You could have anticipated that this situation would obtain in the case of fiction. It is inherent in the fact that the novelist does not communicate in the same way that an expository writer does. But the situation obtains in the case of expository works, as well.
Suppose, for example, that you are interested in reading about the idea of love. Since the literature of love is vast, you would have relatively little difficulty in creating a bibliography of books to read. Suppose that you have done that, by asking advisors, by searching through the card catalogue of a good library, and by examining the bibliography in a good scholarly treatise on the subject. And suppose in addition that you have confined yourself to expository works, despite the undoubted interest of novelists and poets in the subject. (We will explain why it would be advisable to do this later.) You now begin to examine the books in your bibliography. What do you find?
Even a cursory perusal reveals a very great range of reference. There is hardly a single human action that has not been called—in one way or another—an act of love. Nor is the range confined to the human sphere. If you proceed far enough in your reading, you will find that love has been attributed to almost everything in the universe; that is, everything that exists has been said by someone either to love or to be loved—or both.
Stones are said to love the center of the earth. The upward motion of fire is called a function of its love. The attraction of iron filings to a magnet is described as an effect of love. Tracts have been written on the love life of amoebae, paramecia, snails, and ants, to say nothing of most of the so-called higher animals, who are said to love their masters as well as one another. When we come to human beings, we discover that authors speak and write of their love for men, women, a woman, a man, children, themselves, mankind, money, art, domesticity, principles, a cause, an occupation or profession, adventure, security, ideas, p. 311 a country life, loving itself, a beefsteak, or wine. In certain learned treatises, the motions of the heavenly bodies are said to be inspired by love; in others, angels and devils are differentiated by the quality of their love. And of course God is said to be Love.
Confronted with this enormous range of reference, how are we to state what the subject is that we are investigating? Can we even be sure that there is a single subject? When one person says “I love cheese,” and another says “I love football,” and a third says “I love mankind,” are they all three using the word in any sense that is common? After all, one eats cheese but not football or mankind, one plays football but not cheese or mankind, and whatever “I love mankind” means, that meaning does not seem to be applicable to cheese or football. And yet all three do use the same word. Is there in fact some deep reason for that, some reason that is not immediately apparent on the surface? Difficult as that question is, can we say that we have identified the “same subject” until we have answered it?
Faced with this chaotic situation, you may decide to limit the enquiry to human love—to love between human beings, of the same sex or different sexes, of the same age or different ages, and so forth. That would rule out the three statements we have just discussed. But you would still find, even if you read only a small portion of the available books about the subject, a very great range of reference. You would find, for instance, that love is said by some writers to consist wholly in acquisitive desire, usually sexual desire; that is, love is merely a name for the attraction that almost all animals feel toward members of the opposite sex. But you would also find other authors who maintain that love, properly speaking, contains no acquisitive desire whatever, and consists in pure benevolence. Do acquisitive desire and benevolence have anything in common, considering that acquisitive desire always implies wanting some good for oneself, while benevolence implies wanting a good for someone else?
At least acquisitive desire and benevolence share a comp. 312mon note of tendency, of desire in some very abstract sense of the term. But your investigation of the literature of the subject would soon uncover writers who conceive of the essence of love as being cognitive rather than appetitive. Love, these writers maintain, is an intellectual act, not an emotional one. In other words, knowing that another person is admirable always preceeds desiring him or her, in either of the two senses of desire. Such authors do not deny that desire enters into the picture, but they do deny that desire should be called love.
Let us suppose—in fact, we think it can be done—that you are able to identify some common meaning in these various conceptions of human love. Even then not all of your problems are solved. Consider the ways in which love manifests itself between and among human beings. Is the love that a man and woman have for each other the same when they are courting as when they are married, the same when they are in their twenties as when they are in their seventies? Is the love that a woman has for her husband the same as that she has for her children? Does a mother’s love for her children change as they grow up? Is the love of a brother for his sister the same as his love for his father? Does a child’s love for its parents change as he or she grows? Is the love that a man has for a woman, either his wife or some other, the same as the friendship he feels for another man, and does it make a difference what relationship he has with the man—such as one with whom he goes bowling, one with whom he works, and one whose intellectual company he enjoys? Does the fact that “love” and “friendship” are different words mean that the emotions they name (if that is in fact what they name) differ? Can two men of different ages be friends? Can they be friends if they are markedly different in some other respect, such as possession of wealth or degree of intelligence? Can women be friends at all? Can brothers and sisters be friends, or brother and brother, or sister and sister? Can you retain a friendship with someone you either borrow money from or lend it to? It not, why not? Can a boy love his teacher? Does it make a difference whether the p. 313 teacher is male or female? If humanoid robots existed, could human beings love them? If we discovered intelligent beings on Mars or some other planet, could we love them? Can we love someone we have never met, like a movie star or the President? If we feel that we hate someone, is that really an expression of love?
