CHAPTER NINE
Seeing the Skeleton
every book has a skeleton hidden between its boards. Your job is to find it. A book comes to you with flesh on its bare bones and clothes over its flesh. It is all dressed up. I am not asking you to be impolite or cruel. You do not have to undress it or tear the flesh off its limbs to get at the firm structure that underlies the soft. But you must read the book with X-ray eyes, for it is an essential part of your first apprehension of any book to grasp its structure.
You know how violently some people are opposed to vivisection. There are others who feel as strongly against analysis of any sort. They simply do not like to have things taken apart, even if the only instrument used in cutting up is the mind. They somehow feel that something is being destroyed by analysis. This is particularly true in the case of works of art. If you try to show them the inner structure, the articulation of the parts, the way the joints fit together, they react as if you had murdered the poem or the piece of music.
That is why I have used the metaphor of the X ray. No harm is done to the living organism by having its skeleton lighted up. The patient does not even feel as if his privacy had been infringed upon. Yet the doctor has discovered the disposition of the parts. He has a visible map of the total layout. He has an architect's ground plan. No one doubts the usefulness of such knowledge to help further operations on the living organism.
Well, in the same way, you can penetrate beneath the moving surface of a book to its rigid skeleton. You can see the way the parts are articulated, how they hang together, and the thread that ties them into a whole. You can do this without impairing in the least the vitality of the book you are reading. You need not fear that Humpty-Dumpty will be all in pieces, never to come together again. The whole can'remain in animation while you proceed to find out what makes the wheels go round.
I had one experience as a student which taught me this lesson. Like other boys of the same age, I thought I could write lyric poetry. I may have even thought I was a poet. Perhaps that is why I reacted so strongly against a teacher of English literature who insisted that we be able to state the unity of every poem in a single sentence and then give a prosaic catalogue of its contents by an orderly enumeration of all its subordinate parts.
To do this with Shelley's Adonais or with an ode by Keats seemed to me nothing short of rape and mayhem. When you got finished with such cold-blooded butchery, all the "poetry" would be gone. But I did the work I was asked to do and, after a year of analysis, I found otherwise. A poem was not destroyed by such tactics in reading. On the contrary, the greater insight which resulted seemed to make the poem more like a vital organism. Instead of its being an ineffable blur, it moved before one with the grace and proportion of a living thing.
That was my first lesson in reading. From it I learned two rules, which are the second and third rules for the first reading of any book. I say "any book." These rules apply to science as well as poetry, and to any sort of expository work. Their application will be somewhat different, of course, according to the kind of book they are used on. The unity of a novel is not the same as the unity of a treatise on politics; nor are the parts of the same sort, or ordered in the same way. But every book which is worth reading at all has a unity and an organization of parts. A book which did not would be a mess. It would be relatively unreadable, as bad books actually are.
I am going to state these two rules as simply as possible. Then I shall explain them and illustrate them. (The first rule, which we discussed in the last chapter, was: Classify the book according to kind and subject matter.)
The second rule—1 say "second" because I want to keep the numbering of the four rules which comprise the first Way of reading—can be expressed as follows: State the unity of the whole book in a single sentence, or at most in several sentences (a short paragraph).
This means that you must be able to say what the whole book is about as briefly as possible. To say what the whole book is about is not the same as saying what kind of book it is. The word "about" maybe misleading here. In one sense, a book is about a certain type of subject matter, which it treats in a certain way. If you know this, you know what kind of book it is. But there is another and perhaps more colloquial sense of "about." We ask a person what he is about, what he is up to. So we can wonder what an author is trying to do. To find out what a book is about in this sense is to discover its theme or main point.
Everyone, I think, will admit that a book is a work of art. Furthermore, they will agree that in proportion as it is good, as a book and as a work of art, it has a more perfect and pervasive unity. They know this to be true of music and paintings, novels and plays. It is no less true of books which convey knowledge. But it is not enough to acknowledge this fact vaguely. You must apprehend the unity with definiteness. There is only one way that I know of being sure you have succeeded. You must be able to tell yourself or anybody else what the unity is and in a few words. Do not be satisfied with "feeling the unity" which you cannot express. The student who says, "I know what it is, but I just can't say it," fools no one, not even himself.
