The Forgotten History of the Chapter

It is hard to chapters, such is their banal inevitability. The chapter possesses the trick of vanishing while in the act of serving its various purposes. In 1919, writing in the , famously insisted that the most beautiful moment in ’s was not a phrase but a , or white space: a terrific, yawning fermata, one “sans l’ombre de transition,” without, so to speak, the hint of a transition. It is the hiatus, Proust explains, that directly ensues from a scene set during ’s 1851 coup, in which the protagonist Frédéric Moreau watches the killing of his radical friend Dussardier by Sénécal, a former militant republican turned policeman for the new regime. After this sudden and virtuosic blanc, Frédéric is in 1867; sixteen aimless years elapse in the intervening silence. It is, Proust argues, a masterful change of tempo, one that liberates the regularity of novelistic time by treating it in the spirit of music. And yet this blanc is not entirely blank. What Proust neglects to mention, whether out of forgetfulness or disdain for such editorial and typesetting detail, is that the hiatus he is praising here is a chapter break. However masterful and unprecedented its handling of time, it is also to some extent procedurally typical—a blanc like countless others in the history of the novel, dully routine in visual terms, simply the transition between not just by the Roman numeral that prefaces the new chapter but by a change of page between the two units, an arrangement most subsequent editions followed. It was an arrangement already present in the novel’s manuscript, where across six different rewritings Flaubert indicated this transition with a horizontal line and a carefully, even dramatically, indited “VI.” The blanc has more than a shadow to indicate it; it has conventional marks. Flaubert was writing a chapter break. It is easy to see, but also, apparently, easy to forget, or too common to be worth mentioning.