These are just a few of the questions that would be raised by your reading of even a part of the standard expository literature of love. There are many other questions that could be asked. However, we think we have made the point. A curious paradox is involved in any project of syntopical reading. Although this level of reading is defined as the reading of two or more books on the same subject, which implies that the identification of the subject matter occurs before the reading begins, it is in a sense true that the identification of the subject matter must follow the reading, not precede it. In the case of love, you might have to read a dozen or a hundred works before you could decide what you were reading about. And when you had done that, you might have to conclude that half of the works you had read were not on the subject at all.
The Role of Inspection in Syntopical Reading
We have stated more than once that the levels of reading are cumulative, that a higher level includes all of those that precede or lie below it. It is now time to explain what that means in the case of syntopical reading.
You will recall that in explaining the relationship between inspectional reading and analytical reading, we pointed out that the two steps in inspectional reading—first, skimming; and second, superficial reading—anticipated the first two steps in analytical reading Skimming helps to prepare you for the first step of analytical reading, in the course of which you identify the subject matter of whatever you are reading, state what kind of book it is, and outline its structure. Superficial p. 314 reading, while it is also helpful in that first step of analytical reading, is primarily a preparation for the second step, when you are called upon to interpret a book’s contents by coming to terms with the author, stating his propositions, and following his arguments.
In a somewhat analogous fashion, both inspectional and analytical reading can be considered as anticipations or preparations fo
r syntopical reading. It is here, in fact, that inspectional reading comes into its own as a major tool or instrument for the reader.
Let us suppose once more that you have a bibliography of a hundred or so titles, all of which appear to be on the subject of love. If you read every one of them analytically, you would not only end up with a fairly clear idea of the subject that you were investigating—the “same subject” of the syntopical reading project—but you would also know which, if any, of the books you had read were not on that subject and thus irrelevant to your needs. But to read a hundred books analytically might well take you ten years. If you were able to devote full time to the project, it would still take many months. Some short cut is obviously necessary, in the face of the paradox we have mentioned concerning syntopical reading.
That short cut is provided by your skill in inspectional reading. The first thing to do when you have amassed your bibliography is to inspect all of the books on your list. You should not read any of them analytically before inspecting all of them. Inspectional reading will not acquaint you with all of the intricacies of the subject matter, or with all of the insights that your authors can provide, but it will perform two essential functions. First, it will give you a clear enough idea of your subject so that your subsequent analytical reading of some of the books on the list is productive. And second, it will allow you to cut down your bibliography to a more manageable size.
We can hardly think of any advice that would be more useful for students, especially graduate and research students, than this, if they would only heed it. In our experience, a certain number of students at those advanced levels of schooling p. 315 have some capability of reading actively and analytically. There may not be enough of them, and they may be far from perfect readers, but they at least know how to get at the meat of a book, to make reasonably intelligible statements about it, and to fit it into a plot or plan of their subject matter. But their efforts are enormously wasteful because they do not understand how to read some books faster than others. They spend the same amount of time and effort on every book or article they read. As a result, they do not read those books that deserve a really good reading as well as they deserve, and they waste time on works that deserve less attention.
The skillful inspectional reader does more than classify a book in his mental card catalogue, and achieve a superficial knowledge of its contents. He also discovers, in the very short time it takes him to inspect it, whether the book says something important about his subject or not. He may not yet know what that something is precisely—that discovery will probably have to wait for another reading. But he has learned one of two things. Either the book is one to which he must return for light, or it is one that, no matter how enjoyable or informative, contains no enlightenment and therefore does not have to be read again.
There is a reason why this advice is often unheeded. In the case of analytical reading, we said that the skillful reader performs concurrently steps that the beginner must treat as separate. By analogy, it might seem that this kind of prepararation for syntopical reading—the inspection of all of the books on your list before starting the analytical reading of any of them—could be done concurrently with analytical reading. But we do not believe that can be done by any reader, no matter how skillful. And this indeed is the mistake that so many younger researchers make. Thinking they can collapse these two steps into one, they end up reading everything at the same rate, which may be either too fast or too slow for a particular work, but in any event is wrong for most of the books they read.
