5.1 The Immanence of Animal Drifts
The open relations between Heathcliff and Cathy and the moor, presented in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, are expanded further in responses to this text that highlight the modes of responsiveness possible between humans and animals of other species. These interrelations are particularly evident in Kathy Acker’s “Obsession”, which brilliantly revises the scorn Brontë’s Heathcliff has for those who see the world as made to privilege the human. The creaturely aspects in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Wuthering Heights” are less radical. This poem’s speaker refuses to engage with the co-affective invitations of the sheep that she observes, occluding the possibility of more equitable animal relations. The films of Andrea Arnold and Luis Buñuel offer viewers a stronger posthumanist perspective, particularly when they engage audiences’ visual and aural senses with the gaze of animals who are not human actors. Together these works demonstrate the radicalisation that comes with depicting animal co-affectivity across species.
To illustrate how this intertextuality destabilises anthropocentric hierarchies that force one animal being above another, I will firstly focus on Emily Brontë herself, considering her life, before detailing my reading of her novel. My analysis for this and the following sections is inspired by the concept of respect and trust, outlined by Donna Haraway, that shifts human-centric ideas of animal relations. I extend my argument for these texts’ contribution to intent intra-activity between species by activating Jacques Derrida’s thinking about what it is to be beast or sovereign, or outside the law.
Stevie Davies claims, with more authority than I am prepared to take, that Emily Brontë gave nonhuman animals a significance ‘equivalent in meaning and importance to her own’ (1994, 109). To make her point, Davies cites a well-known, if only anecdotally supported example from Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë. This story, passed to Gaskell by Charlotte, involves Emily being told that Keeper was yet again occupying his forbidden but preferred territory of Emily’s bed. Gaskell reports that a white-faced and tight-lipped Emily dragged this mastiff bull terrier downstairs, punched the miscreant with ‘her bare clenched fist’, repeatedly hitting ‘his red fierce eyes’ until they ‘swelled up’ ([1857] 1992, 190). At this point ‘the half-blind, stupefied beast was led to his accustomed lair, to have his swollen head fomented and cared for by the very Emily herself’ (190). Juliet Barker, with Davies, argues Brontë’s ‘love of animals was always stronger than any concern for her own wellbeing’, citing this unsettling beating to support her contention (1994, 198). Not all scholars are convinced by the full truth of this anecdote, with Lucinda Miller wryly commenting that Gaskell did not ‘scrutinise over-carefully the authority of her stories’ (2005, 225). This grain of salt might also be applied to Gaskell’s story of Emily giving a ‘merciful draught of water’ to a potentially rabid dog and receiving a ‘maddened snap’ in return ([1857] 1992, 189). Apparently unruffled, so the story goes, she uses a hot iron to ‘sear the bitten place’ (189). To avoid the dog being destroyed, Gaskell writes, Emily never spoke of the incident. Citing a contemporary of Gaskell, Miller suggests that such incidents might have been extraordinary rather than ordinary, for such are the things most often written down.
For me, the best evidence of the attention Brontë paid to nonhumans, apart from her exceptional novel and poetry, is in the portrait of Keeper, the bull terrier mastiff that accompanied her for a good portion of her life. This work, “Keeper–from life”, was completed in 1838 (Alexander and Sellers 1995, 391). Also, as literary scholar Nancy Workman points out, Emily, like her sisters and brother, did a great deal of ‘copy work’ to develop her artistic abilities, with pets and birds being common studies (2016, 256). Brontë’s inclusion of various animal species in her paintings and writings was a proclivity shared with many Victorians of her era, her siblings not the least of such artists. However, in the time taken to create her portrait of Keeper, it is clear Emily Brontë took him into close account. Her human vision of his canine vision illustrates the attention to multispecies personhood that marks Wuthering Heights.
Scholarly understandings of Emily’s relations with other animals, that are based on literary evidence, often draw upon Charlotte’s novel Shirley ([1849] c1871–1901). Written in the shadow of her brother’s and sisters’ deaths, this work was intended, Charlotte later wrote, to depict a woman of Emily’s character, as she would be with more money and power. Charlotte had shared the early parts of this novel with her sisters, when they were alive, but completed the final section of Shirley alone, in the wake of living through the death of her brother Branwell, then Emily, and then her last surviving sister Anne. It is tempting to accept as truth Charlotte’s suggestions of Emily’s equitable relations with Keeper, and other creatures, through Shirley’s friendship with Tarter, the large dog who lives alongside her. However, to treat this novel as historical truth is to lean on Charlotte’s grief-stricken state. The novel’s depiction of Shirley’s relationship with Tartar may be part of a heart-felt sisterly eulogy, but it is no objective measure of Emily’s animal politics.
I make this point because scholarly analyses of the animal relations in Brontë’s novel are perhaps not best supported by biographical sources, augmented by her poems and a quite limited number of essays and letters. This is my reservation with Ivan Kreilkamp’s argument that Brontë’s development of Heathcliff’s character was modelled on Keeper. ‘Like Heathcliff, Keeper is both and alternately “friend” and “brute,” human and animal, subject of affection and bitter enemy’ (2005, 100). Kreilkamp’s proposition is appealing, but difficult to substantiate, because of the limited documentation detailing Brontë’s life with Keeper. He was one of the various animals who shared her habitat, but their relationship was never explicated by Brontë herself.
Kreilkamp also compares Heathcliff’s vigil at Cathy’s window as she dies to Gaskell’s account of Keeper’s vigil by Emily Brontë’s door when she was ill. Gaskell writes, ‘he slept moaning for nights at the door of her empty room’ ([1857] 1992, 190). The same link could be made between Gaskell’s report of Keeper’s bout of howling after Emily’s death and Heathcliff’s scrabbling through the ground towards Cathy’s corpse. Brontë and Gaskell were probably both aware of the Victorian trope of dogs long-attached to their newly dead human companions pining at their grave. In Brontë’s novel, Isabella makes the snide suggestion that Heathcliff should ‘go stretch’ over Cathy’s ‘grave and die like a faithful dog’ ([1847] 1997, 178). Robert Polhemus draws upon Brontë biographies to argue that her philosophy, simply stated, is, ‘If you love your dog and your dog behaves badly, you don’t make a huge moral case out of it, because you don’t idealise the ethical life of dogs or expect them to be angels’ (2006, 187). Brontë, he goes on to argue, was also not ‘shocked by human misbehaviour’ but instead saw ‘savage humanity as part of immortal nature’ (187). I question Polhemus’ use of the words ‘savage’ and ‘immortal’, for their anthropo-theological loadings, but his broader point about the non-hierarchical relations between humans and other species is sympathetic to my reading of Brontë’s novel. I prefer not to lay weight on Brontë’s personal opinions about animals in my reading of her novel, even while Kreilkamp, Davies and Polhemus may well be accurate in their biographical suppositions.
Scholarly investigations into the role played by animals in Brontë’s novel need not depend upon biography. Readings of the animal relations in her novel are suitably inspiring. To consider the question of animal relations in this novel is to consider its heart. As Deborah Denenholz Morse observes, ‘Heathcliff is forcefully associated with animals’ (2007, 57). His canine characteristics include snarling and growling, his mouth foams and his body bristles. Morse also notes that as a youth he was characterized as a colt; long-maned, long-legged, playful and strong. Finally, Morse points out Heathcliff ‘has only one name, like supernatural beings–or companion animals’ (2015, 200). There is equity in the characteristics of Brontë’s animals in Wuthering Heights, whatever their species. Brontë does not limit Heathcliff through her use of animal metaphors. Rather, her descriptions emphasise human characteristics that can also be observed in individuals of other species. His animality does not make him a lesser human.
