Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/just-a-little-longer

by cacher • 11 months ago

138 65 11 months ago

lqet• 11 months ago

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.

That may all be true. But many authors of that era (e.g. Dickens and Dostoevsky) published their work mainly in monthly installments. Chapters are then, exactly like TV show episodes, simply a technical necessity.

ldmosquera• 11 months ago

One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks, and even if you watch them without ads, you get narratively unnecessary cliff hangers just before a break, complete with dramatic music and a closeup of some dramatic gesture, trivially resolved in the next 5 seconds after the break.

You're constantly yanked out of the narrative in service of ads even if you never see them, which has disfigured the medium.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 11 months ago

One thing I hate about modern TV shows is that they have been further sliced into ~5-10min sequences between ad breaks,

If it is on a broadcast tv network, it's not really worth watching. Sure, there are the one or two exceptional shows, but with so much premium content, why would you want to watch that?

crazygringo• 11 months ago

I think you've got it backwards.

That was the hallmark of old TV, on networks. Since the start of TV in the 50's.

There are tons of modern TV shows that don't do anything you're talking about because they're made for streamers or paid TV without ads.

It sounds like you watch different shows than I do, but I watch a lot of TV and haven't seen what you're talking about in many, many years. Not with Squid Game or Stranger Things on Netflix, or Andor on Disney+, or White Lotus on HBO, or Severance on Apple TV+, or even something like Alien: Earth currently on FX/Hulu.

You might want to find better places for watching TV...

red3692• 11 months ago

I agree with your feeling that those mini cliff-hangers break the immersion, especially when watching without ad-breaks, although I can mostly deal with it. I agree with some of the other replies though, that it is more prevalent in older shows.

I find that laugh-tracks are the aspect of older shows which I find harder to ignore. Still worth bearing with for some old shows though, especially as I gradually stop hearing them.

beAbU• 11 months ago

Modern tv shows are more often than not released in a single go on a streaming service, intended to be binged in a single go. Often the episodes form a single narrative and a single episode cannot stand alone. The MOTD format is all but dead.

Do you have an example of a modern show that has the dramatic-music-and-cliffhanger ad-break?

bdunks• 11 months ago

I read Isaac Asimov’s foundation series a few years ago (side note for anyone who hasn’t read it: it still holds up incredibly well with a small suspension of disbelief and some grace for when it was written).

In the preface to the 4th or 5th book (which were written 30+ years after the “original” trilogy) he discussed how the originals parts of the trilogy were published as a set of short stories in a SciFi publication over 8 years, and later compiled into the books.

I was astonished.

Perhaps everyone else already knew this. But such a clear narrative through line to be written in discrete short stories. Very impressive.

It sounds like this may have been common prior to this era as well.

hinkley• 11 months ago

Didn’t Verne also serialize his stories? This has been going on for a long long time but for sure Clark and Asimov have books that were serials in periodicals.

Edit: looked it up. Dickens and Dumas preceded Jules Verne in serials being turned into novels.

andrewflnr2• 11 months ago

Weird. I bounced off Foundation immediately because it felt like a series of short stories instead of a novel (and also I couldn't take psychohistory the least bit seriously). I'm kind of kicking myself for not predicting that it actually did start that way.

esperent2• 11 months ago

some grace for when it was written

I reread it last year and I needed to give it a lot of grace, mostly from it's treatment of women. To Asimov's credit, there's no overt sexism - he manages to bypass that by having almost no female characters at all. There's a single female character who has no agency, every other character is white and male. I understand it's a product of it's time, and avoid judgment. However, the lack of women feels weird and makes it hard to enjoy.

To be fair, the later books in the series which were written in the 70s are much better in this regard.

k__2• 11 months ago

"it still holds up incredibly well"

Can't confirm. I couldn't get through the first 100 pages.

bwilliams18• 11 months ago

Another even more modern example is The Martian. Weir published it chapter by chapter on his website, even updating previous chapters based on (mostly technical) feedback from his readers. Once completed, his readers encouraged him to publish an eBook, it took off on Amazon, and the rest is history.

ImaCake• 11 months ago

Text size is also contingent on the basic technologies of the time. Ancient texts by the length and cost of parchment, and anything before the printing press by how easy it is to copy.

Maybe its only now that we are less constrained by technology that we have to really focus on our mental faculties as the limiting factor for writing.

galaxyLogic2• 11 months ago

I think it is simply because the writer needs to take a pause afteer writing some amount. And the reader also prefers to take pause. Having chapters aligns the interests of both readers and the writer.

andrewflnr2• 11 months ago

Nah, as a writer who talks to other writers with wildly different processes, I don't think that's how it works for anyone. Time spent writing is almost unrelated to visible time markers in the text. It's not a big deal to stop writing in the middle of a scene or stop one and start another in the same session (assuming we're writing linearly at all). Scene and chapter boundaries are something we specifically think about in their own right to optimize the reading experience.

throw245433• 11 months ago

Also, I know "Journey to the West" had chapters and I'm sure other cultures books had chapters too.

