Wuthering Heights, Vampires, Handbooks, and Citizen Science

Heathcliff as vampire wannabe? Why didn't I think of that? Fortunately others have.

Over at The Literature Network, kev67 asked (in Nov 2012):

I was just wondering whether Wuthering Heights was some sort of proto-vampire book when in the last chapter Nelly herself wonders whether Heathcliff is a ghoul or a vampire. I was surprised as I did not think vampires had been discovered till later. I have not watched any of the Twilight films (and I don't intend to neither) but it struck me there were some similarities between Wuthering Heights, Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other vampire films and television series. Heathcliff can stand bright sunlight; bibles, wooden crosses, garlic and holy water might annoy him but would not be sufficient to ward him off; and although driving a wooden stake through his heart would kill him, so would other methods of execution. However, there are some similarities: Heathcliff is evil (like most vampires). Heathcliff and Catherine continue to walk the Earth after death and do not find rest. Heathcliff has no hope of salvation, neither does he want it. Heathcliff's idea of heaven is close to torment. Heathcliff's love for Catherine is eternal (rather like some vampire love stories). Heathcliff's love for Catherine is rather chaste. Heathcliff is tall, strong, rather dark with long, black hair. Heathcliff forms one point of a love triangle with Catherine as the apex (a bit like Twilight I believe).

The good folks at Shmoop – "We speak student" – are on the case. Here's the lead to their Wuthering Heights material:

Edward and Bella, meet Heathcliff and Catherine.

That's right: before The Walking Dead, Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Vampire Diaries, there was Wuthering Heights.

At first glance, Heathcliff may not resemble the vampires that you've grown to know and love (or hate), but he's got a lot more going for him than most of 'em. Just saying.

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, revolves around the passionate and destructive love between its two central characters, Emily Brontë's headstrong and beautiful Catherine Earnshaw and her tall, dark, handsome, and brooding hero/devil, Heathcliff.

Forget the romantic candlelit dinners, the wine, and the roses. Catherine and Heathcliff's love exists on an entirely different plane: one that involves ghosts, corpses, the communion (or possession) of souls, and revenge. And, speaking of revenge, Heathcliff—who harbors more than one grudge against his adoptive family, the love of his life, and his neighbors—manages to make every revenge drama look like kid's play.

And to seal the deal, "Reading Wuthering Heights gives you bragging rights over all your friends who think that the whole vampire thing started with Buffy. Suckas."

* * * * *

I'm thinking a couple of things.

First, the connection is valid. I assume that proper scholarly work has been done on this connection, tracing themes and connections, that sort of thing. If not, get on it, someone!

Second, I'm guessing that these two sites, Shmoop, and The Literature Network, are aimed at high school students and lower level undergraduates and community college students (and their teachers). And we've got Cliff's Notes and Spark Notes and others serving the same market. They all have basic stuff about literary texts, mostly canonical ones.

How much of the material at these sites could be consolidated into consensus handbooks of materials about these texts? These sites are commercial enterprizes and so, I assume, would be reluctant to give up their stuff to an open-access resource. But, they're already giving their stuff away on the net. Why don't they all draw on the same body of standard material, material that furthermore has been vetted by scholars – assuming you can find first-rate scholars willing to do this. These sites would also be useful for the casebook industry.

I've been calling for handbooks for awhile. My point is that we've got the seeds of that already on the net.

Third, this leads us to citizen science. There's lots of 'fan'-created stuff on the web. Some of high quality. This Wuthering Heights site, by Paul Thompson, is excellent. I found it when looking for a timeline of events in the story. Thompson's done quite a bit of sleuthing on this. There's handbook quality material lurking here.

But how do we put it all together? And just who is "we"? Does literary academia want to commit proud suicide or does it want to enter the 21st century and engage the large population of people who are interested in literature (though they might not give a crap about high theory)?

Living Handbook of Narratology

Published on line by the Hamburg University Press, HERE.

The living handbook of narratology (LHN) is based on the Handbook of Narratology, first published by Walter de Gruyter in 2009. As an open access publication, it makes available all of the 32 articles contained in the original print version—and more: the LHN offers the additional functionality of electronic publishing including full text search facility, one-click-export of reference data and digital humanities tools for text analysis.

