> 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.
I did not learn writing formally, and I do not publish what I write.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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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´.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
16 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 43.6 ms ] threadThat 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.