Reading: Wuthering Heights (Unreliable Narrators)
First off, there's something like twenty different characters named Cathy in this novel. There are also Hindens and Harentons and Earnshaws -- all of which sound a little bit alike enough to require a handy cheat-sheet while reading. If those seventeen poor seventeen Aurelianos had only found a way to hide out in Wuthering Heights, they might have stood a better chance. Or maybe not. I don't know when the rage for Latino gardeners started, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the late 1700s.
Wuthering Heights is a very irritating book. That's not to say it isn't good, or that it isn't worth your time reading it. But if you read books because you like meeting people you've never met before, you should know up front that there isn't a single worthwhile character in this novel.
Everyone sucks.
This is my second go-through, and I'm near the midpoint. The first time I read it, it was because so many posters at my much-beloved, but sadly no-more, Fametracker message boards were really up in arms about it. Some loved it passionately; others wanted to burn all copies of the book and salt the ground where they lay.
I think part of the problem is teenaged girls. They're usually the problem. In this case, it's the way they've over-romanticized the primary relationship of the novel, that between Heathcliff and Cathy. (A propos of nothing except how awesome YouTube.com is, I'm watching the video for Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, where Bonnie Tyler is trapped in an evil sexy boys' school and she's trying to escape and I keep telling her to "Run, Bonnie! Run!" But the boys keep doing things like throwing doves at her or wearing swim goggles and then, out of nowhere -- NINJAS. And then there's some sort of kickboxing scene with barbarians? The hell? And then the Satan's Choir from that one Pat Benatar video shows up, the one where she's trapped in that room of shredded paper towels with her band, and there's that one guy who looks like the supposedly sexy younger brother from "Wings" but really, I never saw it, and then he did that awful TV version of The Shining and there was that ugly-assed kid, but in this video he's the drummer or something, only it really isn't that guy, it's just some guy who looks like him, and there aren't any drums in this shredded fabric filled room so he just sort of beats the air around him with his drum sticks and Pat Benatar claps along wearing the lime green gloves of a dead woman but then she ends up in a magic volcano with that creepy kids choir and by the way Pat Benatar? Gorgeous. But back to Bonnie Tyler. After they're unable to stop her with interpretive dance, the sexy evil boys' school boys try to attack Bonnie with their glowing bright eyes and then at the end, it turns out she's the sort-of lesbian school master of the boys' school, only when she's shaking everyone's hand, one of the glowing eyed boys is there, and this catches Bonnie by surprise. Verily I say unto you all, once upon a time there was the '80s. And they were fucking awesome.)
Heathcliff and Cathy have this unfair reputation of romantic love in the mushy, you're-my-soul-mate kinda way rather than in the true sense of romantic which is more along the lines of that frightened feeling one gets sometimes when listening to Beethoven, because the music is wild and unpredictable and a little scary sometimes in the way that Kate Bush makes me anxious. She's sing and it's beautiful, but you know that at any moment it's going to get kinda screachy.
If Heathcliff and Cathy aren't True Love Forever, what are they? I think that Emily Brontë's showing us what toxic, insular, incestuous love looks like. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange seem to be the only two households in existence, and people marry and intermarry with the frequency of breathing. I want to believe that if Emily Brontë could only see the way stupid 15 year-old boys and girls have elevated her monsters Heathcliff and Cathy she'd wanna smacka bitch or something.
Dude, I'd totally wear a t-shirt that said "15-year-olds make Emily Brontë wanna smack a bitch." It's urban street cred with just a hint of post-grad doctoral thesis.
