How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [36]
7
X-RAYING A BOOK
Every book has a skeleton hidden between its covers. Your job as an analytical reader is to find it.
A book comes to you with Hesh on its bare bones and clothes over its Hesh. It is all dressed up. You do not have to undress it or tear the Hesh off its limbs to get at the firm structure that underlies the soft surface. But you must read the book with X-ray eyes, for it is an essential part of your apprehension of any book to grasp its structure.
Recognition of the need to see the structure of a book leads to the discovery of the second and third rules for reading any book. We say "any book." These rules apply to poetry as well as to science, and to any kind of expository work. Their application will be different, of course, according to the kind of book they are used on. The unity of a novel is not the same as the unity of a treatise on politics; nor are the parts of the same sort, or ordered in the same way. But every book without exception that is worth reading at all has a unity and an organization of parts. A book that did not would be a mess. It would be relatively unreadable, as bad books actually are.
We will state these two rules as simply as possible. Then we will explain and illustrate them.
The second rule of analytical reading can be expressed as follows: RULE 2. STATE THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE BOOK IN A 75
76 HOW TO READ A BOOK
SINGLE SENTENCE, OR AT MOST A FEW SENTENCES ( A SHORT PARA
GRAPH ) .
This means that you must say what the whole book is about as briefly as possible. To say what the whole book is about is not the same as saying what kind of book it is. ( That was covered by Rule 1. ) The word "about" may be misleading here. In one sense, a book is about a certain type of subject matter, which it treats in a certain way. If you know this, you know what kind of book it is. But there is another, more colloquial sense of "about." We ask a person what he is about, what he is up to. So we can wonder what an author is up to, what he is trying to do. To find out what a book is about in this sense is to discover its theme or main point.
A book is a work of art. ( Again, we want to warn you against too narrow a conception of "art." We do not mean, or we do not only mean, "fine art" here. A book is the product of someone who has a certain skill in making. He is a maker of books and he has made one here for our benefit. ) In proportion as it is good, as a book and as a work of art, it has a more nearly perfect, a more pervasive unity. This is true of music and paintings, of novels and plays; it is no less true of books that convey knowledge.
But it is not enough to acknowledge this fact vaguely. You must apprehend the unity with definiteness. There is only one way to know that you have succeeded. You must be able to tell yourself or anybody else what the unity is, and in a few words. ( If it requires too many words, you have not seen the unity but a multiplicity. ) Do not be satisfied with "feeling the unity" that you cannot express. The reader who says, "I know what it is, but I just can't say it," probably does not even fool himself.
The third rule can be expressed as follows: RuLE 3. SET
FORTH THE MAJOR PARTS OF THE BOOK, AND SHOW HOW THESE
ARE ORGANIZED INTO A WHOLE, BY BEING ORDERED TO ONE .(\N
OTHER AND TO THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE,
The reason for this mle should be obvious. If a work of X-Raying a Book 77
art were absolutely simple, it would, of course, have no parts.
But that is never the case. None of the seQsible, physical things man knows is simple in this absolute way, nor is any human production. They are all complex unities. You have not grasped a complex unity if all you know