The Critical Love of Total Identification

"This is nothing," cried she: "I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."

Wuthering Heights, Chapter IX

The destructive identification between Catherine and Heathcliff may be matched by the Nature of their realm in bleak fervor, but Nature does not give its blessing, nor does society, and the two entities collude against the two lovers, annihilation through sickness and status not just them but many who happened to be in the way, while scarring the survivors. This maelstrom of passion, however, is necessary to clear away the build-up of past enmities, even if by obliteration, and the junior Catherine and Hareton, after Heathcliff finally dies, are free to attempt a new way.

Or so new thoughts and old memories make of it. I confess to not having read the novel again since I first read it around eight years ago. This is not an exegesis on the novel, though, so I am undeterred. Emily Brontë's violent vision came to mind as I watched again Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical Passion. The similarities are abundant and obvious: a love triangle, a passionate love that comes at the cost of not much less than everything, a desolate and remote location, sickly people. Yet, my real concern here is the idea of complete yielding, and that such a thing as demanded in the worlds of these two words is demanded also by great art.

Clara is beautiful and still young enough that Giorgio, himself young and handsome, is "hopelessly in love" with her (one wonders if Sondheim was aware of Cecily's rebuke of that phrase in The Importance of Being Earnest). Joined through pity, they do as lovers do and believe they are not just another love story. Then Giorgio, a soldier, is sent to some provincial military post and meets Fosca, who is sickly, homely, and embittered by life; her only escape until Giorgio arrives is through reading ("I read to fly!"). All it takes is Giorgio's initial pity and general gentlemanly conduct, and the spark is lit and grows until the fire illuminating the bonds between him and Fosca also go on to burn away  his honor and his shallow love for Clara.

In both of these works, morality has little to no relevance: indeed, they are more proscription than prescription, and no one should carry on in the real world as such--even if we actually do. But, as with much other art, that is hardly their point, as far as interactions between people are concerned. Aesthetic interactions, though, are different, as they are our selves in dialect with ourselves, carried on in the echo chambers of the art which possess us. The abuses we suffer of our own doing are overlooked in a way that abusings of others are not; they are doubt, guilt, anguish, and so on. We are not moved to change when content, when Clara's and Edgar Linton's are moved just enough to love us as we are, to meet us just enough past convenience; but a new life, a new self emerges in the clearing love that Fosca's and Heathcliff's demand--and yes, manipulate--us to rise to. The inner voice of actualizing change that frequently torments us needs an agent to affect us, this agent being seemingly possessed by this voice the way Heathcliff and Fosca can seem possessed by some foreign passion, and this agent needing the sublimity of these two characters instead of the beauty of a Clara. Outside of our selves, what we find in this real world of ours are, most personally and therefore most profoundly, our experiences with art.

Passion, when it premiered, was lauded by critics but derided by audiences. Sondheim said in reply:

The story struck some audiences as ridiculous. They refused to believe that anyone, much less the handsome Giorgio, could come to love someone so manipulative and relentless, not to mention physically repellent, as Fosca. As the perennial banality would have it, they couldn't "identify" with the main characters. The violence of their reaction, however, strikes me as an example of "The lady doth protest too much." I think they may have identified with Giorgio and Fosca all too readily and uncomfortably. The idea of a love that's pure, that burns with D.H. Lawrence's gemlike flame, emanating from a source so gnarled and selfish, is hard to accept. Perhaps they were reacting to the realization that we are all Fosca, we are all Giorgio, we are all Clara.

[Thanks to Wikipedia for the above, whose citation credits Sondheim's book Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011)]

The demand of Fosca and the eventual yielding of Giorgio is analogous to the thorough submission that art, great art, demands of us. To be Catherine confessing her complete identification with Heathcliff, that he even surpasses herself as her self, is the truest form of love-criticism we auditors of works can and should have. The Clara's of art are the pretty distractions that come and go: all the movies, all the books, all the music which we profess to like, which we acclaim to be "cool": how much of it all remains, haunting our hearts and thoughts the way Fosca haunts Giorgio, or Catherine literally haunts Heathcliff? When a work of art possesses me, I learn about myself, and when I possess it in return--can we say that it learns more about itself? The critical is forever the personal, and while great works fill the canons, the greatest works are the vocations of our individual canons, works "hopelessly in love" with the lovers who find them and are found in return, a love that is not a choice but what they are, and who we are as well. This criticism by total yielding of identity marks me as a Romantic, and is almost literally Narcissistic: we are transfixed by our reflections, and who's to stay the reflection, or the reflector, is not transfixed with us?