The best-written book of criticism of the century; and of the year
Picked from the National Book Critics Circle Awards' previous winners, and from this year's shortlist
In today’s post:
— Our pick of the most beautifully written book from the shortlist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. The winner is announced on the 21st of March.
— An extended extract from this pick, by arrangement with Princeton University Press. We’ll soon be sending out a masterclass on prose style by the book’s author, one of the best we’ve published.
— Our pick of the best-written book among the previous winners of the NBCC’s award for Criticism. This is part of our project to identify the best-written nonfiction of the century to date.
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The National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
This year’s shortlist:
The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century by Nicholas Dames (Princeton University Press)
Creep: Accusations and Confessions by Myriam Gurba (Avid Reader Press)
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques by Grace E. Lavery (Princeton University Press)
Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression by Tina Post (NYU Press)
The best-written of these is
ANTE CHAPTER
On Segmented Time
THERE IS NO LIMIT to the ways we can imagine the divisions of time. The swell and crash of a wave; the disappearance and return of an axial rotation, an orbit’s centripetal curve; the ripening and rotting of a fruit; arboreal concentric rings, radiating outward in alternating shades; the crossing of an invisible meridian; the transit of an eclipse into and out of totality; sedimentary layers of rock, striated by subtle gradations of color; a pattern of stitches, knit and purl together creating a rhythm of textures; the opening and closing of a shutter, darkness falling to isolate one moment from the next; the cresting and descent of pitch as a sound dopplers past; separate celluloid frames merging into continuity as they pass by at the rate of so many per second; manifold and crease, pulse and echo, call and response, downbeat and upbeat, systole and diastole, ones and zeroes; even, if we prefer, the unmarked flow, the continuous stream of duration impossible to cut or mark. And among them, the chapter: that artifact of the book, giving us an image of time as a series of ordered linear segments. Intelligible units, these chapters, each one tagged or numbered and neatly sequential. Puzzling ones as well, somehow speaking to us of both the feeling of being in a unit and of transitioning to the next—the enclosed space and the wall promising an obverse side, the organ and the membrane attaching it to another.
This is a book about ruptures. But traversable ones: gaps one crosses, fissures within continuities, the marks within an individual life. William James: “The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is the co-conscious transition, so to call it, by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self.” Even nonphilosophers have reason to be troubled by this mystery, and can use a figurative hook by which to grasp it. A gifted analyst remarked to me once, by way of encouragement and explanation at one such rupture: “You’re starting a new chapter.” For a bookish type, the remark was instantly clarifying. It gave me the hook I needed at a particular juncture: the sense of being propelled forward, the sense of being lodged within a linearity that had just passed over a gap, the sense as well of being narrated. Above all it gave me the sensation, in Donald Winnicott’s terms, of being “held” in a time, my pieces gathered together by the new time I was entering. While it did all this, the remark also kindled a search. I was a novel reader, I had some pretense at being practiced at it, I’d devoted years to making it into an occupation. Yet this instant novelization of my life—that was how it felt; I’d eagerly accepted the time signature of a novel—was something whose effects I couldn’t as yet explain to myself. I clearly knew how to think in chapters. I’d been doing it my entire reading life; it had created an orientation to time that I would struggle to erase even had I become conscious of it, which until then I hadn’t been; it was in some sense what I’d been thinking all along, without knowing it. The little release of the chapter break, the tidiness of its sequencing, the quiet space of resonance it opens, all these were rhythms to which I had learned to respond without effort and without much thought; chapters were occasionally pleasures to encounter, but more often a cognitive and even haptic habit, a discipline, a training. Its bearing on me was precisely its way of helping me find my bearings. A temporal GPS, a way of finding your location: here, in this chapter, this is where I am. (Like the chapter- and book-ending line of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, a plangent but also reassuring deictic demonstrative: “Then there we are!”) But I had no idea why chapters existed—a historical question—nor what exactly they did to our sense of time, a theoretical question. So this book came slowly into being.