The third rule can be expressed as follows: Set forth the major parts of the book, and show how these are organized into a whole, by being ordered to one another and to the unity of the whole.
The reason for this rule should be obvious. If a work of art were absolutely simple, it would, of course, have no parts. But that is not the case. None of the sensible, physical things man knows is simple in this absolute way, nor is any human production. They are all complex unities. You have not grasped a complex unity if all you know about it. is how it is one. You must also know how it is many, not a many which consists of a lot of separate things, but an .organized many. If the parts were not organically related, the whole which they composed would not be one. Strictly speaking, there would be no whole at all but merely a collection.
You know the difference between a heap of bricks, on the one hand, and the single house they can constitute, on the other. You know the difference between one house and a collection of houses. A book is like a single house. It is a mansion of many rooms, rooms on different levels, of different sizes and shapes, with different outlooks, rooms with different functions to perform. These rooms are independent, in part. Each has its own structure and interior decoration. But they are not absolutely independent and separate. They are connected by doors and arches, by corridors and stairways. Because they are connected, the partial function which each performs contributes its share to the usefulness of the whole house. Otherwise the house would not be genuinely livable.
The architectural analogy is almost perfect. A good book, like a good house, is an orderly arrangement of parts. Each major part has a certain amount of independence. As we shall see, it may have an interior structure of its own. But it must also be connected with the other parts—that is, related to them functionally—for otherwise it could not contribute its share to the intelligibility of the whole.
As houses are more or less livable, so books are more or less readable. The most readable book is an architectural achievement on the part of the author. The best books are those that have the most intelligible structure and, I might add, the most apparent. Though they are usually more complex than poorer books, their greater complexity is somehow also a great simplicity, because their parts are better organized, more unified.
That is one of the reasons why the great books are most readable. Lesser works are really more bothersome to read. Yet to read them well—that is, as well as they can be read—you must try to find some plan in them. They would have been better if the author had himself seen the plan a little more clearly. But if they hang together at all, if they are a complex unity to any degree, there must be a plan and you must find it.
Let me return now to the second rule which requires you to state the unity. A few illustrations of this rule in operation may guide you in putting it into practice. I begin with a famous case. Many of you probably read Homer's Odyssey in school. Certainly most of you know the story of Ulysses, the man who took ten years to return from the siege of Troy only to find his faithful wife Penelope herself besieged by suitors. It is an elaborate story as Homer tells it, full of exciting adventures on land and sea, replete with episodes of all sorts and many complications of plot. Being a good story, it has a single unity of action, a main thread of plot which ties everything together.
Aristotle, in his Poetics insists that this is the mark of every good story, novel, or play. To support his point, he shows you how the unity of the Odyssey can be summarized in a few sentences.
A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Neptune, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight; suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tost, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them.
"This," says Aristotle, "is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode."
After you know the plot in this way, and through it the unity of the whole narrative, you can put the parts into their proper places. You might find it a good exercise to try this with some novels you have read. Try it on some great ones. such as Tom Jones or Crime and Punishment or the modern Ulysses. Once when Mr. Clifton Fadiman was visiting Chicago, Mr. Hutchins and I asked him to lead our class in the discussion of Fielding's Tom Jones. He reduced the plot to the familiar formula: boy meets girl, boy wants girl, boy gets girl. This is the plot of every romance. The class learned what it means to say that there are only a small number of plots in the world. The difference between good and bad fiction having the same essential plot lies in what the author does with it, how he dresses up the bare bones.
For another illustration—a more appropriate one because it deals with nonfiction—let us take the first six chapters of this book. You have read them once by this time, I hope. Treating them as if they were a complete whole, can you state their unity? If I were asked to, I would do it in the following manner. This book is about the nature of reading in general, the various kinds of reading, and the relation of the art of reading to the art of being taught in school and out. It considers, therefore, the serious consequences of the neglect of reading in contemporary education, suggesting as a solution that books can be substituted for living teachers if individuals can help themselves learn how to read. There is the unityas I see it in two sentences. I hesitate to ask you to reread the first six chapters to see whether I am right.
