MOVE 10 (jjm)

30 July 1911

Nothing in this library, nothing I could ever hope to gain for it (perhaps not even a copy of Byron's lost Memoirs!) touches or shall touch the precious and terrible character of these few pages. Each year they yield up to my persistent attentions a few more of their secrets and mysteries. Unlike those more or less integral units - the masking episode for instance -- the power of these fragments is a direct function of what fate has torn away from them. They are, I now see quite clearly, the scattered residue of the original narrative of what EB reworked into our received chapters 7-10.

This afternoon's investigation into that maddeningly enigmatic scrap beginning "me - I started and after a moment's bewilderment" has convinced me of this. The piece - I am sure of it! -- is all that remains of Catherine's original remarks to Nelly Dean following the visit Heathcliff makes to Thrushcross Grange immediately after his three years' absence. The fragment shows that in the original version of the story Catherine left the Grange that evening and met Heathcliff on the moors. In the published novel Catherine wakens Nelly Dean in the middle of the night because, she says, "I cannot rest, Ellen" [page 76]. Now we understand much more about that restlessness as well as the full import of the midnight conversation between Ellen Dean and Catherine Linton.

Here is how the fragment would have been situated [see pages 75-76]:
"[About the middle of the night. . .and pulling me by the hair to rouse] me - I started and after a moment's bewilderment managed to ask 'Mrs. Linton, what are you doing here at such an hour?'
--'Did you not hear the wind tonight, Ellen?'
--'I heard nothing unusual.'
--'Perhaps at such times it only speaks to us. It came and I knew Heathcliff was waiting for me, so I went to him, I had to go, and there he was.'
--'If you had not come, Cathy, no power on earth or in heaven would have stopped me from carrying you where you belong - away from the life of that ridiculous house and its ridiculous characters, and out here with me. You cannot have forgotten what we found so many times together in this place - what you first discovered to me, for me, when I was not yet 14 years old! "Come to me Heathcliff" - that was what you said the very first time, I shall never forget or let you forget - "This is our life-in-death, our death-in-life, no one else can know us as we will know ourselves." And you were right, I came and died then, and was born again in another world where I learned to die many times since. Our world, this world.'
--And oh Ellen he rapt me away and this other world dissolved and disappeared and we were there together again - beyond the Grange and the Heights and everything that seems to be. And now I am back and I want some living creature to try to understand my happiness. Not Edgar, he would only sulk and[. . .]."
And there the fragment ends.

But the implications of this passage! Young Catherine, we are surely meant to understand, is the child of Heathcliff and Cathy, born prematurely, if Nelly Dean's chronology is correct.

And whenever Cathy or Heathcliff speak about death and their desire for it, they are using as it were a different, a kind of prelapsarian, language. Their idea of death is an idea of consummate love - indeed, of consummated love! Well and good, if also unspeakable. What seems truly uncanny is how EB manages to reveal in those moments of her book the childlike literality of C's and H's ways of speaking. Death seems no stranger to them, death seems for them to be, to have been, a way of life, an intense and uncontaminated existence "that has been and shall be again".

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posted by Jerome McGann 8/15/2000 3:03:57 PM

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Malibu 10 minutes later

To: Cora
From Jarred
Subject: the "man" thing

Cora,

I know, I know -- I did use that term self-reflexively, and it is so sweet of you to embrace it at face value. Still, even AFTER the operation, I am soooo in touch with my feminine side that I wonder if all this surgery was worth it. I think the process of re-gendering has helped me in other ways -- but if what you mean by blowing bubbles is what I call pure ludic pleasure, then I may stop trying to get in touch with my "inner grown-up"! Seriously, however, I think the theme of androgyny in WH is an underdeveloped theme of literary analysis.

xoxox,

your ever delirious and wayward,

J

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/15/2000 8:32:45 AM

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JD: Move 10 (sorry, couldn't resist! it will be brief)

Cora, dear,

Not to worry, your dreadful "textual condition" is a result of that vile Saturn's slow transit through yr third house -- I've aspected yr chart, and it will pass within a few days! Trivialities and beetle-brows notwithstanding, I am here to open the doors of perception for you -- always and ever,

xoxo Jarred

p.s. I just knew moving back to the East Coast was NOT going to be good for your spiritual development. And HOW can you nurture your critical faculties without THAT? Don't laugh at me, dearest, when I recommend that you have a heavy dose of spirulina and wheat grass juice this morning and lie absolutely still long enough to retune yourself.

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/15/2000 6:48:36 AM

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Dear All,

I shall post/publish this after sending it on here -- as last time I made such a mess of that simple process!

This will be my last, I think, unless some evil instinct grasps me and forces parodic unkindnesses or irreverent mockeries or profound interventions or responses -- but I think my own stock of moves is exhausted for now.

Johanna

JD: Move 9 (my final move)

Anne Mack, _My Emily_, (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 2000)

Chapter 2, The Fascicules

Marginalia from three volumes in EB's library are evidently those referred to in Chapter III. Following on the notes cullted from The Testament, recorded by Lockwood in his night's reading, these are found in the white spaces of Reverend Jabes Branderham's sermons, published in 1771. The volume was part of the Haworth parsonage library, though it had migrated into Emily's chosen set of works and sat on the desk in her own chamber at the time of her death.* The entries are written in a hand utterly unlike EB's own.

"Hindley's brutality continues. A bantam cockerel holds its foe more gently at bay than does my brother. Heathcliff dips under his unkindess with the swiftness of a spotted fly catcher, darting through the spines of the berberis bush. Heathcliff makes a game of keeping Hindley at bay. In their contest, my brother struts and poses, while H defies him, all agility and skill, eyes dark as blackcurrants, flashing determination. H is far the smaller of the two, but sleek as a water vole, quick as a jackdaw, and bold as a kingfisher, so that whatever advantage Hindley brings to the contest is soon outstripped by Heathcliff's greater cunning."

Friday November 10, 1777

"We broke free this day of Joseph's droning sermonizing. A mist wraithes through the uplands behind the Heights, and free as young sparrowhawks we raced, among the hawthorn and sycamore. The bare boughs of the crabapples along the fence could not more starkly trace their intentions against the soft grey sky than we did in our flourish of flight. The heather masses its furzelike claws against the dark earth, particularly up near the nest left empty in this bitter season by the rooks. The chill air was more welcome after the suffocating atmosphere at the hearth, and Heathcliff took my hand to pull me along on the strength of his greater swiftness til all the ground below me swept into a blur. When the hellebore comes back into bloom, what potent draughts will needs be made from its blooms to cure this madness?"

Sunday,November 19, 1777

EB made these artifacts to correspond to those in WH, guaranteeing the textual reference with an external authority. As Catherine was real to her, an actual rather than fictional, extension of her own subjectivity, so she, EB, imagined Catherine and Heathcliff as embodiments of the natural world they inhabited. Her romantic turn is infused with a material engagement grounded in an inventory of natural artifacts. Only that real, with its specifics, details, and particulars, all elements of a natural world governed by language and yet immune to its laws, could suffice to counter the repressive regime according to which Catherine bound her heart into a conventional marriage. By externalizing the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine, EB was evidently attepting to transcend the limitations of a merely subjective, emotional condition, and to link the spiritual struggle of Catherine to a natural world that brought no moral judgements to bear. That she left these passages out of the final draft, while allowing them to stand within the artifacts she created in the fictional web of her own authorial existence, demonstrates her commitment to locating her own text within a field of production of which it is only an aspect, thus providing an escape from its confines. EB's own spirit was thus assured of other possibilities beyond the final sentence to which her writing condemned the tortured spirit of her characters.

* Chatsworth, William, "A Material Inventory of the Bronte household," Bronte Studies, #21, New Haven, Spring 1932; pp.21-27. No better account has been made than this one, based on the auction sales receipts recorded by Jos.T.Wentwood, sect'y to one Edward Allen, Yorkshire County Clerk, in the proceedings of the court recorded April 1853.

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/15/2000 6:43:06 AM

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Dear All,

I shall post/publish this after sending it on here -- as last time I made such a mess of that simple process!

This will be my last, I think, unless some evil instinct grasps me and forces parodic unkindnesses or irreverent mockeries or profound interventions or responses -- but I think my own stock of moves is exhausted for now.

Johanna

JD: Move 9 (my final move)

Anne Mack, _My Emily_, (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 2000)

Chapter 2, The Fascicules

Marginalia from three volumes in EB's library are evidently those referred to in Chapter III. Following on the notes cullted from The Testament, recorded by Lockwood in his night's reading, these are found in the white spaces of Reverend Jabes Branderham's sermons, published in 1771. The volume was part of the Haworth parsonage library, though it had migrated into Emily's chosen set of works and sat on the desk in her own chamber at the time of her death.* The entries are written in a hand utterly unlike EB's own.

