Nothing is clear in and about and with Heathcliff.
Nothing beyond his skin tone and his gothic and vengeful personality, foreshadowing those of Edmund Dantès and Bruce Wayne.
Heathcliff is a hermetic character, sealed of his own volition in the absolute void, but to whom—as tends to happen with the best mysteries to be solved—you can attribute anything. “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” as Winston Churchill said of Russia, and might Heathcliff have been born of the union of a Siberian father and a prostitute from the taverns along the River Mersey?
Anything is possible.
And for that reason, Sigmund Freud doesn’t hesitate to analyze him mythologically and Karl Marx to consider him the embodiment of the New Man and Albert Camus to take him as the inspiration for his Man in Revolt.
And, oh, the many Heathcliffs in other books by other authors. Pastiches that, in general, tell what Emily Brontë never told (generally what happened in his three missing years and how Heathcliff made his fortune) with titles as imaginative as Return to Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff or Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering Heights. Or mash-ups that make him a wolf man or vampire or zombie or a sex addict (or as a wolf-sex addict vampire-zombie man). Or as an unsurpassable and insatiable lover who enjoys innovative positions and is able to prolong his pleasure beyond even the tantric (tricks learned, perhaps, during his absence abroad). Or novelized biographies of the Brontës. Or even detective novels in which he lives and dies to find and hold onto the manuscript of Emily Brontë’s second novel that in the end Charlotte Brontë didn’t destroy but that … Or to reencounter him, more or less unconsciously, under other names like Jay “Gatz” Gatsby or Lázló “English Patient” Almásy. (And Penelope finds it amusing that the protagonists of the film adaptation of that last novel, The English Patient, have since been reunited in a version of Wuthering Heights that, though it costs Penelope to admit it, wasn’t all that bad and at least, for once, didn’t overlook the detail of telling the plot of Emily Brontë’s novel in its entirety; though Wuthering Heights, as in the majority of adaptations, is depicted there, architecturally, more like a photogenic haunted mansion than like the rather dilapidated and possessed estate described in the novel.) In any case, no derivative is on a level with the original and no antecedent, not even that Greco-Shakespearean, is, for Penelope on a level with her Heathcliff. With the Heathcliff whom she read for the first time when she was a girl after seeing him on television. For Penelope, Heathcliff is like a black hole that devours and expels all light; like an expelled and fallen Luciferian angel; like a devil ascending to reconquer the heavens only believing in thunder and lightning, declaiming things like “I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain.” Heathcliff forgives no one and loves no one (not even his wife Isabella or his son Linton, whom he tortures with care and devotion) other than his completely irreal idea of the dead Catherine Earnshaw, of his Cathy. His rage, at last, near his end, is extinguished with an almost existentialist sigh and with a sincere confession to his housekeeper Nelly Dean, always all ears and blabbing mouth: “It is a poor conclusion, is it not … an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking: I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing. Nelly, there is a strange change approaching—I’m in its shadow at present—I take so little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to eat and drink … The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her! … I have neither a fear, nor a presentiment, nor a hope of death—Why should I? With my hard constitution, and temperate mode of living, and unperilous occupations, I ought to, and probably shall remain above ground, till there is scarcely a black hair on my head—And yet I cannot continue in this condition!—I have to remind myself to breathe—almost remind my heart to beat! And it is like bending back a stiff spring … it is by compulsion, that I do the slightest act, not prompted by one thought, and by compulsion, that I notice anything alive or dead, which is not associated with one universal idea … I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. They have yearned toward it so long, and so unwaveringly, that I’m convinced it will be reached—and soon—because it has devoured my existence—I am swallowed in the anticipation of its fulfilment. My confessions have not relieved me—but, they may account for some otherwise unaccountable phases of humour which I show. O, God! It is a long fight, I wish it were over!”
And the problem with wishes is that sometimes they come true, but, a few mornings later, Heathcliff doesn’t seem all that upset being discovered by Nelly Dean, in his rain-soaked bed, the window open, and his hand resting on the windowsill, as if waiting to be held by another hand. There is the master, loveless, but at last at peace, “laid on his back. His eyes met mine so keen, so fierce, I started; and then he seemed to smile … I hasped the window; I combed his black long hair from his forehead; I tried to close his eyes—to extinguish, if possible, that frightful, lifelike gaze of exultation, before anyone else beheld it. They would not shut—they seemed to sneer at my attempts, and his parted lips, and sharp, white teeth sneered too! Taken with another fit of cowardice, I cried for Joseph. Joseph shuffled up, and made a noise, but resolutely refused to meddle with him. ‘Th’ divil’s harried off his soul,’ he cried, ‘and he muh hev his carcass intuh t’ bargain, for ow’t Aw care! Ech! what a wicked un he looks girnning at death!’”
Then, a few hours later, a boy claims to have seen the ghost of “Heathcliff, and a woman,” among the crags, revealing themselves to mortals and making them realize how lucky they are, because, as someone once sang in a song Penelope once heard, “If you have ghosts then you have everything.”
