Wuthering Heights – An Exploration of Reading

Correct Methodology
There is never a correct answer in English. Lots of different critics have different viewpoints, different ideological perspectives and different cultural backgrounds: all readers also come to books with different personal histories, prejudices, tastes and emotional backgrounds.

Furthermore, writers do not usually aim at a narrow audience of like-minded people: they are not usually aiming to “preach to the converted”: indeed, the opposite case is truer. Writers are usually, when they are serious writers, aiming to add something new to people’s ways of viewing the world. They are very often writing because they do not find existing worldviews satisfactory, and they are very often aiming to say something to improve the way people understand the world.

Hence, it is by and large nonsensical to try to look for a correct answer. It is certainly a sterile way of reading and suggests that the reader who looks for such sterility does not know much about the business of writing or about the business of reading. Reading, for an experienced reader, is an exciting voyage of discovery, involving changes and readjustments, not confirmations of previously held views.

However, there are rules and expectations within literary study, and you would be foolish to ignore that fact when you study and particularly when you revise.

Firstly, there are people who, through carelessness or ignorance, do not understand the literal aspects of the text. You must obviously understand every word in each text; you must comprehend accurately the plots of your texts; your interpretation of character must also fall somewhere within the agreed parameters. (You can’t understand Catherine Earnshaw as a man in drag, for example, or Heathcliff as a weak-willed bookworm who has no passion in his soul.)

We should also take some trouble to understand each of our texts in terms of its own cultural background, and to embrace the difficulties posed by the fact that each of them was written in a different cultural context from the one you inhabit.

Again, it is implicit in the whole ethos of reading that we should wish to broaden our awareness of the human condition, to take lively interest in the variety of ways we humans can understand life, and in the variety of ways we choose to live life, as well as being excited by the discovery that, despite such variety, it can also make good sense to aim, through our study, to discover what is essentially human. (“The proper study of Mankind is Man.&rdquo

I hope these notes will help you to understand aspects of the novel Wuthering Heights, but I would be happiest if you use them as only a starting point to develop dynamic investigations of your own.

The subject must be studied according to a certain methodology for the study to be judged successful or academically reputable, and it is vital now that you get this correct methodology into your working routines.

Bearing in mind what is said above, and thinking about the fact that you are given only one hour to respond to the examination excerpt and the question asked, what should you be aiming to show your examiner

Firstly, if what is obviously correct (a safe reading) is not of much interest, we should think twice before offering what John Cleese called in Fawlty Towers “the bleeding obvious”. Examples include : “Heathcliff sometimes gets angry… Heathcliff is not a very nice man… Catherine Earnshaw is not always reasonable… Linton Heathcliff is not an athlete … Hareton is not well-mannered;

There is, in other words, a vast number of statements which are indubitably correct but which, when essays are composed largely of them (however much evidence is neatly stacked up to prove the truth of them), the examiner can only conclude that the reader is insecure, timid, unexcited and, frankly, boring.

You sometimes need to use such statements in proofs of more interesting propositions, but the bleeding obvious is not the business of Literature

Secondly, don’t aim just to be original either. That would be to go to the other extreme, and would often make the logical demands on you excessive.

Thirdly, bear in mind that the examiner wants to know that you know what to do with a book and that you have genuinely worked the text, worked with the text, thought deeply about what it says and about how it says it, over the course of your study.

Think of a book as a thinking tool. Just as a cycle is a tool for allowing you to move across terrain, and just as an examiner can work out whether you know how to ride one by watching you perform a certain few manoeuvres, putting your feet in the pedals, your hands on the handlebars, rotating the pedals with your feet, turning the cycle in a tight circle, changing gears appropriately etcetera, the examiner is aiming to see what you can do with text and what kind of thing you have been doing with the book as a whole.

The question you will be asked has been carefully, very, very carefully, designed to test a surprisingly wide range of skills. It will enable the examiner to find out things like this:

Does the candidate pay close attention to words (beyond their literal meaning: the examiner will assume, unless your stupidity makes him question this, that you – being an AS student – have sorted out all the literal meanings of your texts)?

Does the candidate enjoy thinking – and show evidence of skilful thinking? – about the tones, the sound-patterning, the rhythms, the contexts, the ambiguities, the ironies, the incongruities, the associations, the symbolic possibilities, the implications, the registers, etc. of the words, or the combinations of words, which authors so carefully choose?

Or is the reader still stuck at the basic level of reading for meaning alone?

Does the reader know how to read a given passage?

Does the reader just decode it for its literal meaning, or does the reader show signs of active engagement, exploration of the text?

Is the reader, when he explores the text, using intelligent hypotheses, judging the truth or value of them by the disciplined examination of relevant evidence (both in the passage under review, but also – in a good reader – selected judiciously from the evidence available in the novel as a whole)?

Does the reader understand the cultural context of the texts? Does the reader understand how this can change the way it can be read?

Has the reader managed to arrive at a convincing personal reading of the whole text?

(What has he been doing for the year? Is the reading arrived at primitive and basic, or evolved and complex? Has he worked on it?)

It is odd that candidates imagine that, for English, it can be OK to do everything at the last moment: experienced readers know that the kinds of books judged capable of supporting an AS examination continue to develop in the mind for many years.