CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Other half
this is only half a book on reading, or perhaps I should say that so far it has been concerned with only halt the reading that most people do. Even that might be too liberal an estimate. I am not so naive as to suppose that most of the reader's life will be spent in reading the great books. Probably the greater part of anybody's reading time is spent on newspapers and magazines. And so far as books are concerned, most of us read more fiction than nonfiction. True, the best-seller lists are usually divided in half: fiction and nonfiction. But although the nonfiction books often reach large audiences, their total audience is somewhat less than the audience of fiction, good and bad. Of the nonfiction books, the most popular are frequently those which, like the newspapers and magazines, deal with matters of contemporary interest.
I have not deceived you about the rules set forth in preceding chapters. In Chapter Seven, before undertaking a detailed discussion of the rules, I explained that we wo"ld have to limit ourselves to the business of reading serious I' nonfiction books. To expound the rules for reading imaginative and expository literature at the same time would be confusing, and an adequate treatment of the reading of fiction or poetry could not be managed in less space than it took to discuss the nonfiction rules. I seemed to be faced with the choice of writing a much longer book, perhaps even another one, or ignoring half the reading people do. For the sake of clarity, I took the second alternative while writing the preceding part of this book. But now, when I consider the rest of the reader's life, I cannot ignore the other types of reading any longer. I shall try to make up for these deficiencies, even though I know that a single chapter devoted to all other kinds of reading must be inadequate.
I would be far from frank if I let you think that lack of space was my only shortcoming. I must confess that I have much less competence for the task this chapter undertakes, though I might add, in extenuation, that the problem of knowing how to read imaginative literature is inherently much more difficult. Nevertheless, you may think that the need to formulate rules for reading fiction is less urgent, because more people seem to know how to read fiction and get something out of it than nonfiction.
Observe the paradox here. On the one hand, I say that skill in reading fiction is more difficult to analyze; on the other, it seems to be a fact that such skill is more widely possessed than the art of reading science and philosophy, politics, economics, and history. It may be, of course, that people deceive themselves about their ability to read novels intelligently. If that is not the case, I think I can explain the paradox another way. Imaginative literature delights primarily rather than instructs. It is much easier to be delighted than instructed, but much harder to know why one is delighted. Beauty is more elusive, analytically, than truth.
From my teaching experience, I know how tongue-tied people become when asked to say what they liked about a novel. That they enjoyed it is perfectly clear to them, but they cannot give much account of their enjoyment or tell what the book contained which caused them pleasure. This indicates, you may say, that people can be good readers of fiction without being good critics. I suspect this is, at best, a half-truth. A critical reading of anything depends upon the fullness of one's apprehension. Those who cannot say what they like about a novel probably have not read it below its most obvious surfaces.
To make this last point clear would require an explicit formulation of all the rules for reading imaginative literature. Lacking both space and competence to do that, I shall offer you two short cuts. The first proceeds by the way of negation, stating the obvious "don'ts" instead of the constructive rules. The second proceeds by the way of analogy, briefly translating the rules for reading nonfiction into their equivalents for reading fiction. I shall use the word "fiction" to name all of imaginative literature, including lyric poetry as well as novels and plays. Lyric poetry really deserves a separate and elaborate discussion. In fact, just as in the case of expository books, where the general rules must be particularized for history, science, and philosophy, so here an adequate treatment would have to consider the special problems involved in reading the novel, the drama, and the lyric. But we shall have to be satisfied with much less.
In order to proceed by the way of negation, it is first of all necessary to grasp the basic differences between expository and imaginative literature. These differences will explain why we cannot read a novel as if it were a philosophical argument, or a lyric as if it were a mathematical demonstration.
The most obvious difference, already mentioned, relates to the purposes of the two kinds of writing. Expository books aim primarily to instruct, imaginative ones to delight. The former try to convey knowledge—knowledge about experiences which the reader either has or could have. The latter try to communicate an experience itself— one which the reader can get only by reading—and if they succeed they give the reader something to be enjoyed. Because of their diverse intentions, the two sorts of work appeal differently to the intellect and the imagination.
We experience things through the exercise of our senses and imagination. To know anything we must use our powers of judgment and reasoning, which are intellectual. I do not mean that we can think without using our imagination, or that sense experience is ever divorced from some rational reflection. The point is only one of emphasis. Fiction appeals primarily to the imagination. That is the reason tor calling it imaginative literature, in contrast to science and philosophy which are intellectual.
We have been considering reading as an activity by which we receive communication from others. If we look a little more deeply now, we shall see that expository books do communicate what is eminently and essentially communicable—abi(rac( knowledge; whereas imaginative books try to communicate what is essentially and profoundly incommunicable—concrete experience. There is something mysterious about this. If concrete experience is really incommunicable, by what magic does the poet or novelist hope to convey to you for your enjoyment an experience which he has enjoyed?
Before I answer this question, I must be sure that you fully realize the incommunicability of concrete experience.