I finished this book in the midst what felt like a series of breaks in collective life. They were far from common, even if they could well have been predicted. Again, a series of adjustments seemed necessary, as if everyone were engaged in adapting to some kind of weather condition, trapped as we were in a transitional historical moment—in fact, in several overlapping transitional historical moments. There were of course literal weather conditions: planetary time seemed to have decisively shifted. Some others (say, a presidential term) were discrete, however infinite they felt. Others (a pandemic, outbursts of collective outrage over the immiserations of racial subjugation, a widespread coming to terms with the ruinations of capitalism’s latest phase) were more amorphous, as it was unclear whether they served as a boundary—as the gap between temporal units, the transition to something new—or as the unit themselves, something into which we were sealed, no threshold visible. The Jamesian question of “where we are” beckoned again, if differently. Everywhere the language of chapters was invoked as a way of answering it. That language was often abused, tendentious, or merely glib. It has featured, for instance, in the rhetoric of American presidential speeches stretching back for well over a century, in order to declare any number of national perils, however prematurely, concluded. And in the years of this book’s development it returned continually. Take two recent presidents, one who spoke of “a new chapter of international cooperation,” the other “a new chapter of American Greatness.” The juxtaposition is politically significant for its similarity as well as for its difference. Both are assertions of change within continuity, progress as repetition, the rupture as merely a resumption. If the metaphor can be so tamed by the banalities of power, the experience of temporal fissure the chapter break evokes can also ramify unpredictably. A new chapter might be more of the same, but intensified: long-prepared causes exploding into effects, long-delayed reckonings awaiting. Or new, untold horrors awaiting. So it seemed to me at the most recent turn of the decade: the logic of a linear segment coming to an end, of sequential advance and of the caesuras of transition, possessed a newly heightened communal-historical force, even if instead of feeling “held” by these collective chapters, more often recently I felt trapped, stuck, or strangled by them, without feeling as if their conclusion would offer comfort. We can be lacerated by shifts in time just as well as relieved by them.
Between those two orientation points, an experience of personal and then collective transition, both articulated by the same metaphor, this book took shape. What became apparent was how deeply embedded, how durable, the metaphor of the chapter was. As the American idiom “chapter book” still tells us, mature literacy, a familiarity with how to use a book, is defined by the expectation of the chapter break. We “start a new chapter” in our lives with dread or excitement; we “close that chapter of my life” with regret or relief. It is an old metaphor, its bookishness signaling its longevity. But its antiquity—both in cultural-historical terms and in our individual lives as readers, taking us back to some of our earliest experiences with books—allows it to modulate between the personal and the collective. It is almost always both: the life lived as a historical narrative, historical change lived as an individual itinerary. Thomas De Quincey, writing in 1853: “About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my life came to a violent termination; that chapter which, even within the gates of recovered paradise, might merit a remembrance.” Vilém Flusser, in 1991: “On the one hand, the history of the human species is one of the final chapters in natural history. On the other hand, natural history is a late chapter of human history.” We live stretched between many different clocks, many different temporal rhythms: the abstraction of an hour, the inevitability of diurnal repetition, our different biological rhythms and phases, the measures provided by a historical or cultural or economic phase. The chapter is not just one of those clocks; it has become a metalanguage for the interrelationship, the intricate polyrhythm, of those various clocks in their simultaneous operation. If it still works for us this way, for how much longer? I have attempted here to trace the history of this temporal construction, this bookish way of parsing time, and to consider its phenomenological nuances. It did not escape me that I was perhaps standing near the conclusion of its long history, the end of the chapter of the chapter. In a culture, and on a planet, where our temporal frames seem as unlocked or mismatched as ever before, and where the influence of the book on our mappings of time could be waning, it may be that this study is written as almost an elegy. But if I was foretelling a transition, taking the attitude of anticipatory poignancy, it did not escape me either that I had learned that habit from chapters.