Davies was one of the first readers to focus on Brontë’s depictions of animals in Wuthering Heights in its historical context. She argues that Brontë’s writing position bears comparison to Charles Darwin’s refusal to anthropomorphise animals, working instead to ‘decentre’ humans from a ‘privileged position’ (1994, 113). Kreilkamp’s stimulating post-anthropocentric reading supports this claim. In an application of Derrida’s thinking about animal exploitation, he describes Brontë’s novel as deeply concerned with ‘the ethical problem and narrative resource of the suffering animal’ (2005, 94). ‘Western culture’, Kreilkamp, writes, is ‘fundamentally structured by the necessity for the suffering and execution of the animal’ (2005, 90). Kreilkamp makes this point in the context of broader Victorian discourses focusing on questions of vivisection and cruelty.
Human abuse of other animal species is of significant concern to Derrida. David Kress offers a helpful analysis of Derrida’s theoretical approach concerning animals, through his reading of Derrida’s last major work, a series of essays considering the beast and the sovereign. Krell argues Derrida is working through ‘the twofold exclusion from the human public realm of beast and king, with kings and gods hovering above the law while animals grovel below’ (2013, 1). Focusing on the question of how death might be experienced by different species, Derrida dismisses Martin Heidegger’s argument that dying means something fundamentally different to humans, compared to animals of different species. The key question at stake for Heidegger is the difference between reaction, which he attributes to animals of all species, and response, which he attributes only to humans. Derrida does not deny there will be differences in death from species to species, but he finds the divide between reaction and response unhelpful. It is the harm that matters for a vulnerable finite animal. Krell agrees with Derrida that there is a faultline in Heidegger’s ‘confident distinction’ between human animals that die and all other animals that perish (66). However, in Heidegger’s defence, Krell raises the point that any ‘charge of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism is essentially duplicitous’ (114). It is impossible, he argues, for human thought to be ‘rigorous’ enough to ‘liberate itself from its human nexus’ (114). No matter how advanced biology, or any other life science might be, humans will never fully establish how the death of another species is cognitively processed by an individual within that species, because studies will always centre around questions of interest to the human species. Dinesh Wadiwel offers an appropriate response to this impasse by suggesting that rather than ‘exploring the ways in which animals might be said to be like us’, so that an ‘award’ of ‘moral equivalence’ might be granted, it might be more productive ‘to examine the way in which human violence towards animals establishes our own superiority as a contingent “truth”’ (2014, 160). This ethical position goes directly back to the question of perishing or dying. It is not possible for one species to ascertain the difference between a reaction and response as it is experienced by another species, but humans can certainly question the systemic causes behind their violence to others. My material account of response and reaction does not enter into the detailed play Derrida performs with human ideas of death, loneliness and evil, so ably summarised by Krell. Less ambitiously, I approach Derrida’s ideas about response and reaction through the question of affect, as contextualised by Brian Massumi and further materialised by Karen Barad.
I take this approach not least because death is a very difficult concept to grasp, even as it is understood within the human species. Even when death is spoken about in a language that humans fully understand, it confounds full comprehension. It is possible, however, to seek ways of causing less human harm, even if the idea of harm itself is susceptible to anthropomorphic projections. This is, perhaps, a situation where something might be gained in forcing human-specific understandings upon other species. Yet even then, representations of animals speaking in human languages is questionable, for such overwriting often obscures animal communications across species.
My concerns with scientific anthropomorphism do not discount the valuable findings focused on the cognitions of animals of various species since the time in which Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. Body by body, important progressions are being made in how humans understand other species. These discoveries inform the increasing abhorrence felt by many humans when other animals are treated as unfeeling machines. Many countries now have regulations focused on treating other species, including humans, with greater care. Yet human-centric thinking still dominates. As cultural critic Barbara Creed argues, pointing to the nineteenth century anti-vivisectionist movement as a precedent for current posthumanist thinking, even the most positive contemporary behavourial science has been shaped by mechanical directions towards an ‘ordered human rational world’ (2017, 57). The assumed subjectivity of any species other than the human will always be skewed by human perceptions.
Even while the personhood of nonhuman animals remains under debate for all but a limited number of species, the validity of animal reactions and responses is well recognised, most of all by humans who live in proximity with other species. As moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains, most humans with nonhuman companions and/or workers assert anecdotal evidence of recognizable feelings in fellow creatures. All the same, such observations, anecdotal or scientific, will be limited by the empathetic skills of each observer. Humans can only tell a human story. Thus, Nussbaum concludes, ‘the range of emotions of which other animals are capable’ remains conjectural, particularly as far as causal or empathetic thinking is concerned (2001, 119). Lori Gruen’s work to better understand cross-species empathy adds detail to this limitation. While empathy can assist human relations with nonhuman animals, empathy is always ‘limited by the resources of our own minds’ (2015, 87). Gruen does not mean, however, that these resources should remain undeveloped. Recent formulations around compassion and care, such as those offered by Alex Lockwood, are finding ways to bring together intellectual and embodied responses to these barriers. As Lockwood puts it, caring is not just about ‘withdrawing support for cruelty’, but rather about ‘resisting injustice’ (2016, 114). Reading the expression of pigs as one might read those of human people is not a harmful form of anthropomorphism in this context. When humans are bearing witness to the impending death of other species, quibbles about reaction and response seem quite unimportant.
In a purely literary context, allowing for multispecies personhood involves making room for what Susan McHugh calls the ‘embodied relations of agency and form’ that inform scientific analyses (2011, 218). As she argues, there will always be ‘nonhuman traces’ in what is written by humans, and this is the case for literary works, as well as for ethologies (9). Animal bodies are very capable of speaking for themselves. Many individuals of other animal species offer humans ways to get know them better. Vinciane Despret has outlined the potential for clearer cross-species communications in her ethnographic approach to multispecies behavioural studies, citing ‘a new signifying sound’ that emerged through ethnographic communications with a parrot. This is not unlike a grown cat’s kittenish mew directed only at humans. Despret argues for a ‘constant movement of attunement’ where control is redistributed, no longer centred on human research interests, but rather, as an open investigation of clear interest to all parties involved (2008, 125). Despret suggests it is not only the information communicated through these signifying sounds that brings species more closely together. The act of listening helps animals get on better. Despret finesses her argument with the point that communications between humans and other species are best understood as utterances between one singular representative of a species to one singular representative of the human species. This means humans do not depict any species in a conclusive way, but rather, more simply, and more convincingly, indicate the possibilities of inter-species communication between collaborating individuals.
Given these perspectives, it seems valid to make an ethical argument for the possibility of recognisable communications across species. As literary scholar Adela Pinch suggests, in her study of nineteenth-century empathy, it might not be scientifically proven that thoughts can have ‘extrapersonal effects on others’, but it makes ‘moral, psychological, and social sense’ for humans to ‘go about life as if one believes that they do’ (2010, 14). In a similar vein, going on with life, as if cross-species communications do indeed occur, might be enough to create lasting change.
Literature can stretch the human mind towards these attentive directions. In Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, animals of various species feel and sense their world in ways that are recognisable to humans. These cross-species relations might be characterised through Barad’s notion of intra-actions. If this is accepted, the depictions of Heathcliff as a dog and a colt are not necessarily negative, but rather speak to the elements of animality that humans share with their canine and equine co-mammals. Brontë’s depictions suggest humans co-learn with other creatures through encounters to variable degrees. Barad’s reminder that this happens on a molecular level is instructive. Humans do not always scent the smells that they release and encounter, yet these molecules impact directly on how humans feel and act. Human bodies are always making sense (scents).
Brontë is aware that people listen differently, no matter their species. In the very first stages of her novel, Lockwood learns very little from his encounter with a dog. He pays a ‘tacit insult’ to a ‘ruffianly bitch’ by making faces at her, an attempt at human mastery that sets the nursing dog into a ‘fury’ ([1847] 1997, 7). In Beth Newman’s reading of this scene, she suggests the altercation is powerful enough shift the ‘psychosexual dynamics of the gaze’, turning the emasculated male subject into ‘the object of the gaze’ (1990, 1032). Lockwood no longer watches, but is watched, he is no longer a master, but is mastered. Lockwood is soon dodging behind the table to parry with a phallic poker as ‘half-a-dozen four-footed fiends’ set upon his coat tail and heels ([1847] 1997, 7). Only his pride is hurt, his self-centred humanity remains. Had Lockwood listened differently, this encounter might have led to another kind of beginning.
