OK, well, thank you for showing up on my day, volume one, part one, chapter one, why chapters why indeed they are not a fashionable subject of literary criticism. They may not have actually seemed that appealing to you when you saw that that was one of the lectures on this list. And yet there they are, deep in the structure of most prose works, doing much of the supporting and some of the embellishing, which is why I think they deserve some attention.
In fact, an awful lot more attention than they've had European languages agree in their metaphors. Chapter shaped capital or capital. And the Greek cephalic from Latin Kaputt had the Russia the Russian Glover from Gulliver also had. So chapters don't, in fact refer to Gerda's or supporting walls or partitions, but point to the heading of the chapter and our extended met anemically to the whole.
But perhaps in addition, each chapter has a had a mind of its own and develops its own set of thoughts. Charters have a long history, but not quite as long as written literature, The Iliad and The Odyssey are supposed to have been divided into their 24 books apiece. About 200 years before Christ, the subdivision of the books of the Bible was more complicated.
The Hebrew scriptures were first divided into paragraphs four reading aloud, and the New Testament was divided in this way in three hundred and twenty five A.D. in 2014, 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 the Greek Bibles. And in fifteen 90, another English Bible finalised the chapters and the verses in a way which was adopted by the Greek Orthodox Bible to.
When the heads of Catholic cathedrals met to read out to each other a few of these chapters, they did so in a separate building or as it were, chapter of the cathedral, which became known as the Chapter House 70s, use them in his sixty five novel, Don Quixote, and most novels have used them ever since. But why? Chapter two, resting places.
They can be points to stop and take stock of what is being read, and if one is inclined to reflect on whatever else it might be, the chapters are there for Henry Fielding. At the opening of the second book of his novel, Joseph Andrews spends an entire chapter doing just that. The narrator comments. It becomes an author generally to divide a book as it does a butcher. To joint his meat for such assistance is a great help to both the reader and the carver.
One of the more trivial forms of this assistance is that the chapter, quote, prevents spoiling the beauty of a book by turning down its leaves a method otherwise necessary to those readers who, though they read with great improvement and advantage, are apt when they return to their study after half an hour's absence to forget where they left off. And then, with typically memorable whimsy, he develops a metaphor quotation to.
Those little spaces between our chapters may be looked upon as an inn or a resting place where the reader may stop and take a glass or any other refreshment as it pleases him, they are fine readers will perhaps be scarce, able to travel further than through one of them in a day that in the end, the reader may consider of what he has seen in the past, has 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 does, he may probably miss the seeing some curious productions of nature, which will be observed by the slower and more accurate reader. But at this point, I would like to take a survey of the extent to which you actually read in chapters. Could you put up your hands if when you read a novel you tend to end a reading session at the end of a chapter rather than partway through one?
OK, and who is conscious that they often finish reading, finished reading at points other than chapter breaks? OK, yeah, that's a minority for myself, I freely confess that I often stop reading after an hour's reading or four or when the phone rings or when the impulse to check my emails suddenly quells my desire to find out what happens next to Emma Bovary or when I need the toilet or I need to eat or I want to fall asleep.
This is the equivalent of falling asleep under the stars, perhaps on a haystack rather than pressing through to the next in. And yet even I benefit from the existence of chapters. For one thing, a vast expanse, less sorry, a vast, featureless expanse of text can be as intimidating to the mind as a voyage across uncharted water to the sea. Fieldings says that a volume without any such places of rest resembles the openings of whales or seas, which tires the eye and fatigues.
The spirit, when embarked upon his comments, apply to 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. The waves we are truly are out on the open sea.
But seeing Ehnes on my journey reassures me that I am making progress, that I'm no longer in that place, but this one, if the chapters are numbered, then it is as though the INS have in front of them stones indicating the number of miles that I have travelled. And if I have consulted the contents pages map, then I know how many I still have to have to go through till the end.
This lecture, by the way, has five. The INS also give me a reassuring sense that I am still in civilisation, that I am not, in fact tilting at windmills in early 17th century Spain or watching the shambles at Borodino on September the 7th, 1812, or being seduced by Arabella done or sinking into a feeling in the air of a Ford. Six hundred and thirty two. Now I am reading a novel and at the INS, the controlling presence of the author is reassuring the 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 men, but art such as war and peace and brave new world.