(CONTINUED BELOW)
This book can then be thought of as a study of the long, slow coming into being of the conditions of the chapter metaphor and its persistent grip on how we speak and think of change, transition, boundaries in time. It starts, however, with some naïve and nonfigurative questions: Why do books have chapters, and when did they start to have them? How has the chapter, and the idea of the chapter, changed over the two millennia of the practice of writing and reading in them? What kinds or durations of experiences do chapters encapsulate? What I aim to detect are some patterns in the history that help give shape to what otherwise might seem too hopelessly shapeless, irregular, and nebulous to be anything like the phenomena literary scholars usually study. Such a purpose, however, necessitates a few opening explanations, a provisional map to the peculiarly organized terrain that follows and the compromises I’ve adopted in charting it.
Norms and Exceptions. That there are broad, enduring logics to the chapter, affinities across different genres, languages, and historical occasions, is one of this book’s contentions. Necessarily therefore it is in search of representative, model examples, those that seem to best (or, most quickly) encapsulate normative practices in the long history of chaptering. This is not a history of resistances to the chapter or flagrant refusals of its protocols. Much of my attention has been devoted to the usual chapter and its almost unthinking repetitions of technique, as well as the subtleties of that technique. And yet, often the exception has proven too important to ignore: the “bad” or flawed version of chaptering, the deliberate adjustment to a habitual gesture, the idiosyncratic stamp put on an old template. Some of those eccentricities, in the eddies of stylistic history, have spawned their own microlineages. Which is to say that the tension between the norm and the exception runs throughout this book’s choice of examples, in a way that is not finally resolvable; their relationship is unstable. But that tension even goes to the heart of my arguments about the chapter’s form itself. The chapter metaphor might seem to indicate—particularly given its presence in the lexicon of the powerful, in the rhetoric of governments—not just the presence of a norm but the influence of normativity. Yet the chapter, as the following pages will demonstrate, is far stranger than that, far more porous and recalcitrant than the regulatory goals to which it is sometimes put. This is an irony that my book pursues throughout. The chapter is indeed one of the primary exemplars of linear time, still a significant way of expressing the dread and hope associated with that mode of futurity. Yet it is also a means for prying linear time apart, making it conspicuous and peculiar, balking or taming its relentlessness. A chapter is a way of paving a linear path and of marking gaps or tears in that path; it is the progress and the impasse both, the space of hesitation between them, the hiccup or delay as well as the leap across or thrust forward. It is a norm, and a way of imagining an escape from or interruption to that norm.
Counting and Reading. Chapters have an intimate relationship with numbers. It can even sometimes seem as if numbering is all they exist to do. George Gissing’s 1891 New Grub Street, providing a tableau of writer’s block: “At the head of the paper was inscribed ‘Chapter III.,’ but that was all. And now the sky was dusking over; darkness would soon fall.” More cynically consoling, Elizabeth Taylor’s 1947 A View of the Harbour: “The best part of writing a book is when you write the title at the top of the page and your name underneath and then ‘Chapter One!’ When that’s done the best part’s over.” A chapter numerates a text, even in the absence of literal numbers. And so it is not an accident that one intellectual mode this book adopts is that of counting. Word counts, in particular, will matter here, as one way of measuring size; size will matter as one way of measuring stylistic change over time. None of these quantitative elements are particularly sophisticated or have required feats of computational power. I have wanted to stay close to the rudimentary arithmetic of chaptering itself: Chapter One, Chapter the Second, the chapter-as-next-in-a-series. I have not refused the aid of counting, nor some of the analytic styles (the graph, the grid, the chart) that accompany it. That said, this is not a study that operates solely, or even largely, at the level of the quantitative. Its interest is finally phenomenological: how a chapter organizes both diegetic and readerly time. Counting is one way to capture elements of chaptering style that can operate below the threshold of consciousness, and of recognizing patterns and deviations from them, but it is always accompanied by reading, the procedure of investigating a select few instances in granular detail. At a moment when the relationship between quantitative and hermeneutical impulses is fraught and sometimes polemical, my method here—eclectic, rudimentary, and even happenstance as it might be—is an experiment in companionship between these modes.