Lockwood’s powers of observation are not improved through this exposure to an unfamiliar world where dogs have their own personhood. Immediately after his difficulties with the nursing mother, Lockwood mistakes a pile of dead rabbits for a set of slothful cats, gaining even greater scorn from his would-be love object, Catherine Linton. The hauteur of the lunging nursing dog is justified. This is a man who primarily attends to himself. Dream readers are encouraged to respond to their own encounters with other animals differently, through Lockwood’s awkwardness, encouraged by Brontë’s humour and her close observation of animal behaviours.
In contrast, Heathcliff accepts the personhood of the dogs that live in and around his farmhouse. When Lockwood complains of their barking, Heathcliff says they ‘do right to be vigilant’ (7). Together, Heathcliff and the dogs guard the household as one. ‘I and my dogs’, he says, collapsing human and canine into a single group of people unused to guests (8). They are all unsure of how best to act, there is no hierarchy in Heathcliff’s ‘and’. Heathcliff gives all the animals in his house the attention as he gives himself. He cannot, however, be counted as a campaigner against animal exploitation. As a teenager, Heathcliff insists on swapping a lame colt, given to him by his foster-father, for an uninjured colt gifted to his bullying older foster-brother Hindley. The difference between Heathcliff and Hindley is that Heathcliff commodifies his own body as he does that of the horse. He calculates the pain of being trampled and decides to add these bruises to the signs of ‘three thrashings’ from Hindley, to achieve his object of riding a horse as it suits him (39). There is no preference for him, either Hindley or horse, both can mark his flesh. His actions show readers, as I have detailed elsewhere, the ‘relationship between violence against humans and violence against nonhumans’ (2017, 170). Heathcliff is similarly dispassionate in his choice to quieten Fanny, Isabella’s yapping lapdog, when they elope. Fanny is left ‘suspended to a handkerchief’ on a bridle hook, to be found by Nelly just before her ‘last gasp’ (129). Heathcliff is singled out as brutal for this act, but Isabella also put her own life’s desire above that of the dog’s will to live. She would have seen it all, given that Heathcliff held the reins of her horse as they rode away. Just as readily, (unlike Isabella) Heathcliff hangs up his own life to join the Cathy ghost on the moor. The Heideggerian distance between response and reaction are indistinguishable in his actions. Death is a matter-of-fact part of his life.
While these actions are harmful, to himself, the horse and the dog, Heathcliff’s actions partially signify the respect and trust that Donna Haraway proposes because his actions are more equitable than Isabella’s narcissistic lack of care for her lapdog, who is presumably the same little dog she tussled over with Edgar when they were younger. Heathcliff is an animal amongst other animals. The hierarchies he obeys are made according to his individual predilections, not speciesist assumptions. While Heathcliff’s encounters with animals of all species are in no way indicative of a generously attentive mutual inclusivity, his communicative relationship with other animals takes a step towards the approach Haraway suggests is needed to create ‘civil peace within or across species’ (2008, 165). Heathcliff follows the shift outlined by Haraway, towards relationships that do not involve ‘reification, possession, appropriation, and nostalgia’ (2008, 158). Heathcliff (who is Cathy), acts through respect and trust, not through a mirroring narcissism that characterises relationships described in terms of unconditional love. This is an important element in the textual productivity of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Heathcliff’s refusal to privilege humans above other animals nuances the moment when Cathy reaches an understanding that she and Heathcliff cannot be separated from each other or their habitat without harm. At this moment of realisation Cathy declares, ‘I am Heathcliff’’ ([1847] 1997, 82). In acknowledging there is more to her body than her self, Cathy accepts that she can never wholly sever herself from the interconnected and intra-active world that she inhabits. She and Heathcliff are as much animals as any creature of the moor. Polhemus points to this passage to suggest Brontë ‘claims a dynamic authority beyond gender’, arguing Cathy ‘does not identify either as a woman or as a man, but as an imaginative force that can incarnate either and join both’ (2006, 178). I suggest Brontë’s text goes further. Cathy’s objectified self, a self of instrumental value to Edgar, exists in tension with the co-affective material of her body that is Heathcliff and Cathy. This co-affective ‘I’ is directed, as a gaze might be, towards the moor. The dynamic intra-action suggested by this open ‘I’ gives physical veracity to Cathy’s claim that she is Heathcliff, even as she is Cathy. Brontë may not have conceptualised this co-affectivity in terms of molecular intra-action, but she does leave an opening for an unbounded ‘I’ to exist outside more restrictive ideas of self-focused mimetic desire. Brontë’s allowance for such transcorporeality invigorates my posthumanist reading.
The shared ‘I’ made up of Heathcliff, Cathy and their surroundings, requires attending to the shared languages of the moor without delineation. As a moor creature, Cathy no longer belongs to a human ‘us’, set against a nonhuman ‘them’. This possibility invites readers to imagine new forms of communication opening to Cathy, with drifting invocations between beings that have nothing to do with discovering human traits in other species. In becoming moor, with Heathcliff, Cathy creates a post-secular ‘I am’ who shares beingness with other creatures in habitat. She hosts all others, excessively, and at the same time she is hosted. In this she enacts the possibility of open generosity Derrida theorises in his concept of the pure gift. Cathy, Heathcliff, and other moor creatures, drift in and out, hosts and guests, offering themselves, and accepting others without the ethical difficulties that come with speaking for, rather than with, animals of other species. In this drift, discourses that reinforce boundaries between animals become arbitrary and unnecessary. This hospitable perspective confirms ‘the precarious nature of the classification of human beings’ described by cultural studies scholar Tom Tyler, in his post-Darwinian critical research (2006, 69). Undoing such categories does not mean that new categorisations must be avoided. Shifting around seemingly logical determinations of difference and similarities between species can offer new possibilities in interspecies relations. These emergent ways of relating to the world are beautifully achieved in Anat Pick’s critical strategy of dehumanisation that involves an unframing, not a reframing, letting loose the ‘material, temporal and vulnerable’ mark of all ‘living bodies’ (2011, 6). Pick’s readings of cinematic texts complicate formulations of the other. Her reading perspective sees the category of human as an expression of differences to be respected and commonalities to be trusted. To grow into the productive multiplicity of this posthumanist respect and trust, this respectful attention to difference, and trusting delight in similarities, is marked by a discerning openness to the unsaid.
The textual responses to the posthumanist possibilities in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights offer entwined connections between these creative artists’ intertextual readings, made present in their afterings, and their previous encounters with animal others that shape the articulation of their texts. In turn, readers and audiences will bring their experiences, both through texts and through their lives, to the textual works that respond to Brontë’s novel. To illustrate this point I consider Acker’s depiction of Kathy (Cathy) and Heathcliff, working with the memorable articulation of what love can be outside humanist confines in “Obsession”. The doddering sheep in Plath’s poem are offered as supportive examples of how literary works can offer new ways for humans to relate to other animals. I then explore the space created by different animal species in the films of Luis Buñuel and Andrea Arnold.
5.2 The Animal Heathcliff
Brontë often depicts nonhuman animals in ways that give them equal privileges—and more often, equal disadvantages—as those granted to humans. Most radically, Brontë depicts Heathcliff as a nonhuman beast as much as a beastly human. The slippages between these terms breaks down animal hierarchies, offering more complex readings than those that reduce Heathcliff to a cruel and sadistic character. Acker memorably re-employs Brontë’s refusal to contain Heathcliff to one species and to one pattern of behaviour. In her “Obsession”, Heathcliff pointedly and repeatedly spurns any notion of human superiority to other animals, celebrating his corporeal crossings between being human and being some other kind of species, or even genus. He lives in broader animal terms than those allowed for in such divisive categories. Acker’s Heathcliff decentres the human with something akin to contempt, and this estrangement from humanity rests on his species’ lack of responsiveness to other creatures.
