How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (26 page)

This brief discussion gives you a clue to the two major questions you must ask yourself in reading any sort of practical book. The first is : What are the author's objectives? The second is : What means for achieving them is he proposing? It may be more difficult to answer these questions in the case of a book about principles than in the case of one about rules.

The ends and means are likely to be less obvious. Yet answering them in either case is necessary for the understanding and criticism of a practical book.

It also reminds you of one aspect of practical writing that we noted earlier. There is an admixture of oratory or propaganda in every practical book. We have never read a book of political philosophy-however theoretical it may have appeared, however "abstract" the principles with which it dealt that did not try to persuade the reader about "the best form of government." Similarly, moral treatises try to persuade the reader about "the good life" as well as recommend ways of leading it. And we have tried continuously to persuade you to read books in a certain way, for the sake of the understanding that you may attain.

You can see why the practical author must always be something of an orator or propagandist. Since your ultimate judgment of his work is going to turn on your acceptance of the goal for which he is proposing means, it is up to him to win you to his ends. To do this, he has to argue in a way that appeals to your heart as well as your mind. He may have to play on your emotions and gain direction of your will.

There is nothing wrong or vicious about this. It is of the very nature of practical affairs that men have to be persuaded to think and act in a certain way. Neither practical thinking nor action is an affair of the mind alone. The emotions cannot be left out. No one makes serious practical judgments or engages in action without being moved somehow from below the neck. The world might be a better place if we did, but it would certainly be a different world. The writer of practical books who does not realize this will be ineffective. The reader of them who does not is likely to be sold a bill of goods without his knowing it.

The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do.

The person who reads a practical book intelligently, who knows its basic terms, propositions, and arguments, will always be able to detect its oratory. He will spot the passages that make an "emotive use of words." Aware that he must be subject to persuasion, he can do something about weighing the appeals. He has sales resistance; but this need not be one hundred percent. Sales resistance is good when it prevents you from buying hastily and thoughtlessly. But the reader who supposes he should be totally deaf to all appeals might just as well not read practical books.

There is a further point here. Because of the nature of practical problems and because of the admixture of oratory in all practical writing, the "personality" of the author is more important in the case of practical books than theoretical. You need know nothing whatever about the author of a mathematical treatise; his reasoning is either good or not, and it makes no difference what kind of man he is. But in order to understand and judge a moral treatise, a political tract, or an economic discussion, you should know something about the character of the writer, something about his life and times. In reading: Aristotle's Politics, for example, it is highly relevant to know that Greek society was based on slavery. Similarly, much light is thrown on The Prince by knowing the Italian political situation at the time of Machiavelli, and his relation to the Medicis; or, in the case of Hobbes' Leviathan, that Hobbes lived during the English civil wars and was almost pathologically distressed by social violence and disorder.

What Does Agreement Entail in the Case of a Practical Book?

We are sure that you can see that the four questions you must ask about any book are somewhat changed in the case of reading a practical book. Let us try to spell out these changes.

The first question, What is the book about?, does not change very much. Since a practical book is an expository one, it is still necessary, in the course of answering this first question, to make an outline of the book's structure.

However, although you must always try to find out (Rule 4 covers this) what an author's problems were, here, in the case of practical books, this requirement becomes the dominant one. We have said that you must try to discern the author's objectives. That is another way of saying you must know what problems he was trying to solve. You must know what he wanted to do-because, in the case of a practical work, knowing what he wants to do comes down to knowing what he wants you to do. And that is obviously of considerable importance.

The second question does not change very much, either.

You must still, in order to answer the question about the book's meaning or contents, discover the author's terms, propositions, and arguments. But here again it is the last aspect of that task (covered by Rule 8) that now looms most important. Rule 8, you will recall, required you to say which of the author's problems he solved and which he did not. The adaptation of this rule that applies in the case of practical books has already been stated. You must discover and understand the means the author recommends for achieving what he is proposing. In other words, if Rule 4 as adapted for practical books is FIND OUT WHAT THE AUTHOR WANTS YOU TO DO, then Rule 8, as similarly adapted, is FIND OUT HOW HE PROPOSES THAT YOU DO THIS.

The third question, Is it true?, is changed somewhat more than the first two. In the case of a theoretical book, the question is answered when you have compared the author's description and explanation of what is or happens in the world with your own knowledge thereof. If the book accords generally with your own experience of the way things are, then you must concede its truthfulness, at least in part. In the case of a practical book, although there is some such comparison of the book and reality, the main consideration is whether the author's objectives-that is, the ends that he seeks, together with the means he proposes to reach them-accord with your conception of what it is right to seek, and of what is the best way of seeking it.

The fourth question, What of it?, is changed most of all.

