How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [102]
-and accepts as appropriate the means by which the author says they can be attained. Action in this sense is not obligatory when the expository work is theoretical. There, mental action alone is required. But if you are convjnced that such a book is true, in whole or part, then you must agree with its conclusions, and if they imply some adjustment of your views of the mbject, then you are more or less required to make those adjustments.
Now it is important to recognize that, in the case of a work of imaginative literature, this fourth and final question must be interpreted quite differently. In a sense, the question is irrelevant to the reading of stories and poems. Strictly speaking, no action whatever is called for on your part when you have read a novel, play, or poem well-that is, analytically.
You have discharged all of your responsibilities as a reader when you have applied the parallel rules of analytical reading to such works, and answered the first three questions.
We say "strictly speaking," because it is obvious that imaginative works have often led readers to act in various ways. Sometimes a story is a better way of getting a point across-be it a political, economic, or moral point-than an expository work making the same point. George Orwell's Animal Suggestions for Reading Stories, Plays, and Poems 21 7
Farm and his 1984 are both powerful attacks on totalitarianism.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is an eloquent diatribe against the tyranny of technological progress. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle tells us more about the petty cruelty and inhumanity of the Soviet bureaucracy than a hundred factual studies and reports. Such works have been banned and censored many times in the history of mankind, and the reason for that is clear. As E. B. White once remarked,
"A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedomhe fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold."
Nevertheless, such practical consequences of the reading of stories and poems are not of the essence of the matter.
Imaginative writings can lead to action, but they do not have to. They belong in the realm of fine art.
A work of fine art is "fine" not because it is "refined" or
"finished," but because it is an end ( finis, Latin, means end ) in itself. It does not move toward some result beyond itself.
It is, as Emerson said of beauty, its own excuse for being.
Therefore, when it comes to applying this last question to works of imaginative literature, you should do so with caution.
If you feel impelled because of a book you have read to go out and do something, ask yourself whether the work contains
-:orne implied statement that has produced this feeling. Poetry, properly speaking, is not the realm of statement, although many stories and poems have statements in them, more or less deeply buried. And it is quite right to take heed of them, and to react to them. But you should remember that you are then taking heed of and reacting to something other than the story or poem itself. That subsists in its own right. To read it well, all you have to do is experience it.
How to Read Stories
The first piece of advice we would like to give you for reading a story is this : Read it quickly and with total immer-21 8 HOW TO READ A BOOK
sion. Ideally, a story should be read at one sitting, although this is rarely possible for busy people with long novels. Neverth�less, the ideal should be approximated by compressing the reading of a good story into as short a time as feasible. Otherwise you will forget what happened, the unity of the plot will escape you, and you will be lost.
Some readers, when they really like a novel, want to savor it, to pause over it, to draw out the reading of it for as long as they can. But in this case they are probably not so much reading the book as satisfying their