To read Acker’s reading of Brontë’s Heathcliff and Cathy through a reading of Derrida, Cathy becomes unresponsive as she forms her allegiance with the Lintons, devolving to a sovereign who is outside the laws of civility. Heathcliff becomes an beast, yet he is also an outlaw, outside the sovereign state and outside the bounds of human civility. Brontë’s Heathcliff takes all animals into account. Acker’s poem begins with her speaker’s need to move into what might be considered an urban moor. She seeks to go ‘out into tracks beyond’ the limits of ‘the human world’ to become ‘only nature’ (1992, stanza 15). As the dreamscape of “Obsession” extends temporal and physical possibilities, the speaker’s gender and species become fluid. ‘Time began here, outside, where there were no humans’ (stanza 49). In this space, outside human time, Acker’s Kathy (Cathy), more boldly than Brontë’s Cathy, looks for an opportunity to hear utterances not limited to human signification. Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) and Heathcliff move towards ‘the beginning of the world’, running away from humanity, ‘into the moors’, where they wander for (inhuman) ‘days’ (stanzas 48, 49). This atemporal perspective corresponds with the strange ‘psychical space’ in dreams that Cixous details as a ‘foreign country ’ (2011, x, 49, Cixous’ emphasis). In this other country, human time is no time at all.
Acker’s response to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights performs the rare task of repositioning the animality of Heathcliff and Cathy in a positive way. It is not an anthropocentric reading. When Heathcliff identifies as a nonhuman ‘animal’ he is not putting himself down (stanza 85). He discards his human status without regret and roars from the dirt of shared animal waste. Acker’s poem shows the limitations of verbal signifiers, compared to other animal communicative tools, such as the olfactory sense. Heathcliff sniffs the desire excreted by Kathy (Cathy) with pleasure and expresses interest in the smell of his urine. He meets these visceral stimulations as a liberated animal, not as a repressed human. Acker’s Heathcliff, and by implication, her Kathy (Cathy), embraces what might be considered perverse by adult humans, foregrounding shared animal traits, and thus turns human-centred hierarchical relations of mastery and servitude upside down.
Kathy (Cathy) resists the limits of human language in a different way. She searches for a new language in the ‘night’ (stanza 6). This darkness is not negative, but more a promising unknown, suggesting the abyss of change conceptualised by Luce Irigaray. Acker’s speaker is seeking a language beyond the self, attending to her human limits in affective darkness. She is preparing for stronger relations with others of different species. Her unsettling dream of talking to various species of animals reaches towards dream readers with the uncanny telepathy described by Nicolas Royle.
Acker’s poem expands Brontë’s more subtle ideas of shared meanings between species. As the poem moves in this post-archaic direction, it evokes the strange ‘unthought subknowledge’ that Bracha Ettinger seeks in radical artwork. Such knowledges will only obliquely approach ‘visibility’ (2006, 113). As Ettinger theorises, within the matrixial borderspace the self intra-acts with the other through a shared knowledge that is present, but not always consciously reachable. The effort of Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) to learn languages in the dark does not involve knowing what those other animals are communicating in the dimly lit but unbounded spaces of her childhood. She ‘talked to those animals who sat around me and I knew they had languages and I began to learn their languages’ (1992, stanza 6). Kathy (Cathy) turns away from her human language, perhaps feeling compromised by its violent history, and settles into a gentler space of not-knowing. As Derrida puts it, language forces humans to ‘give’ a ‘word’ that might, in the end, be broken (2009, 124). A broken word does away with respect, and most certainly overthrows trust. There is a positive ethical turn in this effort to learn other languages. She is refusing to speak in the language that she knows, the language that trips its speakers into mendacity. This effort to find new communicative modes is underlined by her intention to learn from. This is very different to a talking to.
Acker’s poem then returns to Heathcliff, who is watching (‘whaching’) Kathy (Cathy) change under the influence of the wealthy Lintons in neighbouring Thrushcross Grange. In the poem, as in the novel, Kathy (Cathy) spends three months recovering from an ankle injury caused by a guard dog. This territorial dog, as Diane Long Hoeveler puts it, writing to Brontë’s novel, ‘literally drags Catherine, kicking and screaming, into the other, proper world, with its other, proper husband’, knowing that ‘Catherine is its appropriate prey’ (1998, 192). Devastatingly, ‘it is the animal in Catherine that is seized and wounded by the Linton dog’ (192). Acker’s sympathetic analysis sees this harm done to Cathy, a harm that shapes her into a different personhood during her enforced stay in the grand house of the Lintons.
To underscore the anthropocentric cruelties active in this household, Acker’s poem points to the fight between Isabella and Edgar over a lapdog, described with sardonic humour in Brontë’s novel. In Acker’s poem the speaker condemns the act of ‘dismembering’ performed by these siblings, as they struggle for rights over this much smaller creature with such force that she yelps and licks her paw (stanza 51). The poem’s striking hyperbole reminds readers of the dog’s personhood and censures the Linton children’s reification, possession and appropriation of this creature. As Acker’s Heathcliff puts it, ‘They aren’t nice people, those who live inside of houses’ (stanza 52). In this poem, Heathcliff lives in a stable, by choice. There is nothing he desires that comes with being housed.
When Brontë’s Cathy returns to Wuthering Heights, Nelly sees her as more human, less animal. The ‘wild, hatless little savage’ has been vanquished ([1847] 1997, 53). Acker sets Heathcliff’s disappointment against Nelly’s delight. Her Heathcliff bemoans this change to Kathy (Cathy), he is all regret that she is ‘no longer like a wild thing’ (1992, stanza 87). Much is made of the comparison between Kathy (Cathy)’s lack of scent and Heathcliff’s smell. He is clad in the leavings of the stable. His clothes are animal-stained; he smells of his body’s workings and the working bodies of others. He is content in his scent, and, he says, ‘silent because I was a hound’ (stanza 97). He prefers animal observation to human utterance. Talking makes limited human sense.
Brontë’s returned Cathy weighs down a bridled horse, wearing a hat made of a beaver’s fur and the feathers of a bird. Of all these layers of animal oppression, the feathers are most significant, according to the logic of the novel. Brontë’s returned Cathy, all sovereign dignity, replaces a previous Cathy wild enough to mourn the death of lapwings as her kin. Davies reports that Brontë’s ‘identification with the bird-life of the moorlands was as profound as her knowledge of their habits’ (1994, 129). Literary scholar Ivonne Defant goes further, noting Brontë’s characterisation of Cathy’s ability to list bird species indicates she was ‘on speaking terms with the landscape’ (2017, 43). She knew it as a habitat for more than herself. Towards the end of her life, in a state of ‘baby-work’ (or, alternatively, in an advanced stage of inclusiveness) she distractedly tears at a pillow stuffed with the feathers of birds that she recognises, names, and mourns ([1847] 1997, 123). Such readings nuance Phillip Wion’s psychoanalytical suggestion that this moment signifies Cathy’s conflicted and inadequate mothering. Cathy may well be identifying both with the older lapwing, who ‘wants to get home’ and the ‘abandoned little ones’ (1985, 151). However, this moment also shows her welcoming the world of moor creatures back into her body.
On her return from Thrushcross Grange, Brontë’s Cathy accepts the responsiveness of Wuthering Heights’ unnamed and unnumbered dogs, as a servility she is owed, rather than a form of open communication. Acker builds on Brontë’s Cathy’s preference for a clean dress, over the enthusiastic welcome from the dogs who formed part of her childhood. Nelly’s fond description of the joyful sparkle in her eye, as she reunites with her childhood friends, is extinguished in Acker’s darker vision, which magnifies the recoil in her newly adorned skin at the touch of the dogs’ hospitality. Brontë’s Cathy welcomes the dogs’ greetings but ‘dared hardly touch them’ ([1847] 1997, 53). Brontë’s Cathy also embraces Nelly cautiously, so she might not be marked by the flour on her apron, then seeks out and kisses Heathcliff, hurriedly checking her hands and clothes to make sure they have not been stained with the mess of servitude. She is as much her outfit as her body. Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) shifts her affinities differently. From Heathcliff’s shadowed perspective, when Kathy (Cathy) greets him, ‘her heart leaped up like the dog it is’ (stanza 89, Acker’s emphasis). He refuses the servility that Hindley commands and as quick as a dream, ‘Kathy threw her finery into a bathroom and climbed on me until her lips became my skin’ (1992, stanza 91). Only when her animal passions are slaked, does she hesitate at his accumulated dirt. Kathy (Cathy), re-states Acker’s Heathcliff, ‘was scared to shake hands with filth’ (stanza 111). She mindfully pushes away further intimacy with the dirt of the stable, pulling back her body set in motion by smell and then touch.