"Hindley's brutality continues. A bantam cockerel holds its foe more gently at bay than does my brother. Heathcliff dips under his unkindess with the swiftness of a spotted fly catcher, darting through the spines of the berberis bush. Heathcliff makes a game of keeping Hindley at bay. In their contest, my brother struts and poses, while H defies him, all agility and skill, eyes dark as blackcurrants, flashing determination. H is far the smaller of the two, but sleek as a water vole, quick as a jackdaw, and bold as a kingfisher, so that whatever advantage Hindley brings to the contest is soon outstripped by Heathcliff's greater cunning."

Friday November 10, 1777

"We broke free this day of Joseph's droning sermonizing. A mist wraithes through the uplands behind the Heights, and free as young sparrowhawks we raced, among the hawthorn and sycamore. The bare boughs of the crabapples along the fence could not more starkly trace their intentions against the soft grey sky than we did in our flourish of flight. The heather masses its furzelike claws against the dark earth, particularly up near the nest left empty in this bitter season by the rooks. The chill air was more welcome after the suffocating atmosphere at the hearth, and Heathcliff took my hand to pull me along on the strength of his greater swiftness til all the ground below me swept into a blur. When the hellebore comes back into bloom, what potent draughts will needs be made from its blooms to cure this madness?"

Sunday,November 19, 1777

EB made these artifacts to correspond to those in WH, guaranteeing the textual reference with an external authority. As Catherine was real to her, an actual rather than fictional, extension of her own subjectivity, so she, EB, imagined Catherine and Heathcliff as embodiments of the natural world they inhabited. Her romantic turn is infused with a material engagement grounded in an inventory of natural artifacts. Only that real, with its specifics, details, and particulars, all elements of a natural world governed by language and yet immune to its laws, could suffice to counter the repressive regime according to which Catherine bound her heart into a conventional marriage. By externalizing the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine, EB was evidently attepting to transcend the limitations of a merely subjective, emotional condition, and to link the spiritual struggle of Catherine to a natural world that brought no moral judgements to bear. That she left these passages out of the final draft, while allowing them to stand within the artifacts she created in the fictional web of her own authorial existence, demonstrates her commitment to locating her own text within a field of production of which it is only an aspect, thus providing an escape from its confines. EB's own spirit was thus assured of other possibilities beyond the final sentence to which her writing condemned the tortured spirit of her characters.

* Chatsworth, William, "A Material Inventory of the Bronte household," Bronte Studies, #21, New Haven, Spring 1932; pp.21-27. No better account has been made than this one, based on the auction sales receipts recorded by Jos.T.Wentwood, sect'y to one Edward Allen, Yorkshire County Clerk, in the proceedings of the court recorded April 1853.

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/15/2000 6:39:38 AM

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MOVE 9 (jjm)

12 August 2000
Dear Jarred,

This comes to you as snailmail since I clearly can't even HOPE for a serious response from you in that electronic medium. I thought your longstanding interest in puzzles and hoaxing would have inspired your critical imagination - you used to have one, I seem to recall -- but instead it triggered your old slapstick habits. You're really impossible sometimes. Men! I've no idea what flimsy traces of actuality cling to that fabric of trivial nonsense - whether you were at any party at all and saw McGann, whatever. It's so LIKE you, piling a travesty set of hoaxes on top of these matters - turning everything into a kind of burlesque theatre. My Emily!! And publisher's blurbs thereon! Gag. Stop blowing bubbles for a minute and THINK about this thing. The problem can be simply and clearly stated even though what follows from the problem - whatEVER follows from it, whatever we make of it - opens what the derrideans used to call, in their rather selfimportant and now happily-gone glory days, a mise en abime.

WHAT IS TO BE GAINED BY PRESERVING ANY CONCEPT OF TEXTUAL AUTHENTICITY IN AN ACT OF LITERARY-CRITICAL REFLECTION? or;

ARE THE PROCEDURES AND CONCEPTS OF BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL CRITICISM CATEGORICALLY THE SAME AS THE CATEGORIES OF HERMENEUTICS? or;

THE SEMANTIC REQUIREMENT FOR A GRAMMAR OF CRITICAL ASSENT IS A VOCABULARY THAT NEED REFERENCE ONLY (A) THE INTENTION OF THE "SPEAKING" SUBJECT AND (B) THE DELIBERATION OF A WILLING INTERLOCUTOR or;

THE CONCEPT (AND HENCE THE FACT) OF A DOCUMENT IS AN ACT OF FAITH IN THE TRUE PERSISTENCE OF HUMAN INTERCOURSE.

I could multiply these kinds of apothegms at some length but in your present mood you probably register only an amused recoil from such reflections. But haul out all your pataphysical apparatus and test what I'm saying in its light (or dark). For instance, consider this: that if the object of critical reflection is enlightenment and critical clarity, then this case shows why documentary authenticity, in the traditional sense, has no necessary privileged or foundational status? - shows, in fact, that its assumed privilege and foundation - sometimes called its "pre-critical" status - is nothing more than an imaginative hypothesis.

Now if you (or any of your cronies) care to weigh in on these matters in some SERIOUS way - and I don't mean BEETLE-BROWED, JUST SERIOUS IN THE SENSE OF INTELLECTUALLY SALIENT (as opposed to that flip and inconsequent manner you put on in your last two notes) - I'd be, as I'd very much like to be,

Your humble and obedient servant,

Cora

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posted by Jerome McGann 8/14/2000 3:16:35 PM

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JD-Move 8

Dear Cora,

Apropos of my last email, guess who I ran into at Marjorie's last night? None other than J.McGann! I asked him what he thought about the Anne Mack business, and he said (and I quote): "I think we have to take it seriously-- Anne's dug up some VERY convincing bibliographic evidence." I couldn't get much else out of him -- you know how reserved he is. Turns out he has a proof copy of _My Emily_. I'm going to borrow it when Marjorie's done having a look. McGann's response to that was a bit more vivid -- he quoted some line of poetry, as usual, and then made a quip - but I didn't hear it properly enough to know if he'd said "facile" "fascicle" or "facsimile" --! He’s so damn clever I feel like a dunce asking him to repeat something. The look on his face was positively fiendish. I promise to send on some excerpts of the book as soon as I get my hands on it. In the interim, here’s the copy from McGann’s blurb(!) for it: "Perhaps the least startling typographic intervention ever made in an author’s manipulation of the book as a text form. An extant set of corrected proof sheets displays Mack’s recombinant engagement with every boring detail of physical presentation. The textual event on these pages involves far more than the intercourse of linguistic organs – it involves a total body sensation almost nauseating in its absence of intensity." Well, that can’t surprise you. You KNOW the way that man exaggerates. And I may have transposed a few words in my transcription….

xox J

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/12/2000 4:57:14 PM

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Move 7 (JD –type of move? )

Malibu, August 4, 2000

Dearest Cora,

What a pleasure to hear from you -- and in such a self-righteous rage! You know my thoughts on Wise -- I've always suspected secret fetishism of the worst kind where TJ was concerned. What surprises me, even knowing you as well as I do, is that you are so shocked by the thought of his real nefariousness! Men, my dear – even my dear self – are inclined to the most bizarro behaviors when it comes to the control of work by women. Would that it were not true – but only a Freudian could figure the full complexities of such a case! And I know your opinion on that school of "astrological" thought, as you have made clear on many an occasion (sometimes not to the dismay of your colleagues….!).

But that brings me to the heart of the matter. Anne Mack. Now there is a case to contemplate. Do you know that she is about to publish a book titled My Emily --! And if that doesn’t shock you enough, she claims that she has actually recovered features of the original EB mss through reading these Wise diaries that will force us to rethink the "nature of prose itself" (what kind of preposterous claim is THAT???? as if there were an "itself" to prose???). Her claim (I have this on good authority because my former advisor from undergrad days, Jerry McGann, is good buddies with her for some inexplicable reason, and I ran into him at a godawful necrophilic Byron event recently – but that’s another story and I’ll spare you – you know these hopeless romantics! – or should I say, romanticists?) – anyway, her claim is that the physical properties of the EB mss., drooled over by Wise in a way that would make the skin of any self-respecting feminist crawl, are essential to the tale. The mid-point of the book, it seems, is in fact that moment in Chapter XV – we all know this, of course, the hinge – pivot of the book being that embrace of Heathcliff and Cathy (I must confess, I have always preferred the Lawrence Olivier/Merle Oberon version to EB’s – but I wouldn’t dare say that outside of California…) – anyway, that crucial moment, according to our weirdo AM, was apparently mathematically calculated to sit precisely in the middle of the text. She has done elaborate "diagrammatic" analyses to demonstrate this fact – which she has the gall to call a "theory" (whatever happened to REAL theoretical discourse, I’d like to know – I think the influence of computational methoods is at work here, and that makes any nefariousness of old TJW look like child’s play – HE, at least, never claimed "scientific" authority for his assertions, just creepy bodily investigation – that is, what passes for "textual criticism" of manuscripts…I have a feeling he was a secret "collator" and performed bibliographic description in private, or other intellectual rituals of a truly perverse kind. Enough said).
Okay. I’m rambling and ranting. I know, but listen, my dear C, here’s what the whole thing comes to. Anne is desperate to make a splash – her book on incest among the Bronte’s was so well received (it was published at the height of the vogue for repressed memory / survivor stuff in the mental health industry – early 90s) that she is afraid she’ll lose her star status if she doesn’t follow with something equally shocking. She’s gotten so used to all that attention… and then her career as a "poet" (don’t get me started!) needs a boost these days as well – something more than the blonde frosting she’s put onto her hair (didn’t anyone tell her that the Farrah Fawcett thing has been over since before her current students were born?)
My take on all this? She made it up. More or less. And the whole thing is a hoax. At least, that’s what I was ready to believe up until yesterday. Now comes the shocker! You’ll love this, you with your love of the perverse. Well, my old dear friend Amy was here last night. She’s truly psychic – and she suggested that we do some channelling and see what sort of spiritual energy was around both/each of us. We usually do this when we get together. So we sat in the cupola and she went into light trance (nothing heavy) and then – damn! if she didn’t find out that old TJ himself was lurking! He’s furious, apparently! Amy doesn’t know anything about any of this literary listserv stuff—she’s a gardener – and so when she connected with Wise I realized he must be desperate to make contact and keep his name from being sullied by Anne’s wicked machinations.
The problem is, if I post anything about this to the list, it will just look like I’m jealous of Anne – well, you know, because of that other business.
So, I hope YOU pursue this, because for the moment, my hands are tied. Hold your breath, however, C, because My Emily will be out any day!!!

