, because they exist in closer interdependence and more necessary sequence than do the stories of a collection. In these respects they more resemble scenes in a play, with the larger books or темы into which some long novels are divided resembling acts. Novels of very few chapters, like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (which has three) may be thought to resemble symphonies or concerti of three or four movements. But in most novels, chapters are so numerous and closely linked, that they more resemble the paragraphs of which the prose is composed - which may have very different lengths and shapes, but follow necessarily from one to the next. Indeed, some of the chapters of Chekhov’s Палата № 6, Pasternak’s Доктор Живаго, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are only one paragraph long. And a chapter can hardly be shorter than that.

• Chapter 3    Naming of Parts

You can do several things in an inn other than spend the night there. You can get information from the landlord about the road that lies ahead, possible pleasures, diversions, dangers, and his estimation of the likely weather conditions over the next few hours. Likewise, chapter titles can give considerable detail about what is to come.

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is composed entirely of letters, which serve as the novel’s de facto chapters. Letter 62 is entitled: ‘Clarissa to Miss Howe. - Her uncle’s angry answer. Substance of a humble letter from Mr. Lovelace. He has got a violent cold and hoarseness, by his fruitless attendance all night in the coppice. She is sorry he is not well. Makes a conditional appointment with him for the next night, in the garden. Hates tyranny in all shapes’. In fact such detailed titles sometimes fail to mention the chapter’s most decisive events, whereas some short titles give away a considerable amount. In Chapter 52 of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist one of the main characters, an elderly criminal called Fagin, is in prison under sentence of death. Now, in novels the nature of death sentences on major characters is that they are quite often reversed at the eleventh hour. The chapter is entitled ‘Fagin’s last night alive’. No chance of a reprieve there, then. Another example is in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which is written in named ‘Phases’. At the end of ‘Phase the First, The Maiden’ Tess looses her virginity. It is night, the action is in a dense forest, this is a Victorian novel, and the passage is obscurely written. But the second Phase opens by making this much at least clear: ‘Phase the Second. Maiden no More’.

Of course, titles give great opportunity to be teasing. In Fielding’s Tom Jones Part 1 Chapter 12 is entitled ‘Containing what the reader may, perhaps, expect to find in it’. Some of this playfulness finds its way to Bely. In his Петербург we find:

• -    Глава первая, в который повествуется об одной достойной особе, ее умственных играх и эфэмерности бытия

• -    Глава четвертая, в который ломается линия повествования

• -    Глава восьмая, и последняя

Pelevin’s Группа продленного дня has titles which, if they don’t reveal any specifics, at least put relevant questions:

Для кого?

Каким образом?

Почему теперь?

Вслед за кем?

Во имя чего?

О чем?

О ком?

Of course, the full humour of this is felt only when the titles are read in sequence on the contents page. Indeed, the contents pages of novels which have chapter names and which put those names on the contents page (not all of them) have several uses. For people who have already read the novel, they serve the extremely helpful function of helping them to relocate passages. There is for example no need, when reading the thousand pages of Война и мир, to insert a bookmark at a favourite spot; you can just refer to the contents page and go straight there. Chernyshevskii’s Что делать? doesn’t give names for all its chapters, but it does for the ones which it wishes to emphasise - such as ‘Второй сон Веры Павловны’.

If you look at contents pages you can often, as a first time reader, learn certain things about the novel as a whole. Read the contents page of Мастер и Маргарита, and certain things are immediately apparent. The second chapter being called ‘Понти пилат’, and other chapter titles referring to Satan, absolution, and eternal refuge, will be enough to tell you that it is not the kind of novel of which Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz - chairman of MASSOLIT, who opens the novel rebuking Bezdomnyi for taking Jesus sufficiently seriously to bother criticizing him - would approve.

Contents pages can also, when read retrospectively - as their position at the end of Russian books seems to invite - acquire something of the quality of verse, or even poetry, bearing a similar summative relationship to the section of the novel concerned as the chapter titles do to their corresponding chapters. In E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View, the four chapters before the last are all called, with reference to the heroine, Lucy Honeychurch: ‘Lying to George’ ‘Lying to Cecile’ ‘Lying to Mr Beebe, Mrs Honeychurch, Freddy and the Servants’, and ‘Lying to Mr Emerson’. But Mr Emerson is someone you can’t get away with lying to; he forces Lucy be honest to herself and to marry the right person, and therefore the next chapter is the last. On the contents page it is clear that the author is indulgently ticking Lucy off. That’s not the way, it says. Nor is that. Nor is that. Nor is that.