It does not end well, this refusal of animality, this turn from the dirt of the body. Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) is degraded herself, when she sees Heathcliff as lesser, covered as he is with the dung of the earth. Acker’s Heathcliff’s angry response speaks to the beginning of their mutual pain. Like Brontë’s Cathy, Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) uplifts her eyes towards Edgar Linton’s heavenly ascent towards the magisterial and sees only a lack of care in the earthliness of her childhood mate. Citing directly from Brontë’s text, Acker’s Heathcliff growls, ‘I shall be as dirty as I please: and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty’ (1992, stanza 95). Acker’s Heathcliff has preferences that align with Haraway’s reverence for compost. He lives closely with dirt and celebrates its positive life. His choice is rejected by Acker’s Kathy (Cathy), even while she is responding to his hunger for ‘every inch of her flesh, muscle, and liquids’ (stanza 100). Heathcliff lives fully in his appetite. His connection with his stable mates, through shared droppings, contrasts with the newfound olfactory weakness of his childhood friend.
Acker maintains Heathcliff’s shared animality with other species in the face of Cathy’s humanist judgement. He scorns her ‘allegiance to skin, her fancy clothes, trappings of society’ (stanza 111). His decision to become ‘an animal who didn’t even clean itself’ is depicted as a positive resistance to her anthropocentric choices (stanza 85). There is no Kathy (Cathy) in scentless clean clothes in the heaven that he prefers. Heathcliff chooses to stay covered in his own dirt, stinking of urine, living under the law. Rather than being a human who will ‘run away from their own shit’, he becomes, instead, ‘twice a man’ (stanzas 85, 86). He chooses to exist as a member of a community of individual animals, unranked by species.
Acker’s reading of Heathcliff’s intra-action with dirt also reminds readers that humans, like other animals, are of the same matter as dust and dung. In a compostist context, Heathcliff’s responses to the affect of such intra-actions contrasts positively with the lack of response from Kathy (Cathy). Acker works with the ambiguity in Brontë’s text to suggest that Heathcliff has no cause for shame. In approaching Heathcliff this way, Kathy (Cathy) is marginalised as disrespectful and untrusting. Heathcliff respects his place amongst animals and trusts the animal body he smells in Kathy (Cathy). Brontë’s older Heathcliff, who shares his vigilance with dogs, as he shares his home, is already present in Acker’s younger Heathcliff. And, like Brontë’s older Heathcliff, Acker’s Heathcliff does not hesitate to scrabble in dirt to bring Cathy closer to his body.
[Heathcliff’s] total exposure of self to another’s touch and gaze … courts a risk so total that it verges toward death. To one who loves [respects and trusts] totally, no defence can exist. The other is in oneself and is oneself. For to allow one’s boundaries to be porous in this way is not to be the self that one was. (2001, 608)
This re-working of ‘love’ to respect and trust opens a new pathway of interpretation. Nussbaum’s descriptions of Heathcliff’s open porosity suggest a preference for dirt that strives towards Barad’s intra-activity with generative intent.
In this posthumanist context, it doesn’t matter if Cathy and Heathcliff kissed only once at Cathy’s deathbed, or if their last kiss was a sign of more intimate caresses in the enclosed bed of their late childhood. Brontë leaves these possibilities open for Acker. The novel makes it clear that Cathy and Heathcliff’s years of embodied proximity entwined them physically, socially and emotionally. Brontë’s Cathy is quite literal when she explains to Nelly that without Heathcliff her world would become ‘a mighty stranger’ ([1847] 1997, 82). She has taken Heathcliff into her skin. Heathcliff, too, takes Cathy into account, in every breath of his body. In these intra-actions Cathy and Heathcliff enact Haraway’s ‘response and regard that change the subject’; their embrace builds ‘attachment sites’, tying them together with ‘sticky knots’ as part of their ongoing becoming-with each other (2008b, 387). Such are the ‘entanglements’ created by the ‘connections and responsibilities’ that Barad suggests form part of the world’s invitation to humans (2007, xi). At the time of Cathy’s death, when she is held in Heathcliff’s arms, she becomes his future-to-come. Their ready embrace of the other’s difference and similarity is part of a larger response that goes beyond their shared bodies. In Cathy’s last moments they breathe each other’s breath, and wet each other with their tears. Once separated, Cathy no longer responds.
It is significant that when Brontë’s Heathcliff and Cathy are apart they are less able to become-with their surroundings. Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) knows she has sold herself short through her choice not to be with Heathcliff. ‘I’m only human,’ she mourns (1992, stanza 142). Estranged from Heathcliff, her potential to mindfully intra-act with the more than human is diminished. Her self-dismissal mirrors Brontë’s Heathcliff’s dismissal of Edgar as having ‘nothing but common humanity and a sense of duty to fall back upon’ (1847] 1997, 185). For Brontë’s Heathcliff, Edgar is not worthy of trust or respect. He is, like Acker’s deformed Kathy (Cathy), only human, shaped by a human-centred mimetic desire that has none of the respect and trust that flourishes between Heathcliff, Cathy and the world that they co-inhabit.
Acker’s Heathcliff transgresses the law that supports Edgar’s limiting humanity, and Cathy’s temporary adoption of this irresponsible disregard. Her Kathy (Cathy) yearns for his otherworldliness. ‘I can’t be other than Heathcliff because to be other than Heathcliff is to be human’ (stanza 45). Acker suggests, more directly than Brontë, that the decision to perform humanity, adopting the calculated non-reciprocal lawlessness of the mendacious sovereign described by Derrida, is a limited masked response. Acker’s Heathcliff remains under the law in these terms, ‘as dumb as any animal’ (stanza 132). Yet this may not be the limited Heideggerian ‘benumbness’ that Derrida critiques, but rather, as Krell goes on to argues, a being-with and becoming-of a language that is more than human (2013, 107). Heathcliff’s refusal to speak unframes his humanity and reworlds his animality. As Acker’s Heathcliff rejects language, he is freed from the obligation to ‘belong in any decent society’ (1992, stanza 130). He doesn’t ‘know how to reply’ to the unfeeling civility of Kathy (Cathy) because he is ‘open to her’ (stanza 131). This openness marks a respect and trust that goes beyond the limitations of words.
Acker’s poem suggests that the decision to communicate in ways that spurn human language broadens the human state of decathexis, that encircling restriction created through a fear of loss. At the time of her death, Brontë’s Cathy is wordless, ready to become a different kind of body. In contrast, Acker’s Kathy (Cathy), is distanced from moor love by fear, increasingly reduced and stifled by her rush of words. Brontë’s Cathy finds reprieve from her failure to thrive when she gives up her biting words and loses consciousness in Heathcliff’s arms. In contrast, the singular speaker in Acker’s poem is left alone, entrapped in a murderous verbose civilisation. To read civilisation as an unfeeling departure from Haraway’s ideas of respect and trust allows a different interpretation of the epiphany in Brontë’s Cathy’s much-echoed cry, ‘I am Heathcliff’. When Cathy howls out this affinity, she signals a readiness to depart from the anthropo-theological cruelties of the humans that surround her, so she might evolve to a co-affective trust and respect that provides greater opportunities for growth. Her ‘I’ is both her self, and all that she feels part of, beyond her species.