Sometimes an author obligingly tells you on the title page what the unity is. In the eighteenth century, writers had the habit of composing elaborate titles which told the reader what the whole book was about. Here is a title by Jeremy Collier, an English divine who attacked the obscenity of the Restoration drama much more learnedly than the Legion of Decency has recently attacked the movies: A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, together with the Sense of Antiquity upon this Argument. You know from this that Collier recites many flagrant instances of the abuse of public morals and that he is going to support his protest by quoting texts from those ancients who argued, as Plato did, that the stage corrupts youth, or, as the early Church fathers did, that plays are seductions of the flesh and the devil.
Sometimes the author tells you the unity of his plan in his preface. In this respect, expository books differ radically from fiction. A scientific or philosophical writer has no reason to keep you in suspense. In fact, the less suspense such an author keeps you in, the more likely you are to sustain the effort of reading him through. Like a newspaper story, an expository book may summarize itself in its first paragraph.
Do not be too proud to accept the author's help if he proffers it, but do not rely too completely on what he says in the preface. The best-laid plans of authors, like those of other mice and men, gang aft agley. Be somewhat guided by the prospectus the author gives you, but always remember that the obligation of finding the unity belongs to the reader, as much as having one belongs to the writer. You can discharge that obligation honestly only by reading the whole book.
The opening paragraph of Herodotus' history of the war between the Greeks and the Persians provides an excellent summary of the whole. It runs: These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, in order that the actions of men may not be effaced by time, nor the great and wondrous deeds displayed by Greeks and barbarians be deprived of renown; and for the rest, for what cause they waged war upon one another. That is a good beginning for you as a reader. It tells you succinctly what the whole book is about.
But you had better not stop there. After you have read the nine parts through, you will probably find it necessary to elaborate on that statement to do justice to the whole. You may want to mention the Persian kings—Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes—the Greek heroes of Salamis and Thermopylae, and the major events—the crossing of the Hellespont and the decisive battles of the war.
All the rest of the fascinating details, with which Herodotus richly prepares you for his climax, can be left out of the plot. Note, here, that the unity of a history is a single thread of plot, very much as in fiction. That is part of what I meant in the last chapter by saying that history is an amalgam of science and poetry. So far as unity is concerned, this rule of reading elicits the same kind of answer in history and fiction. But there are other rules of reading which require the same kind of analysis in history as in science and philosophy.
A few more illustrations should suffice. I shall do a practical book first. Aristotle's Ethics is an inquiry into the nature of human happiness and an analysis of the conditions under which happiness may be gained or lost, with an indication of what men must do in their conduct and thinking in order to become happy or to avoid unhappiness, the principal emphasis being placed on the cultivation of the virtues, moral and intellectual, although other necessary goods are also recognized, such as wealth, health, friends, and a just society in which to live.
Another practical book is Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Here the reader is aided by the author's own statement of "the plan of the work" at the very beginning. But that takes several pages. The unity can be more briefly stated as follows: this is an inquiry into the sources of national wealth in any economy which is built on a division of labor, considering the relation of the wages paid labor, the profits returned to capital, and the rent owed the landowner, as the prime factors in the price of commodities. It discusses the various ways in which capital can be more or less gainfully employed, and relates the origin and use of money to the accumulation and employment of capital. Examining the development of opulence in different nations and under different conditions, it compares the several systems of political economy, and argues for the beneficence of free trade. If a reader grasped the unity of The Wealth of Nations in this way, and did a similar job tor Karl Marx's Das Kapital, he would be well on the way toward seeing the relation between two of the most influential books in modern times.
Darwin's Origin of Species will provide us with a good example of the unity of a theoretic book in science. I would state it thus: this is an account of the variation of living things during the course of countless generations and the way in which it results in new groupings of plants and animals; it treats both of the variability of domesticated animals and of variability under natural conditions, showing how such factors as the struggle for existence and natural selection operate to bring about and sustain such groupings; it argues that species are not fixed and immutable groups, but that they are merely varieties in transition from a less to a more marked and permanent status, supporting this argument by evidences from extinct animals found in the earth's crust, from the geographical distribution of living things, and from comparative embryology and anatomy. That may seem like a big mouthful to you, but the book was an even bigger one for the nineteenth century to swallow in many gulps.