Your wicked Jared

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/11/2000 6:34:02 AM

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MOVE 8 (jjm)

[email letter to Jarred Huonnack from Cora Jegmann, 30 July 2000]

Dear J,

I know you've seen (of heard about) that listserve announcement by Anne Mack about the newly discovered T. J. Wise Diaries and associated papers. The excerpts she posted are truly remarkable, no doubt there. But all that secrecy and circumspection about their location and present owner is infuriating! I suppose we're all to suppose it can't be helped - at least for now. Happily, everything will be revealed "in the fullness of time", as Wise himself discovered - even in his own nefarious lifetime. As the poet has remarked somewhere or other: "If life is short, and art is long/All craft is punishment".

Craft. That's my word for the day and the reason I'm writing. Here's the thing - and I want to know, need to know - what you think about this. I BELIEVE THE WHOLE THING'S A HOAX.

Period, end of story? Not to be thought of! I want your judgment on this because I mean to write it up and either post what I think about these materials or send the piece to a journal for publishing, or both. There's much more at issue here than the question of whether any or all of these announced documents are genuine or not. Myself I think they're not, but it might well be that some - even all - are what Mack represents them to be. Whatever, since Wise is involved the question of authenticity looms large; and addressing THAT question - something critics, if not scholars, rarely do when they pursue their games of "reading" and interpretation - opens up the entire subject of the relation between original and secondary textualities.

But let me leave that subject for the essay and just lay out for you some of my reasons for suspecting foul play here.

Understand, I'm not saying that Anne Mack is the avatar of that odious TJW
a very satan of his profession, whose honor he cast into disrepute. She MAY be involved in some kind of hoax but she may also simply be the victim of her own enthusiasm and critical naivete. I'm rather inclined to this latter view since she chose to make her "discovery" known via the internet. I mean, REALLY! You can say or propose ANYTHING in this venue and give it an appearance of gospel truth. You can also get your ideas circulated rapidly and widely. Her production mode, as the Marxists would say, is not I think the best one to choose if you want to perpetrate a successful hoax. It's rather an index of something more or less enthused and even spontaneous - more like this letter I'm writing to you now, with its (I admit) petty obvious negative enthusiasm (that "petty" is a typo for "pretty", but I leave it intact as a sign of my desire for candor and honesty - even if it IS a Freudian sign).

The evidence for hoaxing stands clear whether Anne Mack is involved or not. It appears in the "texts themselves", as scholars used to say before the coming of our various "hermeneutics of suspicion". (Is this letter a document from that hermeneutical archive? Perhaps, but let me not digress.) Instead, let me lay out the evidence for my suspicions.

• First of all, the method by which this "discovery" was made known to the scholarly community. Nothing so momentous, surely, would be reported in such a loose and unexamined way. We're talking here about MS materials and an early version of one of the half dozen most important novels in the English canon.
  
• Second, who can believe that such materials would have been held back this long? These were not LOST documents, like the lost Byron and Shelley MSS found in that trunk in Coutts's bank. We're told they were documents known for what they were since TJW first had them in his hands in 1895.
  
• Third, suppose they were/are what that wretch Wise says they are (in those "Diaries" said to be his - but more on THAT subject in a moment!). Is it even remotely believable - I admit it is possible! - that TJW, of ALL people (note I do not say "of all SCHOLARS"), would have held these materials in secret and never capitalized on them either for money or for fame or both? Or that he would have destroyed them, as he tells us he intended to do? That fetishist DESTROY original EB MSS? I don't THINK so! What else did that monster care about except money and fame - and that peculiar and disgusting sensual delight he took in handling MSS?! HANDLING! When I think of it my whole body shivers with repulsion.)
  
• Fourth (and finally), NOT ONE SINGLE FEATURE OF THESE MATERIALS, IF THEY EVEN EXIST, CAN BE SHOWN TO BE UNEQUIVOCALLY GENUINE. Why is that the case? Because according to the tale we are being asked to credit here, the actual original EB MSS no longer exist. Mack's revelations tell us that we have now only TJW's so-called diaries plus the copies HE made of the original EB MSS.
  

I admit there are problems here. If those TJW diaries are authenticated we shall have to rethink much of what we - let us say I and all scholars who take their profession seriously - now take for granted about the despicable TJW. We shall even have to reconsider the case for the authenticity of the EB MSS TJW said that he intended to destroy. But the authenticity of the diaries and associated MSS also leaves open the possibility that Wise was planning a hoax more horrid and infamous than any of the ones we now know about. A hoax from beyond the grave, and one that would, he imagined, NEVER be finally exposed. Never be able to be exposed!

This last possibility leaves me aghast with a fear that goes to the ground of everything I hold true and dear. If this proves to be the situation, my judgment of that man will have been shown to be truer - more terribly true - than I ever dreamed (or "nightmared"). We would in that case see that the true purpose of his life and work was this: to destroy for good and ever any ground of objective authority for the work that we do!
x
Cora.

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posted by Jerome McGann 8/10/2000 11:20:21 AM

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London, March 1857

Fell into a swoon this morning for no accountable cause. Mother insists it is the result of over-application to the esoteric study of finer points of grammar, but I see no scientific evidence for language as a cause of vertigo. The physician, whose visit I protested violently, suggested it was the result of an inflamed imagination, brought on by gazing at engravings in the edition of Les Antiquites d’Afrique. Palm trees in ink are now to be blamed, it seems, for what is more likely a need for fresh air and exercise. Both denied me in this last week as the weather turned more foul than even I could tolerate, determined though I am to toughen my constitution with walks morning and evening no matter how dreadful the climate might appear to ordinary folk. I cannot allow myself to be daunted by rough temperatures, but what lashed against the windows in this week was more sleet than rain, and the bitter freeze has caused a sheet of glassy ice to form on every surface of park and street. So treacherous is the path underfoot that the carriage traffic has slowed to almost nothing in recent days, and any who are forced to be abroad move through the frozen landscape at their peril.
But as I lay in my peculiar twilight state upon the couch, a vision came to me. Clear as any clarion call it trumpeted across my mind and remained when I woke, sharp as a newly minted coin in the realm of my understanding. I have been preoccupied of late with preparation to fulfill my destined future, marshalling my forces to bring that long-sought life to pass. The images of young Cathy in that terrible tale by the late Miss Brontë have come to play a companion role to my imaginings for my own future voyages. How this has come to pass, I am no longer quite certain, but as a woman may adopt a younger friend in the role of sororial guide, so her spirit has occupied a place that allows me to nurture her yearnings as a benefit to believing in my own. So vividly have I conjured scenes and passages for her that should a phantasm bright as a magic lantern image have appeared to my eyes, I would not have been surprised in the least were I able to decipher the very pattern of embroidery in the robes she donned to wander in an Eastern bazaar.
But it was not her face that rose in that darkened room as a hallucinatory presence. It was the fierce beauty of her mother, the doomed Catherine, whose dark brow and streaming hair filled the air before my eyes. It was in that moment in the tale, in the tenth Chapter (so precise my recollection of this story that even this was a part of the vision!), when Heathcliff had first reappeared in the neighborhood, after Catherine’s marriage to Linton. Nelly Dean, in recounting the events remarks (on page 73 – uncanny the precision of my recollection! though I do understand that it is not uncommon for persons in fits have such experiences) that Catherine was "too excited to show gladness; indeed, by her face, you would rather have surmised an awful calamity."
A passage, spoken as if by Miss Brontë herself in the voice of Nelly, spoke itself in my head as the visage of Catherine – wild, possessed, and vivid – occupied my interior eye. "Calamity indeed. For in that moment she saw too clearly the hell to which she had condemned herself. What had been, just instants before, a parlour scene of domestic harmony and relative bliss, one in which I might have hoped that a semblance of peace might reign indefinitely under Edgar’s calm stewardship, became an image of a lost era. Catherine’s expression showed all her deeply conflicted feelings. She was at once found and lost, saved and damned, redeemed and abandoned by and to her fate. Because she saw the consequences of her trivial deeds. The choice to make a safe life had struck away forever the deeply profound possibility to salve her soul in the full communion with Heathcliff’s." When I reflect upon this passage, it is so obviously the condition of the work, and so unsurprising as a revelation, that I am quite struck to imagine that I was moved by the passage as it appeared in my dream. But my own convictions, so uncompromising in their sentence to Destiny, were all apparent in the vivid brilliance of her face – burning on the awful cross of her realization that she had sacrificed her soul to the least of purposes – and lost everything as a consequence.
As R becomes ever more distant as a person, more present as a companion, I am renewed in my daily faith by the realization that comfort, at least, is one aspect sure to be absent from my future life.

