"poetry" would be gone. But I did the work I was asked to do and, after a year of analysis, I found otherwise. A poem was not destroyed by such tactics in reading. On the contrary, the greater insight which resulted seemed to make the poem more like a vital organism. Instead of its being an ineffable blur, it moved before one with the grace and proportion of a living thing.
That was my first lesson in reading. From it I learned two rules, which are the second and third rules for the first reading of any book. I say "any book." These rules apply to science as well as poetry, and to any sort of expository work. Their application will be somewhat 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 which is worth reading at all has a unity and an organization of parts. A book which did not would be a mess. It would be relatively unreadable, as bad books actually are.
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I am going to state these two rules as simply as possible. Then I shall explain them and illustrate them. (The first rule, which we discussed in the last chapter, was: Classify the book according to kind and subject matter. )
The second rule—1 say "second" because I want to keep the numbering of the four rules which comprise the first Way of reading—can be expressed as follows: State the unity of the whole book in a single sentence, or at most in several sentences (a short paragraph).
This means that you must be able to 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. The word "about" maybe 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 and perhaps 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 trying to do. To find out what a book is about in this sense is to discover its theme or main point.
Everyone, I think, will admit that a book is a work of art. Furthermore, they will agree that in proportion as it is good, as a book and as a work of art, it has a more perfect and pervasive unity. They know this to be true of music and paintings, novels and plays. It is no less true of books which convey knowledge. But it is not enough to acknowledge this fact vaguely. You must apprehend the unity with definiteness. There is only one way that I know of being sure you have succeeded. You must be able to tell yourself or anybody else what the unity is and in a few words. Do not be satisfied with "feeling the unity" which you cannot express. The student who says, "I know what it is, but I just can't say it," fools no one, not even himself.
The third rule can be expressed as follows: Set forth the major parts of the book, and show how these are organized into a whole, by being ordered to one another and to the unity of the whole.
The reason for this rule should be obvious. If a work of art were absolutely simple, it would, of course, have no parts. But that is not the case. None of the sensible, 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 about it. is how it is one. You must also know how it is many, not a many which consists of a lot of separate things, but an .organized many. If the parts were not organically related, the whole which they composed would not be one. Strictly speaking, there would be no whole at all but merely a collection.
You know the difference between a heap of bricks, on the one hand, and the single house they can constitute, on the other. You know the difference between one house and a collection of houses. A book is like a single house. It is a mansion of many rooms, rooms on different levels, of different sizes and shapes, with different outlooks, rooms with different functions to perform. These rooms are independent, in part. Each has its own structure and interior decoration. But they are not absolutely independent and separate. They are connected by doors and arches, by corridors and stairways. Because they are connected, the partial function which each performs contributes its share to the usefulness of the whole house. Otherwise the house would not be genuinely livable.
The architectural analogy is almost perfect. A good book, like a good house, is an orderly arrangement of parts. Each major part has a certain amount of independence. As we shall see, it may have an interior structure of its own. But it must also be connected with the other parts—that is, related to them functionally—for otherwise it could not contribute its share to the intelligibility of the whole.
As houses are more or less livable, so books are more or less readable. The most readable book is an architectural achievement on the part of the author. The best books are those that have the most intelligible structure and, I might add, the most apparent.
Though they are usually more complex than poorer books, their greater complexity is somehow also a great simplicity, because their parts are better organized, more unified.
That is one of the reasons why the great books are most readable. Lesser works are really more bothersome to read. Yet to read them well—that is, as well as they can be read—you must try to find some plan in them. They would have been better if the author had himself seen the plan a little more clearly. But if they hang together at all, if they are a complex unity to any degree, there must be a plan and you must find it.
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Let me return now to the second rule which requires you to state the unity. A few illustrations of this rule in operation may guide you in putting it into practice. I begin with a famous case. Many of you probably read Homer's Odyssey in school. Certainly most of you know the story of Ulysses, the man who took ten years to return from the siege of Troy only to find his faithful wife Penelope herself besieged by suitors. It is an elaborate story as Homer tells it, full of exciting adventures on land and sea, replete with episodes of all sorts and many complications of plot. Being a good story, it has a single unity of action, a main thread of plot which ties everything together.
Aristotle, in his Poetics insists that this is the mark of every good story, novel, or play.
To support his point, he shows you how the unity of the Odyssey can be summarized in a few sentences.
A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Neptune, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight; suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tost, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them.
"This," says Aristotle, "is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode."