Finally, I shall take Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a theoretic book in philosophy. You may recall from the last chapter that Locke himself summarized his work by saying that it was "an inquiry into the origin, certainty and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion and assent." I would not quarrel with so excellent a statement of plan by the author, except to add two subordinate qualifications to do justice to the first and third parts of the essay: it will be shown, I would say, that there are no innate ideas but that all human knowledge is acquired from experience; and language will be discussed as a medium for the expression of thought, its proper uses and most familiar abuses to be indicated.
There are two things I want you to note before we proceed. The first is how frequently you can expect the author, especially a good one, to help you state the plan of his book. Despite that fact, most students are almost at a total loss when you ask them to say briefly what the whole book is about. Partly that may be due to their general inability to speak concise English sentences. Partly it may be due to their neglect of this rule in reading. But it certainly indicates that they pay as little attention to the author's introductory words as they do to his title. I do not think it rash to conclude that what is true of students in school is true also of most readers in any walk of life. Readers of this sort, if they can be called readers at all, seem to want to keep a book as, according to William James, the world appears to a baby: a big, buzzing, blooming confusion.
The second point is a plea that I make in self-defense. Please do not take the sample summaries I have given you as if I meant them, in each case, to be a final and absolute formulation of the book's unity. A unity can be variously stated. There is no simple criterion of right and wrong in this business. One statement is better than another, of course, in proportion as it is brief, accurate, and comprehensive. But quite different statements may be equally good, or equally bad.
I have often stated the unity of a book quite differently from the author's expression of it, and without apologies to him. You may differ similarly from me. After all, a book is something different to each reader. It would not be surprising if that difference expressed itself in the way the reader stated its unity. This does not mean that anything goes. Though readers be different, the book is the same, and there can be an objective check upon the accuracy and fidelity of the statements anyone makes about it.
Now we can turn to the other structural rule, the rule which requires us to set forth the major parts of the book in their order and relation. This third rule is closely related to the second which we have just discussed. You may have noticed already how a well-stated unity indicates the major parts that compose the whole. You cannot apprehend a whole without somehow seeing its parts. But it is also true that unless you grasp the organization of its parts, you cannot know the whole comprehensively.
You may wonder, therefore, why I have made two rules here instead of one. It is primarily a matter of convenience. It is easier to grasp a complex and unified structure in two steps rather than in one. The second rule directs your attention toward the unity, and the third toward the complexity, of a book. There is another reason for the separation. The major parts of a book may be seen at the moment when you grasp its unity. But these parts are usually themselves complex and have an interior structure you must see. Hence the third rule involves more than just an enumeration of the parts. It means treating the parts as if they were subordinate wholes, each with a unity and a complexity of its own.
I can write out the formula for operating according to this third rule. Because it is a formula, it may guide you in a general way. According to the second rule, you will remember, we had to say: the whole book is about so and so and such and such. That done, we can proceed as follows: (1) the author accomplished this plan in five major parts, of which the first part is about so and so, the second part is about such and such, the third part is about this, the fourth' part about that, and the fifth about still another thing. (2) The first of these major parts is divided into three sections, of which the first considers X, the second considers Y, and the third considers Z. Each of the other major parts is then similarly divided. (3) In the first section of the first part, the author makes four points, of which the first is A, the second B, the third C, and the fourth D. Each of the other sections is then similarly analyzed, and this is done for each of the sections of each of the other major parts.
Terrifying? I can see why it might be. All this to do, you say, and on what is only the first reading of a book. It woulc take a lifetime to read a book that way. If you feel this way, I can also see that all my warnings have done no good. When put down this way in a cold and exacting formula, the rule looks as if it required an impossible amount of work from you. But you have forgotten that the good reader does this sort of thing habitually, and hence easily and naturally. He may not write it all out. He may not even at the time of reading have made it all verbally explicit. But if he were called upon to give an account of the structure of a book, he would do something that approximated the formula I have suggested.
The word "approximation" should relieve your anxiety.' A good rule always describes the ideal performance. But a man can be skilled in an art without being the ideal artist. He can be a good practitioner it he merely approximates the rule. I have stated the rule here for the ideal case. I would be satisfied, and so should you be with yourself, if you made a very rough approximation to what is required. Even when you become more skilled, you will not wish to read every book with the same degree of effort. You will not find it profitable to expend all your skill on some books.
