The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century

This book offers (1) a theory of chapters, (2) a history of chapter varieties, roughly between the Romans and the early Renaissance, paying special attention to controversies of biblical scholarship, and (3) an examination of varieties of chapter division in the novel, essentially from eighteenth-century English acrobatics to contemporary authors. The theory rests on ten “premises” that are not quite premises. Its only genuine premise is that a chapter “marks time in ways that absorb and compete with other ways of marking time.” At this point, there is both good and bad news. The bad news is that the premise is obviously false on its own terms; the good news is that its falsity does not affect the better parts of the book. Thus, the book does not really need its one premise.Dames's history of chapterdom suggests, even if it does not always fully acknowledge, that chapter breaks are to an extent not unlike punctuation (some English words for punctuation marks come straight from Latin words for parts of texts). For the longest time, chapter breaks and punctuation marks were not inserted by authors, and editorial work has long and often consisted in the addition of both. One follows, and disagrees with, chapter breaks as one follows and disagrees with choices of punctuation, and indeed with all editorial choices. These are disagreements between different uses and interpretations of texts, for which there have been motley reasons and motives: the length and the context of public and private readings, the anticipated use of quotation, the strictures of typesetting, considerations of searchability and indexation, the relevance of certain episodes, and even the very definition of what counts as an episode in each case. As Dames concedes, there is an essentially ad hoc connection between modes of chapter-making and contingent interpretive procedures. Such procedures employed convenient forms of title giving, of chapter division, and, as he nicely calls it apropos early Renaissance adaptations of Arthurian legends, sundry “remediations.”Against the official premise of Dames's argument, the variety of motives for chapter breaks seems to preclude anything like an underlying chapter form or common concern. Dames's Platonism has a pronounced phenomenological bent and insists on a vaporous phenomenology of time-consciousness, to be supplemented on occasion by future cognitive science. This playing for philosophy and for science is unnecessary, since, as he admits, the concern with what he calls “chapter time” could not possibly have always been there. The book, however, allows for another explanation. Dames's “segmented history” of chapters culminates, in its third part, in a lengthy discussion of prose fiction, especially of the novel. This history is selective, though that result was perhaps to be expected and cannot be faulted. What seems to me to be the true motive for the sequential structure of the book is, rather, that, in its mode of historical explanation, controversies about religious and doctrinaire texts are for Dames inevitably destined to become aufgehoben in contemporary critical discussions of fiction and literature and, indeed, of fiction as the supreme literary kind. By inheriting and revising the modes of chapter-sectioning of earlier tribes, the novel truly represents a culmination of the Bible, emancipated from belief and protected by a purportedly distinct logical status. The editor of sacred texts has for Dames eventually given place to the author of fiction, as the secular literary critic is the contemporary heir to the theologically minded earlier commentator and as the cathedral schools and talmudic academies of yore have been superseded by the seminar room of the English department.