Page 121 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

120 How to write critical essays
terms like ‘all’ and ‘always’ and their equally unhelpful
opposites, ‘none’ and ‘never’.
A critical essay is only enfeebled by the hyperboles which can
often invigorate comic poems. Consider Dryden’s demolition of
Shadwell, one of his many rivals in Augustan verse: ‘The rest to
some faint meaning make pretence/But Shadwell never deviates
into sense’ (‘Mac Flecknoe’, ll. 19–20). The unqualified
decisiveness of ‘never’ succeeds in being funny. It also assures us
that the judgement is not offered seriously. The laws of chance
will allow even the most idiotic writer occasionally to make
some kind of sense, however worthless Shadwell’s random
collisions with meaning may have been.
An overstated case is unlikely to be believed. Claims that
‘Tennyson’s verse is always lyrical’ or that ‘all Browning’s
poems focus on character’ or that ‘none of Pope’s lines sound
clumsy’ or even that ‘Dryden himself never deviates into
nonsense’ will suggest ignorance of the texts or a casual
disregard for what your own words must strictly mean.
Even a Shakespeare play cannot be ‘unfailingly’ subtle
‘everywhere’. Even a novel as ramblingly open-ended as Joyce’s
Ulysses is not about ‘everything’. Even a poem as serious as
Paradise Lost cannot be truly said to provide ‘nothing’ for the
reader’s sense of humour. You might draw up your own list of
words which, in nearly every context, will prove false. You
could begin by adding to those mentioned above the following
adverbs: ‘totally’, ‘wholly’, ‘completely’, ‘utterly’, ‘perfectly’
and ‘faultlessly’. The alert, critical mind tends to have
reservations. It notices exceptions. Write accordingly.

OVERSTATEMENT AND UNDERSTATEMENT IS A MATTER OF
DEGREE AND CONTEXT

Criticism may sometimes need to sound confidently incisive if it
is to cut through to the roots of an issue. An endlessly tentative
beating about the bush may circle around all sides of the debate
without itself advancing a contribution:

In attempting to assess the achievement of Samuel Johnson,
it would perhaps be insufficient to concentrate on a single
work since some of his concerns are arguably recurrent,
however varied in treatment. So it might be more