Page 47 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

46 How to write critical essays
will depend on the expert’s own convictions as to what a
culture should create or conserve.
The converse process by which certain emphases and
interpretations are censored is potentially even more costly. Of
course, a politically radical interpretation of Paradise Lost or
The Prelude need not be explicitly forbidden as wickedly
subversive. The scholar’s approach can just bypass it as
ignorantly tangential: a cul-de-sac fit only for the ill-informed
or the simple-minded. The English Civil War may be briefly
acknowledged as contemporary with Milton’s epic. The French
Revolution may be mentioned as close in time to Wordsworth’s
verse autobiography. Yet, in a guide to the origins of Paradise
Lost, Virgil and Dante might still be given overwhelmingly
more space than contemporary politics. An account of how The
Prelude discovered its substance and style may devote far more
pages to Wordsworth’s study of earlier poets (particularly
Milton himself, as it happens) than to his experience of
revolution in Paris or his later fears that England itself might
become unrecognizably democratic.
Literary history can in fact reduce itself to a mere history of
literature, as if the history of classes and nations had developed
in some wholly separate world. The influence of author upon
author may leave little room for the effect of major events upon
texts. It may leave none at all for the production or prevention
of major events by texts themselves.
You may think that texts simply do not have that kind of
power; you may think that they mirror, rather than create, the
beliefs which determine behaviour. Certainly, to seem
comprehensible to their contemporary readers, texts do have to
work within a given vocabulary. The parameters of that
vocabulary do perhaps reflect the prevailing political climate. A
text’s language must acknowledge those distinctions between
the meaningfully important and the meaninglessly trivial which
are accepted by the dominant culture. Nevertheless, within
these limits, an energetic work of literature may still make itself
sufficient room for manoeuvre to redefine its readers’
assumptions about what is conceivable or desirable. ‘Poets’, as
Shelley argues in his preface to Prometheus Unbound, ‘are in
one sense the creations and in another the creators of their age’.
So, too, are scholars and critics. Their preferences among
texts can be both cause and effect of what modern society