Archives and Itineraries. The scope of this book is necessarily broad in time and geography, and necessarily highly partial in its examples. There are countless forms of textual segmentation in the world: cantos, stanzas, paragraphs, dramatic acts, Qur’anic surahs, Vedic mantras, Attic strophes. Few, if any, however, have become so mundanely widespread, so adaptable to different geographical and generic climates, so pervasively figural; one does not speak of “paragraphs of my life,” nor of a “new canto” in the history of a nation. Some part of this ubiquity is the effect of the chapter’s multicultural and multilinguistic spread; whether capitolo, chapitre, capítulo, kapituła, or Kapitel, глава or bab or kabanata or κεφάλαιο, it is evidently unmoored from any particular linguistic or national tradition. It is an enormously diverse terrain, and what this book offers is one itinerary through it, weaving its way across a number of locations and times, starting with a 2,200-year-old Italian legal tablet and leading to, among many others, scriptoria and schoolrooms in third-century Caesarea, sixth-century Vivarium, and thirteenth-century Saint Albans; a courtly coterie in Burgundy and a London printer’s workshop in the fifteenth century; a host of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century locations from Britain to Germany, Russia, Brazil; and finally to the Paris of the early 1960s captured on film and the United States, sometime around now, captured in a slide presentation. That itinerary is admittedly limited by the linguistic and interpretive tools with which I am familiar, and its stopping places have been significantly determined by something like an individual readerly education and taste. There are enormous gaps here, of culture, region, and historical time. My examples are drawn from Western languages and locales only, already just a portion of the chapter’s wild global proliferation, and this is also literary scholar’s book, oriented toward the highly self-conscious presence of chapters in novels. A version of this book written by a theologian, or philosopher of science, or historian, might imagine a different trajectory; the alternative paths that could have been taken are limitless, in language, geography, and genre. But the route this book sketches is not just a matter of disciplinary training or eccentric preference. Certain inarguably pivotal examples loom large, among them the Bible itself, in its long history toward becoming one major paradigm for a chaptered text. At other moments I have chosen examples because archival evidence permits us to glimpse chapters in the process of formation—where, as in my instances in chapters 3 and 4, we can directly compare texts chaptered by editors, scribes, or printers to the older, undivided texts to which they applied breaks, or to different attempts at chaptering the same texts, these before-and-after comparisons revealing the poetics of the chapter at particular moments. Chapters are everywhere, but they are not everywhere so visibly worked, and one principle of my approach has been to try to locate moments where the thinking behind chaptering might be most visible. Whether my landmarks were chosen for their cross-cultural influence or the fact that they bear useful traces of their construction, the goal has been to extract from these stopping places a list of stylistic and tonal traits of the chapter that have endured over long stretches of time and found their way into very different historical occasions. Each of my own chapters is focused, not just by a particular set of texts embedded in its cultural-technological specificity, but by an identifiable chaptering style that is there generated and that would last beyond its initial moment. Neither this list of styles, however, nor the examples out of which it has been derived are in any way exhaustive. It is meant instead to suggest that, however infinite the possibilities of chapter division might be, the repertoire of its uses is much less than infinite. A set of tropes around the chapter tend to recur across its long history: a rhetoric of hands and fingers (grasping, reaching, pointing); a set of architectural images (thresholds, doors, staircases, steps); a frequent recourse to daily biorhythms (resting, sleeping). The chapter is a set of familiar styles and justifications: broad, and flexible, and far from doctrinaire, but recognizable. Recognizable not just as a way of writing but as a way of conceiving of a life in time.
What follows is in three parts: The first is a theoretical portion, laying out synchronically some of the conceptual terrain around the chapter; the second a history of the editorial chapter, which studies moments in which legal texts, philosophies, Scripture, and prose romances from antiquity to the early days of print are segmented, sometimes in multiple ways, by scribes, compilers, or printers after their initial composition, creating durable habits of division that would remain influential for later writers composing in chapters from the outset. The third is a final portion on the novelistic chapter, where I argue for the novel form’s unique ability to use the chapter—the numbered or titled section, the blank space of its caesuras—as a way to articulate how the experience of time is the experience of time’s segmentations. So while this book’s second part generates a set of nouns to identify techniques, or topoi, that never quite disappear (the threshold, the syncopation, the cut, the fade), the third, or novelistic, portion turns to the adjectival (the postural, the tacit, the diurnal, the antique-diminutive) to describe some of the styles in which those early techniques were used and transformed at particular moments in the novel’s history. One motto for the book’s final section might be: how the novel is like other kinds of books, and what it takes from, and does to, that likeness.