Once you have identified, by inspection, the books that are p. 316 relevant to your subject matter, you can then proceed to read them syntopically. Note that in the last sentence we did not say “proceed to read them analytically,” as you might have expected. In a sense, of course, you do have to read each of the individual works that, together, constitute the literature of your subject, with those skills that you acquired by applying the rules of analytical reading. But it must never be forgotten that the art of analytical reading applies to the reading of a single book, when understanding of that book is the aim in view. As we will see, the aim in syntopical reading is quite different.
The Five Steps in Syntopical Reading
We are now prepared to explain how to read syntopically. We will assume that, by your inspection of a number of books, you have a pretty good idea of the subject that at least some of them are about, and furthermore that this is the subject you want to investigate. What, then, do you do?
There are five steps in syntopical reading. We shall not call them rules, although we might, for if any of the steps is not taken, syntopical reading becomes much more difficult, perhaps impossible. We will discuss them roughly in the order in which they occur, although in a sense all of them have to take place for any of them to.
STEP 1 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: FINDING THE RELEVANT PASSAGES. Since we are of course assuming that you know how to read analytically, we are assuming that you could read each of the relevant books thoroughly if you wanted to. But that would be to place the individual books first in the order of your priorities, and your problem second. In fact, the order is reversed. In syntopical reading, it is you and your concerns that are primarily to be served, not the books that you read.
Hence the first step at this level of reading is another inp. 317spection of the whole works that you have identified as relevant. Your aim is to find the passages in the books that are most germane to your needs. It is unlikely that the whole of any of the books is directly on the subject you have chosen or that is troubling you. Even if this is so, as it very rarely is, you should read the book quickly. You do not want to lose sight of the fact that you are reading it for an ulterior purpose—namely, for the light it may throw on your own problem—not for its own sake.
It might seem that this step could be taken concurrently with the previously described inspection of the book, the purpose of which was to discover whether the book was at all relevant to your concerns. In many cases, that is so. But it is unwise to consider that this is always possible. Remember that one of the aims of your first inspection of the book was to zero in on the subejct matter of your syntopical reading project. We have said that an adequate understanding of the problem is not always available until you have inspected many of the books on your original list. Therefore, to try to identify the relevant passages at the same time that you identify the relevant books is often perilous. Unless you are very skillful, or already quite familiar with your subject, you had better treat the two steps as separate.
What is important here is to recognize the difference between the first books that you read in the course of syntopical reading, and those that you come to after you have read many others on the subject. In the case of the later books, you probably already have a fairly clear idea of your problem, and in that case the two steps can coalesce. But at the beginning, they should be kept rigorously separated. Otherwise, you are likely to make serious mistakes in identifying the relevant passages, mistakes that will have to be corrected later with a consequent waste of time and effort.
Above all, remember that your task is not so much to achieve an overall understanding of the particular book before you as to find out how it can be useful to you in a connection p. 318 that may be very far from the authors own purpose in writing it. That does not matter at this stage of the proceedings. The author can help you to solve your own problem without having intended to. In syntopical reading, as we have noted, the books that are read serve you, not the other way around. In this sense, syntopical reading is the most active reading you can do. Analytical reading is also active, of course. But when you read a book analytically, you put yourself in a relation to it of disciple to master. When you read syntopically, you must be the master of the situation.
Because this is so, you must go about the business of coming to terms with your authors in a somewhat different way than before.
STEP 2 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: BRINGING THE AUTHORS TO TERMS. In interp
retive reading (the second stage of analytical reading) the first rule requires you to come to terms with the author, which means identifying his key words and discovering how he uses them. But now you are faced with a number of different authors, and it is unlikely that they will have all used the same words, or even the same terms. Thus it is you who must establish the terms, and bring your authors to them rather than the other way around.
This is probably the most difficult step in syntopical reading. What it really comes down to is forcing an author to use your language, rather than using his. All of our normal reading habits are opposed to this. As we have pointed out several times, we assume that the author of a book we want to read analytically is our better, and this is particularly true if the book is a great one. Our tendency is to accept the author’s terms and his organization of the subject matter, no matter how active we may be in trying to understand him. In syntopical reading, however, we will very quickly be lost if we accept any one author’s terminology. We may understand his book, but we will fail to understand the others, and we will find that not much light is shed on the subject in which we are interested.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Page 32