(Okay, but just now I saw the video for Love is a Battlefield and guys! Guys! Have you seen it? Like, back when you were 12 and it was 1983? Because if you haven't, or if you've forgotten, you totally have to treat yourself right now. It opens with Pat Benatar as a hooker and then she's on a bus and you don't know if she's going to somewhere or coming back from somewhere, but what you do know is that Pat is tired. And then she's a hooker and then she's on the bus and then it's hooker and bus and hooker and bus until we find out that Pat totally ran away from home in a fit of teenaged rage and singing though she's really what? 30? And as her dad tells her she can never come back, she waves up to her brother who might be disabled or he has cancer because he's never downstairs with the family in any of his scenes; he either stares forlornly out the window or reads the letters Pat sends home on his bed before contemplating his own life as a high-priced call girl. So anyway, after being jostled by two gay men on an escalator, Pat winds up at this danceteria run by a skeevy Latino. But don't feel too bad for Pat because she's totally making friends and apparently being a hooker means all you have to do is dance. So sometimes she does, but then this one time she totally doesn't have time for that nonsense and she lounges in these Stevie Nicks cast-offs because she didn't have time to pack her good hooker clothes before leaving home. Poor Pat. Anyway, while she's lounging and playing with her frayed fringe, the skeevy Latino -- because, as you know, all pimps are skeevy Latino because if the '80s taught us nothing they at least taught us that stereotypes are only bad if you're a cripple -- has an altercation with this other dancewhore, only you know it's the skeevy Latino's fault because Pat jumps up, all in his grill, and then she and the other hookers form a ring around the skeevy Latino and they start the Hooker Shimmy of Empowerment and Social Justice for Sex Workers. And it totally works; she's like Norma Rae for the string-top and teased hair set. The hookers dance around him, and then once they've taught him an Important Lesson, they all dance out of the dance place and into the street, where they all hug and congratulate themselves for overcoming adversity and achieving never-before-seen heights with mousse. From here, I don't know where the other girls go. Probably to business school or community college. I don't know that I was able to get across the true awesomeness of this video in mere words; you'll probably just need to watch the video.)
(And that's the problem with this entry. I keep wanting to write about Wuthering Heights and the fallacy of the unreliable narrator -- I don't think they exist as much as post-modern students of literature want them to; I think you can have an unreliable narrator, but you can't have an unreliable writer or the novel just doesn't work -- but I keep getting sidetracked because YouTube.com is the shit and whaddaya know, there's a ton of Kate Bush videos out there to watch. I'll try writing again later.)
Wuthering Heights is a very irritating book. That's not to say it isn't good, or that it isn't worth your time reading it. But if you read books because you like meeting people you've never met before, you should know up front that there isn't a single worthwhile character in this novel.
Everyone sucks.
This is my second go-through, and I'm near the midpoint. The first time I read it, it was because so many posters at my much-beloved, but sadly no-more, Fametracker message boards were really up in arms about it. Some loved it passionately; others wanted to burn all copies of the book and salt the ground where they lay.
I think part of the problem is teenaged girls. They're usually the problem. In this case, it's the way they've over-romanticized the primary relationship of the novel, that between Heathcliff and Cathy. (A propos of nothing except how awesome YouTube.com is, I'm watching the video for Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, where Bonnie Tyler is trapped in an evil sexy boys' school and she's trying to escape and I keep telling her to "Run, Bonnie! Run!" But the boys keep doing things like throwing doves at her or wearing swim goggles and then, out of nowhere -- NINJAS. And then there's some sort of kickboxing scene with barbarians? The hell? And then the Satan's Choir from that one Pat Benatar video shows up, the one where she's trapped in that room of shredded paper towels with her band, and there's that one guy who looks like the supposedly sexy younger brother from "Wings" but really, I never saw it, and then he did that awful TV version of The Shining and there was that ugly-assed kid, but in this video he's the drummer or something, only it really isn't that guy, it's just some guy who looks like him, and there aren't any drums in this shredded fabric filled room so he just sort of beats the air around him with his drum sticks and Pat Benatar claps along wearing the lime green gloves of a dead woman but then she ends up in a magic volcano with that creepy kids choir and by the way Pat Benatar? Gorgeous. But back to Bonnie Tyler. After they're unable to stop her with interpretive dance, the sexy evil boys' school boys try to attack Bonnie with their glowing bright eyes and then at the end, it turns out she's the sort-of lesbian school master of the boys' school, only when she's shaking everyone's hand, one of the glowing eyed boys is there, and this catches Bonnie by surprise. Verily I say unto you all, once upon a time there was the '80s. And they were fucking awesome.)