There are very few novels which have no positive markers between their chapters at all, merely a new page, or just a few missed lines. Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders has no breaks at all -though her life can fairly easily be read as episodes, defined by the man with whom she happens to be. That was one of the very first British novels, as novel is usually defined, after which few novels were written in Britain or in Russia without clear chapters until the early twentieth century. Петербург is divided by words in bold at the beginning of what may be called chapters. James Joyce’s Ulysses has a short space between episodes, and his Finnegan’s Wake seven times starts again on a new page. A new page also separates the focalizing consciousnesses of Woolf’s The Waves, and Mrs Calloway. and the phases of Samuel Beckett’s Watt.

Sometimes one, two, or three stars are used - as in Grossman’s Жизнь и Судьба.

But if this shunning of the advantages of chapters is typical of modernism, then postmodernism brings them back in, in order to play with them. Pelevin’s Желтая стрела starts at Chapter 12 and goes down to Chapter 0. In Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie, in which two of the central characters are photographers, the chapters are called not that but Plates - as in photographic plates - each dated and titled, and playing on the congruity between titles of visual and verbal art.

The chapters in some novels start with epigraphs - but it is questionable how much effect they have on many readers’ comprehension of the novel. Some readers skip them, and many who don’t skip them don’t keep them in mind through the whole chapter, considering how they relate. Almost nobody rereads the epigraph at the end of the chapter, in order to reflect on its full function. But people are more likely to pay attention to epigraphs when they are only few; when, as in Atonement, there is one for the whole novel.

• Chapter 4    Shape

Sometimes the shape of chapters is obvious. The Old Testament Book of Job is divided into chapters largely according to who is speaking: when he, or one of his friends, or God, start saying something, they typically do so in their own chapter. Un a Bildungsroman - a novel concerned with an individual’s development - chapters can describe one particular phase of learning. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man does this, with its five chapters corresponding roughly to the artist’s learning of language, politics, sex, God, and art. In this respect, each chapter - with something learned and something lost - recapitulates the shape of the novel as a whole. But one should also look out for the absence of a chapter break at a point when one might expect it. In all four New

Testament Gospels, the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, Pilate, Herod, and Pilate again, Jesus’s scourging, his dragging of his cross to Golgotha, his crucifixion, death, and burial, all take place in a single chapter. All of the events in this list would have been obvious places for chapter breaks, but the Bible’s early editors clearly wished to assert that these events were of a piece and could not be interrupted. They shunned the rhetorical pause, and kept within one chapter’s remit the action of what was on the one hand only twenty-four hours, and on the other, hours of terrible agony and extension, and an event which would alter cosmic history.

It is also worth noting how chapters begin and end. Some novelists change chapters in order to introduce somebody new - and of these, a few draw attention to the fact. Book IV of Fielding’s Tom Jones, called ‘Containing five pages of paper’, ends with a build-up to the introduction of the heroine: ‘Indeed we would, for certain causes, advise those of our male readers who have any hearts [etc.] And now, without any further preface, we proceed to our next chapters’. The next is called: ‘A short hint of what we can do in the sublime, and a description of Miss Sophia Western’. The effect of the narrator’s selfconsciousness is comic. But a comic effect can also be generated by a chapter break mimicking a character’s consciousness. The first chapter of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy ends with Tristram saying: ‘Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying? - Nothing’. The ensuing chapter break then mimics the silence in which the act of procreative sex should, according to Tristram, be performed.

The eleventh chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends with Alice in a court room:

Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling very curious to see what the next witness would be like, ‘- for they haven’t got much evidence yet,' she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the White Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name ‘Alice!’

The next chapter starts:

‘Here!’ cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she had grown in the last few minutes

And there are less comic examples of the same technique. In The Book of Job, after Job has suffered a number of blows, including the loss of his animals, the death of his children, and the infliction of a skin disease, his friends come to comfort him at the end of chapter 2:

So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great.

Chapter 3

After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day.

The silence between the two chapters is of indefinite extension.

In the transition between the second and third sections of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - which has only three sections - the silence is also maintained. A Russian trader is enthusing to Marlowe about the sinister Kurtz:

T tell you,’ he cried, ‘this man has enlarged my mind.’ He opened his arms wide, staring at me with his little blue eyes that were perfectly round.

Ill

T looked at him, lost in astonishment.’

In all three of these examples, the break is significant because of the continuity which is maintained between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. More often, however, transitions between chapters involve a sharp change of scene and tone.