With all the colonization and cultural exchange going on during that period, they should've been familiar with it.

novosel• 11 months ago

And hence, Dickensian invention of cliffhanger at the end of installment. Narrative push and pull that you can feel when you read it in a book.

dotancohen5• 11 months ago

I did not learn writing formally, and I do not publish what I write. But I do write a lot, mostly fiction to express the things that happen to myself in a controlled environment.

I tried not writing in chapters, but I find that the chapters helped me compartmentalize different times and places and specific subjects. It may be that I'm simply used to chapters from reading other books, but no matter what the book I find that some sort of compartmentalization is beneficial and often necessary.

madaxe_again• 11 months ago

If you eschew chapters, it can have a pretty distinctive effect on your prose. Prominent examples that come to mind are Finnegan’s Wake, The Waves, and On The Road, and all make for an intense read. The absence of pause gives you no place to put it down, you are ensnared within the inescapable flow.

Seems to fit stream of consciousness stuff better.

Although this does remind me of sitting on a plane as a kid with finnegan’s wake, and an older American leans over and reassures me that I’ll be able to move on to “chapter books” soon. To this day I remain unsure if he was being ironic or if he thought I was reading “Spot The Dog”.

beezlebroxxxxxx2• 11 months ago

Most writers kinda skip chapters. Instead, on early drafts, they focus on scenes, which might be 1:1 with a chapter, but are often 2:1 or even 3:1 with a chapter. The relationship between paragraphs, scenes, and chapters, is one way of thinking about and manipulating pace in a story.

lopsotronic• 11 months ago

If you've ever waded hip deep into publication technology, you can see how the 2nd CE heading has moved down, down, down, down all the way to the individual word level, in something like a DITA `conref` where the individual word is a reference.

Even though DITA pays my checks, I've always been apprehensive about functionality like `conref`[1] in a general-purpose document. You can only fuss with natural language for so long before you're not a document anymore, and if you're not a document . . well, what are you doing? Why are we here? You've built a conceptual box that's better done in an actual programming language.

But no one's going to argue about the utility of headings (hmm except for the DITA architects, who have disposed of it in favor of a nested transclusion of `topicrefs`). This sort of article is always fascinating, although it is just as concerned with fiction prose.

Off topic, the following would prove darkly prophetic:

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.

[1] I'm calling out DITA but it's also mechanisms in S1000D and DocBook, and you can do the same in Asciidoc (include directive to region) or ReStructuredText (same). The XML specs are clunkier, but the basic concept is the same.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 11 months ago

I like the verses.

How else could I deep-link to a total banger line like Matthew 25:40?

lostlogin• 11 months ago

What is the protocol by which the judge will evaluate us?

spc476• 11 months ago

By using the web? https://bible.conman.org/kj/Matthew.25:40

1718627440• 11 months ago

he system of chapter-and-verse left scripture ‘so chop’d and minc’d […] so broken and divided’

I don't get the problem. You never hear them, and when you read them yourself, you also just ignore them. When your starting at a chapter, just read the last few verses of the previous to get the context.

Telemakhos2• 11 months ago

The Latin quoted is wrong ("de nomine deferundo iduibusque legundeis" should be "de nomine deferundo iudicibusque legundeis") and the Greek "kephalaia" is plural while the Latin terms with it are singular. "Titlos" is the Greek way of writing the Latin "titulus," which is a weird thing to have in a list like that; the only place I can remember seeing it is the Bible.

This comes across as sloppy work from someone in an English department who didn't have the language skills to work outside English but decided to try anyway.

thaumasiotes3• 11 months ago

Can you point to something with the text of the tablet? I was curious, but all I could find were references to an 1863 attempt at reconstructing it by Theodor Mommsen.

I'm not sure why "language skills" are necessary for this piece - these questions are fundamentally about what the words inscribed on a document are, not what those words mean. It could easily be true that Latin scrolls started labeling something "capitulum" while Greek scrolls called the same thing "kephalaia".

Telemakhos2• 11 months ago

It's the Lex Acilia Repetundarum from the second century BC; the standard reference would be CIL i.198. While parts of have been restored, there's no way that "iduibusque" could have been part of the heading, as "iduibus" simply isn't a word in Latin of any era. Nobody from Mommsen onward prints anything but "iudicibusque," because that is a word, and "iudices (d)eligere" is the usual legal phrase for picking jurymen, just like "nomen deferre" is a standard phrase for indicting someone. The author of the article did not have privileged access to some special truth about this: whatever he copied from said "iudicibusque," and he miscopied it. If you're looking for a text with notes and standardized orthography, Lindsay (1897) _Handbook of Latin Inscriptions_ 84-88.