25 move 57 lines

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/7/2000 8:17:51 PM

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MOVE 7

(jjm)

30 July 1896. These past months - I shall never experience anything like them again. I expected the usual labors deciphering and then organizing what one knew would be a difficult sheaf of MSS. But how could anyone have anticipated what that customary tedious, if also always fascinating, process would reveal? Nicholls - pious and sweet man -- clearly could not have studied these documents or realized their contents. I still recall the shock that some of these texts caused when their contents gradually began to unfold themselves in my private study during these months - a shock I feel even now, reflecting on them. When WH first appeared its reviewers - most of them - were as troubled by the book's tale as they were impressed by its style, and when it became clear that its author was a woman, the difficulty increased. CB and Gaskell did much to mitigate the public murmur, and then we passed into our new and odd age with our new and odd men and women. Now if our books and our art works and our ideas do not carry some kind of shock wave with them they scarcely register or carry public credit at all. - But some things even we continue to cherish and try to protect!

What a sensation would be stirred were it known that a great part of the first version of WH has been preserved in MS! The version that Colburn in 1846 did not - and I (at least) now know would not and could not -publish. And then, were these remains of that abandoned work actually revealed…. Well, even in this epicene and jaded time, quel horreur. The incest theme alone, so explicit and so resolutely pursued across three generations as well as along an unexpected genteel tangent! How different must now appear to us the novel's remarkable and seductive gaps - teasing us into and out of thoughts about what those gaps withhold from our direct view. The first book would have been far less haunting, perhaps, but far more naked and terrible - such a book, indeed, as Zola himself could not have contemplated writing, much less publishing - and least of all any of those more refined sensualists from Gautier to our own bad boy Oscar Wilde. One wonders: is it possible that EB and her siblings managed to divine the deep and imageless truth, still forbidden to be told fully in public, about Byron and Augusta? Byron looms like a dark god over the work of EB and her siblings, but especially EB, whose work involves, in my judgment, a more profound meditation on Byronism than what we find even in Baudelaire, Melville, or Nietzsche. Stowe's scandalous and pinched sermon didn't appear until years after death brought peace and oblivion to EB and her breathtaking - what other word will do? - imaginative explorations. We know that an oral history preserved the precious truth of Byron's life, its splendours and its miseries, its evil - another word to be taken at face value here - and its good. A history that could keep the truth alive by keeping it from a public that simply would not hear of it. Did that oral history make its way into Hayworth?

Holding these papers in my hands tonight I realize what this special lust of mine holds in store for me. A lifetime's pursuit of questions that shall lead on only to other questions, on and on until the questions break like waves against some forbidden, Masoretic wall. Last week I dreamed of that wall in a dream that took me on an agonizing journey through vast Piranesi-like chambers, endlessly leading on one to the next, until I seemed finally pitched into an ultimate hall of ruined grandeurs - and at its opposite end was this looming wall. The whole room shook and throbbed as if it were holding off some vast and powerful enginery just outside itself. The air resounded with a dull roar from these engines, whose principal locus was just beyond that wall. As I walked up to it I saw at its base a great metal door, and I knew that if I were to open that door the questions would cease - but that I would die.

Tonight I know, I fear, I shall never have the courage to open that door.

Yet knowing that dreadful truth about myself, I hereby make this vow: that every year on this day I shall take out these papers and study them. Why? Because if they shall never yield up the secrets of themselves, if those secrets are to remain beyond my power to grasp, they shall at any rate hold a mirror to my soul and reflect back to me its wretched truths. If I am damned I shall at any rate observe my corruptions with the most perfect care and fidelity I can give to them.

57 lines

posted by Jerome McGann 8/7/2000 5:11:54 PM

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Move Three: BPN

I'll read it, for I keep it yet. Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.

Dear Ellen, it begins.

I came last night to Wuthering Heights, and heard, for the first time, that Catherine has been, and is yet, very ill. I must not write to her, I suppose, and my brother is either to angry or too distressed to answer what I send him. Still, I must write to somebody, and the only choice left is you.

Inform Edgar that I'd give the world to see his face again--that my heart returned to Thrushcross Grange in twenty-four hours after I left it, and is there at this moment, full of warm feelings for him, and Catherine! I can't follow it, though--(those words are underlined)--they need not expect me, and they may draw what conclusions they please; taking care, however, to lay nothing at the door of my weak will or deficient affection.

The remainder of the letter is for yourself alone.

[Here follows a restored page of Lockwood's journal, once ripped out by Nelly Dean.]

Ellen, perhaps I need not tell you that your presence in our home has contributed more to my meagre happiness there than that of any other person since the death of my dear Mother three years ago. Indeed, until your coming, it seemed as though there'd be no end to the boiling of linen and the airing of rooms and all the little cleanly diurnal tasks I set myself. Catherine's infection -- the fever she brought to Thrushcross Grange and to my poor parents -- peaceful now! I am quite sure it never left the place until you came to us, with your brisk milk-washed hands and broad, open face, and calmed the air.

A clean house. A clean house after so much blood and bile, and a true brotherhood of souls is all we may ask of God in this world, and all He expects that we provide each other. Edgar's marriage to Catherine was a hard cross to bear, and her installation here as mistress of the house she poisoned left me more distracted than the poisoning itself. My thoughts are clearer now -- now that I have committed a more grievous sin and have been scourged for it.

That Heathcliff is sent from the Enemy of Man to punish me I have no doubt, and I wear the marks of his infernal attentions as monks wear shirts of hair to keep them mindful. You shall not tell Edgar this, Ellen, any more than you shall tell anyone what I now confide in you as I would a priest, were my husband to allow me one. I am punished well, and in precisely the manner I deserve, for I made of my body a tool of revenge. You will think I speak of the injury my elopement with her lover has done to Catherine.

But I have harmed us all more than she can know, for I've brought her better as well as her worser angel to my bed, and poisoned the house of Linton -- more than ever Catherine could -- with a fever I fear will follow us for generations to come. Edgar is not to blame; no, Ellen, never think that! Whether it was his distraction with her illness, or the strange effects of a Power I did not, in my soul (oh, I swear it!) take for truth, I cannot say. He sobbed her name all the while with tear-dimmed eyes, and I set my teeth and shuddered in my stony heart.

For lack of a confessor, I tell you this. I cannot ask of you forgiveness, for it is not yours to give and I am confident it would, in any case, be denied to such a wretch as me. But I require three things of you, Ellen Dean. The first is your silence, which I scarcely need beg, as you understand as well as any that the telling of this tale would spread corruption. For my next requests, I must ask that you come to me at the Heights, although I dread to meet your eyes. You must bring to me a book my father kept in the tall, locked case in the Library. The key is in the second drawer of Edgar's writing-desk, and the book will not be missed. I beg you, do not read it, Nelly. It is Dun Cordova's Black Arts. I tremble at the thought of opening it again, but I fear I must, and I am too far fallen from the Path of Light now to be timid.

My final request is this. You must bring to me several dresses belonging to my dear Mother -- loose gowns of any sort, high-waisted and unconstrictive. I have yet one mark of shame I desire to hide from the sullen eyes of those around me here. I fear I am with child.