After you know the plot in this way, and through it the unity of the whole narrative, you can put the parts into their proper places. You might find it a good exercise to try this with some novels you have read. Try it on some great ones. such as Tom Jones or Crime and Punishment or the modern Ulysses. Once when Mr. Clifton Fadiman was visiting Chicago, Mr. Hutchins and I asked him to lead our class in the discussion of Fielding's Tom Jones. He reduced the plot to the familiar formula: boy meets girl, boy wants girl, boy gets girl. This is the plot of every romance. The class learned what it means to say that there are only a small number of plots in the world. The difference between good and bad fiction having the same essential plot lies in what the author does with it, how he dresses up the bare bones.
For another illustration—a more appropriate one because it deals with nonfiction—let us take the first six chapters of this book. You have read them once by this time, I hope.
Treating them as if they were a complete whole, can you state their unity? If I were asked to, I would do it in the following manner. This book is about the nature of reading in general, the various kinds of reading, and the relation of the art of reading to the art of being taught in school and out. It considers, therefore, the serious consequences of the neglect of reading i
n contemporary education, suggesting as a solution that books can be substituted for living teachers if individuals can help themselves learn how to read.
There is the unityas I see it in two sentences. I hesitate to ask you to reread the first six chapters to see whether I am right.
Sometimes an author obligingly tells you on the title page what the unity is. In the eighteenth century, writers had the habit of composing elaborate titles which told the reader what the whole book was about. Here is a title by Jeremy Collier, an English divine who attacked the obscenity of the Restoration drama much more learnedly than the Legion of Decency has recently attacked the movies: A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, together with the Sense of Antiquity upon this Argument. You know from this that Collier recites many flagrant instances of the abuse of public morals and that he is going to support his protest by quoting texts from those ancients who argued, as Plato did, that the stage corrupts youth, or, as the early Church fathers did, that plays are seductions of the flesh and the devil.
Sometimes the author tells you the unity of his plan in his preface. In this respect, expository books differ radically from fiction. A scientific or philosophical writer has no reason to keep you in suspense. In fact, the less suspense such an author keeps you in, the more likely you are to sustain the effort of reading him through. Like a newspaper story, an expository book may summarize itself in its first paragraph.
Do not be too proud to accept the author's help if he proffers it, but do not rely too completely on what he says in the preface. The best-laid plans of authors, like those of other mice and men, gang aft agley. Be somewhat guided by the prospectus the author gives you, but always remember that the obligation of finding the unity belongs to the reader, as much as having one belongs to the writer. You can discharge that obligation honestly only by reading the whole book.
The opening paragraph of Herodotus' history of the war between the Greeks and the Persians provides an excellent summary of the whole. It runs: These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, in order that the actions of men may not be effaced by time, nor the great and wondrous deeds displayed by Greeks and barbarians be deprived of renown; and for the rest, for what cause they waged war upon one another. That is a good beginning for you as a reader. It tells you succinctly what the whole book is about.
But you had better not stop there. After you have read the nine parts through, you will probably find it necessary to elaborate on that statement to do justice to the whole. You may want to mention the Persian kings—Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes—the Greek heroes of Salamis and Thermopylae, and the major events—the crossing of the Hellespont and the decisive battles of the war.
All the rest of the fascinating details, with which Herodotus richly prepares you for his climax, can be left out of the plot. Note, here, that the unity of a history is a single thread of plot, very much as in fiction. That is part of what I meant in the last chapter by saying that history is an amalgam of science and poetry. So far as unity is concerned, this rule of reading elicits the same kind of answer in history and fiction. But there are other rules of reading which require the same kind of analysis in history as in science and philosophy.
A few more illustrations should suffice. I shall do a practical book first. Aristotle's Ethics is an inquiry into the nature of human happiness and an analysis of the conditions under which happiness may be gained or lost, with an indication of what men must do in their conduct and thinking in order to become happy or to avoid unhappiness, the principal emphasis being placed on the cultivation of the virtues, moral and intellectual, although other necessary goods are also recognized, such as wealth, health, friends, and a just society in which to live.
Another practical book is Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Here the reader is aided by the author's own statement of "the plan of the work" at the very beginning. But that takes several pages. The unity can be more briefly stated as follows: this is an inquiry into the sources of national wealth in any economy which is built on a division of labor, considering the relation of the wages paid labor, the profits returned to capital, and the rent owed the landowner, as the prime factors in the price of commodities. It discusses the various ways in which capital can be more or less gainfully employed, and relates the origin and use of money to the accumulation and employment of capital. Examining the development of opulence in different nations and under different conditions, it compares the several systems of political economy, and argues for the beneficence of free trade. If a reader grasped the unity of The Wealth of Nations in this way, and did a similar job tor Karl Marx's Das Kapital, he would be well on the way toward seeing the relation between two of the most influential books in modern times.
