Page 112 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

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risk of being a banal truism or an untruth. So, too, are remarks
about the ways in which all their characters or events are
presented: ‘D.H.Lawrence’s novels involve contrast (and even
collision) between the realistic and symbolic levels in which
events are presented. Visual descriptions and allegorical
patterns of imagery conflict.’
Superficially this last example may impress as more
sophisticated than the first two. Yet each of the plural key-
phrases in its second sentence is in urgent need of support from
a singular observation: an example to prove that Lawrence’s
attempt to make a scene visible does, at least once, get in the
way of its symbolic function.
Criticism often needs to identify what is singularly interesting
about a particular work or passage. What is singular is seldom
best defined by a flood of plurals.
Be sparing too with abstract nouns. The more inclusive the
noun the less usefully precise it is likely to prove. ‘Life’, to take
an extreme example, can hardly ever deserve a place in your
critical vocabulary: ‘This work sometimes aspires to be an
enquiry into the very nature of life itself.’ Does this say
anything? Life, in at least some of its myriad forms, is
presumably evoked by any text from a train ticket to a
television programme guide. Nothing earlier in the quoted
sentence limits the almost limitless range of connotations that
‘Life’ might suggest.
The following sentence, from an essay on T.S.Eliot, may
sound less obviously naïve but does it say anything more?
‘“The Wasteland” is given artistic depth by its philosophical
profundity.’ The nouns ‘depth’ and ‘profundity’ are being used
metaphorically here, in an abstract rather than a concrete sense;
so your suspicions should be aroused. Grammatically, both may
be qualified by adjectives, but ‘artistic’ and ‘philosophical’ are
themselves epithets of such unqualified vagueness here that they
can hardly qualify the latently multiplying implications of the
nouns.
Perhaps the most regrettably common abstract nouns in
literary criticism are that dreary pair ‘appearance and reality’.
Too many fascinatingly distinct texts tend to be reduced with
mechanical consistency to ‘studies/exposures/explorations’ of
the ‘contrast/conflict/dichotomy/gulf/gap’ between ‘appearance
and reality’.