Again, later Christian Greek texts (probably codices rather than scrolls) could have called "kephalaion" the thing Latin marked as "caput" (not in the article, but very common in Latin; Cicero uses it in _De Inventione_) or "capitulum," and in fact Greek texts did so in imitation of the Latin, but "kephalaia" is plural, and the author, despite writing about the history of terms, doesn't seem to know that.

It's also odd that he discusses Aulus Gellius' _Attic Nights_ without talking about Pliny the Elder's _Natural History,_ on which Gellius likely based his concept of an index and chapter headings. In Pliny, the chapter headings proceed logically through thematically related groups in a taxonomy, so you can drill down through the index to the chapter you want by looking for the larger genus to which it might be a species. If you're looking for a particular rock, for example, you start in the index under rocks and then look for a more specific type of rock, rather than looking under plants or geography. Gellius turns this on its head, quite possibly intentionally: none of his chapters fall into any sort of order that anyone has ever been able to discern, so you have to read the entire index of chapter headings (itself a book in length) in order to locate one you might be seeking. Besides being the first, to my knowledge, openly user-hostile interface, I think that makes it harder to believe what the author says about the Attic Nights being "only something to be consulted partially, and on occasion, rather than read and absorbed line-by-line." It's actually really hard to use the Attic Nights as a reference book in that way, not only because of how Gellius set up the index and disordered the chapters but also because it was originally published in linear-access scrolls rather than a random-access codex, making quick reference even more difficult. So, it's odd that the author skips from headings that organize a legal treatise straight to Gellius' chapter headings summarizing, but not organizing, his random miscellany without some mention in between of someone like Pliny, who organizes chapters into a taxonomy.

There's already a lot of scholarship about chapter markings and other paratextual devices in ancient literature: Butler (2009) "Cicero's Capita" in _The Roman Paratext_ shows that Cicero's speeches were capitulated in antiquity without written rubrics or headings, marking new units of text on the same argument instead by extending the first line into the left margin; surely this is a step that should have been considered on the road from legal text rubrics to chapters without headings as a temporal organizational device in novels.

Maybe the book did the topic more justice than the review.

romaaeterna• 11 months ago

titlos/τίτλος: Its singular Biblical use in John 19:19-20 (prb. "inscription") is separate from its later use in (heavily Latin-influenced) Byzantine jurisprudence documents, where it frequently gets used to label section numbers: ΤΙΤΛΟΣ Α´.

heikkilevanto• 11 months ago

Possibly because carrying and managing multiple smaller clay tablets was so much easier

pedropsb• 11 months ago

There is a great book from brazilian writer Guimaraes Rosa which explores both "unusual" way of speaking portuguese and the role of chapters (by not having them over its >500 pages!).

The book is "Grande Sertão Veredas" (it has an ongoing translation to english which is going on for over 10+ years). Rosa is an educated diplomat, and he choose to explore the culture, language, landscapes and subjectivness of the place he grew, in some rural area of a small city in Minas Gerais.

At the beginning both "features" usually cause some frustration. It is really hard to understand some expressions or know who is speaking, or if its just a thought, or even when or where something is happening. And that goes on in an never ending continuum.

Nevertheless, if you keep going, you're rewarded with a incredible immersive experience. The unusual and becomes playful, the continum becomes the flown of a river (the Sao Francisco river!). And on top of all that, an epic sertanejo's Fausto slowly unfolds towards one of the best endings of brazilian literature.

_0ffh• 11 months ago

Terry Pratchett was mostly a no-chapters guy, and I barely noticed until he mentioned it somewhere.

alkyon• 11 months ago

Literature from before 1800, Davis notes, is ‘mostly unread, even by writers’

I strongly disagree. There are many counterexamples, some authors are still widely read. Besides Shakespeare, it's Defoe, his Robinson Crusoe is one of defining books for me, later I also enjoyed Journal of the Plague Year and Moll Flanders. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is in top ten list all of the books I ever read.

bloak• 11 months ago

It's a bit hard for the casual reader to discover to what extent the spelling and punctuation, and perhaps more than just the spelling and punctuation, has been updated for modern editions of those books, but there are photographs online of the original 1726 edition of "Gulliver's travels" and it looks like the main obstacle to me reading it, if I could afford a copy, would be the way they wrote s as ſ, which is a trivial matter. The book is still worth reading and still fairly widely read, I would guess.

On the other hand, if I hadn't done Shakespeare at school and someone were to hand me a First Folio (1623) I don't think I'd make much progress with it. Of course most people don't read plays anyway.

hnburnsy• 11 months ago

These days excessive chapters and large margins serve to make printed books appear larger than there are.

alejohausner• 11 months ago

Why is there no mention of Don Quixote (1605) the first modern novel? It was divide into chapters, long before the Victorian era, which the author claims is when chapters in novels became accepted?

waldarbeiter• 11 months ago

Nassim Taleb (black swan author) does not divide his books into chapters. Instead each book consists of several (sub-)books. In Antifragility he explains that two subbooks from the same book have the same distance to each other than one subbook from book to one from another book. I found that quite interesting.

Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history

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