And no, it’s not true: there’s nobody like Heathcliff among the Karmas; but Penelope can’t help but connect the man’s fits of rage and despotism to the dictatorial character of Mamagrandma (here another sex change, but male to female) reigning over the fates of her entire clan ever since the death/disappearance of Papagrandpa of whom nobody speaks. Mamagrandma like the woman who takes up arms and bites bullets; playing chess with the pieces of her family on the board of Mount Karma and always winning; getting her way and deciding who gets in and who’s left out and who’ll be expelled never to return. With Mamagrandma on the command bridge and at the helm and with her thumb always hovering over the red button, it’s not that nobody does what they want and only does what Mamagrandma wants. No, it’s something far more disturbing: Mamagrandma makes you do what she wants you to do while simultaneously convincing you you’re doing exactly what you want to do. Mamagrandma has the gift of all great political dictators and the most powerful religious leaders. That of, in her name and image, making you march toward the conquest of the Promised Land, without giving it a second thought, drink that cup of poison in order to ascend to that comet that’ll take you back to Heaven. The difference is that Heaven and the Promised Land are already at and on Mount Karma. And if you go, you’ll soon return asking, please, that they let you back in, like the spectral Cathy, lost and roaming the moors, asking Lockwood, “Let me in—let me in!”
Once, before disappearing from the “literary circuit,” on the only tour she ever did, in New York and for one of those festivals, Penelope ended up sharing a roundtable with an important writer, prestigious, serious. She a
ssumes someone thought it a good joke: bring together the éminence grise (but really cool and millennial and de luxe countercultural) with the colorful superstar of the youth who were suddenly reading as if possessed, but reading only her. The evening didn’t begin very well (the huge auditorium full to overflowing was composed of an audience eight to two in her favor); but the writer, no doubt accustomed to such things, was kind to her, and told her when he’d started writing “it didn’t occur to anybody you should go out on tour to appear and present and to sign and to get to know your readers so they can know you. You wrote and that was it. The end. The book. Now, the book is almost what matters least … Now, writing seems to be merely the prologue and they want you to be like a politician or a preacher and for you to offer an opinion about everything and I wonder if we aren’t betraying the basic idea of the whole thing: the mystery of creating an object that contains all the explanations for those individuals who know how to read them on their own, without needing us to go around from one auditorium to the next pointing them out, ringing our little bells, like leprous visionaries of the end of the world … And, seeing ourselves fade away, so much easier and quicker when we’re judged and condemned. Because it’s much easier to read a writer than a piece of writing, right?” And the writer cleverly suggested to her that, to avoid falling into clichés, he read something of hers and she read something of his. She can’t remember what he read of hers (maybe a fragment where a rocketless astronaut wanders across the sands of the Sonora Desert, maybe that invocation of the spirit of Stella D’Or); but she remembers perfectly what she read of his. And that she read it in a faltering voice, more broken than fragile, wondering how and why it was the writer had ended up choosing precisely those brutal and illuminating pages for her to read. Something about the family as “the cradle of the disinformation of the world” and that there must be something in the idea of the family that generates constant error. Something that is due perhaps to the excessive closeness and the heat of being near one another, and thus that the family process was always working toward being sealed off and isolated from the outside world. Something about how that was why the strongest families with the tightest bonds tend to be produced in less developed societies, where not knowing, or, even better, not wanting to know or acknowledge, becomes a weapon of survival. Something about the family as a sanctuary where magic and superstition blend together like clan orthodoxy. And that the family, as an entity, tends to be more powerful in places where reality is more powerfully misinterpreted. And Penelope read that and thought, “This man is a sage.” Penelope read that and said to herself that yes, that just so, that exactly: that the Karmas were the least bookish people she’d ever known. The highest concentration of nonreaders per square meter; creatures that asked themselves and asked you if you were okay or bored or depressed anytime they saw you reading, by yourself. But, also—as her own damned and thieving and bad brother tested and verified—the Karmas as the easiest creatures to introduce as characters in any book. They are so classic and nineteenth-century in their depths and their forms and Penelope envies them so much for that. Family as subject is one of the two pillars of the novelistic genre. The other pillar is the solitary journey. And the Karmas are always traveling en masse away from and toward themselves, asking to be let in without ever leaving, so alone on the inside, so accompanied on the outside.
And Penelope traveled toward them. And it was one of those journeys some would designate a bad trip, others an odyssey, and everyone as unforgettable.
And it’s known that the nature of memories with respect to persistence is good or bad or more or less ambiguous.