I have tried to make a close approximation to the requirements of this rule in the case of relatively few books. In other instances, which means for the most part, I am satisfied if I have a fairly rough notion of the book's structure. You will find, as I have, that the degree of approximation you wish to make varies with the character of the book and your purpose in reading it. Regardless of this variability, the rule remains the same. You must know how to follow it, whether you follow it closely and strictly or only in a rough fashion.
The forbidding aspect of the formula for setting forth the order and relation of the parts may be somewhat lessened by a few illustrations of the rule in operation. Unfortunately, it is more difficult to illustrate this rule than the other one about stating the unity. A unity, after all, can be stated in a sentence or two, at most a short paragraph. But in the case of any large and complex book, a careful and adequate recital of the parts, and their parts, and their parts down to the least structural units, would take a great many pages to write out.
Some of the greatest medieval commentaries on the works of Aristotle are longer than the originals. They include, of course, more than a structural analysis, for they undertake to interpret the author sentence by sentence. The same is true of certain modern commentaries, such as the great ones on Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason. I suggest that you look into a commentary of this sort if you want to see this rule followed to perfection. Aquinas, for instance, begins each section of his commentary with a beautiful outline of the points that Aristotle has made in that part of his work; and he always says explicitly how that part fits into the structure of the whole, especially in relation to the parts that come before and after.
On second thought, perhaps you had better not look at masterly commentaries. A beginner in reading might be depressed by their perfection. He might feel as the beginner in climbing feels at the bottom of the Jungfrau. A poor and slight sample of analysis by me might be more encouraging, though certainly less uplifting. It is all right to hitch your wagon to a star, but you had better be sure it is well lubricated before you take the reins.
There is one other difficulty about illustrating this rule. I must choose something that I can be relatively sure most of you have read. Otherwise you will not be able to profit very much from the sample analysis as a guide. As a starter, therefore, let me take again the first six chapters of this book. I must warn you at once that this is not a very good book. Its author is not what I should call a great mind. The book has a very loose structure. Its chapter divisions do not correspond to basic divisions of the whole treatment. And within the chapters the progression of points is often disorderly and interrupted by rambling digressions. You may have thought it was an easy book to read, but analysis will show that it is really not very readable.
Here is an analysis of the first six chapters, comprising Part I, treated as a whole:
1. This book (i.e.. Part I) is divided into three major parts:
A. The first treats of the nature and kinds of reading, and the place of reading in education.
B. The second treats of the failure of contemporary education with respect to reading.
C. The third attempts to show how the contemporary educational situation can be remedied.
2. The first part (A) is divided into the following sections:
a. A first dealing with the varieties and degrees of reading ability;
b. A second dealing with the major distinctions between reading for amusement and reading for instruction;
c. A third dealing with the distinction, in reading for instruction, between information and understanding;
d. A fourth dealing with the relation of this last distinction to one between active and passive reading; .
e. A fifth which defines the sort of reading to be discussed as the reception of communications conveying knowledge;
f. A sixth which relates reading to learning, by distinguishing between learning by discovery and learning by instruction;
g. A seventh which treats of the relation of books and teachers, distinguishing them as dead and alive, and shows that reading is learning from dead teachers;
h. An eighth which distinguishes between primary and secondary teachers, living or dead, and defines the great books as original communications, and hence primary teachers.
The second part (B) is divided into the following sections:
a. A first in which various evidences are recited, giving the writer's personal experiences with the inability of students to read;
b. A second in which the relation of reading to such other skills as writing and speaking are discussed with respect to current educational defects;
c. A third in which the results of scientific educa. tional measurements are reported to show the lack of these skills in the graduates of our schools;
d. A fourth in which other evidences, especially from book publishers, are offered as corroborating these findings;
e. A fifth in which an attempt is made to explain why the schools have failed.
The third part (C) is divided into the following sections:
a. A first in which it is shown that any art or skill can be acquired by those who will practice according to rules;
b. A second in which it is indicated how the art of reading might be acquired by those who did not learn how in school;
c. A third in which it is suggested that, by learning how to read, people can compensate for the defects of their education;
d. A fourth in which it is hoped that if people generally understood what an education should be, through having learned to read and having read, they would take serious steps to reform the failing school system.
