HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  "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.

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  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.