Everyone has gone through some intense emotional crisis— the quick wave of anger, prolonged anxiety about an impending disaster, the cycle of hope and despair in love. Have you ever tried to tell your friends about it? You can tell them all the facts without much trouble, because the outward and observable facts are matters of ordinary knowledge and can be easily communicated. But can you give them the experience itself, in all its concrete inwardness— the experience which you find difficult even to remember in its fullness and intensity? If your own memory of it is pale and fragmentary, how much more so must be the impression you are conveying by your words. As you watch the faces of your listeners, you can tell that they are not having the experience you are talking about. And you may realize then that it takes more narrative art than you possess—an art which is the distinctive possession of the great imaginative writers.
In one sense, of course, even the greatest writer cannot communicate his own experiences. They are uniquely his through all eternity. A man can share his knowledge with Others, but he cannot share the actual pulsations of his life. Since unique and concrete experience cannot be communicated, the artist does the next best thing. He creates in the reader what he cannot convey. He uses words to produce an experience for the reader to enjoy, an experience which the reader lives through in a manner similar and proportionate to the writer's own. His language so works upon the emotions and imagination of each reader that each in turn suffers an experience he has never had before, even though memories may be evoked in the process. These new experiences, different for each reader according to his own individual nature and memories, are nevertheless alike, because they are all created according to the same model—the incommunicable experiences on which the writer draws. We are like so many instruments for him to play upon, each with its .special overtones and resonances, but the music that he plays so differently on each of us follows one and the same score. That score is written into the novel or poem. As we read it, it seems to communicate, but it really creates, an experience. That is the magic of good fiction, which creates imaginatively the similitude of an actual experience.
I cannot substantiate what I have said by quoting a whole novel or play. I can only ask the reader to remember and dwell upon what happened to him while he was reading some fiction which moved him deeply. Did he learn facts about the world? Did he follow arguments and proofs? Or did he suffer a novel experience actually created in hi» imagination during the process of reading?
I can, however, quote a few short and simple lyrics, widely familiar. The first is by Robert Herrick:
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration, each way free,
0, how that glittering taketh me!
The second is by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory-
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
The third is by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Different in their objects and in the complexity of the emotions told about, these lyrics work upon us in the same way. They play upon our senses directly by the music of their words, but more than that, they evoke imaginations and memories which blend into a single whole of significant experience. Each word is counted on to do its part, not only musically in the pattern of sounds but also as a command to remember or imagine. The poet has so directed our faculties that, without being aware of how it happened, we have enjoyed an experience, not of our making but of his. We have not received something from him, as we re" ceive knowledge from a scientific writer. Rather we have suffered ourselves to be the medium of his creation. He has used words to get into our hearts and fancies and move them to an experience that reflects his own as one dream might resemble another. In fact, by some strange manner of effluence, the poet's dream is dreamed differently by each of us.
The basic difference between expository and imaginative literature—that one instructs by communicating, whereas the other delights by recreating what cannot be communicated—leads to another difference. Because of their radically diverse aims, these two kinds of writing necessarily use language differently. The imaginative writer tries to maximize the latent ambiguities of words, thereby to gain all the richness and force that is inherent in their multiple meanings. He uses metaphors as the units of his construction just as the logical writer uses words sharpened to a single meaning. What Dante says of The Divine Comedy, that it must be read as having four distinct though related meanings, generally applies to poetry and fiction. The logic of expository writing aims at an ideal of unambiguous explicit-ness. Nothing should be left between the lines. Everything that is relevant and statable should be said as explicitly and clearly as possible. In contrast, imaginative writing relies upon what is implied rather than upon what is said. The multiplication of metaphors puts more content between the lines than in the words which compose them. The whole poem or novel says something which none of its words say or can say: it speaks the incommunicable experience it has re-created for the reader.
Taking lyric poetry and mathematics as the ideals, or perhaps I should say the two extreme forms of imaginative and expository writing, we can see another and consequent difference between the poetical and logical dimensions of grammar. A mathematical statement is indefinitely translatable into other statements expressing the same truth. The great French scientist Poincare once said that mathematics was the art of saying the same thing in as many different ways as possible. Anyone who has watched an equation undergo the countless transformations to which it is subject will understand this. At each stage, the actual symbols may be different or in a different order, but the same mathematical relationship is being expressed. In contrast, a poetic statement is absolutely untranslatable, not only from one language to another, but within the same language from one set of words to another. You cannot say what is said by "Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory" in any other English words. Here is no proposition which can be expressed in many equivalent sentences, all equally rendering the same truth. Here is a use of words to move the imagination, not to instruct the mind; in consequence, only these words, and in this order, can do what the poet contrived them for. Any other form of words will create another experience—better or worse, but in any case different.
You may object that I have drawn the line too sharply between the two kinds of writing. You may insist, for instance, that we can be instructed as well as delighted by imaginative literature. Of course we can, but not in the same way as we are taught by scientific and philosophical books. We learn from experience—the experience that we have in the course of our daily lives. So, too, we can learn from the vicarious, or artistically created, experiences which fiction produces in our imagination. In this sense, poetry and novels instruct as well as delight. The sense in which science and philosophy teach us is different. Expository books do not provide us with novel experiences. They comment on such experiences as we already have or can get. That is why it seems right to say that expository books teach primarily, while imaginative books teach only incidentally, if at all, by creating experiences from which we can learn. In order to learn from such books, we have to do our own thinking about experience; in order to learn from scientists and philosophers, we must first try to understand the thinking they have done.
