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concentrate on expository works. We have already observed that including novels, plays, and poems in a syntopical reading project is difficult, and this is so for several reasons. First of all, the backbone or essence of a story is its plot, not its positions on issues. Second, even the most talkative characters seldom take clear positions on an issuethey tend to talk, in the story, about other matters, mainly emotional relations. Third, even if a character does make such a speech-as, for example, Settembrini does about progress in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain-we can never be sure that it is the authors view that is being represented. Is the author being ironic in allowing his character to go on about the subject? Is he intending you to see the foolishness of the posi-0 The results of these researches were published as The Idea of Progress, New York: Praeger, 1967. The work was done under the auspices of the Institute for Philosophical Research, of which the authors are respectively Director and Associate Director.

The Fourth level of Reading: Syntopical Reading 327

tion, rather than its wisdom? Generally speaking, an intensive effort of synthetic interpretation is required before a :O.ctional work can be placed on one side or another of an issue. The effort is so great, and the results essentially so dubious, that usually it is prudent to abstain.

The discussion of progress in the many works that remained to be examined was, as is usually the case, apparently chaotic. Faced with this fact, the task was, as we have indicated, to develop a neutral terminology. This was a complex undertaking, but one example may help to explain what was done.

The word "progress" itself is used by authors in a number of diferent ways. Most of these different ways reflect no more than shades of meaning, and they can be handled in the analysis. But the word is used by some authors to denote a certain kind of movement forward in history that is not an improvement. Since most of the authors use the word to denote a historical change in the human condition that is for the better, and since betterment is of the essence of the conception, the same word could not be applied to both views. In this case, the majority gained the day, and the minority faction had to be referred to as authors who assert "non-meliorative advance"

in history. The point is that when discussing the views of the minority faction, we could not employ the word "progress,"

even though the authors involved had used it themselves.

The third step in syntopical reading is, as we have noted, getting the questions clear. Our intuition about the primary question in the case of progress turned out to be correct upon examination. The first question to ask, the question to which authors can be interpreted as giving various answers, is, Does progress occur in history? Is it a fact that the general course of historical change is in the direction of improvement in man's condition? Basically, there are three different answers to this question put forth in the literature of the subject: ( 1 ) Yes, (2) No, and ( 3 ) We cannot know. However, there are a number of different ways of saying Yes, several different ways of 328 HOW TO READ A BOOK

saying No, and at least three different ways of saying that we cannot know whether human progress occurs or not.

The multifarious and interrelated answers to this primary question constitute what we decided to call the general controversy about progress. It is general in the sense that every author we studied who has anything significant to say about the subject takes sides on the various issues that can be identified within it. But there is also a special controversy about progress, which is made up of issues that are joined only by progress authors-authors who assert that progress occurs.

These issues have to do with the nature or properties of the progress that they all, being progress authors, assert is a fact of history. There are only three issues here, although the discussion of each of them is complex. They can be stated as questions: ( 1 )