Art, in all its modes, demands in its creators and receivers, a heightened perception of form of gestalt, given which one of the limitations of the novel as a whole is the difficulty of perceiving the shape of so large and complex, an object Henry James famously referred to by not mere war and peace, amongst other novels, as great loose baggy monsters or fluid pudding's.
The English critic Percy Lubbock memorably described the process of reading the first page sorry of reading on the first page of his 1921 study, The Craft of Fiction. And this is a quotation one as quickly as we read, it melts and shifts in the memory. Even at the moment when the last page is turned a great part of the book, its finer detail is already vague and doubtful. A little later, after a few days or months, how much is really left of it?
A cluster of impressions, some clear points arising from a mist of uncertainty. This is all we can hope to possess. Generally speaking, in the name of a book, nobody would venture to criticise a building, a statue, a picture with nothing before them but the memory of a single glimpse caught in passing. Yet the critic of literature on the whole has to found his opinion upon little more.
In this, of course, the novel differs from the short story, and this is where the chapter can come in and offer within the novel something of the shape and a ability of the short story. Yet in practise, before you run away with this metaphor, most chapters do not have a short story shape because they exist in closer independence and more necessary sequence than do the stories of a collection.
So perhaps in that respect they more resemble the scenes of a play with the larger books into which some long novels are divided, then 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 perhaps most of all resemble the paragraphs of which the prose is composed, which may have very different lengths and shapes, but necessarily followed from one to the next. Indeed, some of the chapters of Wolfe's to the Lighthouse are actually one paragraph long, and a chapter can hardly be shorter than that. Chapter three, naming of parts. You can do several things in an in 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. I'm referring here to chapter titles which give, in some cases, considerable detail of what is to come. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa is composed entirely of letters which serve as the novels, de facto chapters, letters.
Sixty two is entitled Clarissa to Miss How 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 copies. 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 failed to mention the chapters most decisive events, whereas some short titles give away a considerable amount.
In Chapter fifty two of Oliver Twist, Fagin is in prison under sentence of death. Now, the nature of death sentences on major characters in novels is that they are quite often reversed at the 11th hour. The chapter is entitled Fagin's Last Night Alive. No chance of a reprieve there even. Another example is in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which is written in named phases at the end of phase, the first, the maiden test loses 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. That is the second major no more. Over the 19th century, however, titles in English novels tended to become less revealing as well as shorter. Some are straightforwardly indicative. For example, in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Voxel and Marine simply indicate new locations.
Others have a poetic function and operate in an oblique or ironic way in relation to the contents of the chapter. Other chapters in the same novel are entitled Arcadian Simplicity and Quite A Sentimental Character. Such titles function in a similar way to the titles of works of visual art.
Although given the density of verbal detail in a chapter in relation to its title and the fact that they like the narrative exist in the dimension of reading time chapter titles are not, I would suggest, as determinative of the objects, meaning as is the case with works of visual art.
Of course, titles take great opportunity to be teasing Fieldings narrator claims that and in these inscriptions, I've been as faithful as possible, not imitating the celebrated montane who gives you one who promises you one thing and gives you another, nor some title page authors who promise a great deal and produce nothing at all. Yet in his novel, Tom Jones, Part one, Chapter 12 is entitled Quotation three, containing what the reader may perhaps expect to find in it.
Part two, Chapter four is containing one of the most bloody battles or rather duels that were ever recorded in domestic history. The duel is a highly undignified fight between women in a churchyard after church. The contents pages of novels which have chapter names and which put those names on the contents page, which is 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 locate, relocate passages.
No need when reading the thousand pages of Little Dorrit to insert a bookmark at a favourite spot such as Fanny Dorrit's last conversation with Mr. Myrdal before he commits suicide in a bath house.
You can just refer to the contents page and go straight there. In this respect, films are retrospectively novelised when they are transferred to DVD and broken by somebody in two chapters with titles and representative frames presented on a continuous screen, giving instant access to the beginning of the chapter chosen and in certain editions of certain novels such as those of Dickens, you can even find precise moments with the help of descriptive headers at the top of every page.
If you bother to look at contents pages, you can often, as a first time reader, learn quite a lot about the novel as the whole. When industry eskies notes from underground, you are faced with one underground, two concerning wet snow and that's it, you know that you're in the hands of a rather strange author or a rather strange narrator or as is the case here, both. Read the contents page of Bulgar, Master and Margarita and certain things will be immediately apparent.
