How to Read a Book, Chapter 7
Chapter 7: X-raying a Book
Adler and Van Doren provided three more rules for reading in this chapter devoted to understanding the structures of books. The book, they said, comes to us as a sort of living body, and all dressed up. In order to understand it fully, we must be able to see beneath the clothes and even the flesh, to the skeleton. This is a fairly elaborate metaphor; they go so far as to describe the thickness of the flesh in a good book (neither too flabby nor too thin), which allows the reader to see the articulation and movement of the limbs.
Rule two is, "State the unity of the whole book in a single sentence, or at most a few sentences (a short paragraph)." The idea here is to be able to articulate the book's theme. It is not enough to vaguely claim you got the point, they said. The way to know and to prove that you have succeeded in understanding the theme is to tell yourself or somebody else. I think this is one of the most important pieces of advice they gave in this chapter.
Closely connected to understanding the unity of the book is understanding the structure. Rule three is, "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 book, like a house, is more than a random pile of bricks, they said. It is an orderly arrangement of parts, built to a plan by a craftsman (they said artist). The best books, they said, are also the most readable because the structure is easy to navigate; the rooms are connected to each other in a way that makes it easy to move about. They gave several examples of ways that authors showed the structure to their readers, remarking that authors of non-fiction have no need to keep the reader in suspense. Generally they describe the plan of the book in the title, contents, and preface. Even a history, which makes its case via narrative, will state its thesis at the start.
Along the way, the authors added some remarks that suggest they actually approach reading as I suggested earlier, as being very dependent on the reader's own goals. They said:
We have here sometimes 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 us. 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, however, that anything goes. Though readers are different, the book is the same, and there can be an objective check on the accuracy and fidelity of the statements anyone makes about it.
This interests me because it is nuanced. While accepting a degree of subjectivity, it's not a simple statement of relativism. There can be differences in what people get out of books, and these are largely based on what they are looking for when they enter them. But that doesn't mean anyone can get anything out of a book. Like people entering a house, they can look for and find different things; but only what is actually there.
Continuing on, Adler and Van Doren asked and answered why they had bothered to split the two tasks of finding unity and outlining structure into two rules rather than one. They described these tasks as two sides of a single coin (my analogy rather than theirs), that mutually support each other. I think an additional reason, that they did not explain as explicitly, was that the two processes are a bit distinct from each other, and probably happen at different times when one is reading. Outlining, they admitted, can be almost infinitely complicated if it includes commentary. They give as an example Aquinas' commentaries on Aristotle, which are much longer than the original texts. They also advised, once again, that "you will not want to read every book with the same degree of effort." The depth of the analysis and complexity of the outline "varies with the character of the book and your purpose in reading it." And in a sense, you are reverse-engineering the book, using similar techniques in the opposite order as the book's author. The author created an outline, then added flesh and clothing. The reader is seeing through these embellishments, at least at this stage.
Why then, Adler and Van Doren asked, do authors of non-fiction bother to animate and dress up their skeletons? "Why should not an expository book, one that attempts to present a body of knowledge in an ordered way, be merely an outline of the subject?" I don't think their answer to this question was well stated, although I suspect I can guess what they would have said in a longer response. They said something about what a "self-respecting reader" expects. I think the actual answer is that even an expository book still has a point, above and beyond the information it uses to demonstrate or "prove" its thesis. An author advancing a new interpretation, especially one as radical as Darwin (whom they use as an example), naturally has to show their work and invite the reader to follow their thought process and decide.
This leads to the fourth rule of the chapter, "Find out what the author's problems were." I like this one a lot. As a historian, my narratives show changes over time. But even a scientific or philosophical book includes an element of time. Describing a thesis and showing evidence for and against it takes time. So did the author's own thought process as they formulated the question, found and organized data, and reasoned how it answered the question. This is still a human process, so it has its own narrative arc. The authors warned against the "intentional fallacy", where the reader believes they have discovered everything that was in the author's mind. Examples included readers of Hamlet believing they could psychoanalyze Shakespeare, which would seem absurd if such things had not happened. They ended the chapter with some questions a reader might ask about the author's "problem", in practical and theoretical books. This was an interesting suggestion that the problems authors address are often similar, just as the plots of fiction tend to fall into recognizable patterns. The value of the book comes from what the author does with that archetypal plot or oft-pondered question.