I have emphasized these various differences in order to state a few negative rules. They do not tell you how to read fiction. They tell you merely what not to do, because fiction is different from science. All of these "don'ts" boil down to one simple insight: don't read fiction as it it were fact; don't read a novel as if it were a scientific work, not even as if it were social science or psychology. This one insight is variously expanded by the following rules.
(1) Don't try to find a "message" in a novel, play, or poem. Imaginative writing is not primarily didactic. No great work of fiction is the sugar-coated propaganda that some recent critics would have us believe they all are. (It Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath are good fiction, they are so in spite of, not because of, what they preach.) I am not here making a sharp division between pure art and propaganda, for we know that fiction can move men to action, often more effectively than oratory My point is rather that fiction has this force only when it is good as fiction—not when it is a sermon or harangue thinly wrapped in a poorly told fable. If the general precept is wise—that you should read a book for what it is—then look for the story, not the message, in books which offer themselves as narratives.
The plays of Shakespeare have been anatomized for centuries to discover their hidden message—as if Shakespeare had a secret philosophy which he cryptically concealed within his plays. The search has been fruitless. Its failure should be a classic warning against the misreading of fiction. How much sounder is the approach which finds each play a new world of experience that Shakespeare opens for us. Mark Van Doren, in his recent book on Shakespeare, wisely begins by telling us that he finds creations, not thoughts or doctrines, in the plays:
The great and central virtue of Shakespeare was not achieved by taking thought, for thought cannot create a world. It can only understand one when one has been created. Shakespeare, starting with the world no man has made, and never indeed abandoning it, made many worlds within it. ... While we read a play of Shakespeare we are in it. We may be drawn in swiftly or slowly—in most cases swiftly—but once we are there we are enclosed. That is the secret, and it is still the secret of Shakespeare's power to interest us. He conditions us to a particular world before we are aware that it exists; then he absorbs us in its particulars.
The way in which Mr. Van Doren reads the plays of Shakespeare provides a model for reading any fiction worthy of the name.
(2) Don't look for terms, propositions, and arguments in imaginative literature. Such things are logical, not poetic, devices. They are proper to that use of language which aims at communicating knowledge and ideas, but they are utterly foreign when language serves as a medium for the incommunicable—when it is employed creatively. As Mr. Van Doren says, "In poetry and in drama statement is one of the obscurer mediums." I think I would go further and say that in fiction there are no statements at all, no verbal declarations of the writer's beliefs. What a lyric poem "states," for instance, cannot be found in any of its sentences. And the whole, comprising all its words in their reactions upon each other, says something which can never be confined within the strait jacket of propositions.
(3) Don't criticize fiction by the standards of truth and consistency which properly apply to communications of ~ knowledge. The "truth" of a good story is its verisimilitude, its intrinsic probability or plausibility. It must be a likely story, but it need not describe the facts of life or society in a manner that is verifiable by experiment or research. Centuries ago, Aristotle remarked that "the standard of correctness is not the same in poetry as in politics," or in physics or psychology for that matter. Technical inaccuracies about anatomy or errors in geography and history should be criticized when the book in which they occur offers itself as a treatise on those subjects. But mis-statements of fact do not mar a story if its teller succeeds in surrounding them with plausibility. When we read a biography, we want the truth about a particular man's life. When we read a novel we want a story that must be true only in the sense that it could have happened in the world of characters and events which the novelist has created.
(4) Don't read all imaginative books eis if they were the same. Just as in the case of expository literature, here, too, there are differences in kind—the lyric, the novel, the play—which require appropriately different readings.
To make these "don'ts" more helpful, they must be supplemented by constructive suggestions. By developing the analogy between reading books of tact and books ot fiction, I may be able to take you through another short cut to the rules for reading the latter.
There are, as we have seen, three groups of rules for reading expository books. The first set consists of rules for discovering the unity and part-whole structure; the second consists of rules for analyzing the whole into its component terms, propositions, and arguments; the third consists of rules for criticizing the author's doctrine so that we can reach an intelligent agreement or disagreement with him. We have called these three groups of rules structural, interpretive, and critical. If there is any analogy at all between reading expository and imaginative books, we should be able to find similar sets of rules to guide us in the latter case.
First, what are the structural rules for reading fiction? If you can remember the rules of this sort which we have already discussed (and if you cannot, you will find them summarized at the opening of Chapter Fourteen), I shall now translate-them briefly into their fictional analogues:
(1) You must classify a piece of imaginative literature according to its kind. You must know whether it is a novel . or a play or a lyric. A lyric tells its story primarily in terms of a single emotional experience, whereas novels and plays have much more complicated plots, involving many characters, their actions and reactions upon one another, as well as the emotions they suffer in the process. Everyone knows, furthermore, that a play differs from a novel by reason of the fact that it narrates entirely by means of actions and speeches. The author can never speak in his own person, as he can, and frequently does, in the course of a novel, All of these differences in manner of writing call for differences in the reader's receptivity. Therefore, you should recognize at once the kind of fiction you are reading.
