On Chapters In Narrative and Life
Also: Resurgence of Sincerity, Decentralized Chore Protocols, and The Rehearsal S2
As I’ve been doing revisions for my second novel, I’m thinking again about the nature of chapters as a narrative tool. It’s so inescapably familiar that we also bookend our lives with it: chapters end and new chapters begin. Narratively, they don’t *need* to exist. In some novels, they don’t, and in other mediums they exist with other tools of overlapping intent. Films don’t really do it. They have scenes… followed by more scenes. Scripts don’t have chapters. Games have checkpoints, when after a particularly action-filled scene (like a boss battle), there’s an expectation of a “save” and, if need be, a “pause”. Television contains it, existing in an episodic format, where the ends of episodes tend to narratively act like chapters. Or, in the past, commercial breaks.
Chapters apparently started as a knowledge aid before religious scholars attempted to segment and reference the Bible. Nicholas Dames, who wrote a book on chapters, speaks about in the New Yorker.
The first authors who wrote in chapters were not storytellers. They were compilers of knowledge, either utilitarian or speculative, who used chapters as a way of organizing large miscellanies. Cato the Elder’s “De Agri Cultura” (“On Farming”), from the second century B.C.E., was organized in numbered units with titles; Pliny the Elder’s great compilation of Roman science, “Naturalis Historia” (“Natural History”), from the first century C.E., came with a summarium of topics similar to a modern table of contents; Aulus Gellius, a collector of legal and linguistic arcana in the second century C.E., divided his “Noctes Atticae” (“Attic Nights”) into “capita” with long descriptive titles.* These chapters, unlike the “books” of epic poetry, were what we would now call finding aids: devices for quickly locating specific material in long texts that were not meant to be read straight through.
Apparently, initially the chapter became a checkpointing tool before it evolved into the narrative tool it is today.
As a technique, designed for information-seeking or scholarly citation, the chapter is a peculiar fit with a narrative form that presumes a continuous, serial reading.
For most, it’s still a checkpointing tool, although as a narrative form, it “aerates” a story:
What the chapter did for the novel was to aerate it: by encouraging us to pause, stop, and put the book down—a chapter before bed, say—the chapter-break helps to root novels in the routines of everyday life. The chapter openly permitted a reading oriented around pauses—for reflection or rumination, perhaps, but also for refreshment or diversion.
As Dames ends the article, he asks a good question:
The unassuming quality of the chapter, its way of not insisting on its importance but marking a transition nonetheless, turns out to be its most useful, if also its most vexing, quality. It is a vocabulary for noting the way we can organize our pasts into units. Some things stop; others begin. We note these shifts, in relationships or jobs or domiciles, reassured that the environing story itself—our lives—are still ongoing. But how do we know when we are starting a new chapter? How are we justified in picking a moment out of fluid passing time and declaring a pause?
In a novel, a chapter is not a scene (or the end of a bunch of scenes). Sometimes it ends at the end of a scene, sometimes it doesn’t. Narratively, I see chapters like waypoints on a trail. When you are hiking, at certain points, the trail disappears ahead, maybe around a corner or over a hill. Once you arrive at this point, the trail either looks the same or presents a new vista or sight that invites you along. Either way, the brief break in continuity is an opportunity for rest. To me, most chapters should not just end, but invite you into the next. One could say that this is a cliffhanger, but more often than not it’s not that intense and merely the start of the next scene alongside a clear direction of what’s to come. A great trail leaves you with these surprises around every corner. A great story invites you along the way to continue its journey.
However, constant inertia in this sense can also be exhausting and sometimes, truly, a reader needs a rest. Narratively, to me, it comes at inflection points where you want to give the reader the space to process the story. To linger. To feel. It’s cues I’m also taking from being a musician. Many musicians start with the expectation that good music is about filling the available space with your beautiful noise. But, later, it’s more about what you choose to remove.
