Wuthering Heights and The Question of Identity : Personal or Relational [Edited Anew]

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a troubling book. On many levels. A story of unrequited love and wandering spirits and race and class and hate — all wrapped around the wind tousled moorland, a story of longing unfolded in a lonely place. Loneliness — the sheer impassibility of loneliness — is in many ways the theme of the book. The story, at its core, is about Catherine, the girl who would be a ghost, and Heathcliff, the orphaned gypsy boy, it is about their more-than-love, about the one-ness of their spirit surpassing the unsurpassable, the wasteland of the material world — that separates one spirit trapped in two bodies.

There is a moment in the book, when Catherine speaks of her bond with Heathcliff — I am Heathcliff, she says, and he is me. What does this mean? What does it mean to be someone else? Is it an illogical statement, romantic and emotional at best? We are so used to questions of love thrown around in our popular culture that statements of longing — and belonging — such as this, seem almost cringe-worthy. But I want to explore this still — the idea of being someone else, of the ‘I’ being someone else, the ‘I’ which extends beyond one body, and, an ‘I’ which is only complete, which is only itself, when it is so extended. Anything else, a separation, is an abridgement of the I, a reduction, a containment, a disfigurement.

There seem to be two ideas of the self here, in seeming conflict. One, the personality argument of the self. The other, the spirit argument. Is the self a person, so a body, an organism? Or, is the self a mind, a soul, a non-material spiritual being, everbecoming?

If we take the first view, it seems illogical to speak of the self being complete only when it ‘bonds’ with another bodysoul. But. Would a person be a complete person if he was to be alone? Absolutely alone. Alone and separated from not just human company but all company, animal, vegetational, everything. Can the self be a self in a vacuum, in a void? What is a body? Is it a physical entity contained within the skin? Or should we consider it differently. The body, at any moment, is a conduit for innumerable flows, in and out of the environment which it inhabits and travels in. There is the complex of sense perception, then respiration, ingestion, hydration, excretion, ejaculation. We inhabit a conduit, in which the body seems to be an intersection of flows.

That is one subject body, yes. But then, let us talk about thought. Thought from speech and thought from experience. Is thought, in the mind, self born? Or is thought seeded in the mind? From outside? In this moment I might sit, and ponder, contemplate. I might feel that my mind is churning out ideas, interpreting the world and producing thought. But think harder. Is thought produced or reproduced? One line of thinking is this : all thought is composed of language. And language itself is never a personal thing. How can thought then be personal? It might ‘sound’ in the chambers of the mind, so we gain the impression that it sources from the mind, but only one step further into the origins of thought, we learn that its is not such a personal thing.

I have often wondered about two experiences. First, often when I am thinking of a song, or a tune, sometimes even a name, someone sitting next to me will mention it. It happens to everyone, I believe. Is there some supernatural explanation for this? Or does the environment around us, conduiting through us, extending our thinking, our speaking and sharing, a being becoming as a sort of shared extended mindenvironment?

Second, often I have some idea, about some project like a story or a film idea, or something similar, and I will find out in a matter of time that something to the likeness has been made, by someone else, far away, with whom I would have had no possibility of contact. How does that happen? Again, through influences, from the world, from the larger, shared world of mass media and popular culture. One finds such occurrences with even more regularity in specialist communities, often small, which share the same sources of information and are trained to interpret and expound in similar disciplines, Take for example, the Newton-Leibniz calculus controversy. Or Darwin and Wallace and the theory of evolution.

Then, there is the second argument. The view about the spirit and the soul. Personally, I have always understood such themes as being more metaphoric than real — if metaphors are unreal, that is. But then, there are views and there are views. Scientifically speaking, one could not deny the existence of a soul, or to extend it, a world spirit. But equally so, current scientific knowledge leads one to be very sceptical about such views. Memory, experience, their articulation in language, are all physical acts — which happen in the material world. Problems in the systems of engagement — especially the brain — that facilitates these experiential interpretations, might result in errors of communication, which we might interpret as something more. What if the errors themselves are something more than mere error?

Nevertheless, I mentioned that I understand the soul to be a metaphor, and I consider metaphors to be real things — for the complex of experience that creates a substantial sense of the self, a whole view of who one is as a person, inclusive of memory, beliefs and desires, is a metaphorical reality without which we can have no sense of self. The question is — can this view of the self be reduced to mere physical phenomena, specifically contained within one body, bounded by the skin, so to say? I have already mentioned my view that the personbody is not one unitary being but an intersection of flows. The perpetuation of these flows creates life as a living thing, as we know it. The end of flow is the end of the living process. Even a reduction of one flow from the weavecomplex of allflows would reduce the lifespectrum of the living person. And this, I believe, would be a reduction of his personhood.

This might seem like a New Age prescription for the existentially challenged soul. But it is actually an old idea. In ancient Indian thought, it was believed that a balance between the four goals or righteousness, pleasure, wealth and spirituality create a complete person. Aristotle called this state of being, of loving in a balanced completeness, eudaimonia — a state of being in which one lived the good life.

But my investigation is not about psychotherapeutical strategies. I am concerned about the question of identity. At the end, I would like to pose a question, in light of my discussions above. Can the identity of a person be wholly personal? Or, rather, should we look at the question of identity as being a relational one? Returning to Catherine, when she says, she is Heathcliff, what does she mean? I interpret this as saying that she can be herself, as she wants to be, only when she is with Heathcliff, together, they create one another, and complete one another — not in a romantic but ideational sense. The idea of one is of her making when she makes it as she wants to be. Anything else is forced on her — by the world, by circumstance, by the manifested operation of power on the person, forcing her into a form conceived for her, by that power.

This then is the conflict between the personal and the relational aspects of identity. Personal identity is only complete when the person is the sole constructor of its nature, which includes the freedom to associate and make relations with the world as the person would want, free of any force, to manifest the flow of self regulated becoming. But the fact that our existence is relational, makes us subjects of manipulative power. We are written, constructed, shaped by the operation of devious power, which itself uses relational channels of contact to poison the flow, and hinders us from becoming wholly self-conceived persons.

This is a musing, an exploration and a question. Even though in the form of a rather meandering essay. It is still one rather small question.

There remains however the loneliness. For that I have no answer. Yet.

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