The Birth of the Chapter | Hacker News Reader

The Birth of the Chapter

chronicle.com

15 pointsapollinaire6 comments

What we must not forget is that literature was originally meant to be performed, not read. Live performances have physical and temporal limitations that books and movies don't, and are often divided into acts and scenes in order to overcome these limitations. The stage is rearranged between acts, the performers grab a glass of water, while the audience has time to go pee.

The Homeric epics are divided into 24 "books" each, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet. The size of those books makes them feel very much like the chapters of a modern novel. It is said that the divisions were not made by Homer himself. One could easily imagine his students using some convenient unit to refer to parts of the poem: "Hey, let's perform scroll no. 16 tonight!" "Have you memorized no. 2 yet?"

Some of the more play-like books of the Old Testament, such as Esther, also lend themselves naturally to divisions between scenes. The deliberate context switches leave the audience anxious about what will happen next, just like modern shows often end in a cliffhanger to make the viewer return for another episode. Not surprisingly, medieval priests who assigned chapters to the Bible preserved many of these natural breakpoints.

There has been nearly a century of scholarship now about how there may never have been a Homer, and therefore he couldn’t have had students. Even if there was a Homer and he had students, that immediate generation after Homer may still have been a purely oral one, and the text was not committed then to writing.

In any event, as much as poetry remained a matter of live recital, by the Hellenic period there was certainly plenty of prose that was read by connoisseurs, not performed before an audience.

Yes, I'm aware of that discussion. My personal theory is that there really was a dude named Homeros who made a significant contribution to the compilation of what we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey, though he certainly didn't make it all up out of thin air. He would have been part of a long line of bards/poets passing stories down from teacher to student, and he would have had students in that sense.

Whether the students had access to any written scrolls, of course, is debatable. But the point still stands that they likely had agreed-upon breakpoints to help identify the various parts of a long poem like the Iliad, whether for practice or for live performance.

Also, committing something to writing back then was not as final an act as we might think today. Books were copied by hand, over and over again, and lots of people made their own changes in the process. There are large parts of the Homeric epics that we think were added later.

> No one before Dames seems to have asked where this ancient and deeply established convention came from, or how it spread

That's odd. In the 90s I took a college course called History of the Book and I distinctly remember talking about chapters. I also remember talking about them in several medieval history classes, where we talked about how information and art and letter styles spread, too.

Maybe Nicholas Dames is a time traveler!

I'm looking forward to the prequel, where he is the first to ask about punctuation.

And blankspaces, this invention is not to be underestimated

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