How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [98]
What do we do with a philosophical book, once we have read it and understood it? We test it-against the common experience that was its original inspiration, and that is its only excuse for being. We say, is this true? Have we felt this? Have we always thought this without realizing it? Is this obvious now, though it was not previously? Complicated as the author's theory or explanation may be, is it actually simpler than the chaotic ideas and opinions we had about this subject before?
If we can answer most of these questions in the affirmative, then we are bound by the community of understanding that is between ourselves and the author. When we understand and do not disagree, we must say, "This is our common sense of the matter. We have tested your theory and found it correct."
Not so with poetry. We cannot test Othello, say, against our own experience, unless we too are Moors and wedded to Venetian ladies whom we suspect of treachery. But even if this were so, Othello is not every Moor, and Desdemona is not every Venetian lady; and most such couples would have the good fortune not to know an Iago. In fact, all but one would be so fortunate; Othello, the character as well as the play, is unique.
General Ru les for Reading I maginative Literature To make the "don'ts" discussed in the last section more helpful, they must be supplemented by constructive suggestions. These suggestions can be developed by analogy from the rules of reading expository works.
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There are, as we have seen, three groups of such rules.
The first group consists of rules for discovering the unity and part-whole structure; the second consists of rules for identifying and interpreting the book's component terms, propositions, and arguments; the third consists of rules for criticizing the author's doctrine so that we can reach intelligent agreement or disagreement with him. We called these three groups of rules structural, interpretive, and critical. By analogy, we can find similar sets of rules to guide us in reading poems, novels, and plays.
First, we can translate the structural rules-the rules of outlining-into their fictional analogues as follows.
( 1 ) You must classify a work of imaginative literature according to its kind. A lyric tells its story primarily in terms of a single emotional experience, whereas novels and plays have much more complicated plots, involving many characters, their actions and their reactions upon one another, as well as the emotions they suffer in the process. Everyone knows, furthermore, that a play differs from a novel by reason of the fact that it narrates entirely by means of actions and speeches.
( There are some interesting exceptions to this, which we will mention later. ) The playwright can never speak in his own person, as the novelist can, and frequently does, in the course of a novel. All of these differences in manner of writing call for differences in the reader's receptivity. Therefore, you should recognize at once the kind of fiction you are reading.
( 2 ) You must grasp the unity of the whole work. Whether you have done this or not can be tested by whether you are able to express that unity in a sentence or two. The unity of an expository work resides ultimately in the main problem that it tries to solve. Hence its unity can be stated by the formulation of this question, or by the propositions that answer it. The unity of fiction is also connected with the problem the author has faced, but we have seen that that problem is the attempt to convey a concrete experience, and so the unity of a story is always in its plot. You have not grasped the whole 210 HOW TO READ A BOOK
story until you can summarize its plot in a brief narrationnot