I once asked Joseph Pearce, the most well-read man I’ve ever met, how he managed to get such a good education without going to college.
“Kevin,” he replied, “I am well educated BECAUSE I did not go to college.”
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I have the great honor of tutoring a very intelligent 15-year-old home-schooled student. Together we just finished Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which I read allowed to my student, over the course of several days, changing my voice for each character and dramatizing the action the best I could.
And, as Joseph Pearce will tell you, there’s an advantage to a lack of much formal education. Thus, although I did graduate from college (I am ashamed to admit), I’ve learned everything I know on my own – but that everything has never included any of the rich and complex novels of the Brontes. So I was able to approach the Heights as my student did, unprejudiced by any agenda one might pick up at university, either feminist or post-modern or what-have-you.
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| Emily Bronte |
And to my eyes, unfamiliar with the literary criticism that has assessed the novel for the past 170 years, it was clearly a story about forgiveness, about how clinging on to vengeance or jealousy is literally self-destructive, for the climax of the story is a simple moment where two young people forgive one another (Cathy and Hareton), end up in love, and thereby complete an imbalance and an injustice that has lasted for a generation. There was, of course, much more to the tale – complex and three-dimensional characters, social commentary, Gothic romance, a touch of horror, intense passion expressed in a lyrical and spiritual manner – but the point of the story overall is something the critics have apparently been missing all this time.
Joyce Carol Oates gets it, and chides those who don’t.
Who will inherit the earth’s riches? Who will inherit a stable, rather than a self-consuming, love? What endures, for mankind’s sake, is not the violent and narcissistic love of Catherine and Heathcliff (who identify with each other, as fatal twins, rather than individuals), but the easier, more friendly, and altogether more plausible love of the second Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw. How ironic, then, that Brontë’s brilliantly imagined dialectic, arguing for the inevitable exorcism of the old demons of childhood, and professing an attitude toward time and change that might even be called optimistic, should have been, and continues to be, misread.
She goes on to compare (in a brilliant essay that you can read in full) mis-reading critics to censors who judge a book not by its cover but by an offensive word here or there. The mis-readers who see Bronte’s imagination as “narrow”, or who see the novel as extolling the self-indulgent Victorian narcissistic Gothic romance it clearly undercuts, or who see it as a novel that exalts the moral authority of individual longing and rugged independence, (when this is not at all what the novel does) are similar to such small-minded censors.
But it’s understandable that the novel would be misread. The power of its “chick flick” elements, and the atmosphere that is reminiscent of Poe or the darker scenes from Dickens, the stunning love story that keeps the reader enthralled over the long recounted history, and the rebellious and morally ambivalent character of the very masculine Heathcliff, serve to obscure the structure of the story and the overall theme that is being conveyed. Critics, Oates tells us, get caught up in the process of the novel and thereby lose sight of its structure – failing to see the book (I would say) from the Heights, and wuthering thereby in confusion.
And need it be said that this is a typically modern mistake, this misreading of Wuthering Heights? I think this is because of a dichotomy that Oates calls design vs. process. She seems to mean this: PROCESS is the reader or viewer’s involvement in the emotions of the story, the “Dionysian” immersion into the work, while DESIGN is the “Apollonian” overview of the work, by which design the reader or audience sees the meaning that the characters, acts and emotions reveal.
In Dante’s day, design was paramount; with Shakespeare design and process co-exist; the neo-classicists of the 18th Century tended more toward design; the romantics of the 19th Century tended more toward process.
And today nobody believes in design. There is no design in nature, we are told – either human nature or the rest of nature. How, then, can there be design in art? Isn’t reading a novel all about feeling things, just like the faith is supposed to be all about feelings and not about the structure of life, or about insight? Given this modern disregard for appreciating design as an element of art, and given the power and beauty of the process of Bronte’s novel, is it any wonder that the book is not seen as the great work of Christian fiction that it is?
Can’t help wondering if you saw the classic film with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, when he was very young and very handsome.
I avoid academic criticism, for this and other very good reasons.
Read “aloud” not “allowed”. What kind of tutor am I????
To Kevin O’Brien,
The great literary critic F.R.Leavis had a dictum: “In art, intentions [what you call design] count for nothing except where they are realized”. Flannery O’Connor expressed a similar view in adopting Conrad’s phrase that the aim of the artist is “to make you see”. It is in the realization, the success or failure of “making you see”, the “process” if you like, that a work of art differs from an abstract argument.
And what is realized in a work of art, what it makes you see, may not be what the author conciously intended. The classic example is Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. Milton’s declared design in this work was “to justify the ways of God to man”, but readers of genius from Dr Johnson to Blake to T.S.Eliot have found that in fact the devil gets all the best lines, so that what is realized is quite different.
And such is the consensus view over time–by people who are not at all feminists or post-modernists–on “Wuthering Heights”. The general view has been that it is in the charged Romantic relationship of Heathcliff and Cathy that the novel comes alive, that it makes us see and feel, whereas the coda has been generally judged as rather slight and sentimental, if not twee. This, if I remember correctly, is the verdict of the sometime-Inkling Lord David Cecil in his excellent essay on Bronte in “Early Victorian Novelists”.