† Catherine Earnshaw Linton / The dead woman calling outside the windowpanes to be let in. Again, forever: “Let me in—let me in!” And, before, alive and capering about, impassioned romantic temperament, with a tendency to run across the moors with the lower classes without that, when the time comes, keeping her from also running off toward a well-to-do marriage. Thus, Catherine Earnshaw the dreamer for whom Heathcliff turns into the nightmare of all those around him and the Catherine Earnshaw who marries Edgar Linton, young sir and master of Thrushcross Grange, without really knowing what she’s getting into. Like when someone goes swimming in the sea with a hangover and gets swept out too far by the undertow. And Penelope always liked that Edgar Linton succumbed to her charms after Catherine Earnshaw gave him a good ear-boxing. Which, Penelope thinks, no doubt establishes a pattern of behavior for what will be their brief but intense married life. Edgar Linton idolizes Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Earnshaw is at her best when she’s being idolized. As tends to happen with such specimens, on her deathbed, with Edgar Linton at her side, the volatile Catherine Earnshaw Linton only recalls the idyllic moments of her youth with Heathcliff, while her husband looks on, thinking he’d much rather move to a Jane Austen novel. One of those novels the Brontë sisters didn’t like at all and in which there was nothing they cared for besides their revolutionary use of free indirect style and masterful dialogue. Novels the Brontë sisters looked down on, considering them too polite and lacking passion. Novels whose heroines—unlike the high-velocity and vertiginous and marathonic and careening Catherine Earnshaw—are, merely, “good walkers,” moving from one house to another across landscapes of meadows and hedges, perfectly maintained by an army of gardeners, concerned with trees if and only if they’re of the family-tree variety, appraising the branches of possible marriages and, most important of all, trimming the hedges of perfect matrimonies to suit their needs.
And, yes, there’s something of Catherine Earnshaw in Hiriz, Maxi’s sister and Penelope’s sister-in-law; but there’s a lot more of Emma Woodhouse. Hiriz, capricious and calculating, but exceedingly preoccupied that nobody miss out on her marvelous person, someone she loves so much and who, if she loves herself so much, there must be a reason, deserves to be so beloved by so many.
† Nelly Dean / If she had lived during the Cold War, Nelly Dean would’ve been the greatest double agent ever, Penelope thinks. She also knows how to tell a good story, because Nelly Dean is a sharp-eyed voyeur and powerful-eared listener. Penelope read, once, in one of the best pastiches of Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean communicating one last time with Lockwood. Sending him a letter and summoning him so she can, yes and for real this time, tell him everything she never told him, everything she left out. And it wasn’t bad as a novel, but Penelope didn’t like it as a gesture: the whole pointing out inconsistencies in the plot of Wuthering Heights, when actually those inconsistencies are not defects. No. They are the dynamic constants of a race apart, of beings not exactly human, castaways on dry and lonely land. Like Mount Karma. Everyone is a little bit Nelly Dean on Mount Karma. Everyone talks among themselves about everyone else, but never asks each other direct questions face to face. They all make sound but never converse. Everyone knows everything about everyone, but never via a straight line and from the mouth of the one who supposedly knows it all. Everyone interprets and theorizes and makes claims, but never asks. They whisper, they gossip, they talk about everyone else to fill up that silence that, if left empty, others would fill talking about them. And, yes, they would say really bad things. And it doesn’t surprise Penelope that the always false and supposedly well-meaning Charlotte Brontë rescues Nelly Dean from all the novel’s monsters as “a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity.” Right, of course, whatever you say, Charlotte …
† Lockwood / Just a first name, like Heathcliff. Penelope’s favorite; because Lockwood is the traveler who arrives one stormy night and to whom a story is told. Don’t forget, always keep in mind: Wuthering Heights is not a novel that “happens,” but the more-than-subjective tale of a woman put into writing in the diary of someone who is passing through and doesn’t seem in full possession of his faculties. True, Lockwood says he listens and takes detailed notes. But even still, he doesn’t seem like someone to be trusted in days when it didn’t occur to lie in writing, because it was much better and easier to lie with a li
ving voice. So, the written word is indisputable and the voice dubious. And Wuthering Heights is voices made written words. In this sense—Penelope thinks that her bad brother would think—Lockwood is the missing link between faithful narrator and the unreliable narrator of modernism à la Henry James and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford and anticipating Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby. To which Penelope would respond that The Great Gatsby is inspired by Wuthering Heights: the arrival of a new neighbor, a romantic obsession, a farewell in a cemetery and … But Lockwood is an even more fragile person than Carraway. To begin with, Lockwood seems to have a somewhat strange notion of romance, and he confides without giving much detail that he has just left behind an unrequited love at a seaside resort. And he says he always feels “out of place” and always has the impulse to shrink “icily into myself, like a snail” faced with any uncomfortable situation. Which doesn’t prevent the oddity, in the first pages, when confronting the specter of Catherine Earnshaw Linton or whatever it is, Lockwood didn’t hesitate and “pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.” Even still, supposedly terrified, Lockwood (perhaps avenging himself on the memory of that young woman who ignored him on the seaside) kept at hurting that arm, so pale as to be transparent, on the sharp edges protruding from that windowsill, where all those names had been carved into the wood as the years passed and feelings changed: Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, Catherine Linton. Also, at some point, the naïve Lockwood comes to believe he has some kind of chance with the young daughter of Catherine Earnshaw, who can’t stop looking at him or ignoring him with something quite akin to disgust and disdain. Lockwood is outside reality, yes, and at a certain point, frozen and terrible, it dawns on Penelope: “Lockwood, c’est moi,” she says to herself and hears herself and thinks that, like in her own, there’s something secret and guilty in Lockwood’s past. Something even Emily Brontë doesn’t know because Emily Brontë doesn’t want it to be known.
The Dreamed Part Page 24