(2) You must grasp the unity of the whole work. Whether you have done this or not can be tested by whether you are able to express that unity in a sentence or two. The unity of an expository book resides ultimately in the main problem which it tries to solve. Hence its unity can be stated by the formulation of this question, or by the propositions which answer it. But the unity of fiction is always in its plot. I cannot stress too much the difference between problem and plot as respectively the sources of unity in expository and imaginative writing. You have not grasped the whole story until you can summarize its plot in a brief narration—not a proposition or argument. It you have an old-fashioned edition of Shakespeare at hand, you may find that each play is prefaced by a paragraph which is called "the argument." It consists of nothing more than the story in brief—a condensation of the plot. Herein lies the unity of the play.
(3) You must not only reduce the whole to its simplest unity, you must also discover how that whole is constructed out of all its parts. The parts of an expository book are concerned with parts of the whole problem, the partial solutions contributing to the solution of the whole. But the parts of fiction are the various steps which the author takes to develop his plot—the details of characterization and incident. The way in which the parts are arranged differs in the two cases. In science and philosophy, they must be ordered logically. In a story, the parts must somehow fit into a temporal scheme, a progress from a beginning through the middle to its end. To know the structure of a narrative, you must know where it begins, what it goes through, and where it ends. You must know die various crises which lead up to the climax, where and how the climax occurs, and what happens in the aftermath.
A number of consequences follow from the points I have just made. For one thing, the parts or subwholes of an expository book are more likely to be independently readable than the parts of fiction. The first book of Euclid's thirteen—though it is a part of the whole work—can be read by itself. That is more or less the case with every well-organized expository book. Its sections or chapters, taken separately or in subgroups, make sense. But the chapters of a novel, or the acts of a play, become relatively meaningless when wrenched from the whole.
For another thing, the expository writer need not keep you in suspense. He can tell you in his preface or opening paragraphs precisely what he is going to do and how he is going to do it. Your interest is not dulled by such advance information; on the contrary, you are grateful for the guidance. But narrative, to be interesting, must sustain and heighten the suspense. Here suspense is of the essence. Even when you know the unity of the plot in advance, as that may be advertised by the "argument" which prefaces a Shakespearean play, everything that creates suspense must remain concealed. You must not be able to guess the precise steps by which the conclusion is reached. However few the number of original plots, the good writer achieves novelty and suspense by the skill with which he hides the turns his narrative takes in covering familial ground.
Second, what are the interpretive rules for reading fiction? Our prior consideration of the difference between a poetic and a logical use of language prepares us to make a translation of the rules which direct us to find the terms, the propositions, and the arguments. We know we should not do that. But what should we look for if we try to analyze fiction?
(1) The elements of fiction are its episodes and incidents, its characters, and their thoughts, speeches, feelings, and actions. Each of these is an elementary part of the world which the author creates. By manipulating these elements, the author tells his story. They are like the terms in logical discourse. Just as you must come to terms with an expository writer, so here you must become acquainted with the details of incident and characterization. You have not grasped a story until you are really familiar with its characters, until you have lived through its events.
(2) Terms are connected in propositions. The elements of fiction are connected by the total scene or background against which they stand out in relief. The imaginative writer, we have seen, creates a world in which his characters "live, move, and have their being." The fictional analogue of the rule which directs you to find the author's propositions can, therefore, be stated as follows: become at home in this imaginary world; know it as if you were an observer on the scene; become a member of its population, willing to befriend its characters, and able to participate in its happenings by sympathetic insight, as you would do in the actions and sufferings of a friend. If you can do this, the elements of fiction will cease to be so many isolated pawns moved about mechanically on a chessboard. You will have found the connections which vitalize them into the members of a living society.
(3) If there is any motion in an expository book, it is the movement of the argument, a logical transition from evidences and reasons to the conclusions they support. In the reading of such books, it is necessary to follow the argument. Hence, after you have discovered its terms and propositions, you are called upon to analyze its reasoning. There is an analogous last step in the interpretive reading of fiction. You have become acquainted with the characters. You have joined them in the imaginary world wherein they dwell, consented to the laws of their society, breathed its air, tasted its food, traveled on its highways. Now you must follow them through their adventures. The scene or background, the social setting, is (like the proposition) a kind of static connection of the elements of fiction. The unraveling of the plot (like the arguments or reasoning) is the dynamic connection. Aristotle said that plot is the soul of a story. It is its life. To read a story well you must have your finger on the pulse of the narrative, sensitive to its every beat.