[Move(25) + Lines(40) = 65 points]

posted by Bethany Nowviskie 8/6/2000 7:06:20 PM

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MOVE 6 (jjm)

[this MS (designated MS.TJW2) is copied neatly on both sides of a single foolscap sheet, undated, unwatermarked, in the hand of T. J. Wise; paper identical to MS.TJW1]

That evening Heathcliff did not take supper. When I asked Mrs. Heathcliff where he was she replied "Dead, I trust, in hell, both, either." As if these words were an incantation to summon him forth, Heathcliff himself appeared as she was finishing her brief curse.
--"Not yet, my dear wife, but let them come and we shall see how Death or the Devil like my company. Poorly perhaps. Death may beware, I have my eye on him. If it is he that keeps Catherine from me I'll hunt him out and raze every foot of his proud world, and weigh him down with pains he never knew, till he yield her up to me again. Or if she be in hell" - his eyes seemed to burn more fiercely at this reflection - "yes, where else should she be, better still - lost for ever to everyone but me. Ah Satan, call your legions, I think you shall need them."
--"Monster! Monsters both, she worse than you perhaps for making you the beast you are." Mrs. Heathcliff spat the words and turned away, and as she made to ascend the stairs to her room she stopped and uttered a brief cry of fright. Throttler lay across the bottom steps and began a low menacing snarl as she approached what he had recently made a favorite lounging place. Her fright ran quickly to frustration and then fury, and she whirled around at Heathcliff. "That dog was another being when he lived at the Grange. Now see what a sullen and savage thing he has become. You have monstered the very air we breath Out of my way, you filthy cur!" Heathcliff laughed in a low guttural as the dog began to bristle, though it did not move except to raise its head slightly and fix a menacing look on Mrs. Heathcliff. "Ah woman, look how he cowers before your will!"
--"I am going to my room now," she said, looking a hurricane of hatred at her husband. "And if that brute hinders my purpose by the fraction of an instant he shall regret it." As Heathcliff roared with laughter Isabella advanced toward the staircase and Throttler leapt to his feet, growling loudly now through bared gums and teeth, his thick neck distended. He seemed readying to attack her there in her own house, but ere he could execute his unnatural purpose Mrs. Heathcliff flew at him like an animal. Her eyes glowed out of the paleness of her face, her lips compressed to stone. Instantly the dog's menace and hostility turned to a wary and perhaps no less dangerous fright as she descended on him like a minor fate. She seized his heavy collar with her left hand and began dragging him from the staircase, his hind legs now not poised to spring but set in a hard effort of stiff resistance, which she broke when she grasped the scruft of his heavy neck with her free hand. Neither Heathcliff nor I spoke as she hurled the enraged and terrified beast into the corner by the kitchen door, and before the brute could recover his resources she fell on him again, her hand quickly back on the collar, this time forcing his head up so that their eyes seemed to meet each other in mutual fear and hatred. Then she raised her right arm and drove her fist against those fierce red eyes, again and again repeatedly, punishing him till the sockets bled and swelled and finally closed in pain. Mrs. Heathcliff then dropped the blind and stupefied beast and walked without a word across the hall and up the stairs.
--"Merciful heaven," I thought to myself, "his madness is maddening us all."
45 lines

posted by Jerome McGann 8/6/2000 7:16:51 AM

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JD Move #5
The Heights, 1803, Winter

They have made me to come into the dark house again. Brutes! Chasing me from my prayers upon the Heights. And yet, that fireside provides at least some bit of light to the dim day. The cold too bitter. Uncle has again made over the place to dour dreams. I cannot fathom the time without end. Nor Hareton’s so unkind attitudes of late. Recently the promise of some other life, glimpsed, came to me only to be let go. Uncle has it to heart that I must suffer his awful moods for some crime I cannot know. And then from the future a worse vision, that I might leave Wuthering Heights to take up adventuring. I have no mind for this, no, nor heart either. Hareton and Uncle are all to me, here, and I would not to foreign lands among the dry palms and oases of a heathen land. The good and the godly are companions enough to my days, and this fate, while it may seem a hardship to some others, is as a blessing to me. There is not a night passes that I do not hear a moan akin to that of the soul itself, willing to give up this mortal state for that of the hear after. No, nor a day that passes in which the sunlight through the panes does not bespeak the most profoundest faith of all, in He who watches and knows. Mine is a soul given over happily to this life of patience. My mother was a wicked woman, and it is her sins that I repay in penitent gratitude. Resigned as I am to this life, I seek my reward in the next, knowing that He who has all things before him judges not the meek with harshness, and I will be welcomed into His forgiveness. This is my place, whatever else a stranger might imagine. – CL, this day, her word before God.

Move 25 Line Count 20 = 45

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/5/2000 9:26:43 PM

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JD Move #4 (IF the "offering" counts as #3)
London, January 1857

My daily rituals of communion with my absent R are now integrated into habit. That he is a presence to me, I cannot doubt, and many are the hours – days even – that pass without the least bit of longing. In these moods my studies advance, and with them, a grasp of the terrific adventure that lies ahead. My linguistic progress is much lauded by Professor Niebuhr, from whom I have had the great good fortune to acquire not only several advanced studies in the languages I wish to acquire, but some works on ancient artifacts as well. If only I had a more clear notion of what eventual destination might be mine (I cannot bring myself to qualify such terms with the plural first-person adjective or its cognates lest my hubris outstrip tempt the jealous gods), these pursuits could have more focus. But in the interim, the vast picture of the ancient regions of the East are filled with broad strokes so that wherever we (there! I have let it slip!) may happen to alight, the coordinates to such a position will be clear in the main, if not in the details or particulars.
But in other moments a mood of longing comes upon me with such fierceness that I am at pains to maintain even my composure, let alone my equilibrium. Yesterday, pausing again to pass an hour in the company of those doomed lovers, Heathcliff and Catherine, I felt my heart swell and burst with sensations I think immoderate in my maidenly state. But such is my passion for R that this cheat of time creates an acute pain – only because I cannot imagine any expenditure for the precious span of a mortal life morejoyous than that which is passed in his company and in the joint pursuit of those shared objectives. My spirit hardens against such extravangances, however, as I assert a wilfull repossession of my own spirit, soul, and projects. At this distance, he is as much a companion to me as the North star, a point of reference against which I set my own course, not in any way the master of that vessel that is my own soul.
This morning, a cold hard day, bright with frost, returned my spirits to a pragmatic condition. After several hours’ diligence at verbs and calligraphic decipherments, I engaged with the useful but curious task of imagining an itinerary for the luckless Cathy, had she been able, as I will be (God willing!), to find her way onto the decks of some East Indian packet bound for the shores of the Levant or pausing in the ports along the coasts of North Africa. Her choices would have been more limited than ours will be, this half-century of progress has so modernized the ancient regions that no comparison with the primitive conditions of that period can be made. In such wise, modern romance must be profitably compared with that of the trapped and pitiful Catherine and her heroic lover. For if I know, as she did of Heathcliff, that R is my Destiny, I am so much more at liberty to act upon that impulse than she was. So would I grant to young Cathy a gift of mobility, the capacity to realize some aspect of her own dreams in order to overthrow the terrible yoke of her parents’ legacy. Those traits of family, those awful sentences of fated lineage, have no place now in the life of a woman eager to engage in partnership with her beloved. To embrace Destiny, as I must with R, is to escape that dreadful fate of frustration and destruction, and rather than die tormented from one’s inability to realize the full measure of romance, one must live -- !
Ah yes, I imagine it well, the diary of that brave young Cathy, written home to her excellent Uncle Heathcliff, whose days by the fireside have let him grow sleek and fat with happiness from the vicarious pleasure he derives from her adventures. Or no – better yet, he might have become the gay companion to her journeys, shepherding her eager spirit in the role of watchful chaperonage as she led him on a merry dance about the magic kingdoms of Arabia, Africa, and India! The strains of gypsy blood that Catherine had recognized in him would come to life! His devotion to his beloved moors (note! the rhyme with Moor here – a coincidence too conspicuous to be overlooked!) and the queen of his heart, his lost beloved, would hang about him as a regal mantle on a revered, retired monarch of another era.
Yes, Cathy must have her day! as I must mine! And if R is the means to that end, so be it, he is also he chief object of all earthly desires, none more than these – to realize myself in these adventures. So Cathy, too, my surrogate in these fantasies, finds herself, with rare grace and unexpected pleasure, in the zones of ziggurats and palms, elaborate courtyards and labyrinthine customs, all wound about the vivid soil of her imaginings – and all the more amazing for being real, rather than fantastic!

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/5/2000 9:23:05 PM

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MOVE 5 (jjm)

30 July 1909. Another thrilling day spent alone with EB, my annual devotional visit - breathtaking as ever, if also laborious. I've now made copies of everything I have and I can already see how I shall use them when my enemies descend. But mostly when I am no longer here.

But enough of that. For now I record my notes on the day's principal investigative activity: trying to sort out the odd discrepancies between the two MSS with the two mask episodes.

It must be that EB hadn't integrated the first mask episode (Heathcliff en masque) with the second (Cathy's visionary mask event). The text of the second, as we have it in my MS, has material that clearly overlaps certain materials in the first. Most conspicuous here is the repetition, though with variances, of Heathcliff clasping Cathy's legs. Two possibilities suggest themselves, and each probably involves lost MS materials. 1. EB wrote a different version of Cathy's vision, one that merged properly with the text of the Heathcliff masking MS, and/or a different. Version of the Cathy vision episode, with a correspondingly correct jointure. These MSS, if either or both existed, have not appeared. 2.EB wrote the Cathy vision text first, and then as she wrote the second she began to contemplate a different way of joining the two - a way evidenced in the final 7 lines of the Heathclif masking text.

