Page 103 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

102 How to write critical essays
it.’ This statement could be a wholly proper one to make in
conversation; but you should not write it in your essay. There
you must concentrate on what you still understand and value
in Robinson Crusoe—however long it may have been since
you last read it. The present tense of critical prose helps you to
focus on those ways in which a text is still alive, still able to
stimulate and modify thought. Such surviving powers—as far
as they are discoverable and describable—do belong in your
essay. Points where the text is now dead to you should stay
buried.
The characters in plays, novels, short stories and narrative
poems are similarly only worth discussing because they come to
life in minds now. Of course, some of these modern minds may
be sufficiently informed and sophisticated to use fictional
characters as a means of structuring images of past cultures.
Modern readers may use the characters of an Elizabethan play
or of a Victorian novel to understand the attitudes of some
long-dead generation, and criticism is properly interested in
how the first audience of Julius Caesar, or the first readers to
buy a copy of Oliver Twist, are likely to have responded.
However, your main task in considering characterization is to
define the precise way in which a printed text available today
still compels its fictive personages to act, and the exact signals
by which it still manipulates the reader into a particular view of
human nature.
The convention of the present tense discourages sentimental
confusion between artificially constructed, literary personages
and actual people who once lived as autonomous individuals
but are now dead. Fictional characters spring to new life each
time a fresh reader opens the text. They are ready to perform
the same actions within the same verbal pattern in any
passage which a reader may care to find. They are creations,
still being produced by the text’s choice and arrangement of
language. They are thus at once more enduringly dynamic and
more repetitively static than human beings. We must
eventually die; but until then we can change. They always live
to fight another day for some new audience or readership; yet
they are confined still within the same lines of recurring
signals.
Some modern critical theorists might argue that this
exaggerates the difference. Perhaps the supposedly independent