This principle of treating the end of chapter as an invitation or respite has given me much to reflect on in my personal life. As an important chapter is coming to an end, I’m asking the same question as Dames does: do I write this end as an invitation to the next, or do I declare a pause? Sometimes life wants us to end a chapter with the future already in sight: the next job, the next romance, the next project, the next trip. More often than not, that’s the case. Life is short. Idling burns time. But, sometimes, it wants us to close the book of life and just reflect and not rush into the next chapter. Stop. Linger. Process. Feel.
As a storyteller, I have command over that. But in life, I think when a chapter has ended and the next chapter is not yet in sight, it’s asking to pause, stop, and take off the baggage we’ve been carrying for a while.
Bonus Content!
Oh man. When I look at my week, I see a lot of nothing. I’m so focused on just walking and writing that I’m not even consuming much of the web. Maybe that’s a good thing. It’s also been just been very bad vibes all over the socials anyway.
📺 Watching - Severance, White Lotus
Damn. This week’s Severance was unreal. Truly incredible storytelling. Really enjoying it!
💾 Links
The Resurgence of Sincerity
I’ve been trying to piece together the resurgence of trying and sincerity. It’s recently peaked due to Timothee Chalamet’s SAG awards speech where he is direct about his aspirations to greatness.
Nathan Zed has a video about it:
I feel it’s an important trend to pay attention to. He makes a good point that maybe it is also a cultural response in part, to AI? In a sense, appearing nonchalant and effortless in an era of abundant social media saturation was proof that you did not adhere to needing to be seen. But now, it’s become effortless to look effortless (in part due to AI).
But, I think there’s more to this trend. Is it a devaluation of digital primacy too? Touching grass? Turning off social media and desiring to see real, physical effort? Does it have to do with geopolitical trends? Is it also the economy? Zero-interest rates made making culture cheaper. There’s not one creative industry that isn’t struggling right now due to it. Only true effort and sincerity is being produced. Caring more about your work than it’s just easy. Is it shifting cultural norms with people valuing sincerity as opposed to denigrating it as cringe? If so. Why?
Curious if you have thoughts.
Chore Protocols
A really interesting piece from the Protocolized newsletter on protocols for chores.
The Chores app is simple. Each month residents owe 100 points, which are earned by doing chores. Similar to the Fourierist protocol, the points value of a chore is relative, but unlike in the original, the points value of a chore is not static – rather, it increases slowly until someone claims it. This innovation is critical, as it allows for greater flexibility without loss of accountability or a requirement for hierarchy. The total number of points is fixed, but residents can change the relative priorities of chores, such that some accrue a relatively larger share of the total points, faster, and are thus done more often, as well as define and refine new tasks as needed – allowing for the collective governance of individual contributions. With modern, virtually limitless access to calculating machines, people don’t need to spend their “nights in legislation”.
This is really, really interesting in spaces where the cost of coordination can be quite high compared to the benefit, such as group living spaces. But, there’s more to this concept as described by a commenter who asked if it’s used in work settings.
A group of developers in the Netherlands have been using it to help them keep on top of their social media and other tasks which no single person owned and would often fall through the cracks. Seems like it’s been working well so far.
Essentially, wherever you have collective tasks that’s not one person’s responsibility, this accrual system can work really well. This is particularly useful in areas where it involves maintenance (such as prioritizing open source issues). Definitely given me a lot of food for thought, especially in terms of potentially tokenizing it in a crypto form. Are there ways to self-signal maintenance and collective programming tasks that rewards contributors without requiring a centralized distribution of responsibilities? That’s fascinating…
The Rehearsal Season 2 Teaser
Just last week I was pining for a new Nathan Fielder show and lo and behold, we’re getting a season 2 of The Rehearsal. With how wild the first one was, I have no idea where this is going to go. With the scenes set out in identical ways, I bet it will focus on trying out many life paths at once?
🎶 Music
Hen Yanni - Where do we go? (Maud Geffray Remix)
Aptly titled song for this week. Where do we go? Who knows. :)
Enjoy this ethereal track!
Hope you get to see a lovely sunset this week.
Simon