One of the most perplexing examples of this I know occurs in Dickens’s Bleak House. In the fifty-ninth chapter a lady is on the run from her husband who has just found out about an affair and a child she has had. Disguising herself as a poor woman, she makes her way across the countryside to a stinking paupers’ cemetery where she knows that her former lover is buried. The young woman narrator, who has just found out that she is this lady’s daughter, is in pursuit of her to try to save her. When she arrives at the cemetery she, not knowing that her mother is in disguise, finds what she thinks to be a poor woman lying with her face to the ground. The last sentence of the chapter is as follows:

I passed on to the gate and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head, put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my mother, cold and dead.

Chapter 60 Perspective

I proceed to other passages of my narrative. From the goodness of all about me I derived such consolation as I can never think of unmoved. I have already said so much of myself, and so much still remains, that I will not dwell upon my sorrow. I had an illness, but it was not a long one.

This extraordinary example of psychological rupture has, I think, an unintended comic effect.

Most events, and moods, in life usually end vaguely, and it is only in relation to a few decisive events that people actually refer, metaphorically, to chapters of their lives. Lives are not frequently or obviously divided except of course by sleep, which is both frequent and regular. Now, it is one of the peculiarities of fictional characters that they hardly ever do sleep - but when they do fall asleep, it is often at the end of a chapter. Chapter 11 of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey ends with the narrator dismissing the heroine to sleep, the sixth chapter of Chekhov’s ‘В овраге' ends with the elderly Tsybukin falling asleep after seven sleepless nights, and the first part of Преступление и наказание ends with Raskolnikov, after committing his two murders, failing to get to sleep, because he is haunted by thought.

Another common bed-time activity is also used to close chapters, although this time not out of boredom - who’d watch someone sleep if they weren’t in love with them? - but out of discretion. Chapter 5 of Lawrence’s The Rainbow, which contains the wedding of a virginal couple, ends with the villagers going to sing to them under their bedroom window. We end with the couple’s perspective:

And they crept closer, closer together, hearts beating to one another. And even as the hymn rolled on, they ceased to hear it.

In both sleeping and sex it is the loss of a certain kind of consciousness that ends a chapter.

• Chapter 5    A Brief Exhortation

It is I think one of the faults of our age - and here I mean the last two centuries - that there is so unprecedentedly great a disparity between the amount of self-decoration expected of men and of women. But I have heard men as well as women complain of this. That whereas women have a huge choice of types of clothes, jewellery, and makeup from which to choose, men have a very dull, limited palate indeed. And for this reason, such details as ties and cuff links can assume great importance, because here at least men can enjoy some freedom of choice. Similarly, because of the relative formlessness of the novel in relation to all other genres of verbal art, it is worth paying particular attention to the few formal structures that it does have: I am the sort of man who wears an orange tie; this is the sort of novel that chooses to mark its chapters by Roman numerals, or by Arabic numerals, or by empty space. After all, one doesn’t overlook whether or not a poem is rhymed. No more should one overlook how a novel marks, and uses, its chapters.

Epilogue

The subject of this epilogue is not the future of chapters per se, but of texts. When one is interested in chapters, an awareness of editions and media becomes particularly important. More recent editions - and especially cheap editions - of older novels frequently change the layout of the chapters, by for example replacing Roman numerals (which not everyone now finds easy to read) by Arabic numerals; or by not retaining the original practice of starting a chapters on a new page in order to save paper; or by not reproducing the original contents page; or by giving a shortened version of the title of each chapter or even of the novel itself. Online versions of printed novels tend either to efface the chapter divisions, like the Project Gutenberg e-texts which present the whole of a novel on one webpage - or else to exaggerate them, like many e-texts of the Bible, in which each chapter of each book is opened in a different web-page. The effect in the second case can be to enforce one’s sense of the chapters as discrete entities, which is particularly appropriate when chapter boundaries coincide with original instalment boundaries of serialized novels. But it can also feel arbitrary, like changing short play vinyl records when trying to listen to a symphony, and means that you are without the white space which you see between chapters in all print editions and in e-readers which follow print format.

I wonder whether all future editions of Master Georgie, perhaps when it’s out of copyright in 2068, will be printed with crossed muskets under the Plate titles? Perhaps it’s a minor point. A replacement of flamboyant cufflinks by simple buttons. But what if the word Plate were to be replaced by the word Chapter? It is in the nature of art, as of sartorial vanity, that such details are never without importance.