3. In the first section of the first part, the following points are made:
(1) That the readers of this book must be able to read in one sense, though perhaps not in another;
(2) That individuals differ in their abilities to read, both according to their natural endowments and their educational benefits;
(3) That most people do not know what is involved in the art of reading. . . .
And so forth and so on.
I stop here because you see how many pages it might take if I proceeded to do the job in detail. I would have to enumerate the points made in each of the sections of each of the major parts. You will notice that I have numbered tlie three main steps of analysis here to correspond to the tin ce parts of the formula I gave you some pages back. The first is the statement of the major parts; the second is their division into sections; the third is the enumeration of points in each section. I completed the first two stages of the analysis, but not the third.
You will notice, furthermore, if you glance back over the six chapters I have thus analyzed, that they are not as well structured, not as orderly and clear, as I have made them out to be. Some of the points occur out of order. Some of the chapters overlap in their consideration of the same point or their treatment of the same theme. Such defects in organization are what I meant by saying this is not a very good book. If you try to complete the analysis I have started, you will find that out for yourself.
I may be able to give you a few more examples of applying this rule if I do not try to carry the process out in all its details. Take the Constitution of the United States. That is an interesting, practical document, and a very well-organized piece of writing, indeed. You should have no difficulty in finding its major parts. They are pretty clearly indicated, though you have to do some analysis to make the main divisions. I suggest the following:
| First:
|
| The preamble, setting forth the purpose of the Constitution;
| | Second:
|
| The first article, dealing with the legislative department of the government;
| | Third:
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| The second article, dealing with the executive department of the government;
| | Fourth:
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| The third article, dealing with the judicial department of the government;
| | Fifth:
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| The fourth article, dealing with the relationship between state and Federal governments;
| | Sixth:
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| The fifth, sixth, and seventh articles, dealing with the amendment of the Constitution, its status as the supreme law of the land, and provisions for its ratification;
| | Seventh:
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| The first ten amendments, constituting the Bill of Rights;
| | Eighth:
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| The remaining amendments up to the present day.
|
This is only one way of doing the job. There are many others. The first three articles could be grouped together in one division, for instance; or instead of two divisions with respect to the amendments, more divisions could be introduced, grouping the amendments according to the problems they dealt with. I suggest that you try your hand at making your own division of the Constitution into its main parts. Go further than I did, and try to state the parts of the parts as well. You may have read the Constitution many times before this, but if you exercise this rule on it for another reading, you will find a lot there you never saw before.
I am going to attempt one more example, with great brevity. I have already stated the unity of Aristotle's Ethics. Now let me give you a first approximation of its structure. The whole is divided into the following main parts: a first, treating of happiness as the end of life, and discussing it in relation to all other practicable goods; a second, treating of the nature of voluntary action, and its relation to the formation of virtuous and vicious habits; a third, discussing the various virtues and vices, both moral and intellectual; a fourth, dealing with moral states which are neither virtuous nor vicious; a fifth, treating of friendship, and a sixth and last, discussing pleasure, and completing the account of human happiness begun in the first.
These divisions obviously do not correspond to the ten books of the Ethics. Thus, the first part is accomplished in the first book; the second part runs through book two and the first half of book three; the third part extends from the rest of book three to the end of the sixth book; the discussion of pleasure occurs at the end of book seven and again at the beginning of book ten.
I mention all this to show you that you need not follow the apparent structure of a book as indicated by its chapter divisions. It may, of course, be better than the blueprint you develop, but it may also be worse; in any case, the point is to make your own blueprint. The author made his in order to write a good book. You must make yours in order to read it well. If he were a perfect writer and you a perfect reader, it would naturally follow that the two would be the same. In proportion as either of you or both fall away from perfection, all sorts of discrepancies will inevitably result.
I do not mean that you should totally ignore chapter headings and sectional divisions made by the author. They are intended to help you, just as titles and prefaces are. But you must use them as guides for your own activity, and not rely on them passively. There are few authors who execute their plan perfectly, but there is often more plan in a great book than meets the eye at first. The surface can be deceiving. You must look beneath to discover the real structure.
In general, these two rules of reading which we have been discussing look as if they were rules of writing also. Of course, they are. Writing and reading are reciprocal, as are teaching and being taught. If authors or teachers did not organize their communications, if they failed to unify them and order their parts, there would be no point in directing readers or listeners to search for the unity and uncover the structure of the whole.
