Page 80 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Making a detailed case 79
If you fear that you have still not thought up enough ideas,
try to identify those passages in the text which appeal to you so
much that you would like to be able to cite them. You may
sometimes need to resort to this if you are to discover what you
value in a work, and so stir yourself into conceiving an
argument.
Once you have thus triggered some larger ideas, the process
can thenceforward work in the more usual sequence: knowing
what you mean to convey, you choose the most useful
quotation to clarify and support each point.
A lengthy extract whose significance could be interpreted in
numerous different ways may sometimes be essential. You
could be arguing that a text’s multiplicity of implication often
depends on passages where ambiguities proliferate and the
reader is compelled to think in many different directions at
once. Nevertheless, there will be plenty of other moments
where your essay is advancing just one, fairly simple,
proposition. Then a short quotation which does not provoke
too many other, distractingly irrelevant, ideas is best.
For instance, let us suppose that you have to discuss how far
Tennyson’s In Memoriam evokes the intimacies of family life.
Perhaps you first want to establish a straightforward prima-
facie case by showing that the poem often refers to marriage,
parenthood and, more specifically, babies. Two out of the many
available examples might spring to mind:

(a)
The baby new to earth and sky,
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that ‘this is I:’
But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me’,
And finds ‘I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.’
So rounds he to a separate mind
From whence clear memory may begin,
As through the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined. (XLV, ll. 1–12)