The second chapter being called Pontius Pilate and chapter titles referring variously to Satan Absolution and Eternal Refuge, will be enough to tell you that this is really not the kind of novel of which Mihail Alexandrovich Berlioz, chairman of Massachusett, who opens the novel by rebuking Bears Domna for taking Jesus sufficiently seriously to criticise him, would approve.
The contents page of Johnson's coat, what a carve up prepares its reader for its oscillations between action occurring in nineteen ninety to ninety one and chapters concerning six different individuals. Once we've read the first few chapters, we can make still more sense of the contents page and begin to anticipate the horrors which are to come, though quite what an Organisation of Deaths, which is the title of Part two will involve, we can only fear or fantasise about.
In a history of the world, in 10 and a half chapters, the contents page is still more important. This is acknowledged by the fact that it is sent to justified and that its numbers are written out as words.
It is here that the innocent browser in a bookshop is is assured that the book has not been mis shelved as fiction and is reassured that even if this is not a history in any common sense of the term, it does at least have 10 chapters and something called the parentheses, which will have to serve as the half.
Contents pages can also, when read retrospectively as their position at the end of books in certain countries, including Russia, seems to invite a quiet 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 due to their corresponding chapters in E.M. Forster's novel, A Room With a View, the four chapters before the last are all Ussery are called with all with reference to the heroine Lucy Honeychurch lying to George. Lying to Cecile. Lying to Mr. B, Mrs. Honeychurch, Freddie in the servants.
Lying to Mr Emmerson. Only Mr. Emmerson is someone you can't get away with lying to, he forces Lucy to be honest to herself and to marry the right person. And so 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.
First is contemporary D.H. Lawrence, who I find singularly inept and misleading in many of his book titles, tends to use extremely laconic chapter titles in his novel, Women in Love. We have a driver in the train, a chair, all of them perfectly helpful to second time readers, but giving very little away to the first time reader. But the novel's last three chapter titles read in order on the contents page, do resonate to someone who knows the novel.
Chapter 30 is called Snow. Thirty one snowed up thirty to exeunt. So we have snow snowed up exeunt. The effect is cumulative, Snow is concerned with the developing relationships of two couples on holiday in the Austrian to roll in, snow up, the less happy couple becomes more and more unhappy with the combination of one partner trying to kill the other and then committing passive suicide in the snow.
In exeunt, his body is recovered, the other characters converge around him and all are dismissed as the novel ends, the insidious repetition of snow in Snowdrop evokes the claustrophobia of the high Alps from which the characters suffer. The word exeunt breaks into freedom from the mountains and from a destructive relationship, but only at the cost of death. The motion of the novel can be read at its clearest on the contents page. But of course, many chapters have no names at all, only numbers.
Before the 20th century, this was relatively rare. Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novels of Austin and Bronte's Wuthering Heights are rare examples of this chapters, which are only numbered, not named some novels which are divided at two levels. For example, books and chapters. Name one, but not the other. George Eliot experimented with this over the course of her career. Her first novel, Adam Bede, names its chapters, not its books.
The mill on the Floss names both but her later novels, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda all named their parts, but not their chapters. At one level, of course, the choice could just be dictated by the amount of labour involved. It's a lot easier to think of nine to five parts than the 70 chapters, but the choice has an effect on meaning. Numbers follow one another in inevitable order. Names don't numbered. Parts like in Adam Bede are like the acts of a play.
One expect certain kinds of thing to happen in the first act and certain other things to happen in the fifth. Whereas what makes up these acts is a sequence of types of actions that might be found in named chapter titles. The Middlemarch model is the reverse. The large phases are characterised.
One Miss broke too old and young, whereas the precise action is broken down only into numbers as though perhaps the details were subordinate to and the characters even ignorant of the larger scheme of which they form part. This seems to be true of Thomas Hardy, who also uses this form. It's also worth noticing whether the numbering of the chapters starts again at the beginning of each book or part,
or whether it is cumulative, as in Daniel Deronda. In the former case, the parts again relative independence as artistic holds. Of course, in the nineteenth century in particular, many novels were published in instalments and then in one or more volumes. But the two kinds of division, instalment and chapter tended in general to co-operate happily. That is, although there was no necessity for instalment boundaries to coincide with chapter boundaries.
