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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, brieHy 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 I maginative Literatu re

In order to proceed by the way of negation, it is first of all necessary to grasp the basic diHerences 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.

How to Read Imaginative literatu re 205

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 hav,e. 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.

Fiction appeals primarily to the imagination. That is one reason for calling it imaginative literature, in contrast to science and philosophy which are intellectual.

This fact about imaginative literature leads to what is probably the most important of the negative injunctions we want to suggest. Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.

We have discussed at length the importance of reading actively. This is true of all books, but it is true in quite different ways of expository works and of poetry. The reader of the former should be like a bird of prey, constantly alert, always ready to pounce. The kind of activity that is appropriate in reading poetry and fiction is not the same. It is a sort of passive action, if we may be allowed the expression, or, better, active passion. We must act in such a way, when reading a story, that we let it act on us. We must allow it to move us, we must let it do whatever work it wants to do on us. We must somehow make ourselves open to it.

We owe much to the expository literature-the philosophy, science, mathematics.:.that has shaped the real world in which we live. But we could not live in this world if we were not 206 HOW TO READ A BOOK

able, from time to time, to get away from it. We do not mean that imaginative literature is always, or essentially, escapist.

In the ordinary sense of that term, the idea is contemptible.

If we must escape from reality, it should be to a deeper, or greater, reality. This is the reality