Page 38 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Researching an answer 37
been seen in a reader’s mind until they were given that precise
verbal form.
Even if you decide to read a primary text like the Donne
poem, and formulate your response to it, before reading T.S.
Eliot’s or anyone else’s commentary on it, your interpretation
and evaluation are likely to be already coloured by pressure
from supposedly secondary sources. For instance, to make any
kind of sense out of the more archaic or abstruse terminology in
the poem, you may have to consult the notes in some scholarly
edition. You then accept their author’s choice of explanatory,
modern words as part of the poem’s meaning. Even those of the
poem’s own words which are most immediately meaningful to
you will make sense only because you have met them in other
contexts. In measuring the poem’s worth, you are likely to be
influenced by facts which derive, however indirectly, from views
expressed in secondary sources. Is it likely that Donne would be
on your syllabus at all if a powerful mass of critical
commentary had not grown around his works since the 1920s?
You might even have glimpsed a lecture list and deduced the
relative importance Donne is given by those of your teachers
who decide how many lectures should be devoted to each
author.
Of course, you may be sturdily resilient when your own
judgement is faced by such easily recognizable pressures. What,
however, of the subtler ones: those implicit generalizations,
pervading much of your literary education, as to what
constitutes a great poem and how it should be interpreted?
Your essay must, for instance, imply a view on whether early
texts should be interpreted as their first readers may have
understood them, or in the light of the modern reader’s own
values. Arguably, one of the main advantages of studying
literature is that it reveals some of the utterly different
assumptions made by even the most intelligent members of a
past generation. It thus liberates us from an unquestioning
acceptance of whatever value systems happen to operate in our
own time and place. So learning more history is almost bound
to make you a more interested—and interesting—reader of old
texts.
Yet, even if you do decide that it is desirable to respond now
as seventeenth-century readers once did, is it possible? There is
the problem that those earlier readers disagreed on some issues