Heathcliff and Cathy have this unfair reputation of romantic love in the mushy, you're-my-soul-mate kinda way rather than in the true sense of romantic which is more along the lines of that frightened feeling one gets sometimes when listening to Beethoven, because the music is wild and unpredictable and a little scary sometimes in the way that Kate Bush makes me anxious. She's sing and it's beautiful, but you know that at any moment it's going to get kinda screachy.
If Heathcliff and Cathy aren't True Love Forever, what are they? I think that Emily Brontë's showing us what toxic, insular, incestuous love looks like. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange seem to be the only two households in existence, and people marry and intermarry with the frequency of breathing. I want to believe that if Emily Brontë could only see the way stupid 15 year-old boys and girls have elevated her monsters Heathcliff and Cathy she'd wanna smacka bitch or something.
Dude, I'd totally wear a t-shirt that said "15-year-olds make Emily Brontë wanna smack a bitch." It's urban street cred with just a hint of post-grad doctoral thesis.
(Okay, but just now I saw the video for Love is a Battlefield and guys! Guys! Have you seen it? Like, back when you were 12 and it was 1983? Because if you haven't, or if you've forgotten, you totally have to treat yourself right now. It opens with Pat Benatar as a hooker and then she's on a bus and you don't know if she's going to somewhere or coming back from somewhere, but what you do know is that Pat is tired. And then she's a hooker and then she's on the bus and then it's hooker and bus and hooker and bus until we find out that Pat totally ran away from home in a fit of teenaged rage and singing though she's really what? 30? And as her dad tells her she can never come back, she waves up to her brother who might be disabled or he has cancer because he's never downstairs with the family in any of his scenes; he either stares forlornly out the window or reads the letters Pat sends home on his bed before contemplating his own life as a high-priced call girl. So anyway, after being jostled by two gay men on an escalator, Pat winds up at this danceteria run by a skeevy Latino. But don't feel too bad for Pat because she's totally making friends and apparently being a hooker means all you have to do is dance. So sometimes she does, but then this one time she totally doesn't have time for that nonsense and she lounges in these Stevie Nicks cast-offs because she didn't have time to pack her good hooker clothes before leaving home. Poor Pat. Anyway, while she's lounging and playing with her frayed fringe, the skeevy Latino -- because, as you know, all pimps are skeevy Latino because if the '80s taught us nothing they at least taught us that stereotypes are only bad if you're a cripple -- has an altercation with this other dancewhore, only you know it's the skeevy Latino's fault because Pat jumps up, all in his grill, and then she and the other hookers form a ring around the skeevy Latino and they start the Hooker Shimmy of Empowerment and Social Justice for Sex Workers. And it totally works; she's like Norma Rae for the string-top and teased hair set. The hookers dance around him, and then once they've taught him an Important Lesson, they all dance out of the dance place and into the street, where they all hug and congratulate themselves for overcoming adversity and achieving never-before-seen heights with mousse. From here, I don't know where the other girls go. Probably to business school or community college. I don't know that I was able to get across the true awesomeness of this video in mere words; you'll probably just need to watch the video.)
(And that's the problem with this entry. I keep wanting to write about Wuthering Heights and the fallacy of the unreliable narrator -- I don't think they exist as much as post-modern students of literature want them to; I think you can have an unreliable narrator, but you can't have an unreliable writer or the novel just doesn't work -- but I keep getting sidetracked because YouTube.com is the shit and whaddaya know, there's a ton of Kate Bush videos out there to watch. I'll try writing again later.)
posted by Mike at 10:10 AM
2 Comments:
I had to read Wuthering Heights twice in one school year and by the middle of the second reading, I was rooting for the moor. Heathcliff, Cathy and all of their relatives and offspring deserve to die out via their wacky inbreeding.
How I wish I'd been paying attention these past forty years, first to "Wuthering Heights"--as it happens, it was a 17-year-old girl who told me that I absolutely *had* to read it, but I never did--and then to Pat Benatar and her ilk! I'd be getting so much more out of this.
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