And in any case, chapter boundaries were often shifted before a novel was first published in book form. In practise, these boundaries nearly always coincide, but instalment lengths tend to be fairly constant for obvious reasons, and chapter lengths are very variable. But they are nearly always shorter than instalments. So, for example, in the case of Dickens, many of his instalments have two chapters. Some have as many as six, and a few contain only one.
There is, though, a connexion between the length of a published volume and the average length of its chapters. So, for example, if a 600 page novel appears in book form in six volumes, then the average length of its chapters will be shorter than if it is published in four volumes or two or one. Think of the research that I did find that out. 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 nothing at all, though her life can be fairly easily read in 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. And after that, few novels were written without clear chapters until the 20th century. Joyce's Ulysses has a short space between episodes. His Finnegans Wake starts again seven times on a new page.
A new page also separates the vocalising consciousnesses of Wolfe's The Waves. Mrs. Dalloway is from Septimus Smith's The Intellectual Formulations of Stephen, details from Bloom's cooking of kidneys and the four phases of Becket's. What? But if this shunning of the advantages of chapters is typical of modernism, then postmodernism has brought them back again, as has happened in the 18th century in order to play with them in Beryl Bainbridge is Master Georgie,
in which two of the central characters are photographers. The chapters are called not that, but plates, as in photographic plates, each one dated and titled and playing on the Congresses between its visual and verbal art. For example, plate one eighteen forty six girl in the presence of death. Books which describe the writing of books may contain some of the apparatus of the latter.
For example, what a carve up by ends with the title page and preface to the biography of the Winshaw family, which the central character has supposedly spent the whole of that novel writing.
Atonement, which I mentioned last week, doesn't quite do this as the novel itself is the one of which it describes the process of production, but its parts are differently structured in ways which a significant part, one which describes the events of Summer nineteen thirty five is described, is divided into numbered sections, whereas parts two and three, which deal with the retreat from France and Bryony's hospital work respectively,
give merely the first letter of certain paragraphs as an enlarged, bold capital. It's as though the first part of it was written as its first draught certainly were by the highly literary and perniciously inventive teenaged Briony, who does not yet understand the actions being described. She divides this narrative into chapters because that's what creative writers do.
The later sections, which deal with the gradual growth of her understanding and the events which cause it and are its objects dispense with the artifice of numbered sections. From now on, the implication is the narrative is engaging with reality. The last section, London nineteen ninety nine is all in one section. It is, after all, pure autobiography and not within the novel's conceit. Fiction in any sense at all.
At least the young Briony doesn't use epigraphs to embellish the chapter headings of Part one, although one might have expected her to do just that. But the novel as a whole has won a quotation from Austen's Northanger Abbey about its young heroine making lurid accusations after seeing things she doesn't understand. So McEwan then is confessing that the whole work is literature.
The layout doesn't ask us to believe that the older Bryony's puts this epigraph at the beginning of her atonement, and so he is bedding the novel in a history of English literature of which he, as much as Briony is conscious. But all of this applies only to readers who read epigraphs. Some people skip them, and most who read them don't manage to keep them in mind through the whole chapter, which follows considering how they relate.
And almost nobody reads the epigraph, having finished a chapter in order to consider how that epigraph had related to that chapter. Reading that verb can mean so many different things, but perhaps we're more likely to read epigraphs when they are. When they are only few. When, as in Atonement, there's only one for the whole novel. One of the most debated epigraphs in fiction is that of Anna Karenina, mine is vengeance. I will repay. Who generations of critics have asked, is I?
Is it Tolstoy or is it God? And if it's God, is it pulls God as described by Paul to the Romans, from which the New Testament, from which New Testament book the quotation is taken? Or is it the retributive regard of Deuteronomy for which Paul, in his turn is quoting, This ambiguity has caused endless trouble because it is precisely the ambiguity of Anna's story as a whole.
Who is punishing her? The same novel also famously gives an epigraph to only one of its chapters, Chapter 20 of Part five Smit's. Death. If vengeance is the subject of Anna's story, death is that of leavens vengeance to have his hands overtakes her, but he overcomes death, or at least he overcomes his suicidal refusal to accept a life that involves death.
Chapter four shape. Sometimes the shape of chapters is obvious, the Old Testament Book of Job is divided into two sorry, it's divided into chapters largely according to who is speaking when he or one of his friends or God starts saying something. They typically do so in their own chapter in a bildungsroman. A novel concerned with an individual's development chapters can describe one particular phase of learning choices.