18 lines

posted by Jerome McGann 8/4/2000 2:02:12 PM

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MOVE 4 (jjm)

[this MS (designated MS.TJW1) is copied neatly on both sides of a single foolscap sheet, undated, unwatermarked, in the hand of T. J. Wise]

--"What do you see when you look across the moors from the top of Penniston Crag?"
--She didn't answer right away, Nellie, she stood silent and still as that statue of the angel guarding Sowden's grave in the back of the church-yard. Then she began to speak. The words came out each one by itself like a complete thought and her lips seemed to set them in the air like cut blocks of stone, as if building a building - a great hall somewhere or a fortress. "I see nothing at all until the wind comes down streaming through its firmament. Then the bogs and stones and furze bestir themselves and rise to his call. 'Return now and dwell with me today' he says, and his voice runs like rain and fire through the brush and trees and all the blown heathflowers. 'His lightenings enlighten the world, the earth sees and trembles.' So the thaw-wind's cold fires bring new life from these kindled and perishing embers. Clouds are racing from the west across the sun's slow path, they meet and meet again like battalions of Forlorn Hopes hurling themselves along this relentless crag, scattering in splintered pieces of tumbling dark and fleet brightenings. As they all gather and race away I see their white faces and their burning eyes dissolving in mysterious and fevered flight, and the viewless wind freeing them from their iron earthen chains drives them along, legions and legions with silver swords and silver lyres, all singing wild words of an ancient song:

	'We come with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
	From that venomed heart of heaven that brings the darkest stars,	
	Winds, take our maddened souls - stars, plunge us in your fire!
	Come visions - shake and change and kill us with desire.'"

"If you were there, Nellie, you would have scarcely thought she spoke, she stood so still and tranced. It was as if her whole body were an Aeolian-harp set on Penniston itself, and the wind torn to shreds of words as it passed through her."
--"You're more mad than that wicked girl to speak this way. What demon world has she drawn you to?"
--"You're a fool to think so. I have seen what she has seen, we have been there, Nellie. And that day as I watched her I nearly choked to death with terror that she would leave me here. I threw myself weeping at her feet and circled her ankles with my arms. 'Stay Cathy, or take me with you.' But she was feeling and hearing and seeing elsewhere, I knew, from words that continued to pour through her. "Hush, Heathcliff," she said, "listen, look: he for whom I wait thus now is come to me! Strange Power, I trust thy might, trust thou my constancy." Then the crag began to tremble and as I looked toward Crow Hill bog it seemed to plunge and labor and groan with pain. Suddenly the whole moor broke itself apart, erupting in a black and viscous torrent that overtook the horizon like a glacier of peat and began thundering toward us. Stones of immense size ran before that solid oncoming front of dark and upheaved earth. It was as if the whole top of the moor turned itself over on its side and thought to change its ancient place. Not to go far, as people reading books sometimes think to do, just to move a mile or so farther along toward Saltonstal. But in making that move it cared for nothing that might stand in its way. So this convulsion of nature sank in tumult across a mile and more of flowered waste and desolation, choking up each intervening watercourse and burying for ever all that iron stunted moorland fauna. Three stone bridges were carried to their earthy origins ere this inexorable monster ceased its subterranean heavings. Call you this a demon world, Nellie? I tell you all this time a host of skylarks wheeled in the sky, their songs crossing each other in a strange and haunting lacework of sounds heard clear above that rolling din below."

52 lines

posted by Jerome McGann 8/3/2000 10:40:07 PM

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From "The Black Arts: In which is Described the Conguring of SPIRITS, the Varied Applikations of VODUN, and other Methods of WITCHCRAFT" by Dun Cordova


Chapter II:

The Affliktion of Persons and Livestock by Various Methods both Topical and Remote

It will often bee necessary for a Witch to cause the death of
verious Creatures, either from Vengeance or from some other good motive inspired by the iniustice of the Owner of such animals.

The reader will have markd a general Priciple by wich Afflixion
and Plague are effected - namly, the aberation of Sacred or simply convensional methods combin'd with the natural Law of Opposites. In the instanse of Livestock, oure purpose is achieved topicaly by discouering that Priciple or Agent which is the creature's natural enemy, and combining it with some Element assumed to have curative efect. Many creatures, including Scorpions, Vipers, Bats, and othere Vermin comonly associated with Poison and Pestilense, provide powerful means, there Serums and Unguents being easily available and redily combined. Simple oils and ointments such as are used among animal physisians and combined with these ingrediants, when applied to legs of animals and accompanied by
the incantions we have treated in the previous Part, will bring death
quickly and surely.

This same method may be aplied to Men, but such will usualy be the cause Rheumatism, Gout, and other afflictions of the Bones rather than death, for the death of Men requires more Potent means. To these methods we will now turn.

[ . . . ]

posted by Stephen Ramsay 8/3/2000 10:34:10 PM

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JD MOVE: An offering (This is like an accessory but the rules are slightly different).
Jerry: I offer you these 16 lines of addenda to yr Move #2. You don't have to BUY them from me, I offer them freely (in full generosity of spirit). BUT, if you ACCEPT them, then I get 25 points for a move AND 16 lines of credit. IF you accept them, YOU can have 16 lines of credit for your role, without using any player points, BUT you don't get the 25 points for a move.

--"Grief and glory." The words raised a brief smile that she was sending somewhere
else, I know, because it quickly perished as she seemed to waken. This time she
looked directly at me with her small crooked smile and said: "And what should I do
with Heathcliff when he behaves badly and vexes me?" [A fiendish expression took possession of her mercurial features. Heathcliff caught her excitement and grasped her hands with an impulsive gesture, pulling her slim figure roughly towards him. The gesture only caused her to to grin more wildly, as if in the throes of some demonic mood. Their eyes flashed a mute exchange before the little monkey twisted herself free. Even Heathcliff was no match for quickness when such a spirited mood took over her wilfull person. She turned and taunted him with a bantering tone. "And when he vexes me VERY badly?"]
--"Reason with him, and if he won't listen to reason, beat him." She burst out
laughing. "I will, oh Heathcliff, I will." [She fairly danced with the pleasure of teasing him. And he took up the mood, but his engagement with the game communicated more serious intent than that of the mischevious minx. There were moments when she seemed to have no heart at all, so cruelly she abused his feelings. All that was tender in Heathcliff might have been better served by a kinder mistress.]
--"You will do exactly as you please, no more or less. You will ignore me if that suits
you or tell tales to Hindley just to watch him break into fury and do your beating for
you. Or you will do something else you haven't yet thought of. And now I've obeyed
you, Cathy, it's your turn." I pulled the mask from my head and thrust it in her hands.
She looked at it and then at me and she said: "I will," and she put it on. [The transformation it wrought on her countenance was echoed in the swift alteration of her posture. If she had seemed mischievous in the moments before, she appeared now to possess a truly terrifying aspect. The effect upon Heathcliff was all the more surprising. His face clouded with tears and he feel down upon the ground, clasping his arms about her, all teasing dispersed as quickly as it had come. He caught up her hand to his cheek and gazed upon her adoringly. "Cathy!" he cried --and the rest was muffled as he pressed his face against her skirt. This was too serious a game for children, surely.]

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/3/2000 10:08:57 AM

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MOVE 3 (jjm)

1 December 1908. Clement's books have gained their object, their celebrity. But reading them I think of my treasure and have to smile - how much he doesn't know he doesn't know. But suppose he could read these texts of mine, would he be able to decipher them better than I? Thirteen years have left them as uncertain for me as ever. The mask scenes in particular. Where did she intend to put them - I mean where exactly?! And why did she leave them out? And when in fact did she write them? All those echoes from Clement's MS. B poems ought to explain something anyway. But they only deepen the ambiguities. Most fascinating, most maddening, are those miscegenations of real and fictional places and events. No one doesn't know WH for the amazing personal apocalypse that it is. But what finally do we see of her in those bold and shocking texts, the published ones as well as these precious remains that haunt my mind? She seems still as clear and mysterious as a star. As my self! No, there she is far more clear. Even her texts, like cleansed doors of perception. Even I can see that, though their clarity is my daily shame. And yet, in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king. That is my office, I am a dark creator - a vacancy absorbing the false spaces of scholarship and imagination. All those majestic lights! So we say, but we know nothing, we pretend we watch those vanished stars. And so I have come to light some few ignes fatui for the fat and fatuous.

When I am dead they will know me for what I am - dark star, black hole, anti-matter. Some clever fellow will come along and start examining those wicked children of mine, will go burrowing around and drag them to the light for his righteous inquisition. And when it happens - as it will, it always does - I will become a monster! I only hope I'm not already across the bar when that day comes. I'll lose my second and darker joy if it turns out so.

