Page 22 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Facing the question 21
sufficiently well supported to be convincing, they must be seen
to derive from observant analysis of the work’s components.
They must also show sufficient knowledge of other texts to
demonstrate by comparison exactly what about this one seems
to you relatively impressive or unimpressive. So, too, they
must be based on an energetic curiosity about the overall
ideological pressure which a text exerts as the cumulative
result of its more localized effects. You cannot decide whether
to admire a text as an illuminating resource or to condemn it
as a mystifying obstruction until you have worked out what
ways of thinking it is trying to expand or contain. To evaluate,
you must interpret.
These interrelated concepts of evaluation and interpretation
are, as the next section explains, more intriguingly
problematical than some critics acknowledge.

Some problems of value and meaning

Can the values of a literary work be equally accessible to all its
readers? Is a given meaning which interpretative criticism
extracts likely to seem as meaningful to one reader as to
another, and to remain unaffected by any difference in their
respective situations? To take an admittedly extreme example,
could a book about slavery—whether it supported or opposed
that system—make such-equally convincing sense to both slaves
and slave-owners that they would be able to agree on just how
good a text it was?
At least in those days when there was still major
controversy over whether the slave trade should be eliminated,
criticism ought presumably to have anticipated quite different
responses to the same text. You might protest, however, that
even then there were few slave-owners, and still fewer slaves,
among those authors who contributed to the debate; or among
the contemporary reviewers who evaluated their works; or
among the readers for whom both authors and reviewers
wrote. Literature at that time, you might argue, was in fact
produced, processed and consumed by a class which had little
direct experience of the business world that made its leisure
possible. If that were your contention, you might usefully
wonder about the relevance of literary values if they can be