Darwin's Origin of Species will provide us with a good example of the unity of a theoretic book in science. I would state it thus: this is an account of the variation of living things during the course of countless generations and the way in which it results in new groupings of plants and animals; it treats both of the variability of domesticated animals and of variability under natural conditions, showing how such factors as the struggle for existence and natural selection operate to bring about and sustain such groupings; it argues that species are not fixed and immutable groups, but that they are merely varieties in transition from a less to a more marked and permanent status, supporting this argument by evidences from extinct animals found in the earth's crust, from the geographical distribution of living things, and from comparative embryology and anatomy. That may seem like a big mouthful to you, but the book was an even bigger one for the nineteenth century to swallow in many gulps.
Finally, I shall take Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a theoretic book in philosophy. You may recall from the last chapter that Locke himself summarized his work by saying that it was "an inquiry into the origin, certainty and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion and assent." I would not quarrel with so excellent a statement of plan by the author, except to add two subordinate qualifications to do justice to the first and third parts of the essay: it will be shown, I would say, that there are no innate ideas but that all human knowledge is acquired from experience; and language will be discussed as a medium for the expression of thought, its proper uses and most familiar abuses to be indicated.
There are two things I want you to note before we proceed. The first is how frequently you can expect the author, especially a good one, to help you state the plan of his book.
Despite that fact, most students are almost at a total loss when you ask them to say briefly what the whole book is about. Partly that may be due to their general inability to speak concise English sentences. Partly it may be due to their neglect of this rule in reading. But it certainly indicates that they pay as little attention to the author's introductory words as they do to his title. I do not think it rash to conclude that what is true of students in school is true also of most readers in any walk of life. Readers of this sort, if they can be called readers at all, seem to want to keep a book as, according to William James, the world appears to a baby: a big, buzzing, blooming confusion.
The second point is a plea that I make in self-defense. Please do not take the sample summaries I have given you as if I meant them, in each case, to be a final and absolute formulation of the book's unity. A unity can be variously stated. There is no simple criterion of right and wrong in this business. One statement is better than another, of course, in proportion as it is brief, accurate, and comprehensive. But quite different statements may be equally good, or equally bad.
I have often stated the unity of a book quite differently from the author's expression of it, and without apologies to him. You may differ similarly from me. After all, a book is something different to each reader. It would not be surprising if that difference expressed itself in the way the reader stated its unity. This does not mean that anything goes. Though readers be different, the book is the same, and there can be
an objective check upon the accuracy and fidelity of the statements anyone makes about it.
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Now we can turn to the other structural rule, the rule which requires us to set forth the major parts of the book in their order and relation. This third rule is closely related to the second which we have just discussed. You may have noticed already how a well-stated unity indicates the major parts that compose the whole. You cannot apprehend a whole without somehow seeing its parts. But it is also true that unless you grasp the organization of its parts, you cannot know the whole comprehensively.
You may wonder, therefore, why I have made two rules here instead of one. It is primarily a matter of convenience. It is easier to grasp a complex and unified structure in two steps rather than in one. The second rule directs your attention toward the unity, and the third toward the complexity, of a book. There is another reason for the separation. The major parts of a book may be seen at the moment when you grasp its unity. But these parts are usually themselves complex and have an interior structure you must see. Hence the third rule involves more than just an enumeration of the parts. It means treating the parts as if they were subordinate wholes, each with a unity and a complexity of its own.
I can write out the formula for operating according to this third rule. Because it is a formula, it may guide you in a general way. According to the second rule, you will remember, we had to say: the whole book is about so and so and such and such. That done, we can proceed as follows: (1) the author accomplished this plan in five major parts, of which the first part is about so and so, the second part is about such and such, the third part is about this, the fourth' part about that, and the fifth about still another thing. (2) The first of these major parts is divided into three sections, of which the first considers X, the second considers Y, and the third considers Z. Each of the other major parts is then similarly divided. (3) In the first section of the first part, the author makes four points, of which the first is A, the second B, the third C, and the fourth D. Each of the other sections is then similarly analyzed, and this is done for each of the sections of each of the other major parts.
HOW TO READ A BOOK Page 15
