How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [97]
The basic difference between expository and imaginative literature leads to another difference. Because of their radically diverse aims, these two kinds of writing necessarily use language differently. The imaginative writer tries to maximize the latent ambiguities of words, in order thereby to gain all the richness and force that is inherent in their multiple meanings. He uses metaphors as the units of his construction just as the logical writer uses words sharpened to a single meaning.
What Dante said of The Divine Comedy, that it must be read as having several distinct though related meanings, generally applies to poetry and fiction. The logic of expository writing aims at an ideal of unambiguous explicitness. Nothing should be left between the lines. Everything that is relevant and statable should be said as explicitly and clearly as possible. In contrast, imaginative writing relies as much upon what is implied as upon what is said. The multiplication of metaphors puts almost more content between the lines than in the words that compose them. The whole poem or story says something that none of its words say or can say.
From this fact we obtain another negative injunction.
Don't look for terms, propositions, and arguments in imaginative literature. Such things are logical, not poetic, devices. "In poetry and in drama," the poet Mark Van Doren once observed, "statement is one of the obscurer mediums." What a How to Read Imaginative Literature 207
lyric poem "states," for instance, cannot be found in any of its sentences. And the whole, comprising all its words in their relations to and reactions upon each other, says something that can never be confined within the straitjacket of propositions.
( However, imaginative literature contains elements that are analogous to terms, propositions, and arguments, and we will discuss them in a moment. )
Of course, we can learn from imaginative literature, from poems and stories and especially, perhaps, plays-but not in the same way as we are taught by scientific and philosophical books. We learn from experience-the experience that we have in the course of our daily lives. So, too, we can learn from the vicarious, or artistically created, experiences that fiction produces in our imagination. In this sense, poems and stories teach as well as please. But the sense in which science and philosophy teach us is diHerent. Expository works do not provide us with novel experiences. They comment on such experiences as we already have or can get. That is why it seems right to say that expository books teach primarily, while imaginative books teach only derivatively, by creating experiences from which we can learn. In order to learn from such books, we have to do our own thinking about experience; in order to learn from scientists and philosophers, we must first try to understand the thinking they have done.
Finally, one last negative rule. Don't criticize fiction by the standards of truth and consistency that properly apply to communication of knowledge. The "truth" of a good story is its verisimilitude, its intrinsic probability or plausibility. It must be a likely story, but it need not describe the facts of life or society in a manner that is verifiable by experiment or research. Centuries ago, Aristotle remarked that "the standard of correctness is not the same in poetry as in politics," or in physics or psychology for that matter. Technical inaccuracies about anatomy or errors in geography or history should be criticized when the book in which they occur offers itself as a treatise on those subjects. But misstatements of fact do not mar 208 HOW TO READ A BOOK
a story if its teller succeeds