{"id":110,"date":"2010-09-27T22:28:45","date_gmt":"2010-09-27T20:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=13"},"modified":"2010-09-27T22:28:45","modified_gmt":"2010-09-27T20:28:45","slug":"13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2010\/09\/27\/13\/","title":{"rendered":"SEEING BOOKS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, more about Wuthering Heights<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading with my students today, among others, the scene when Nelly Dean tries to persuade an upset, teenage Heathcliff that he has nothing to envy his rival in love, blond, blue-eyed Edgar Linton. \u201cCome to the glass,\u201d she says, \u201cand I\u2019ll let you see what you should wish\u201d: a good-natured temper that would give his handsome face an attractive expression. An unusually nice Nelly tries, besides, to build the boy\u2019s self-confidence by telling him that \u201cYou\u2019re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen…?\u201d <\/p>\n

As she administers this ad-hoc therapy Nelly is actually engaged in washing up Heathcliff\u2019s very dirty face and combing his unkempt hair so that his paramour Cathy, just transformed into a refined, pert young lady, will no longer make fun of him. One of the students, a girl trained as an actress at the Institut del Teatre, later told me (typically in the corridor) that she found this scene quite enticing as, precisely, a scene in the dramatic sense of the word. She marvelled at the good dramaturgy of this novel. I do, too.<\/p>\n

I also marvel at how we miss this aspect of reading novels, caught up as we are in considering character, narrative technique, plot construction and a myriad other factors. It is plain that novels \u2013even Ulysses<\/em>– are a collection of scenes yet we very rarely consider the dramatic talent of novelists, perhaps except when we pay attention to adaptations as they force us to consider what can be transferred onto the screen (the scenes) and what cannot (the rest).<\/p>\n

Maybe because I am indeed interested in adaptations I find it increasingly difficult to read without mulling over the visuals of what I am reading. I have already written an essay on what Heathcliff looks like based on a comparative analysis of diverse film versions of Bront\u00eb\u2019s novel but I am not talking now about this kind of visualisation. I mean: what exactly happens in our brains as we read? How do we imagine? In our media-saturated world, reading seems more and more unsatisfactory: scenes, even when they are as good in their dramaturgy as the mirror scene I have described, are strangely hazy, diffuse, vague… particularly those set in a foreign past we know so little about.<\/p>\n

I wonder what we\u2019d see if we could take the mental images that Bront\u00eb\u2019s excellent mirror scene (wow, doesn\u2019t this sound Lacanian?) generated in each of my students, in each of the million readers of the book. Have they grown dimmer as the years go by? Do we imagine Bront\u00eb\u2019s world in 2010 in a radically different way from 1847? Surely, but still the question remains: how do we do it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, more about Wuthering Heights. I\u2019ve been reading with my students today, among others, the scene when Nelly Dean tries to persuade an upset, teenage Heathcliff that he has nothing to envy his rival in love, blond, blue-eyed Edgar Linton. \u201cCome to the glass,\u201d she says, \u201cand I\u2019ll let you see what you should wish\u201d: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wuthering-heights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}