Before leaving these fictional equivalents for the interpretive rules of reading, I must caution you not to examine the analogy too closely. An analogy of this sort is like a metaphor which will disintegrate if you press it too hard, I have used it only to give you the feel of how fiction can be read analytically. The three steps I have suggested outline the way in which one becomes progressively aware of the artistic achievement of an imaginative writer. Far from spoiling your enjoyment of a novel or play, they should enable you to enrich your pleasure by knowing intimately the sources of your delight. You will not only know what you like but also why you like it.
One other caution: the foregoing rules apply mainly to novels and plays. To the extent that lyric poems have some narrative line, they apply to lyrics also. But the heart of a lyric lies elsewhere. It really requires a special set of rules to lead you to its secret. The interpretive reading of lyric poetry is a special problem which I have neither the competence nor the space to discuss. I have already mentioned (in Chapter Seven) some books which may be helpful in this connection. To those I might add the following: Wordsworth's preface to the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism, Edgar Allan Poe's essays on The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, T. S. Eliot's work on The Use of Poetry, Herbert Read's Form in Modern Poetry, and Mark Van Doren's preface to An Anthology of English and American Poetry.
While I am recommending books, perhaps I should also mention a few that may help you develop your analytical powers in reading novels: Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, Edwin Muir's The Structure of the Novel, and Henry James's prefaces collected under the title The Art of the Novel. For the reading of drama, nothing has replaced Aristotle's analysis of tragedy and comedy in the Poetics. Where it needs to be supplemented for modern departures in the art of the theater, such books as George Meredith's essay On Comedy and Bernard Shaw's The (Quintessence of Ibsenism can be consulted.
Third, and last, what are the critical rules tor reading fiction? You may remember that we distinguished, in the case of expository works, between the general maxims governing criticism and a number of particular points—specific critical remarks. With respect to the general maxims, the analogy can be sufficiently drawn by one translation. Where, in the case of expository works, the advice was not to criticize a book—not to say you agree or disagree—until you can first say you understand, so here the maxim is: don't criticize imaginative writing until you fully appreciate what the author has tried to make you experience.
To explain this maxim, I must remind you of the obvious fact that we do not agree or disagree with fiction. We either like it or we do not. Our critical judgment in the case of expository books concerns their truth, whereas in criticizing belles-lettres, as the word itself suggests, we consider their beauty. The beauty of any work of art is related to the pleasure it gives us when we know it well.
Now there is an important difference here between logical and esthetic criticism. When we agree with a scientific book, a philosophy, or history, we do so because we think it speaks the truth. But when we like a poem, a novel, or play, we should hesitate, at least a moment, before attributing beauty, or artistic goodness, to the work which pleases us. We must remember that in matters of taste there is much divergence among men, and that some men, through greater cultivation, have better taste than others. While it is highly probable that what a man of really good taste likes is in itself a beautiful work, it is much less probable that the likes and dislikes of the uncultivated signify artistic perfections or failures. We must distinguish, in short, between the expression of taste which merely bespeaks liking or disliking and the ultimate critical judgment which concerns the objective merits of the work.
Let me restate the maxims, then, in the following manner. Before you express your likes and dislikes, you must first be sure that you have made an honest effort to appreciate the work. By appreciation, I mean having the experience which the author tried to produce for you by working on your emotions and imaginations. You cannot appreciate a novel by reading it passively, any more than you can understand a philosophical book that way. To achieve appreciation, as understanding, you must read actively, and that means performing all the acts of structural and analytical reading which I have briefly outlined.
After you have completed such readings, you are competent to judge. Your first judgment will naturally be one of taste. You will say not only that you like or dislike the book, but why you did or did not like it. The reasons you give will, of course, have some critical relevance to the book itself, but in their first expression they are more likely to be about you—your preferences and prejudices—than about the book. Hence, to complete the task of criticism, you must objectify your reactions by pointing to those things in the book which caused them. You must pass from saying what you like or dislike and why, to saying what is good or bad about the book and why.
There is a real difference here. No one can disagree with a man about what he likes or dislikes. The absolute authority of his own taste is every man's prerogative. But others can disagree with him about whether a book is good or bad. Taste may not be arguable, but critical appraisals can be assailed and defended. We must appeal to principles of esthetic or literary criticism if we wish to support our critical judgments.
It the principles of literary criticism were firmly established, and generally agreed on, it would be easy to enumerate briefly the main critical remarks that a reader could make about an imaginative hook. Unfortunately— or fortunately—that is not the case, and you will sympathize with my discretion in hesitating to rush in. I shall, however, risk suggesting five questions which will help anyone form a critical judgment on fiction, (i) To what degree does the work have unity? (2) How great is the complexity of parts and elements which that unity embraces and organizes? (3) Is it a likely story, that is, does it have the inherent plausibility of poetic truth? (4) Does it elevate you from the ordinary semiconsciousness of daily life to the clarity of intense wakefulness, by stirring your emotions and filling your imagination? (5) Does it create a new world into which you are drawn and wherein you seem to live with the illusion that you are seeing life steadily and whole?
I shall not defend these questions beyond saying that the more they can be answered affirmatively, the more likely it is that the book in question is a great work of art. I think they will help you to discriminate between good and bad fiction, as well as to become more articulate in explaining your likes and dislikes. Although you must never forget the possible discrepancy between what is good in itself and what pleases you, you will be able to avoid the extreme inanity of the remark: "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like."