I'm dead already, of course, in a way - having chosen, as I have done "with clear and sound mind", to corrupt the roots of my life and my work and all my loves. "And for what," some will ask, "for nothing but some perverse private pleasure." Hardly that - the pleasure is the least of it, a mere sop to my mortal nature. For what? For a knowledge otherwise ungainable and unknowable, a knowledge of what we might call the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. You think knowing nothing is nothing. The dead are prophets. When you read these words - this text I shall not destroy -- you will see what I can see. Not myself, least of all those gone great ones. But you --all of you, who know nothing and think otherwise - you I despise and foresee.

And now, reflecting thus, I can see something else that I must do. I must make copies of these precious relics - at least some of them. And leave them with these "diary papers" of mine, these wretched imitations of those glorious originals that arose from the hands of original angels.

38 lines

posted by Jerome McGann 8/3/2000 8:26:31 AM

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NB: My second move is AFTER the first move here, please read through. I simply posted the first from home, later in the day, for the record, so go past it to read the new post. JD

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/2/2000 4:08:13 PM

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JD: Move 1

September, 1856, London

R is truly gone, as my dream foretold, his letter came this morning announcing his departure of two days ago. I am determined not to miss him, bound as I am by his edict forbidding me to do so. So though by nature I would long for him, I know I must not. I must make instead a living temple of my heart, one closer in spirit to the schoolroom than the shrine, in which I may prepare those many lessons necessary to equip me for our future life. In my daily discipline of labors among languages and literature, I shall conjure him constantly as a companion to those tasks – all made joyful by the continual recollection that they bind me closer to him as a foundation for all that will follow. How much less a burthen do they seem than the dreadful pressure on my chest, that ponderous melancholy whose oppressive force resembles nothing so much as the presence of the weight of one of those mythic elephants of his East placing his foot upon me. All of my determination works toward lifting that burthen with my spirits, forcing my weak nature to conquer the feeble tendencies of my sex, and become truly worthy of that right – now mine – to call him by the title of lover. He who shall be my husband, is in spirit that already, so pledged are we by the disclosures of our hearts and mingling of our souls. By an accident of gesture he left a mark upon my cheek, and by the dimming of its vividness I mark the distance from the moment of his last embrace, a fading trace in the living flesh of what was his presence. I must prepare myself to maintain that recollection long after such tangible signs have departed, and to nourish my faith on precious little sustenance beyond the sheer deliberateness of my belief.
For inspiration in this endeavor my thoughts are drawn to the pages of that most intensely original account of the human heart, ever a favorite of mine, the tale of Heathcliff and Catherine. My musings and perusings returned me to passages long known by heart, now reinvented by experience. How clearly now do I grasp the fuller import of those scenes through the palpable recollection of his embraces than when I read them with a girl’s innocence. My woman’s heart, now brought to life, has an almost too-vital comprehension of the painful fatality of thwarted passion. (Even as I write this, my soul protests against too much identification – ours will not be thwarted, fulfilled already as it is by our acknowledged adoration of each other!) But if it were to me to change that tale, reconfigure the strands and threads of its complexities, it would not be in the first portion I would make my interference, but in the latter half of the work, where the fated children are the unwitting instruments of parents’ awful acts.
Yes, I would change the tale in its Twenty-ninth Chapter, and begin to let Heathcliff’s dark passions inspire young Catherine even as her wilful youth and desires transform his unconquerable longings into purer faith. He might love HER, after all, and revive by plunging his black spirit into the purifying goodness of her fresh soul. In an hour of idle dalliance this morning, one that would have been better spent on pondering the maps in Arabia Deserta or conjugating the infamously difficult verbs in my Arabic gramma, I happened to consider what might be the effect of reworking page 218, for instance, when young Cathy confronts her bitter uncle with these words:

"Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery! You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious of him? Nobody loves you – nobody will cry for you, when you die! I wouldn’t be you!"

I would insert this passage in substitution for the next:

"Cathy spoke with intense passion, all trace of dreary triumph banished by the sudden spark of response that she perceived in her uncle’s expression. Her words, sharp as curlew cries, ripped into the still living tissue of his heart. In that moment her manner and voice were so completely those of her mother that he felt a thick heaving of those boulders with which he had so long blocked the entry to his own passions. A vital force in him wakened to the plaint of his niece. For a moment he saw in her reborn the sheer force of a will to overcome the legacy of those transgressions for which she had been condemned to suffer. She might unleash them both from that infernal sentence of constraint. Joy, so long a stranger to his breast, leapt unexpected into flame – not to dwell in that cold hearth, too frigid and bitter to sustain a fire, but as the ghost reminder of the optimistic energy of youth. An impulse almost unknown caused him to lift his hand, roughened and brown from long exposure in his restless rambles on the moors. She started, shinking from his gesture, fearing he might strike her. But some unspoken communication passed a sympathy between them so that she felt the impact of her words upon the frozen spirit of the man – and grasped that he too saw an opening into which he might pour his long pent energies."

It’s not that she can save him from his Destiny – I would protest against that as I would against anyone’s attempt to swerve me from mine! – but that she might gain his aid in overcoming that terrible sentence to languish forever in the awful domestic isolation of that remote spot. Surely, surely her young spirit longs for adventure, and he must, as a man and as a desperate soul, see the necessity to spring her free to follow that impulse!

How all of this does refresh the very image of R before my eyes. His dark countenance, image of a pure spirit and not a black one in spite of the worn complexion of his skin, fills my mind’s memory, present and alive to my every moment’s apperception. I am wont to imagine that my understanding of his spirit is unique, that I alone grasp fully the so oft-misunderstood clarity and brightness of his mind, the brilliant inspiration of his missionary zeal. That I may now consider myself a partner in that enterprise!

(Move: 25 + Line count: 75 = 100 points)

P.S. NOTE: My second move is below this -- so go ahead and read! This first move is simply being posted here so EVERYTHING is present in the Blogger.

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/2/2000 4:06:00 PM

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[8/2/00 1:50 | Johanna ]

London October 1856

R is now some weeks gone, and the shape of his absence takes many forms. A consolation is that he is spoken of frequently in company - and at every appearance of his name in conversation I feel the impulse to proclaim our connection aloud! I know I must not, and only hope that even those few references to him that pass my lips do not reveal, by immodest tone or the expression of too much affection, the secret that links our feelings and fate.
I am determined to keep my faith in our future, and the daily tasks to which I am devoted assist in this ritual. But so arduous have I been in application of my energies to these duties that I feel yesterday into dark despondency, the result no doubt of a mental fatigue brought on by struggling with these unknown languages. It is a trial not to have the true companion of one's spirit in close proximity. I despise my woman's weakness in this longing, knowing that the path we will trod must be one in which each is able, and neither dependent upon the other. R must consider me a partner and helpmate, delight and comfort to his life, rather than a burden. My spirits are much renewed this morning, but I found myself drawn towards that odd distraction of Literature from which much satisfaction is to be obtained.
Having passed some hours in more strenuous exercise of mind (the insubordinate gerunds of the Arabian forces marshalling themselves like rowdy troops against my grammatical understanding), I allowed myself the distraction of thinking again about young Cathy and her fate. I refrain from rewriting any ending to the tale, at least at the outset of my efforts. But might the opening not contain the germs of an alternative? Might Mr. Lockwood have encountered a different scene? Heathcliff, though uncompromising in his gruff manner, despising the world and its trivialities as he does (and must! given his destiny), might he not have displayed towards young Cathy a measure of inspiration for that singular streak of spirit in her that is her mother's legacy? Could we not glimpse, in that dreary household, at least a hint of salvation in this life? A chance to mitigate her poor female fate and soften her sentence to that awful provincial domesticity? Can he not see that hers is an adventurous soul, one whose fulfillment requires the sight of foreign lands, exotic peoples, and unfamiliar prospects? His whole world was Wuthering Heights, the moors, Penistone Crag, and the cosmography of his soul mapped into that landscape until its mists and moods were as one with the atmosphere of his romantic soul. Can he not imagine another fulfillment beyond the ravages of destruction? A redemption equally inspired by romance, but the romance of the expansive hungers of a restless soul that finds itself in search of a world without -rather than a universe within? Young Linton was the puny creature of a loveless union, a sacrifice to perverted thoughts and feelings. But Cathy? Cathy? Can she not live out the unrealized passions of their great love, as if thrust from its loins into the full glory of an adventure in this world? Could not Mr. Lockwood, then, have felt the pent potential of a creature preparing herself for flight, being urged and fostered by an unseen but palpable force through which her strengths were being tested for the journeys ahead? Instead of that dull countenance, withdrawn, pale, and affectless, might he not have had a glimpse of a fulminating spirit preparing itself for exploits of undreamt-of daring? The soaring flights to which that central pair might have risen had they not been doomed? I must to my text and find some passage whose transformation might hint at this other outcome.
If only I might have the merest word from R - the smallest token of communication (I dare not hope for expressions of affection) would provide such solace. He cautioned me that he was a poor correspondent, at best, and I know I must have few expectations on this score. To await the post each day only to be disappointed by Topsy's "no, nothing ma'am" in reply to my inquiry is to risk a daily tempest in my ever hopeful heart. I must learn to discipline these feelings as I discipline my hand, making its steady entries in the ledgers in which I trace my translations and other exercises. A man's heart is not like a woman's, in need of constant reassurance. I must remember this and keep in mind that his silence is no indication of indifference, but quite the contrary, a steady reminder of his unchanging, indeed, absolute, commitment. It is easy to long for Heathcliff's stormy passion, to envision each instant enthralled with the intensity manifest in those terrible moments of final embrace before the open window of Catherine's chamber, and not recall the depths of unendurable agony that accompany them. Tempting, also, to imagine the human heart can endure such romantic longing, and that such caresses might reconcile spirit and matter if only they were sustained. Longing fills up this absence, and conjures his image to my eyes. If ours is such a passion - as it appears to me, recalling the depths of affection that burned in his eyes when last we parted - then I must school myself all the more in the ways of constraint and be reconciled to this current separation in anticipation of that most precious miracle of eventualities -his return.

