Twittering Heights

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. One look at the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Wuthering Heights with cover art by Ruben Toledo convinced me that I had to re-read it. I’d read Emily Bronte’s only novel back in high school — I skipped over a lot of sections because I found it kind of hysterical — and until I saw that cover I had no intention of opening it again.

One major reason I’m not sold on the Kindle reader is the absence of a cover you can feel. On an e-book you touch the screen, not paper. I do judge people by what they are reading (or listening to) — it seems unfair, but it’s more accurate than forming conclusions based on which designer they’re wearing. Obviously if they’re reading on a Kindle, I can’t see what they’re engrossed in. I’ll have to assume that they’re reading Thomas Mann or Joseph Roth. Then I may hang out with them, only to find that the only things they read are self-help books. Nooo!

On the other hand, I’ve made great friends based entirely on our shared reading lists and playlists.

So I flip casually through Wuthering Heights, and the next thing I know it’s 3 a.m. I’m hooked...and I already know what’s going to happen. This is the exact opposite of my reaction when I read Emily Bronte at age 15. In my impatience I hurled the book across the room a couple of times. (Another reason I don’t own a Kindle — it’s too expensive to throw at a wall.)

When you read a work of literature, you’re not just a passive receiver of the author’s words. You bring your entire personal history and collected experience into the reading. At 15 I knew zip about passion, obsession, and revenge — the main themes of Bronte’s novel — so maybe a lot of the things in the book just whooshed by me.

Actually I still don’t know much about passion, obsession, and revenge in my old age, but I have read a lot of novels and seen a lot of movies with those themes so I have a better understanding. The novel is exactly the same, but the reader has changed over the years. What seemed like homework to me in high school is now a very strange and wonderful book.

Wuthering Heights is a book that could not have been written in the digital age. Much of the story depends on the characters’ isolation and limited access to information. In our interconnected era, protagonists who have no means of communicating with the outside world or each other would seem incredible. (Bakit di kayo mag-text?)

The author herself led a very sheltered life in the company of her two sisters and her brother. Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, and Anne wrote Agnes Grey. Emily died at age 29, a year after Wuthering Heights was published under a male pseudonym.

In the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff are separated by a mere four miles, but they may as well be on different planets. The residents of the two houses have to walk or ride a horse, and this being a 19th- century British novel, someone will fall ill from exposure or take shelter and end up marrying the host.

Basic plot: Catherine and Heathcliff have loved each other from early childhood, but she marries someone else and he vows to destroy her entire family and take everything they own. I suspect that fans of the Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer would eat up Wuthering Heights — once they get used to the language, which sucks in the reader. Heathcliff is so dark and gloomy, he’s practically a vampire.

As for Catherine, she makes this amazing speech shortly before she marries Edgar Linton (who is very nice but kind of a wuss). “My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees — my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath — a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I Am Heathcliff.”

Whoa. If a character in a contemporary novel were to behave the way Catherine does, she would be placed on Prozac-Zoloft-Xanor immediately. Heathcliff would be packed off to a psychiatric institution for violent patients.

But the main bar to Wuthering Heights being written today is its length. Due to the age of the protagonists, publishers would probably market it as a Young Adult book. Will the audience have the attention span for it?

Sure, Wuthering Heights could be condensed into blog posts, Facebook updates, and tweets, but at the expense of atmosphere and character development. This is a weird and compelling novel, and it works because Bronte has conjured up a claustrophobic and entirely believable world. Take Catherine and Heathcliff out of that world, diminish the gloom, put them among regular people, and they might be just another drama queen and king.