By way of further contrast, Plath’s speaker only engages momentarily with the possibilities of moving beyond human centrality through new animal relations. The ‘black slots’ of the sheep’s pupils are liable to take the speaker ‘in’, but this possibility barely moves her. ‘It is like being mailed into space’, she muses, as she determinedly stays in one place ([1961] 1981, 167). Rather than being transported to a new way of being, the speaker regresses to anthropomorphism , seeing the sheep as ‘grandmotherly’; fellow-humans, whose ‘hard, marbly baas’ trap her in mastery, and hold her stable in that rut (167). No longer co-travellers, these sheep’s offerings of otherworldly spaces are dismissed as ‘thin, silly messages’, rather than being heard as a call to a shared animality that includes the speaker’s fragile body (167). Plath’s speaker alerts readers to profound affects that might push them into more open posthumanist matrixial borderspaces, then shows how effectively, and destructively, humans ignore such invitations out of fear.
5.3 The Gaze of the Cinematic ‘I’
Cinematic responses to literary texts open possibilities for multispecies communications to make a different kind of sense to audiences. Buñuel’s surreal Abismos de Pasión is a very different film to Arnold’s contemporary remake of Brontë’s novel, but both adaptations make explicit the source text’s implied acceptance of a fully sentient world. In Buñuel’s film, human cruelty to vultures, butterflies, frogs and pigs, is visceral and shocking. These creatures take on a presence of their own, directly appealing to the audience’s senses. Arnold, too, extends Brontë’s depictions of animals, making space in her film for communications from birds, rabbits and horses. These animals’ subject positions are not wholly defined by direction. Often, these animals speak for themselves. My analysis of Arnold’s and Buñuel’s films does not assume directorial intention, any more than it can be said that Brontë wrote with an agenda focused on the decentralisation of humans. While both films were clearly motivated by an attachment to the source text, it is not possible to say how this attachment is connected to the posthumanist spaces Brontë leaves in her text. Nonetheless, these spaces are expanded in these two adaptations.
Abismos de Pasión, one of the last films produced by Buñuel, reflects his respected position as a founder of the cinematic surrealist movement. At the same time, his film can be described, even derided, as a spaghetti Western. Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is a romantic drama, not too far distant from other mainstream adaptations of Brontë’s novel. It is also, through its temporal doubleness and reflective re-imagining of the past, typical of a neo-Victorian work. The unstable genre categories in these films suggest that conceptual openness and a posthumanist perspective are compatible, if not essential, bedfellows. I find an ethical invocation of less harmful human relations with other species in both these films. This invocation is a call that involves hosting rather than containing the cognitions of other species. Both films pay attention to the animal capacity to communicate across species, reorienting the human story in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to just one strand of a world threaded through with meaningful narrations. In this context of productive and unpredictable communications, human representations of other species are necessarily partial and opaque.
The invocations in these cinematic works expand those in Brontë’s text. Cinematic texts engage audiences’ senses differently, directly activating aural and visual responses, providing new possibilities for posthumanist invocations. In watching and listening to these films, audiences may respond newly to the posthumanist possibilities that are implicit in Brontë’s novel. Buñuel’s discomforting, even excessive, visual imagery and Arnold’s amplification of nonhuman sound are strong aspects of these two films and are likely to elicit a response from audiences. Sound and sight are important sensory affects that can shift humans into new perspectives. Yet just because eyes and ears are differently engaged, affect itself need not change. Human senses are mostly activated by similar neurological wirings in textual and physical responses. Reading a book and watching a film both activate a similar affective responses. Yet there is one important aspect in watching a film that offers an extra dimension for response. The nonhumans in the film offer direct stimuli—they are acting for themselves.
Audiences bring their experiences into their reception. If a viewer has previously met another species, eye to eye, and has considered the sentience of that individual creature, they might bring this encounter to the gaze of another person of that or another species, offered in a film. Alternatively, when films bring a hitherto unexperienced gaze of an individual from a different species directly to the viewer, this may provide a formative experience that will impact on the way that viewer looks into the eyes of other species that are part of their world, after the film is over. This experiential element of reception also means audiences may respond differently, depending on whether or not they question human centrality. Audiences approach artworks from their specific cultural and historical positions. Temporal contexts will also influence the receptions of these works. Sensory perceptions and imaginative flights are tied to prevailing social norms and values. This is illustrated through the differences in Buñuel’s surreal response and Arnold’s neo-Victorian response. Their positionings are made possible through a historical continuum that stretches back to the Romanticism that influenced Brontë’s novel, and forward to contemporary interests in improved animal relations. I suggest then, that when Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is adapted in a cinematic mode, at least in the two films discussed here, audiences’ aural and visual senses will be activated in ways that might heighten their affective awareness of the other species filmed in these works. This response will however, depend on the experiences these audiences bring to their reception.
Brontë’s questioning of animal exploitation, including Lockwood’s unthinking use of horses, who only receive food and rest at the behest of others, is picked up and extended in Buñuel’s Abismos de Pasión in ways that take advantage of his founding experience in surrealist cinema, where visual and aural excess seeks entry to the unconscious of the audience. This orientation is apparent in the nightmarish sacrifice performed by Buñuel’s farmhand José (Joseph) in company with Jorge (Hareton). The camera frequently takes the point of view of the mesmerised Jorge (Hareton), who is watching José (Joseph) throw frogs into a pot of boiling water, offering blessings as he goes with flimsy handmade crosses. For Frogola, this scene is metaphorical, speaking to the ‘sacrifice’ and ‘death’ of the human characters (1994, 54). Buñuel resists the deathly focus of conservative Christian hermeneutics of morbidity by building on Brontë’s characterisation of Joseph as a sanctimonious bible-citing yeoman. As Grace Jantzen’s feminist theology has shown, such thinking privileges masterly humanist patterns of oppression over a more generative natality. Rosi Braidotti takes a similar direction in her call for a focus on zoe, rather than necro-politics, although she makes her point through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s neo-Spinozist ideas of duration, or the perseverance of existence, rather than Jantzen’s activation of Luce Irigaray’s becoming-divine. In the context of these feminist thea-logies, the frogs’ sacrificial deaths can be read as a critique of the masterful self-aggrandisement that legitimises ideas of human dominion over the other species.
Materially, the frogs speak for themselves. Their lifeless legs, bulging with muscles formed from movements that are no longer possible, make the cruelty of human mastery apparent, and the incongruity of a prating prayer, under the questioning gaze of a small child, makes human mastery unconscionable. The frogs, for the considerable length of this scene, make themselves felt. It is not just the hand of religion, suggested by the crosses, that is dangling this sacrifice above the burning furnace. The film, at a material level, shows limp frogs who have suffered an unnecessary death at a human’s behest. This invitation to question human mastery can be attributed both to Buñuel’s psychoanalytical directions, and to the frogs, through their embodied silence.
Buñuel’s film repeats this injunction in a scene where a pig is dragged to a killing bench. The shadow-shrouded pig’s actions speak to the flick of a sharpened knife. There is a resistance in the pig’s feet, rooted in the ground against three men and a rope. The pig makes its own scene, albeit directed by the angle of the camera, with a protracted squeal, a silence, and then (and this last is directorial), in its absence in the next frame. Again, Frogola speaks to this as a metaphorical device, referencing the vow of Alejandro (Heathcliff) that he would slit his own throat like a pig if Catalina (Cathy) didn’t care about his decision to marry Isabel (Isabella). However, the pig is doing anything but holding the knife. The metaphorical inference Frogola points to is important, but so too is the story of absence created in this scene. Audiences familiar with slaughterhouses are invited to consider the act that quietens the squeals of the pig.
Buñuel’s images of potted frogs and a throat-slit pig will make some audiences pause. As Jonathan Burt argues, the images of animals in films can never be read as artificial. Non-acting animals rupture such readings through the openings for them to communicate that are offered in film. Burt calls this opening, created by non-actors, the ‘split’ in the animal image (2002, 163). The possibilities of displacement are present in Buñuel’s film because the pig is not acting subjectivity, but rather, making his or her subjectivity agonizingly apparent. The split gaze does not lessen the metaphorical impetus of Buñuel’s work, it strengthens it. Abismos de Pasión retells human animal instincts, human animal passions. The metaphoric gives impetus to the split gaze that Burt describes. The pig’s eyes, closed to pain, can be understood in terms of the fate that awaits Isobel (Isabella). The metaphor is important. So too is her empathy for the pig; she flees from the scene, hands over ears.