posted by Johanna Drucker 8/2/2000 1:48:19 PM

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Move Two: BPN

16 November 1832.
Gimmerton Parish.

Dear Sir,

It seems to me that the days have passed quickly since I kept house for you at Thrushcross Grange, but I know that time's a fickle thing and does not show the same face to all folk in all estates. I am sensible you may not recollect old Ellen Dean and that sending you this letter after so long is not quite "meeterly mensful," as we say. But then, the thing I have to tell you is scarcely proper, and it pains me. I mean not to hold off here, as I've held off so many years, but to confess directly and ask your understanding.

You were kind to me, sir, and what's more you flattered me by listening to a tale I'd not shared with anyone; but I've had many a listener since, as our household has grown -- master and servant both, and while I've not told them nearly so complete a history as you learned those dark nights at the Grange, the happy listeners here have all but cured me of my old desire to prattle. I recall I feigned reluctance when you asked me to tell the torments of my poor mistress and her kin, but surely you discerned the truth fair enough as I sat hour after hour that long Winter, idle hands a-tangle in untended knitting. I could not hold my tongue, and grew to regret that I had been so glib.

I'll spare you my excuse-making and come to the point. When you left us for London, sir, in January, you left your books and papers and private messes behind and it was not until September and your tenancy's end that you returned. It was a but a short space before I was called to the Heights to tend on Master Heathcliff in his last days, but a long summer followed and I was often at the Grange. As the days since our talks lengthened and the little world around us on the moors brightened, I came to regret that I'd revealed to you a certain event. None had known but me -- to whom all (or almost all) had confided -- and those ghosts whose memory I dishonoured by telling you. So in your absence, Mr. Lockwood, I did an ill deed, but one I meant as remedy for a worse one. I read your journal, sir, in which you had in such complete detail recorded all I said to you of our lives at the Heights, and at the Grange. I read it, and I mutilated it, for which I now ask your pardon.

I enclose herewith the record of my folly, the words I wished I'd never said on the pages I so carefully cut free of your fine little book. Perhaps I am as foolish an old woman as ever I was young. I know I am more thoughtful and more able now to see the good of having a whole story told, even if its principals lie less quietly for the telling.

Restore these pages to your book, and forgive your old servant,

Nelly Dean

[Move(25) + Lines(35) +Reference(3 for having learned how to say "fairly proper" in Yorkshire dialect) = 63 points]

posted by Bethany Nowviskie 8/2/2000 11:37:01 AM

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Move One: BPN

1832.--Thirty years are gone since last I walked the kirkyard at Gimmerton, and yet the letter I have had this morning brings the place and its silent stones quite clearly to my mind's eye. It is strange to open this little book again, to brush away the silvery traces of three decades --a lifetime for some, for both of those poor ladies whose shame this morning's tidy missive overlay. It is strange, too, to see how eagerly these pages take the ink, and to remember.

Perhaps it was an act of charity that Ellen Dean committed on my little book; certainly a questionable remorse has led her to return my property. I shall affix her letter here below. As to the pages themselves, I feel compelled (by Truth? or by some less noble impulse?) to restore them to their proper places in my old journal. I am tempted to chide myself for not having noticed their loss, but then I think on the temperate life I have led since I penned them long ago, and bless the tranquility of this happy house, and cease to wonder.

[Move(25) + Lines(13) = 38 points]

posted by Bethany Nowviskie 8/1/2000 7:13:46 PM

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MOVE 2

[A MS leaf, undated, written on both sides, approx. 8x10", with a small note pinned to the upper right in another hand, dated and signed]

Note leaf:
"This is EB's holograph, normal size, fair copied and remarkably with no erasures or corrections. No watermark and without date, the paper uniform with some of the Diary papers. Date uncertain but sometime during 1845-46. TJW 10/1/01"

MS:
--"What is that you hold behind your back, Cathy?"
--"It's something I found in father's old trunk in that room upstairs over the kitchen."
--"Hindley said he'd thrash us if we went in there."
--"Oh Hindley's a beast. He hates anything that pleases me. Look." She smiled in that way of hers, Nelly, so careless and consumed by what held her attention, and tossed the thing to me. I grasped it and saw it was a mask. It was black, a half mask very like the one we put on Punchinello when we play at puppet theatre.
--"Put it on, Heathcliff. It will improve your looks. And I've some questions to put to you. When you wear that mask you may hide your scowling face and show me your true soul."
--"When have I never showed you that - to my cost often enough."
--"Poor Heathcliff! What kind of soul do you have, that's the question. It doesn't bleed, I think - at least I've never seen its blood. But perhaps it simply doesn't bleed for me."
--"If you could see anything but your own will and pleasure you'd have seen the truth, Cathy. I am crucified very day on that wicked tongue of yours. And you know it, you pretend otherwise, you laugh. But I know you, Cathy, and if that's what you want of me, that's what you shall have. What does Joseph say - that Jesus hung on his cross for three hours dying? Three hours are nothing. You've hanged me on a cross for days and days for no reason but to study my pain. "
--"You're wicked to talk that way. Stop it!" She pouted and bit her lip and looked hard at me. "Put on the mask."
--"Cathy is a perverse and willful girl, Heathcliff. You should resist those whims of hers, for her good if you don't care for your own where she's concerned. As I fear you don't and never will."
--When I put it on, that dark willfulness seemed to run off under her skin and her eyes went flat and bright, the way they look when we reach the top of Penniston Crag and they lose themselves in gazing out across the western moors. Those eyes were passing through me then, looking somewhere else, and she said: "What have those lonely mountains worth revealing, Heathcliff?"
--"Grief and glory." The words raised a brief smile that she was sending somewhere else, I know, because it quickly perished as she seemed to waken. This time she looked directly at me with her small crooked smile and said: "And what should I do with Heathcliff when he behaves badly and vexes me?"
--"Reason with him, and if he won't listen to reason, beat him." She burst out laughing. "I will, oh Heathcliff, I will."
--"You will do exactly as you please, no more or less. You will ignore me if that suits you or tell tales to Hindley just to watch him break into fury and do your beating for you. Or you will do something else you haven't yet thought of. And now I've obeyed you, Cathy, it's your turn." I pulled the mask from my head and thrust it in her hands. She looked at it and then at me and she said: "I will," and she put it on.

52 lines

posted by Jerome McGann 8/1/2000 6:08:28 PM

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MOVE 1

30 July 1915. So once again the day comes and I may look at these amazing documents. Each year they seem yet more wondrous . Perhaps - surely! - because they appear to me alone, like some special theophany. God knows we inhabit a botched civilization. Emily's ferocious retreat more and more seems a forecast of what we are and what we keep becoming. And the lust to possess fragile remains like these - even the damned recollect what they have lost and long to regain it. Vainly of course. And so come men like Clement, John, Harry - myself: hyenas of glory. Worse than that - its salesmen and investors. But these precious remains I hold back, and when I die they shall die with me, I'll see to that.
What wouldn't any one of them give just to see these things, to know they exist. That fool Clement had them in his hands 20 years ago but when Nicholls brought out that trove of his - well, depth of passion is not always measured by excitability. Extreme and manifested feeling in a god like Catherine is one thing. As you plunge toward the quotidian - Hindley, Isabella - it turns to curse and torment. And when it reaches the like of us it is folly alone. Clement's hands shook as he turned over each of those priceless leaves. Priceless! That exactly - and I at any rate may aspire to that kind of truth, to know and to preserve for ever that pricelessness. So trembling with pleasure and excitement - like that other fool of fiction Jeffrey Aspern - he could not see what I did not try to hide. I merely had to draw no special attention to myself, merely lift that packet and put it away in my satchel. Nicholls saw nothing but the happiness and sorrow of those memories Clement is so clever at working upon when he is bent on rifling a gravesite. And Clement was absorbed in his corrupt double pleasures of swindling and possessing.
And so here they are, these relics of a spiritual world, brought out in this yearly ceremony performed by the only priest of a religion that has no adherents and never shall have.
What will be the readings of this day's liturgy?

29 lines

posted by Jerome McGann 8/1/2000 6:07:56 PM

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