The better you can reflectively discern the causes of your pleasure in reading fiction, the nearer you come to knowing the artistic virtues in the literary work itself. You will thus gradually develop a standard of criticism. And unless you happen to be a professional literary critic—tortured by the need to express the same few insights differently for every book, and driven by competition to avoid the obvious—you will find a large company of men of similar taste to share your critical judgments. You may even discover, what I think is true, that good taste in\ literature is acquired by anyone who learns to read.
Having gone so far toward generalizing the art of reading, by translating the expository rules into their fictional equivalents, I am impelled to take the last step and complete the job. You now have rules for reading any book. But how about rules for reading anything that is fit to print? How about reading newspapers, magazines, advertising copy, political propaganda? Can the rules be stated so generally that they apply to everything?
I think they can. Necessarily, as they become more general, the rules become fewer in number and less specific in content. In place of three sets of rules, each including three or four, the directions for reading anything can be summarized in tour questions. To read anything well, you must be able to answer these four questions about it. In the light of all the discussion that has preceded, the questions need little explanation. You already know the steps you must take in order to answer these questions.
But, first, let me remind you of the basic distinction— between reading tor information and for understanding— which underlies everything I have said about reading. For the most part, we read newspapers and magazines, and even advertising matter, tor the information they contain. The amount of such material is vast, so vast that no one today has time to read more than a small fraction of the available sources of information. Necessity has been the mother of several good inventions in the field of such reading. The so-called news magazines, such as Time and Newsweek, perform an invaluable function for most of us by reading the news and reducing it to its essential elements of information. The men who write these magazines are pri marily readers. They have developed the art of reading for information to a point far beyond the average reader's competence.
The same thing is true of Readers Digest, which manages to reduce almost everything that is worth our attention in current magazines to the compact scope of a single, small volume. Of course, the very best articles, like the best books, cannot be condensed without loss. If the essays of Montaigne or Lamb appeared in a current periodical, we would scarcely be satisfied to read a digest of them. A summary here would function well only if it impelled us to read the original. For the average article, however, a condensation is usually adequate, and often even better than the original. because the average article is mainly informational. The skill which produces Readers Digest each month is, first of all, a skill in reading, and only then one of writing simply and clearly. It does for us what few of us have the technique —not merely the time—to do for ourselves. It cuts the core of solid information out of pages and pages of less substantial stuff.
But, after all, we still have to read the periodicals which accomplish these extraordinary digests of current news and information. If we wish to be informed, we cannot avoid the task of reading, no matter how good the digests are. And the task of reading the digests is, in the last analysis, the same task as that which is performed by the editors of these magazines on the original materials they make available in more compact form. They have saved us labor, so far as the extent of our reading is concerned, but they have not and cannot entirely save us the trouble of reading. In a sense, the function they perform profits us only if we can read their digests of information as well as they have done the prior reading in order to give us the digests.
The four questions I shall now state as guides tor reading anything apply equally to material which can inform us or enlighten us. To use these questions intelligently as a set of directions, you must know, of course, what it is you are after—whether you are reading for one purpose or the other. If you are wise, your purpose will accord properly with the nature of the thing to be read. Here are the four questions, with brief comment:
I. What in general is being said? (To answer this question, you must perform all the steps of structural reading, according to the rules already laid down.)
II. How in partocular is it being said? (you Cannot fully discover what is being said unless you penetrate beneath the language to the thought. To do this you must observe how the language is being used, and how the thought is ordered. Here, then, you must follow all the rules of interpretative reading.)
III. Is it true? (Only after you know what is being said, and how, can you consider whether it is true or probable. This question calls for the exercise of critical judgment. You must decide to accept or reject the information being offered you. You must be especially alert to detect the distortions of propaganda in renderings of the news. In reading for enlightenment, you must decide whether you agree or disagree with what you have come to understand. The rules you must follow here are those of the third, or critical, reading.)
IV. What of it? (Unless what you have read is true in some sense, you need go no further. But if it is, you must face this question. You cannot read for information intelligently without determining what significance is, or should be, attached to the facts presented. Facts seldom come to us without some interpretation, explicit or implied. This is especially true if you are reading digests of information which necessarily select the facts according to some evaluation of their significance, some principle of interpretation. And if you are reading for enlightenment, there is really no end to the inquiry which, at every stage of learning, is renewed by the question, What of it?)
These four questions summarize all the obligations of a reader. The first three indicate, moreover, why there are three ways of reading anything. The three sets of rules re spond to something in the very nature of human discourse. If communications were not complex, structural analysis would be unnecessary. If language were a perfect medium instead of a relatively opaque one, there would be no need for interpretation. If error and ignorance did not circumscribe truth and knowledge, we should not have to be critical. The fourth question turns on the distinction between Information and understanding. When the material you have read is itself primarily informational, you are challenged to go further and seek enlightenment. Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the search for significance.
