Page 113 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

112 How to write critical essays
The problem is greater than just that of a cliché which is too
hopelessly wide in its applicability. Students, in writing of
‘appearance and reality’, tend to blind themselves to the
intrinsic oddity of literature itself. Literature, by definition, uses
the strange arbitrariness of black marks on a white page to
manipulate our definitions of what is true. The inky
appearances, reaching us through printer, publisher, distributor
and bookseller somehow determine what our culture accepts as
reality. Even works of so-called fiction redesign our view of
fact.
If you banish the phrase ‘appearance and reality’ from your
critical vocabulary, the search for substitute terminology will
usually lead you to make some less generalized, more usefully
precise point.

DANGEROUS TERMS WHICH NEARLY ALWAYS NEED
FURTHER DEFINITION
‘Realism’ is as problematic a concept as ‘reality’. In most
contexts you can simply avoid calling a work ‘realistic’ or
‘unrealistic’. Where you must use the term, accompany it
immediately by an explanation, preferably citing specific
examples, to show just what level of credulity the text seeks and
what methods it uses in trying to achieve it. Milton’s gigantic,
winged angels and Jane Austen’s demurely clean-thinking
heroines may strike you as equally distant from people you
know. Even so, the ways in which Paradise Lost and Emma
admit their own artificiality are quite distinct. Trying to find
synonyms for ‘realistic’ will help you to be—and therefore
sound—thoughtful. At the very least it will alert you to the fact
that ‘realistic’ is sometimes used to mean ‘pragmatic’,
‘unsentimental’ or even ‘cynical’ instead of ‘life-like’ or
‘credible’ or ‘naturalistic’.
‘Naturalistic’ has an uneasy relationship with ‘natural’,
which in itself can be a confusing word. It will often be one of
those importantly mobile terms which the work under
discussion is itself seeking to redefine. Nature—like so many
key-concepts—tends to be what texts make it. Consider the fact
that in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century poets
write as if it is natural to look away from a mountain peak as a