If, after reading a theoretical book, your view of its subject matter is altered more or less, then you are required to make some adjustments in your general view of things. (If no adjustments are called for, then you cannot have learned much, if anything, from the book.) But these adjustments need not be earth-shaking, and above all they do not necessarily imply action on your part.

Agreement with a practical book, however, does imply action on your part. If you are convinced or persuaded by the author that the ends he, proposes are worthy, and if you are further convinced or persuaded that the means he recommends are likely to achieve those ends, then it is hard to see how you can refuse to act in the way the author wishes you to.

We recognize, of course, that this does not always happen.

But we want you to realize what it means when it does not.

It means that despite his apparent agreement with the author's ends and acceptance of his means, the reader really does not agree or accept. If he did both, he could not reasonably fail to act.

Let us give an example of what we mean. If, after completing Part Two of this book, you (1) agreed that reading analytically is worthwhile, and (2) accepted the rules of reading as essentially supportive of that aim, then you must have begun to try to read in the manner we have described. If you did not, it is not just because you were lazy or tired. It is because you did not really mean either (1) or (2) .

There is one apparent exception to this contention. Suppose, for example, that you read an article about how to make a chocolate mousse. You like chocolate mousse, and so you agree with the author of the article that the end in view is good. You also accept the author's proposed means for attaining the end-his recipe. But you are a male reader who never goes into the kitchen, and so you do not make a mousse. Does this invalidate our point?

It does not, although it does indicate an important distinction between types of practical books that should be mentioned. With regard to the ends proposed by the authors of such works, these are sometimes general or universal-applicable to all human beings-and sometimes applicable only to a certain portion of human beings. If the end is universal-as it is, for example, with this book, which maintains that all persons should read better, not just some-then the implication discussed in this section applies to every reader. If the end is selective, applying only to a certain class of human beings, then the reader must decide whether or not he belongs to that class. If he does, then the implication applies to him, and he is more or less obligated to act in the ways specified by the author. If he does not, then he may not be so obligated.

We say "may not be so obligated" because there is a strong possibility that the reader may be fooling himself, or misunderstanding his own motives, in deciding that he does not belong to the class to which the end is relevant. In the case of the reader of the article about chocolate mousse, he is probably, by his inaction, expressing his view that, although mousse is admittedly delicious, someone else-perhaps his wife-should be the one to make it. And in many cases, we concede the desirability of an end and the feasibility of the means, but in one way or another express our reluctance to perform the action ourselves. Let someone else do it, we say, more or less explicitly.

This, of course, is not primarily a reading problem but rather a psychological one. Nevertheless, the psychological fact has bearing on how effectively we read a practical book, and so we have discussed the matter here.

14. HOW TO READ IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE

So far, this book has been concerned with only half the reading that most people do. Even that is too liberal an estimate. Probably the greater part of anybody's reading time is spent on newspapers and magazines, and on things that have to be read in connection with one's job. And so far as books are concerned, most of us read more fiction than nonfiction. Furthermore, of the nonfiction books, the most popular are those that, like newspapers and magazines, deal journalistically with matters of contemporary interest.

We have not deceived you about the rules set forth in the preceding chapters. Before undertaking to discuss them in detail, we explained that we would have to limit ourselves to the business of reading serious nonfiction books. To have expounded the rules for reading imaginative and expository literature at the same time would have been confusing. But now we cannot ignore the other types of reading any longer.

Before embarking on the task, we want to emphasize one rather strange paradox. The problem of knowing how to read imaginative literature is inherently much more difficult than the problem of knowing how to read expository books. Nevertheless, 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. How can this be true?

It may be, of course, that people deceive themselves about their ability to read novels intelligently. From our teaching experience, we 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 of an account of their enjoyment or tell what the book contained that caused them pleasure. This might indicate that people can be good readers of fiction without being good critics. We 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.

However, there is more to the paradox than that. Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

To make this point clear would require an extensive analysis of esthetic appreciation. We cannot undertake that here.

We can, however, give you some advice about how to read imaginative literature. We will proceed, first, by the way of negation, stating the obvious "don'ts" instead of the constructive rules. Next, we will proceed by the way of analogy, briefly translating the rules for reading nonfiction into their equivalents for reading fiction. Finally, in the next chapter, we will proceed to examine the problems of reading specific types of imaginative literature, namely, novels, plays, and lyric poems.

How Not to Read Imaginative Literature

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 try to convey knowledge-knowledge about experiences that the reader has had or could have. Imaginative ones try to communicate an experience itself-one that the reader can have or share 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. This does not mean that we can think without using our imagination, or that sense experience is ever wholly divorced from rational insight or reflection. The matter is only one of emphasis.