David Peat

Pausing the Cosmos 207ers, a male visitor to the house and a woman servant who unfolds thehistory. The female reader has to perform a highly complex act of creationand interpretation as she brings to life a woman wild with passion,driven to extremes, and identified with the wild Yorkshire moors.What a shock when our Victorian reader later learns that Ellis Bell isthe alias of a woman, Emily Brontë. Suddenly the entire novel shiftsand dislocates and Catherine Earnshaw must be read and re-createdanew.The act of bringing a character to life is of necessity performedthough the context of our own cultural assumptions. The way we readis always within a context of age, ethnic origins, family history, sex,sexuality, and education as well as all the books we have already read.Each time we pick up a book it is different because we have changedand we are bringing something new to the act of creation. When a filmor television series is made of the book we may say, “That’s not reallyHeathcliffe,” or “That’s not the way I see David Copperfield.” Each actorwill create a different Lady Macbeth or a different Hamlet. Eachdirector will reanimate a play by Shakespeare and find within it somethingentirely topical and apposite for his or her own time.What applies to characters in a book, I am arguing, is equally trueof the ways we are constantly creating ourselves, integrating our variouspersonae and attempting to connect to what we feel is our essence.But is there really a “true essence”? Is there an objective aspect thatremains constant through time? Or are we more like open systems andprocesses within the constant flow of life? Is the true essence not somuch a fixed object or attitude within the mind as a constant ongoingprocess, a creative movement toward integration that takes us throughour lives?Attempting to understand how we create ourselves, and the characterswe read, resonates with our new understanding of the world,and its inherent complexity and ambiguity. Just as the electron cannotbe captured within a single explanation, so too the self cannot bereduced to a single name; rather its essence lies in movement andintegration.