The LHN continuously expands its original content base by adding new articles on concepts and theories fundamental to narratology and to the study of narrative in general. The LHN is published in a WiKi system and offers narratologists registered to do so the opportunity to comment on existing articles, suggest additions or corrections and submit new articles to the editors.

Description 2: The Primacy of the Text

I've uploaded another working paper to my SSRN site. As this post's title indicates, it's about description. Here's the link. I've appended the abstract and the introduction to the collection.

Abstract: These notes consist of five posts discussing the description of literary texts and films and five appendices containing tables used in describing to manga texts (Lost World, Metropolis) and two films (Sita Sings the Blues, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence). The posts make the point that the point of description is to let the texts speak for themselves. Further, it is through descriptions that the texts enter intellectual discourse.

Introduction: Constructing Descriptions

This collection of posts about description is a bit different from my first collection, Description as Intellectual Craft in the Study of Literature. Those posts leaned toward the abstract and theoretical first ended with a nod to Mark Changizi’s search for the teleome, a catalogue of goals for behavioral systems. I argued that the purpose of works of art was to create a virtual coupling between individuals so that, in a sense, they became individual facets of a distributed him. In THAT context a description of a literary text, or a film, becomes something like the description and specifications for, say, an interface between two computer systems. That description doesn’t tell you how the computers work or what large tasks they’ll be performing through the interface; but it tells you how they connect.

The posts in this collection tend toward the practical, though they don’t begin that way. I end with four appendices, each a working descriptive document concerning a specific text, two manga, and two films.

Some example descriptions: two poems, a novella, two manga texts, and two films

Having called for more and more systematic description of literary texts, just what do I have in mind? A variety of things, of course, a variety of things.

First I want to mention work I’ve done on canonical texts of English literature, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” and Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness. Then I want to look a tables I developed in analyzing pop cultural materials, two manga by Osamu Tezuka, and two animated feature films, Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley, and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence by Mamoru Oshii. I end by suggesting that the future of research in literature and film depends on setting up online collaboratories where people can work on building up a body of descriptive materials for both canonical and non-canonical texts.

Two Poems

One thing in particular, is an account of parts, and parts within parts. At the sentence level linguists call this constituent structure.

Poems often consist of multiple stanzas. Those divisions are obvious as they are marked in the text by a line break. Poems with several to many stanzas, especially long narrative poems, will often have stanzas grouped into larger units, which may or may not be explicitly grouped into larger units. And stanzas generally have internal grouping as well. My papers on “Kubla Khan” (pp. 9-39) and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (pp. 31-35, pp. 41-49) undertake this kind of analysis; the “Kubla Khan” paper is especially detailed.

A Novella

My working papers on Heart of Darkness contain a great deal of descriptive work of various kinds, though it is not always demarcated from more speculative and interpretive comments. Paragraph Length in Heart of Darkness: Some Basic Numbers and Charts is pure description of a fairly simple kind, as is Periodicity in Heart of Darkness: A Working Paper. I suppose, since I used a computer to compile the counts in those papers, I could even claim them for digital humanities, though that’s secondary. In The Nexus in Heart of Darkness: A Working Paper I comment in the content of a single paragraph in the text; it’s also the longest paragraph and it’s a bit after the middle. The commentary is informal, and perhaps a bit interpretive in that I single out certain things and make connections with other sections of the text; but I do not seek to infer any hidden meanings here. Much of the work in those three papers is also in Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, and there is other descriptive work as well, but I would call particular attention to the postscript, where I discuss a hypothetical handbook for Heart of Darkness. Much of such a handbook would be devoted to description.

Description as Intellectual Craft in the Study of Literature

Here's another collection of posts, this time on description. You can download the PDF HERE. The abstract and an introduction are below.

Abstract: This is a series of notes in which I argue that better descriptive methods are a necessary precondition for more sophisticated and objective literary criticism. Description, though it does not give unmediated access to texts, requires methods for objectifying texts, methods which must be discovered in the doing. By way of comparison I discuss the role of description in biology and I discuss the use of images and diagrams as descriptive devices. Lévi-Strauss on myth and Franco Moretti on distant reading, though quite different, are up to the same thing: objectification.