Knowing these questions is, of course, not enough. You must remember to ask them as you read and, most of all, you must be able to answer them precisely and accurately. The ability to do just that is the art of reading, in a nutshell.
Ability to read anything well may be the goal, but the goal does not indicate the best place to begin acquiring the art. You cannot begin to acquire the right habits by reading any sort of material; perhaps I should say that some kinds of material make it easier to acquire the discipline than others. It is too easy, for instance, to get something out of newspapers, magazines, and digests, even when one reads them poorly and passively. Moreover, all our bad habits of perfunctory reading are associated with these familiar materials. That is why, throughout this book, I insisted that trying to read for understanding rather than information—because more difficult and less usual—provides you with a better occasion tor developing your skill.
For the same reason, reading good books, or better, the great books, is the recipe for those who would learn to read. It is not that the rigors of difficult reading are the punishment which fits the crime of sloppy habits; rather, from the point of view of therapy, books which cannot be understood at all unless they are read actively are the ideal prescription for anyone who is still a victim of passive reading. Nor do I think that this medicine is like those drastic and strenuous remedies which are calculated either to kill or cure the patient. For in this case, the patient can determine the dosage. He can increase the amount of exercise he takes in easy stages. The remedy will begin to work as soon as he begins ind the more it works, the more he can take.
The place to begin, then, is on the great books. They are so apt tor the purpose, it is almost as if they were written for the sake of teaching people how to read. They stand to the problem of learning how to read almost as water does to the business of learning how to swim. There is one important difference. Water is indispensable for swimming. But after you have learned to read by practicing on the great books, you can transfer your abilities to reading good books, to reading any books, to reading anything. The man who) can keep afloat in the deeps need not concern himseif about the shallows.
ut why you did or did not like it. The reasons you give will, of course, have some critical relevance to the book itself, but in their first expression they are more likely to be about you—your preferences and prejudices—than about the book. Hence, to complete the task of criticism, you must objectify your reactions by pointing to those things in the book which caused them. You must pass from saying what you like or dislike and why, to saying what is good or bad about the book and why.
There is a real difference here. No one can disagree with a man about what he likes or dislikes. The absolute authority of his own taste is every man's prerogative. But others can disagree with him about whether a book is good or bad. Taste may not be arguable, but critical appraisals can be assailed and defended. We must appeal to principles of esthetic or literary criticism if we wish to support our critical judgments.
It the principles of literary criticism were firmly established, and generally agreed on, it would be easy to enumerate briefly the main critical remarks that a reader could make about an imaginative hook. Unfortunately— or fortunately—that is not the case, and you will sympathize with my discretion in hesitating to rush in. I shall, however, risk suggesting five questions which will help anyone form a critical judgment on fiction, (i) To what degree does the work have unity? (2) How great is the complexity of parts and elements which that unity embraces and organizes? (3) Is it a likely story, that is, does it have the inherent plausibility of poetic truth? (4) Does it elevate you from the ordinary semiconsciousness of daily life to the clarity of intense wakefulness, by stirring your emotions and filling your imagination? (5) Does it create a new world into which you are drawn and wherein you seem to live with the illusion that you are seeing life steadily and whole?
I shall not defend these questions beyond saying that the more they can be answered affirmatively, the more likely it is that the book in question is a great work of art. I think they will help you to discriminate between good and bad fiction, as well as to become more articulate in explaining your likes and dislikes. Although you must never forget the possible discrepancy between what is good in itself and what pleases you, you will be able to avoid the extreme inanity of the remark: "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like."
The better you can reflectively discern the causes of your pleasure in reading fiction, the nearer you come to knowing the artistic virtues in the literary work itself. You will thus gradually develop a standard of criticism. And unless you happen to be a professional literary critic—tortured by the need to express the same few insights differently for every book, and driven by competition to avoid the obvious—you will find a large company of men of similar taste to share your critical judgments. You may even discover, what I think is true, that good taste in\ literature is acquired by anyone who learns to read.
Having gone so far toward generalizing the art of reading, by translating the expository rules into their fictional equivalents, I am impelled to take the last step and complete the job. You now have rules for reading any book. But how about rules for reading anything that is fit to print? How about reading newspapers, magazines, advertising copy, political propaganda? Can the rules be stated so generally that they apply to everything?
I think they can. Necessarily, as they become more general, the rules become fewer in number and less specific in content. In place of three sets of rules, each including three or four, the directions for reading anything can be summarized in tour questions. To read anything well, you must be able to answer these four questions about it. In the light of all the discussion that has preceded, the questions need little explanation. You already know the steps you must take in order to answer these questions.
But, first, let me remind you of the basic distinction— between reading tor information and for understanding— which underlies everything I have said about reading. For the most part, we read newspapers and magazines, and even advertising matter, tor the information they contain. The amount of such material is vast, so vast that no one today has time to read more than a small fraction of the available sources of information. Necessity has been the mother of several good inventions in the field of such reading. The so-called news magazines, such as Time and Newsweek, perform an invaluable function for most of us by reading the news and reducing it to its essential elements of information. The men who write these magazines are pri marily readers. They have developed the art of reading for information to a point far beyond the average reader's competence.
