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At this point it is probably clear that we are speaking exclusively of expository writers and expository books. Poetry and fiction are not nearly so concerned with the unambiguous use of words as expository works-works that convey knowledge in the broad sense of the word that we have been employing. It can even be argued that the best poetry is that which is the most richly ambiguous, and it has been said with justice that any good poet is sometimes intentionally ambiguous in his writing. This is an important insight about poetry to which we will return later. It is obviously one of the primary differences between the poetical and the expository or scientific realms of literary art.

We are now ready to state the fifth rule of reading ( an expository work ). Stated roughly, it is this: You must spot the important words in a book and figure out how the author is using them. But we can make that a little more precise and elegant: RuLE 5. FIND THE IMPORTANT WORDS AND THROUGH

THEM COME TO TERMS WITH THE AUTHOR. Note that the rule has two parts. The first part is to locate the important words, the words that make a difference. The second part is to determine the meaning of these words, as used, with precision.

This is the first rule for the second stage of analytical reading, the aim of which is not the outlining of a book's structure but the interpretation of its contents or message. The other rules for this stage, to be discussed in the next chapter, are like this one in an important respect. They also require you to take two steps: a step dealing with the language as such, and a step beyond the language to the thought that lies behind it.

If language were a pure and perfect medium for thought, these steps would not be separate. If every word had only one meaning, if words could not be used ambiguously, if, in short, each word was an ideal term, language would be a diaphanous Coming to Terms With an Author 99

medium. The reader would see straight through the writer's words to the content of his mind. If that were the case, there would be no need at all for this second stage of analytical reading. Interpretation would be unnecessary.

But of course that is far from the case. There is no use crying about it, no use making up impossible schemes for an ideal language, as the philosopher Leibniz and some of his followers have tried to do. Indeed, if they succeeded, there would be no more poetry. The only thing to do, therefore, in

-expository works, is to make the best of language as it is, and the only way to do that is to use language as skillfully as possible when you want to convey, or to receive, knowledge.

Because language is imperfect as a medium for conveying knowledge, it also functions as an obstacle to communication.

The rules of interpretive reading are directed to overcoming that obstacle. We can expect a good writer to do his best to reach us through the barrier language inevitably sets up, but we cannot expect him to do the job all by himself. We must meet him halfway. We, as readers, must try to tunnel through from our side of the barrier. The likelihood of a meeting of minds through language depends on the willingness of both reader and writer to work together. Just as teaching will not avail unless there is a reciprocal activity of being taught, so no author, regardless of his skill in writing, can achieve communication without a reciprocal skill on the part of readers. If that were not so, the diverse skills of writing and reading would not bring minds together, however much effort was expended, any more than the men who tunnel through from opposite sides of a mountain would ever meet unless they made their calculations according to the same principles of engineering.

As we have pointed out, each of the rules of interpretive reading involves two steps. To get technical for a moment, we may say that these rules have a grammatical and a logical aspect. The grammatical aspect is the one that deals with words. The logical step deals with their meanings