A portrait of the artist as a young man does this with its five chapters corresponding roughly to the artists learning of language, politics, sex, God and art. In this respect, each chapter with something learnt and something lost, as it generally does when everyone learns something recapitulates the shape of the novel as a whole.
Although, again, it's difficult to be conscious of this whilst one reads at least on the first reading, but there are a few details which may be easier to apprehend as one reads once one knows to look out for them. One is the absence of a chapter break at a point when you might expect it. In all four gospels, the trial of Jesus before the Sun, Hadrian, pilot Herod and pilot again Jesus scourging his dragging of the cross to Golgotha.
His crucifixion, death and burial all take place in a single chapter. All the events in this list would have been obvious places for chapter breaks, but the Bible's 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 chapters, remet the action of what was, on the one hand, only 24 hours and on the other. Hours of terrible extension and agony and an event which would alter cosmic history.
It is therefore worth watching out for the break, which was which is absent particularly, I would note, in Russian novels, of which the average chapter length is much, much shorter than that of British novels, and therefore in which a long chapter is and probably contains a special event. It's also worth noting how chapters start and finish, some not novel novelists change chapters in order to introduce somebody new.
And of these, a few to our attention to the fact book, four of Tom Jones called containing five pages of paper and 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., etc., etc. And now, without any further preface, we proceed to our next chapters. The next one is called a short hint of what we can do in the Sublime and a description of Misfire Western.
Similarly, in Anthony trollops, Barchester Towers, the oleaginous Mr Slope is mentioned before, the narrator then interrupts himself quotation for Mr Slope, however, on his first introduction must not be brought before the public at the tail of a chapter. So Mr Slope gets a chapter of his own called the Bishop's Chaplain here. The effect of the narrator's self-consciousness 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 quotation five did ever woman. Since the creation of the world interrupts a man with such a silly question. 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's, be performed.
The 11th chapter of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ends with Alice in a courtroom, 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, death of his children, and infliction of a painful and grotesque skin disease. His friends come to comfort him at the end of Chapter two. Quotations six.
So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights and none spoke a word onto him, for they saw that his grief was very great. Chapter three. After this, Joe opened his mouth and kissed 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, as I mentioned, has only three sections, a silence is also maintained.
A Russian trader is enthusing to Marleau about the sinister Kurts quotation seven. I tell you, he said, this man has enlarged my mind. He opened his arms wide, staring at me with his little blue eyes that were perfectly round. Three. I 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 that I know occurs in Dickens is Bleak House in the fifty ninth chapter. For those of you who haven't read it, a lady is on her run from her husband, on the run from her husband, who's 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 pauper's cemetery where she knows that her former lover is buried. The young woman narrator who was just found out that she is the sad daughter, is in hot pursuit of her trying 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. Quotation eight I passed on to the gate and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head, put the long, dark 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 derive such consolation as I can never think of unmoved. I've already said so much of myself and so much still remains that I will not dwell upon my sorrow.
I had an illness that it was not a long one. This extraordinary example of psychological rupture has, I think, an unintended comic effect, but in many cases the effect is far from comic. In Elliott's Daniel Deronda, Gwendolyn's husband, Grandcourt informs her at the end of a chapter that a man who she detests will be dining with them. He is useful to me and he must be treated civilly. Silence, full stop.
He reduces the narrator to the novels, only one word sentence and ends the chapter and that part of the novel which is concerned with Gwendoline, he finishes another of its multiple novels I'll be describing next week, but he finishes another of the sections of the novels of the novel concerning her by telling her, no, you will go yachting with me. The next time we see the couple, after a lot of intervening narration on the other plot, they are on the yacht and she is even more in his power.
Some chapters and sections of novels and instalments and at moments of particularly high suspense, the literary equivalent of the cinematic cliff-hanger nineteen thirty seven in the same way Gwendoline ends one of her segments pallid, shrieking as it seemed with terror, the jewels scattered around her on the floor. We don't hear any more about it for about another 60 pages, but some chapters can be felt to end not as cliff-hangers, but arbitrarily.
This is sometimes the case with Fielding, whose chapters tend to be about the same length as each other and end after a regular amount of time. It's like a parent coming in to a child watching a film and saying, Right, that's enough for you. Today, it's nine p.m. You could watch some more tomorrow. And pressing stop this abruptness creates a sense of artifice.
