A review by joe_olipo
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Charles Van Doren, Mortimer J. Adler

1.0

"George W. Bush, if he were literate, could tap the Chanson de Roland. Was it ever thus? I cannot know. Culture is its own explanations."
— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Terror and Its Consequences

Has a book ever been read this way — We cannot know.

Grandpa Simpson was once a distinct parody of the Greatest Generation grandparent, whose onion-belt story is intelligible as a transposition of a famous gag immortalized by Flaubert (with highbrow contempt), "In pantomimes, when a character pulls out his [pocket] watch, it has to be an onion: this never fails to raise a laugh;" (Dictionary of Received Ideas). With the passing of this generation (who once appreciated pantomime), we regret that Grandpa Simpson has become a blight on the screen; since the death of his model it's impossible to write him funny.

We'll miss perhaps much less the passing of those midcentury Great Books advocates who wrote literary theory for people incapable of reading literary theory, and remained — in a display of why all that reading wasn't good for anything — oblivious to the humor in this. Adler in particular embodying the writer of lazy metaphor who often finds himself parodied by Nabokov (though the model for this kind of writing, unfortunately, will never die): "To pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own intellectual effort in reading is something like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It certainly feels that way. It is a major exertion. Obviously, it is a more active kind of reading than you have done before, entailing not only more varied activity but also much more skill in the performance of the various acts required" (10).

The following conceit of reader-as-baseball-catcher is a distinctly mid-20th-century Americanism (a catachresis and a second strike against our author). Of course, in the sense that "understanding more" is like "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" you can't get there from here any more than you could "catch a slider" . . . whatever that means (we cannot know).