"This secret truth would be something formulable as a univocal principle of plantation which would account for everything in the novel. The secret truth about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that there is no secret truth which criticism might formulate in this way. No hidden identifiable ordering principle which will account for everything stands at the head of the chain or at the back of the back. Any formulation of such a principle is visibly reductive. It leaves something important still unaccounted for."
Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the "Uncanny" by J. Hillis Miller
"What is it that, with this novel, the logical mind so conspicuously fails? What does this have to do with the gage or promissory note that both holds off death and risks death, puts one's death on the line, as a kind of mortgage insurance? Why is it that an interpretative origin, logos in the sense of ground, measure, chief word, or accounting reason, cannot be identified for Wuthering Heights? If such an origin could be found, all obscurity could be cleared up. Everything could be brought out in the open where it might be clearly seen, added up, paid off, and evened out. What forbids this accounting?"
Ibid
A teacher told me that in HIS OPINION - as if it were ONLY his - all the problems of the novel could be solved by interpreting Old Earnshaw's words "A gift from god" as a confession that Heathcliff is his illegitemate son, and since that would make him a half-brother to Catherine their union cannot be completed according to certain religious or evolutionary rules which the whole novel then would go to prove and to show the consequences of their transgression. (These are not his exact words, rather, their implication).
What questions does this interpretation leave unanswered? I thought about it over and over and found nothing that would be "reduced" or left out by adopting this as the secret truth, the same Miller said is non-existent.
This point could not have escaped the attention of a critic like Miller, and if he was so strongly advocating the absence of an all-inclusive justifying core, he would have deemed this point unable of achieving such a position. BUT WHY?
If anything comes to mind as being left out by this interpretation please help.
My torment has been that Miller presented his point with such a good show of reason, and that teacher with such an ego-centric confidence stole an opinion and made it his own, and that his easily-stolen opinion could with the same ease refute Miller's "good show of reason", for me at least, because I can't think of what this interpretation would leave out.
Anything would be helpful.
Thanks in Advance.
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