The same thing is true of Readers Digest, which manages to reduce almost everything that is worth our attention in current magazines to the compact scope of a single, small volume. Of course, the very best articles, like the best books, cannot be condensed without loss. If the essays of Montaigne or Lamb appeared in a current periodical, we would scarcely be satisfied to read a digest of them. A summary here would function well only if it impelled us to read the original. For the average article, however, a condensation is usually adequate, and often even better than the original. because the average article is mainly informational. The skill which produces Readers Digest each month is, first of all, a skill in reading, and only then one of writing simply and clearly. It does for us what few of us have the technique —not merely the time—to do for ourselves. It cuts the core of solid information out of pages and pages of less substantial stuff.
But, after all, we still have to read the periodicals which accomplish these extraordinary digests of current news and information. If we wish to be informed, we cannot avoid the task of reading, no matter how good the digests are. And the task of reading the digests is, in the last analysis, the same task as that which is performed by the editors of these magazines on the original materials they make available in more compact form. They have saved us labor, so far as the extent of our reading is concerned, but they have not and cannot entirely save us the trouble of reading. In a sense, the function they perform profits us only if we can read their digests of information as well as they have done the prior reading in order to give us the digests.
The four questions I shall now state as guides tor reading anything apply equally to material which can inform us or enlighten us. To use these questions intelligently as a set of directions, you must know, of course, what it is you are after—whether you are reading for one purpose or the other. If you are wise, your purpose will accord properly with the nature of the thing to be read. Here are the four questions, with brief comment:
I. What in general is being said? (To answer this question, you must perform all the steps of structural reading, according to the rules already laid down.)
II. How in partocular is it being said? (you Cannot fully discover what is being said unless you penetrate beneath the language to the thought. To do this you must observe how the language is being used, and how the thought is ordered. Here, then, you must follow all the rules of interpretative reading.)
III. Is it true? (Only after you know what is being said, and how, can you consider whether it is true or probable. This question calls for the exercise of critical judgment. You must decide to accept or reject the information being offered you. You must be especially alert to detect the distortions of propaganda in renderings of the news. In reading for enlightenment, you must decide whether you agree or disagree with what you have come to understand. The rules you must follow here are those of the third, or critical, reading.)
IV. What of it? (Unless what you have read is true in some sense, you need go no further. But if it is, you must face this question. You cannot read for information intelligently without determining what significance is, or should be, attached to the facts presented. Facts seldom come to us without some interpretation, explicit or implied. This is especially true if you are reading digests of information which necessarily select the facts according to some evaluation of their significance, some principle of interpretation. And if you are reading for enlightenment, there is really no end to the inquiry which, at every stage of learning, is renewed by the question, What of it?)
These four questions summarize all the obligations of a reader. The first three indicate, moreover, why there are three ways of reading anything. The three sets of rules re spond to something in the very nature of human discourse. If communications were not complex, structural analysis would be unnecessary. If language were a perfect medium instead of a relatively opaque one, there would be no need for interpretation. If error and ignorance did not circumscribe truth and knowledge, we should not have to be critical. The fourth question turns on the distinction between Information and understanding. When the material you have read is itself primarily informational, you are challenged to go further and seek enlightenment. Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the search for significance.
Knowing these questions is, of course, not enough. You must remember to ask them as you read and, most of all, you must be able to answer them precisely and accurately. The ability to do just that is the art of reading, in a nutshell.
Ability to read anything well may be the goal, but the goal does not indicate the best place to begin acquiring the art. You cannot begin to acquire the right habits by reading any sort of material; perhaps I should say that some kinds of material make it easier to acquire the discipline than others. It is too easy, for instance, to get something out of newspapers, magazines, and digests, even when one reads them poorly and passively. Moreover, all our bad habits of perfunctory reading are associated with these familiar materials. That is why, throughout this book, I insisted that trying to read for understanding rather than information—because more difficult and less usual—provides you with a better occasion tor developing your skill.
For the same reason, reading good books, or better, the great books, is the recipe for those who would learn to read. It is not that the rigors of difficult reading are the punishment which fits the crime of sloppy habits; rather, from the point of view of therapy, books which cannot be understood at all unless they are read actively are the ideal prescription for anyone who is still a victim of passive reading. Nor do I think that this medicine is like those drastic and strenuous remedies which are calculated either to kill or cure the patient. For in this case, the patient can determine the dosage. He can increase the amount of exercise he takes in easy stages. The remedy will begin to work as soon as he begins ind the more it works, the more he can take.
The place to begin, then, is on the great books. They are so apt tor the purpose, it is almost as if they were written for the sake of teaching people how to read. They stand to the problem of learning how to read almost as water does to the business of learning how to swim. There is one important difference. Water is indispensable for swimming. But after you have learned to read by practicing on the great books, you can transfer your abilities to reading good books, to reading any books, to reading anything. The man who) can keep afloat in the deeps need not concern himseif about the shallows.