Such scenes may foster a spectatorial discomfort with the slaughter of animals for human use. Literary critic Robert McKay observes that images of killing animals makes ‘explicit just how far ideology and presumption condition our conception of animals’ (2006, 206). Audiences watching Abismos de Pasión are invited to question these ideological presumptions that are partly directed by Buñuel and partly enacted—but not acted—by the animals themselves. The audience might have their expectations met, but they might also be jolted into surprise. In this receptive state, audiences have the option to be with nonhuman animals differently, an invitation that is also extended in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. How readers and viewers respond to such options will be shaped through that which they have previously read or experienced. Textual experience might lead them to connect the swooning Isabel (Isabella) and the stony-faced Alejandro (Heathcliff) to Brontë’s Isabella and Heathcliff’s attempt to hang a yapping dog to cover up their elopement. Personal experience might include the unexpected witnessing of an animal slaughtered for meat, or the last time a knife’s edge was used to cut through animal flesh. Meanwhile, the pig does its own work. The gaze of the camera is held by the pig, within Buñuel’s metaphoric frame, even as the scene also allows communications to occur outside his direction. The pig’s resisting body speaks through a gaze that suggests personhood and pain.
This spilt in the image, through the gaze, is suggested less directly in Buñuel’s depictions of winged creatures in the first movement of his film. Foreshadowing the deaths of the frogs and the pig, vultures scatter from their perch on a dead tree at the sound of a gunshot. Catalina (Cathy) enters the study, rifle in hand. Eduardo (Edgar) is busy pinning down live butterflies with more ease than he pins down the object of his rivalrous desire. When Catalina (Cathy) supports his sister’s criticism of his butterfly collection, Eduardo (Edgar) points to a bird Catalina (Cathy) keeps in a cage. Just as he holds the pin, she controls the catch to the cage and the trigger of the gun. Sovereign, ruler of Eduardo (Edgar) and the bird, she slaps the bars hard enough for the bird to fall off its perch, insisting she keeps the bird encaged for love. There is no respect, no trust. This parodic depiction of her inability to see the relationship between capture and death, a cage and a pin, undermines the rationality of human mastery. Animals, the caged, the pinned and the shot, are important presences in Buñuel’s film from the first.
Arnold also makes provisions for the agency of all creatures in the frames of her film, and she gives birds a particular focus. More than once, a black and white feather is set centre screen, spiralling in currents, either with or beyond directorial design. Some viewers will float, with that feather, right into Brontë’s text, remembering the lapwings preyed upon by Heathcliff, before Cathy suggests they attend to dropped feathers instead. In addition, a caged canary specifically engages Arnold’s audience with questions that surround the entrapment of animals. Again, this can be read metaphorically, with wings beating against bars standing in for the oppressive forces that underlie mimetic desire. Arnold has prepared her audience to see the limits in a caged bird’s life through her opening scene, where Heathcliff arrives, grounded, a mud-creature, while the birds on the moor lift and dive with the wind. These freewheeling flights are repeated in the accompanying scene of childish pictures, presumably drawn by Arnold’s Cathy. These alternative lifeworlds press against the caged bird, who considers his/her/hir double in the mirror. Then, with pointed directorial assistance, the bird redoubles, growing out of the cage into an unrestrained shadow. The bird performs both with and beyond the humanist frame of metaphor, the partial freedom of the uncaged shadow making the body behind bars the more contained.
The tension between capture and death is pivotal to questions around the human right to oppress other species. This tension is made explicit in the scene where Arnold’s Nelly rips the feathers from a duck who swings from her dead feet, the extinguished life of her body repeating the boiling of frogs by Buñuel’s José (Joseph), and the pig who resists and squeals when dragged towards the butcher’s knife. The moral question of animal consumption is raised again when Arnold’s Heathcliff goes rabbiting, slinging the corpses he gathers over his shoulder. He holds a live rabbit under his hand as he watches Cathy and Edgar at a distance astride horses, rulers whose feet do not touch the earth. Grounded, Heathcliff snaps the rabbit’s neck. Arnold’s camera witnesses this death, just as the camera has previously lingered on Nelly’s masterly business of duck plucking. Arnold, like Buñuel, leaves openings for the animals to speak through the stiffening of their bodies. These stilled bodies tell metaphoric stories about the sacrifice of one person’s life for another life’s desire, and they also tell their own story. Human mastery is enmeshed with human modes of oppression over other species, showing the horror of exploitation in personal terms.
This is not to assume that images of murdered, caged and pinned animals will make all audiences pause. For some, the non-human animals in the work of Buñuel and Arnold will be no more than a reflection of the everyday farm life that features in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. For me, it is significant that Buñuel’s and Arnold’s films devote screen time to animals who are captured or slaughtered in ways that allow the inherent limitations and in these premeditated cruelties to be communicated through the animals themselves. Both directors make space for their audiences to extend the regard for all animals that marks Brontë’s text. The directors may or may not intend the interventions made possible by the disturbing split created through the images they capture of the non-acting animals in their films, but they host these possibilities, and in this sense, they invoke them.
Arnold goes further than questioning ideologies and presumptions that relate to capturing and killing nonhuman animals in two scenes that move toward ideas of human/equine respect and trust. In the early stages of her film, Arnold’s Cathy invites Heathcliff into the stable and renders him voiceless, as he watches her watch him watching her feel the pinna of a horse’s ear. She is intimate, knowing and attentive. Cathy and the horse are sharing a sensual encounter that reaches out to Brontë’s Heathcliff, derided and complimented as a colt. Arnold’s Heathcliff participates in Cathy’s intra-action with the horse through his gaze. There is metaphorical content here, but the horse’s response is also at play. Cathy slips on the bridle like an embrace, her caress lifts the softness of the horse’s lips, so she might thread the bit like a stroke. There is both mastery and attentiveness in Cathy’s hands. The audience might feel the shock of the bit differently to Cathy and Heathcliff, for while Heathcliff is focused on Cathy’s controlling movements, the non-acting horse looks at the camera, taking on a specific subject position. Now bridled, the horse will be saddled and then ridden. The horse’s split gaze creates an opening for personhood beyond Brontë’s plotline and Arnold’s metaphorical directions.
Arnold returns to the possibilities introduced through this interaction between the horse and the viewer at the end of the film, after Cathy’s death. There is a long shot of Heathcliff, prone and brooding, as he is so often in this film. This time he is in heather. The camera pans in closer, he grinds his boot in the root-busy dirt, breaks the blooms with his hand. He savages his partial namesake, working against other species like Brontë’s Lockwood, inattentive to the potential of the world that surrounds him. There is none of the natalistic connection to heather that Brontë’s Cathy experiences in her dream of an earthy heaven, made manifest through the smell of flowering heather. Arnold’s Heathcliff is bent on morbid destruction.
As Heathcliff stares aloft, a horse comes into the frame and stops, heavy hooves inches from Heathcliff’s face. There is violence in Heathcliff’s inattention. The horse walks away then slowly returns, nudging Heathcliff with a gentle herding nose, suggesting a willingness for exchange in this touch. Gala Argent details equine abilities to attune to other beings’ bodies, explaining this skill as a survival instinct for non-predatorial species who are safer in a herd. Horses have ‘highly developed nonverbal skills’ that together with ‘their capacity to–and choice to–move together in synchrony’, gives them a ‘superior ability to assess intention’ (2012, 120). This can feel a lot like telepathy. This equine ability, or perhaps, this allure, generates co-affective actions between singular beings. Despite Heathcliff’s refusal to respond, the horse seems to have read trauma in his supine position and invites him to be assisted through touch. The potential for increased co-affectivity between species, implicit in Brontë’s text, is made beautifully present in the different possibilities presented by Arnold through the attention of this horse. Such scenes might encourage audiences to listen to the communications of other species more attentively. It may be that the acting Heathcliff has pockets full of horse treats, but I have seen herds of cows act in this way, gathering around humans who stay still for some time, and so a cinematic moment like this makes me take such communications into greater account. In such ways, cinematic interventions can help disrupt the masterful relationships humans have with the physical world that sustains them, together with experiences the audience has had, that help them make sense of these works. To entertain the possibility of another’s sentience in a moment of affective encounter is to let go of limiting self-centred humanity.