Whereas, for example, I would say in Anna Karenina, the fact that some chapters peter out without any obvious reason for them ending serves to reduce the sense that this is art. Most events and moods in life do end vaguely, and it's only in relation to a few very decisive events that people actually refer metaphorically to chapters of their lives.
Lives are not frequently obviously divided. Except, of course, by sleep, which is both frequent and regular now, it's 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 Austins Northanger Abbey ends with the narrator stating quotation nine.
And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroines portion to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears and lucky. May she think herself if she get another good night's rest in the course of the next three months. The first part of Prestopino in Arizona, Crime and Punishment ends with Raskolnikov after committing his two murders, failing to get to sleep because he is haunted by the thought.
Another common bedtime activity is also used to close chapters, although this time not out of boredom. Who'd watch someone sleep if you weren't in love with them, but out of discretion? Chapter five of Lawrences, 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 quotation 10 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 five, a brief exhortation for those of you who are going to be sitting MoD's paper on the introduction to literary studies, read the prose extracts in Section B of the paper and ask yourself whether what you are given might include the beginning or the end of a chapter,
or indeed the beginning of the end of a whole novel. You might well not be told in particular if an extract finishes at the end of the chapter. This is highly unlikely to be indicated, but you can say something along the lines of following. This paper does not indicate whether the extract includes the end of a chapter, but it seems possible for X reasons. And if this were the case, the implications for the meaning of the passage would be as follows.
I think it is one of the faults of our age. And by that here, I mean the last two centuries, that there is unprecedentedly greater 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 limited palette indeed.
And for this reason, such details as ties and cufflinks can assume assume great importance, because here at least, men enjoy some freedom of choice simply because of the relative formlessness of the novel. In relation to all other genres of verbal art, it is worth paying attention to such a few formal structures as 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 does not overlook whether or not a poem is rhymed no more. Should one overlook how a novel marks and uses its chapters?
Epilogue, we tend to think of sorry, we tend we think of these as belonging to 19th century novels in particular, we think of epilogues as a kind of verisimilitude in this narration and engagement with its characters over a protracted period of denoted in narrative time, such that one a leap forward in time and increase in narrative speed needs to be acknowledged by name, which at least sets that final chapter apart from all of the others and may answer our
curiosity about the later lives of the characters with whom we've become engaged. The narrator of Middlemarch, his finale asks Who can quite young lives after being longing company with them and not desire not to know what befalls them in their after years.
But the subject of my epilogue is, in fact, not is not epilogues per say, but the future of chapters and of texts, because when one is interested in chapters and awareness of additions and media becomes particularly important, most recent editions and especially cheap editions of old novels often change the layout of the chapters.
For example, by replacing Roman numerals, which not everyone now finds easy to read by Arabic numerals or by not retaining the original practise of starting 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 and sometimes of the novel itself. Not only the words of a novel can change in translation.
A recent edition of an English translation of Doctor Zhivago reproduces the book titles at the top of every page, which is relatively common in English editions of novels. But I've never seen in any Russian edition.
Online versions of printed novels tend either to face the chapter divisions like the Project Gutenberg Etext, which presents the whole of a novel on one on one Web page, or else tend to exaggerate them like many texts of the Bible do in which each chapter of each book is opened as a different Web page.
The effect in the second case can be to enforce one sense, one sense of the chapters as discrete entities, which is perhaps particularly appropriate when those chapter boundaries coincide with the original instalment boundaries of serialised novels.
But it can feel arbitrary and life changing short play vinyl records when trying to listen to a symphony and means also that you are without the white space, which you see between chapters in all print editions and in those E readers, including ebooks, which follow print format. Getting even further away from the novel's first published, there are film adaptations.
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is 61 chapters long, and there are about as many cuts in the two hour film adaptations of it which exist. But these cuts don't involve blackout's or whiteouts, which the end of chapters do. Nor do most of them, of course, involve the narrator's chapter closing ruminations since the narrator is cut out altogether.
I wonder whether all future editions of Master Georgie, perhaps when it's out of copyright in two thousand sixty eight, 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? So if you are at all interested in chapters, it is worth reading the earliest printed edition you can find.
Don't trust the way I've reproduced chapter breaks on your handouts. I have, for example, given all chapter numbers as Arabic numerals between dashes, which has nothing at all to do with the original presentation. But you can consider as carefully intended the non attribution of quotation 10 to Chapter five of Lawrences the Rainbow and its positioning as the last on this handout in order to give it the resonance of an ending. The end.