Page 140 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

7 Postscript on pleasure

Looking back on this little book, I note how much of it has
been devoted to the difficulties and mere practicalities of
writing critical essays, and how little space has been found in
which to evoke its pleasures. This may have been inevitable.
Perhaps a similar unease is felt by those who have written short
guides to other activities such as playing football, or
appreciating opera, or being a social worker or making love. In
these, as in literary criticism, many skills and satisfactions in
fact derive more from instinct and a sensitively flexible response
to each occasion’s localized demands than from intellectual
rules which have been consciously learnt. So let me close by
privileging pleasure through a rule against rules. If you
repeatedly find that following any guideline—even one of those
that I myself have suggested in the preceding pages—is actually
diminishing your pleasure in writing critical essays, abandon it.
Of course literary criticism can—and perhaps should—aspire to
serve one or other of those high-minded causes that are often
cited as its justification. But such a cause will best be served in
works written with the vigour of enthusiasm by those who have
learnt that composing a critical essay can be fun.