The Chapter Nicholas Dames
A history of how we break up books
Nicholas Dames admits to being “a bookish type”. A professor of humanities at Columbia University, his study of the history of the chapter begins with one of the earliest extant examples of a chaptered text: the tabula Bembina. A bronze tablet that was originally more than two metres wide, this was made for a forum in the region of Urbino, Italy, in the late second century BCE. On it were inscribed legal statutes dating to the Gracchan land reforms of 133-121 BCE.
What is unique about it is the way in which the statutes were presented: each section is prefaced by headings followed by a space. Though not yet numbered, the headings took the form of a brief Latin summary – a noun phrase introduced by the ablative “de”, meaning “concerning” or “in which”. This would later become the default form for signalling the start of a chapter.
Surprisingly then, chaptering did not begin in a book, but in a legal inscription. Indeed, as Dames shows, the adoption of the chapter by prose fiction was “slow and partial”. Though it remained optional well into the eighteenth century, Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews (1742) delightfully compares a chapter break to “an inn or resting-place, where he [the reader] may stop and take a glass, or any other refreshment, as it pleases him”.
According to Dames, the history of the chapter is both deep and long, but “the novel is where the creative potential of that history culminates”. Its role became that of “segmenting time” and this sat uneasily with the aims of some novelists, for it “breaks up what should be continuous, interrupts what should be immersive”. John Berger highlighted the limitations of chaptering in G. (1972): “The relations which I perceive between things…tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters.”
However, by segmenting time, the chapter has gained a metaphorical power that is quite unique: we commonly speak of starting a new chapter in our life, but no one refers to the “paragraphs of my life”. This “innocuous, ubiquitous device” which dates back some two millennia has, argues Dames, “a purchase on one of the grander claims of written narrative: to be capable of representing, and even structuring, what it feels like to have an experience in time”.
Dames is a wonderfully attentive reader of literature, who is alive to every subtlety and nuance of his subject. His study is a superb example of scholarly writing that is thoughtful, erudite and filled with memorable insights.