Incidentally, I am suprised that a Catholic conservative like yourself should have so little time for the great tradition of literary criticism. To see what great minds of the past have made of literary masterpieces, and learn from their insights, seems to me a very proper Burkean undertaking. As for more recent, “post-modern” developments, you do not seem aware that intellectual post-modernism has taken a religious turn. One of the acknowledged leaders of post-modernism at present is Jean-Luc Marion, a Catholic who was a student of Derrida, but also of Henri de Lubac. In literary criticism in particular, the very post-modern Rene Girard, a Catholic and a big fan of Pope Benedict XVI, has recently written an excellent work on Shakespeare’s plays, called “A Theatre of Envy”.
It happens sometimes that commentary can depart from the thesis content of a post (ex., Colin’s post on using language for social engineering), and while that may understandably annoy the post’s writer, it’s kind of interesting to see what arises in that departure.
For Andrew Lomas:
Is it reasonable to assume that because someone is Catholic, conservative or not, he should spend appreciable time reading literary criticism? I can get quite excited about really good criticism, yes, but I don’t spend time reading secondary stuff unless it’s so noteworthy it becomes less “secondary” and more “primary,” and that’s a rare event. Unfortunately, required academic criticism dulls interest faster than a blunt instrument. And the smothering muzzle of political correctness murders more surely than Wordsworth’s condemned “dissection.”
However, Rene Girard has long since transcended the stratum of blandness. I’d be interested in reading this “Theater of Envy” you mention.
Really good criticism is as rare as really good primary works are.
WH makes it to generations of syllabi because of its blatant exposition of all the recognized hallmarks of “romanticism.” It’s such a good showpiece for instruction. Because of that over-use, maybe, genuine appreciation of it as a primary work has all but disappeared. In other words, it’s been “done to death.”
To Dena Hunt,
Thank you for your response. It is certainly true that there is a lot of bad, dull literary criticism about, but then there are a lot of bad, dull novels too! You just have to try to find the good stuff! And it seems I think there is more good literary criticism stuff out there than you do.
The point I was trying to make about Kevin O’Brien’s post on “Wuthering Heights” was that he seemed to be suggesting that those who didn’t recognize its Christian message did not do so because they were post-modernists or feminists. I was trying to point out that there are rheems of critiques by 19th century critics, by Leavisites or New Critics who don’t read the novel quite as he does either. And while they may be wrong, they cannot be wrong simply because they are blinded by contemporary ideas of political correctness.
I am very glad to hear that you know and admire Rene Girard. One of the things that disappoints me slightly about the StAR contributors is how little discussion there is of the works of those really great contemporary French Catholic thinkers: Jean-Luc Marion, Rene Girard, and Remi Brague. Marion is perhaps more for specialist philosophers (I have some academic training in philosophy but most of his work goes over my head), but Girard and Brague write well and wittily on the sort of topics the StAR deals with. They could also help cure the tendency to use “post-modernism” as a simple term of abuse, since to different extents and in different ways they have mastered the terminology and strategies of reading of post-modernism. The silence about them seems even stranger since the English translations of their works are often published by St Augustine’s Press, which I believe also publishes the StAR! I would welcome more discussion of them.
Dear Andrew,
One of the foibles/conventions (choose your term to indicate your opinion) of criticism is the categorization of sundry schools. It’s a handy custom, whichever term one chooses for it, but critics can even argue endlessly sometimes about which school should lay claim to certain criticism. For example, there are those who’d disagree that Girard is “post-modern.”
As for StAR and what it chooses to publish, maybe we should remember that its purpose is the “reclaiming of Catholic culture.” That’s a very broad task they’ve set for themselves, rather than a deep one. You will have noticed that there’s always an essay about music and about art–not just literature, philosophy. Personally, I quite enjoy that broad approach to “culture” and wouldn’t want them to become too esoteric. However, I’m sure they would entertain the idea of publishing something by/about Girard if you requested it; perhaps you should consider submitting something.
To Dena Hunt,
In the long interview with Girard at the end of “To Double Business Bound” he acknowledges the important influence Jacques Derrida has had on his basic ideas (p.220). He also says in praise of Derrida that “The best work of Derrida makes one feel that deeply ingrained intellectual habits are endangered”. So I believe it is beyond doubt that his view of post-modernism is not one of dismissal or simple rejection. But it is true that he re-acts against it on many and important issues, so I take your point.
I don’t want be negative about StAR. Indeed, I was first introduced to Girard and Brague years ago by the interview Robert Asch did with Christophe Geffroy in the magazine, a really excellent piece on French Catholicism that I have referred back to many times (from StAR July/August 2005 Volume 5 No.4). Still, much as I love Belloc and Chesterton, I think Girard is much more likely to connect with younger people today, and young college/university students in particular.
Dear Andrew,
The interview to which you refer (2005) pre-dates my own initial acquaintance with StAR (2006). I think StAR has a method for obtaining earlier issues, and I’d probably do that if I had time, at present.
Meanwhile, however, I want to encourage you again to make a submission, or at least, a suggestion. Faithful StAR readers, as English-speaking readers in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia, are almost always fans of Chesterton and Belloc, but that doesn’t mean they are closed to other voices.
I, for one, would be happy to see some kind of introductory overview of Girard, who has been the source of many otherwise unlooked-for conversions–in quarters no one would have expected.