Though there are reciprocal rules in the two cases, they are not followed in the same way. The reader tries to uncover the skeleton the book conceals. The author starts with it and tries to cover it up. His aim is to conceal the skeleton artistically or, in other words, to put flesh on the bare bones. If he is a good writer, he does not bury a puny skeleton under a mass of fat. The joints should not show through where the flesh is thin, but if flabbiness is avoided, the joints will be detectible and the motion of the parts will revea) the ai ticulation.
I made a mistake several years ago which was instructive on this point. I wrote a book in outline form. I was so obsessed with the importance of structure that I confused the arts of writing and reading. I outlined the structure of a book, and published it. Naturally, it was repulsive to most self-respecting readers who thought that they could do their job, if I did mine. I learned from their reactions that I had given them a reading of a book I had not written. Writers should write books and leave commentaries to readers.
Let me summarize all this by reminding you of the old-fashioned maxim that a piece of writing should have unity, clarity, and coherence. That is a basic maxim of good writing. The two rules we have been discussing in this chapter respond to writing which follows that maxim. If the writing has unity, we must find it. If the writing has clarity and coherence, we must appreciate it by finding the distinction and the order of the parts. What is clear is so by the distinctness of its outlines. What is coherent hangs together in an orderly disposition of parts.
These two rules, I might add, can be used in reading any substantial part of an expository book, as well as the whole. If the part chosen is itself a relatively independent, complex unity, its unity and complexity must be discerned for it to be well read. Here there is a significant difference between books conveying knowledge and poetical works, plays, and novels. The parts of the former can be much more autonomous than the parts of the latter. The student who is supposed to have read a novel and who says he has "read enough to get the idea" does not know what he is talking about. If the novel is any good at all, the idea is in the whole, and cannot be found short of reading the whole. But you can get the idea of Aristotle's Ethics or Darwin's The Origin of Species by reading some parts of it carefully.
So long ago that you may have forgotten it, I mentioned fourth a rule to complete the first way of reading a book. It can be stated briefly. It needs little explanation and no illustration. It really repeats in another form what you have already done if you have applied the second and third rules. But it is a useful repetition because it throws the whole and its parts into another light.
This fourth rule requires you to find out what the author's problems were. This rule is most pertinent, of course, to the great books. If you remember that they are original communications, you will realize that the man who wrote them started out with problems and ended by writing what the solutions were. A problem is a question. The book ostensibly contains one or more answers to it.
The writer may or may not tell you what the questions were as well as give you the answers which are the fruits of his work. Whether he does or does not, and especially if he does not, it is your task as a reader to formulate the problem as precisely as you can. You should be able to state the main problem or problems which the book tries to answer, and you should be able to state the subordinate problems if the main questions are complex and have many parts. You should not only have a fairly adequate grasp of all the questions involved, but you should be able to put the questions in an intelligible order. Which are primary and v/hicb secondary? Which questions must be answered first, if others are/to be answered later?
You see how this fourth rule duplicates, in a sense, work you have already done in stating the unity and finding its parts. It may, however, actually help you to do that work. In other words, following the fourth rule is a useful procedure in conjunction with obeying the other two.
If you know the kinds of questions anyone can ask about anything, you will become adept in detecting an author's problems. They can be briefly formulated. Does something exist? What kind of thing is it? What caused it to exist, or under what conditions can it exist, or why does it exist? What purpose does it serve? What are the consequences of its existence? What are its characteristic properties, its typical traits? What are its relations to other things of a similar sort, or of a different sort? How does it behave? The foregoing are all theoretical questions. The following are practical. What ends should be sought? What means should be chosen to a given end? What things must one do to gain a certain objective, and in what order? Under these conditions, what is the right thing to do, or the better rather than the worse? Under what conditions would it be better to do this rather than that?
This list of questions is far from being exhaustive or analytically refined, but it does represent the types of most frequently asked questions in the pursuit of theoretic or practical knowledge. It may help you to discover the problems a book has tried to solve.
When you have followed the tour rules stated in this chapter and the previous one, you can put down the book you have in hand for a moment. You can sigh and say: "Here endeth the first reading."
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