Introduction: Description Dawns on Me

Ever since my undergraduate days I have considered myself to be a theorist; I want to know how things work; I want to explain them. It is only in the past fifteen years or so that I have realized the importance of description in my work, and yet it has been important from the beginning.

My Master’s Thesis on “Kubla Khan” was fundamentally an act of description. But I didn’t see it that way, nor could I have done so. Description simply wasn’t high on the intellectual agenda back in those days, the late 60s and early 70s.

But theory was. As I explain in the post, Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan”, I started out with the intention of cobbling together bits and pieces of semiotics, phenomenology, developmental psychology, linguistics, and whatnot to create the kind of theory that poem required. I ended up describing structural patterns in the poem unlike any I’d seen other critics describe, not only in that poem, but in ANY poem. But then “Kubla Khan” is a poem like no other, no?

In the Fall of 1973 I set off to graduate school in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo where I studied cognitive theory with David Hays in the Linguistics Department. I wrote papers on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Wuthering Heights, and “The Cat and the Moon,” all of which had strong descriptive elements, though it was always theory that was uppermost in my mind, except for my paper on “The Cat and the Moon,” which was heavily descriptive.

The Coming of Cognitivism

It wasn’t until long after I’d left graduate school and published a number of papers on a variety of topics that I came to focus on the descriptive aspect of my work in literary criticism. This happened in the mid-1990s when I noticed that: A) literary critics were at long last beginning to turn to the cognitive sciences, but that B) they knew nothing of the work I’d done and published during the 1970s and 1980s, and C) the work that they were doing was nothing like what I’d done.

HD Postscript: Toward a Heart of Darkness Handbook

Now for something different.

For some time now I’ve been thinking about the need for ‘handbook level’ information about texts and, correlatively, a professional discipline organized to produce such handbooks. The purpose of this post is to look back over what I’ve written about Heart of Darkness and suggest some things that should be considered for inclusion in such a handbook.

And suggest is I all can do. It’s not merely that literary studies doesn’t have such handbooks (though casebooks serve such a role to a limited extent) but that, if we did, it would not be possible for any one person to enter something into the handbook. All material would have to be vetted in some way. For, when I talk of ‘handbook level’ information I’m talking about consensus among expert specialists: THIS is what we know about, in this case, Heart of Darkness.

Literary studies is not such a discipline. Moreover, if there is a consensus on anything, it is that the discipline cannot, in principle, be organized in such a way because our subject does not permit it. Yes, there is historical information about authors and texts, that admits of consensus. But little else does, or at any rate, little else of significance.

Handbook as Description of a Sharable Promptuary

For literary studies (and kindred disciplines such as film studies and cultural studies) has been driven by the search for meaning, and meaning just doesn’t seem to admit of cumulative knowledge. In the informal extreme, each reader makes his or her own meaning for any given text. That is in fact how the profession has conducted its business, the understanding being that each one is entitled to “roll their own” reading so long as they can come up with a coherent rationale for it.

The last thirty years has seen a wild proliferation of rubrics under which coherent rationales can be constructed. They’re called readings. And, again I’m speaking informally, the meanings set forth in such readings are taken as explanations of the text:

Q: Why does the text exhibit this or that feature?
A: So it can express this or that meaning.

Beyond this, one family of critical approaches, reader response theory, has emerged that explicitly asserts that each reader has their own reading.

Here’s what one reader response critic, Normal Holland, has to say about the role of texts in readers experience (Five Readers Reading, pp. 286-287):

Every reader has available to him what the writer created—the words-on-the-page, that is, the promptuary (a store of structured language) from which he can build an experience. To be sure, the promptuary includes constraints on how one can put its contents together, but these constraints do not coerce anyone. One is always free to go to the extreme of total delusion . . . But most reading is not solipsistic. . . . [Readers] work with what is publicly available—the words-on-the-page as a readiness of structured information. They make from that sharable promptuary a completely original and private experience.

That’s what I want to describe in the handbook, the sharable promptuary.