Page 82 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Making a detailed case 81
How far you are justified in abbreviating a quotation depends
on the point which it must clarify. If you had been asked to
‘Discuss In Memoriam’s stanzaic form’, you would be unwise to
offer many quotations which, like (b) above, begin in the middle
of a line. Only whole stanzas could support most of your points.
By contrast, a brief phrase, or even an individual word, can
usefully be quoted in some contexts:
In The Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s choice of terminology
often suggests that the agents of imperialism are not
awesomely, but absurdly, sinister. The Manager is called a
‘devil’ but only a ‘flabby devil’; the brick-maker is a ‘papier-
maché Mephistopheles’. Their ‘backbiting and intriguing’ is
described simply as ‘foolish’.

Here, to quote whole sentences would be ponderous and of
little assistance to the reader in discovering what the essay
means to suggest or why the writer believes it to be true.
Nevertheless, there are limits to how short a quotation can
be made without becoming enfeebled. Here examples follow
each other too rapidly to convince:
In Volpone, Jonson ensures that the language of the theatre is
constantly used by all the characters: ‘plot’, ‘posture’,
‘epilogue’, ‘scene’, ‘mask’ and ‘action’ are examples to be
readily found.
This list would hardly persuade someone whose own memory
suggested that the text did not in fact make ‘constant’ use of
such terminology. The assertion that ‘all the characters’ employ
it is dangerously extreme since ‘all’ is nearly always a strictly
inaccurate word. Here, certainly, one suspects exaggeration.
The most minor characters say so little that they are unlikely
‘all’ to include ‘the language of the theatre’ among their
relatively few words. Moreover, the reader needs to be shown
the context in which a term like ‘plot’ is used before being able
to form a judgement as to whether this is ‘the language of the
theatre’ or merely a reference to some conspiracy.
Since quotations should be positioned where they have a
precise role to play in advancing your argument, the length of
those that you do use must be appropriate. You need to give
your reader as many words from the text as are strictly relevant
to your present point: no more and no less.