Page 43 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

42 How to write critical essays
not seen as propaganda but merely as practical attempts to
make interesting sense of old texts for a modern audience. It is
extremely hard to recognize contemporary productions of
literary texts as localized, temporary and manipulative
adaptations. One of the advantages of studying the history of
literary reputations and the critical rationales by which these
have been promoted or challenged is that distance of time
exposes the creativity which may be involved in all readings.
Many writers, of course, still work on the assumption that
such problems are slight and should be overcome. The greatest
texts supposedly encapsulate truths which are, and always will
be, as relevant as when they were first defined. The finest
authors are seen as having been transcendentally superior to the
people among whom they lived. Largely unaffected by
contemporary habits of thought and patterns of language, they
discovered original meanings which they then crystallized into
new verbalizations. Centuries later, unless we are too distracted
by merely superficial aspects of modern life, we can still decode
the author’s intended message and see how it remains just as
applicable today.
There is a paradox here. Is the text to be admired for its
universality or its uniqueness? To the traditionalist critic, the
author is essentially an individual, valued for rarity of vision
and novelty of insight. Genius invents its own style,
constructing a hitherto unavailable experience in a previously
unknown pattern of signs. Yet, if the text is also to be valued
for communicating recognizable truth, it may need to tell
readers what they already know. Your essay may suggest that
we can evaluate the accuracy of a landscape poet by
remembering the literal appearances of the natural world itself;
or that we can measure the subtlety of a novelist’s
characterization by comparing the fictional personages with our
prior knowledge of how real people behave. The text’s language
has somehow to be the original creation of an extraordinary
person and a precise echo of what many generations of
ordinary readers have always believed.
The paradox may be explicable in terms of ‘What oft was
thought but ne’er so well expressed’. The implicit premise here
is that reality exists quite independently from the vocabulary in
which we may sometimes choose to describe it. The mind can
supposedly look at the world, or experience its own