Buñuel’s and Arnold’s films offer unpredictable cross-species communications through their provision of filmic space for animals other than humans. Buñuel allows for encounters with hunted vultures, pinned butterflies, caged canaries, straw-crossed slaughtered frogs and a pig, whose resisting feet raise dust in dry heat. Arnold’s creatures are deeply emplaced in a changeable moor: birds that lose their feathers in flight are counterpoised with a caged bird and a plucked duck; a rabbit is killed on the moor as Heathcliff gives a look that could kill; and a horse hospitably herds Heathcliff into a response that suggests human/equine engagement more gentle than the bit of a bridle. Despite these films’ differences in content and context, they both present scenes where animals who are not human, and who are therefore not acting, face their audiences directly. Buñuel’s and Arnold’s texts diffract the space given to various species in Brontë’s novel, offering their own versions of affective agency to all the animals that they film. The split gaze of these non-acting animals invites audiences to create new cross-species relations, if they feel the affect of meeting the eyes of these subjects, these fellow creatures, these people in their time of heightened or supernormal beingness.
It is true that this affect, felt through the pause in audience reception, is caged in signification. These two films are inspired by the written word and framed by directorial decision making. Perhaps this is what makes these works so intriguing. Despite the dominance of human limitations, these films offer increased recognition of multispecies sentience, giving audiences ever-expanding opportunities to regard the other worlds of different species. The attentive attunement of these directors, inspired by the spaces Brontë gives to all the animals in her novel, allows audiences to consider acting differently with animals they encounter, no matter their species.
I find hope in these progressions, where the openness to the personhood of dogs, birds and horses in Brontë’s novel is further hosted by Buñuel, expanding her critique towards variously preyed upon birds and the split gaze of a pig. In time such responses have broadened further still, blossoming into the intersubjective personhood of a herding horse in Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. These texts increasingly allow for unexpected communications with other species, adding to a growing movement towards kinder cross-species relations. The scenes that involve non-signified moments of encounter are particularly moving because of the split in the non-acting animal gaze. It is vital to remember that such scenes are hosted by wind, dirt and flora. When humans listen to other creatures in a shared habitat, mutual encounters may flourish in unexpected ways that are beneficial for all involved. A readiness to listen, nurtured through responding to the non-acting people in these two films, might well create new interspecies narratives. There is a dreamy aspect to these films that goes beyond the cliché of the dream factory. Like dream written literature, these works open the eyes and ears of the human imagination.
5.4 A Healing Co-affectivity
I have considered how Acker’s poem bends back to Brontë’s invitation to approach nonhumans animals with respect and trust rather than narcissistic love. At the beginning of Acker’s “Obsession”, the co-affected self is in process. Acker’s poem, voiced variously by an omniscient speaker who may be the author, Kathy (Cathy), Heathcliff, ‘Heathcliff or the devil’ and ‘I’, offers radical perspectives further diffracted by the remnants in each voice that have something of Brontë’s Heathcliff and Cathy. Acker’s refusal of the unified subject begins with the speaker/s search for other-than-human languages, looking past the ‘human world that seemed nonhuman’ (1992, stanzas 6–7). In “Obsession”, to be limited to the human is to be lesser than the potential offered by the world. The poem celebrates and builds on the co-affective world that includes Cathy, the moor and Heathcliff in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, to spurn teleological thinking for the indeterminate time of dreams. In this, Acker departs from Freud, who closes his opening towards dream work with the reminder that ‘dreams are after all leading us into the future’ ([1985] 1900, 783). Acker also plays with Freud’s further injunction that dreams form a ‘perfect likeness of the past’ (783). Acker’s strategic imperfections in an atemporal world do not seem to have this commitment to a future determined by the past. Her poem illustrates, instead, Barad’s argument for a diffractive world where there is never such dull predictable replication in human lives, nor in human dreams. Rather, there is repetition with difference.
Acker’s extension of Brontë’s perspective on cross-species relations, in her allowance for the possibility of being more than merely human, even if only transiently, is the response required if humans are to be fairer participants in post-anthropocentric co-creative world-making. Becoming aware of oppression is the beginning of lifting it away, and this movement starts with an increased alertness to the personhood of all animals. Multispecies justice is not yet a mainstream dialogue, but this reality is discernible to the conscious listener. The works I discuss here typify the ‘small voice of compassion’ that Derrida describes, that is made up of ‘minority, weak, marginal voices, little assured of their discourse, of their right to discourse’ (2002, 395). Acker’s poem notes the potential for co-affectivity in Brontë’s novel and uses the voice of Heathcliff, and his animal senses, such as smell and touch, to show how it might feel to be more than human, outside the law Derrida might say, but not as sovereign, and nor as beast, but rather as more (and moor). As the poem’s mechanistic ending makes clear, unless the needs of all species are attended to, bodies first, the world will reel and suffer from human violence and destruction.
As Acker’s speaker begins to learn the languages of animal bodies, listening for a voice unconstrained by a shared signifier, there is a suggestion of Derrida’s ‘reciprocated gaze’, a gaze shared, often, with his cat. For Derrida, ‘The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there’ (2002, 396). This unuttered response to the gaze of the nonhuman animal allows a movement outside the containment of the human. Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) is not literally naked, like Derrida, caught in the headlights of his cat’s eyes as he goes from bathroom to bedroom. Instead, she sits in the dark, open to haptic communications that bring species together in unspoken and unseen ways of being. Unable to see, yet still communicating in a dreamy telepathic mode. Animal behaviourist Miho Nagasawa, and his co-researchers, have shown that oxytocins are released when a human and a dog share an ‘affiliative’ gaze (2015, 333). Other parts of animal bodies also communicate when in place together. If such intra-actions involve respect and trust, with a controlling signifier no longer at stake, cross-species relations must surely change. When humans listen to the languages of other species, even in the dark, they move beyond the entrapment of signs, and into freer modes of discourse. The impossibility of giving words or descriptions to these moments of communication does not remove the meanings within them, nor limit the opportunity for these communications to nurture growth. Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) learns with her body and speaks through her pores. Unlike Plath’s speaker, she does not retreat, and unlike Derrida and his cat, bodies looking at, unmoving in their analysis, Acker’s speaker prefers to sit and listen with.
Arnold and Buñuel, inspired in their different ways by Brontë’s novel, also make room for animals to put forward their own personhood . These films offer sensory spectatorial moments that invite audiences along unexpected trajectories through the split gaze. The ruptures created in these films offer the potential for new relationships between humans and other species, building on relationships already experienced in audiences’ physical and imaginative lives. In giving space to the visual and aural presence of different species, these films, in their different ways, leave space for audiences to seek more affective relations with other creatures without the containment of false ideals of human exclusivity.
These works by Acker, Arnold and Buñuel expand Brontë’s allowances for nonhuman sentience. They do not suggest cross-species communications require a two-way speech act; rather they seek communications that occur beyond the limits of human signification. Acker’s Kathy (Cathy) learns by keeping close company with other animals, unlike Plath’s speaker, who silences sheep through anthropomorphic disregard. Arnold’s caged bird, hung duck, broken-necked rabbits and nosy horse, together with Buñuel’s shot-at vultures, captured butterflies, frog corpses and to-be-slaughtered pig, create affect with and beyond the directors’ cameras. Attentive spectators seeking less violent cross-species relations might find a stronger connection to the earth and its others through images that give pause to what passes as human normalcy. Haptic cross-species intra-actions can be felt through texts as well as human skins, and the resulting affect might take people trustingly, respectfully, towards better relationships with the physical world that is also, partially, themselves.