Nothing in this story, however, is irreversible or entirely forgotten; older kinds of labor arrangements or stylistic emphases have a habit of returning. As such, the chapters of this book are in a tense relation to some of the basic presumptions of chapters per se, particularly their linearity. This is a story, but with eddies, loops, persistent motifs. In its broadest sense, however, the trajectory of these three parts is from the chapter’s use as an editorial technique performed on texts not originally written for or with the chapter to its use as a compositional unit—inevitably if not always deliberately, willingly if not always happily. So it goes with my own arrangement of this book. You must, after all, write about chapters in chapters. Writing this book forced me to contend with how I’d learned to write literary-critical chapters, through no precepts or explicit instructions, just by a vague slow osmosis absorbed from countless examples; in this I very much doubt I’m alone. And as the novelists Gissing and Taylor both knew, with that pause before the new—and particularly first—chapter, comes the pleasure and anxiety of trying out something that is also too invitingly open, and too seemingly blank, to instruct you in how to use it. If the white space after a chapter’s last words can sometimes feel like falling through open sky, a pen or cursor hovering as if in zero gravity, one might as well try to savor it as exhilaration before the terror returns. Here, then, is the first leap in a book about crossing gaps.
Excerpted from THE CHAPTER: A SEGMENTED HISTORY FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY © 2023 by Nicholas Dames — a New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Nicholas Dames is the Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches nineteenth-century fiction, the history and theory of the novel, the history of reading, and the aesthetics of prose fiction from the eighteenth century to the present. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (2001), and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007). He has written on contemporary fiction, novel reading, and the humanities for The Atlantic, n+1, The Nation, New Left Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Public Books, at which he is co-Editor in Chief.
Of the award’s previous winners this century, the best-written is
INTRODUCTION
I don’t remember exactly how I got started— come to think of it, it was probably reading John Berger one day in college, the essay on Che Guevara in The Look of Things where he’s talking about the famous photo of Che’s corpse, gruesomely splayed out like that for public display, his military captors proudly arrayed alongside; and Berger in effect says, “We all know what this photo’s based on,” and then proceeds to tell us: Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. And of course he’s right, he’s dead right: that’s undoubtedly the image (hot-wired, as it were, into all of their brains) that taught all of the strutting officers how to pose in relation to their prize, and taught the photographer where to plant his camera in relation to his subjects. And I just remember thinking at the time, regarding Berger: Jesus (Jesus, of course, comprising another apt trope at that particular juncture)—Jesus, this guy doesn’t read his morning newspaper the way I or anybody else I know reads the morning newspaper.
Only, in the years since, and admittedly perhaps still in thrall to Berger’s way of seeing, I myself have increasingly found myself being visited by similarly uncanny moments of conver¬ gence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whis¬ pered recollections—sometimes in the weirdest places. At a certain point I began keeping a folder ofsuch visitations—usually just feathering in the images themselves, occasionally including a tex¬ tual exegesis of my own. The range in tone of these convergences was considerable: some were fanciful, others polemical; some merely silly, oth¬ ers almost transcendental. Some tended to burrow toward some deep-hidden, long submerged causal relation; others veritably reveled in their manifest unlikelihood. Some were dated and now feel dated; others were dated and yet don’t; others have floated entirely free of any such posting. Sometimes I’d publish the results; but usually I just filed them away.
Somehow the politburo over at McSweeney’s got wind of the file and asked if I wouldn’t mind sharing some of its contents with that journal’s august readers. And I figured, what the hell. One thing led to another, and that thing led to a good twenty others beyond that, and then I noticed that actually over the years I’d placed almost as many such pieces in other venues. The commisars at McSweeney’s book-publishing division expressed interest in a giant compilation—a convergence of convergences, as it were—and here we are.
Which is to say, here we go: make what you will.