Page 44 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

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movements, without recourse to words. It may or may not then
decide to seek out verbal equivalents for what it has already
understood.
Many modern critics now work on the contrary hypothesis.
They suggest that it is language itself which allows us to form a
view of human experience. We see things distinct from one
another only because we have a vocabulary in which literally to
tell them apart. In the beginning was not ‘thought’ but ‘the
word’. When a text proposes one construction of experience as
peculiarly ‘well expressed’ we judge its claim by reference to
other, equally verbal constructions through which we have
hitherto shaped our thoughts.
What our language allows to sound sensible will seem true,
and even our most private thoughts may derive—however
unconsciously—from language. Perhaps we discover what sense
we are making of things only by talking to ourselves and
listening to the words in which we define our experience. If
what our vocabulary cannot name remains literally
unthinkable, language is the name of all the games which our
minds can play.
Some modern theorists thus advance serious reasons for
approaching literature playfully. A text should be prevented
from persuading us that it can refer to some reality beyond
language. When Burns assures us that his girl-friend is ‘like a
red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June’, we should perhaps
notice how often we have ‘read, read’ this way of talking about
women in the highly sexist discourse of our love-poetry.
Most of the distinctions between men and women that we
take for granted have been written in by our language. Where
other languages draw different lines between the genders, love
functions differently. For instance, in a society where physically
demanding labour with crops and livestock is regarded as
women’s work, cultural tradition may more often have
celebrated a beloved girl’s body for its functional strength and
less often for its decorative delicacy.
The Burns poem also relies upon our language’s hierarchical
ability to tell the difference between flowers and weeds. In a
vocabulary which grouped vegetation according to edibility
rather than appearance, roses might provide less flattering
similes. If we turn a deaf ear to the reminder that a rose’s value
depends on our having been taught to read, we may mistake for