Abstract
Inspired by Yoshishige Yoshida’s claim that his Japanese film version of Wuthering Heights owes as much to Georges Bataille as to Emily Brontë,2 this chapter argues that Arashi-ga-Oka’s3 hybridity still reveals a deeper affinity with Brontë’s ambivalent vision of existence. Crucial to an understanding of Yoshida’s achievement is his cultural appropriation of Brontë’s and Bataille’s analogous preoccupations. Significantly, Yoshida stages Arashi-ga-Oka on a Shinto-sacred mountain in the late Muromachi4 period, thereby imbuing the Kinu-Onimaru (Catherine-Heathcliff) relationship with the ritualistic mysticism of the Yamabe (Earnshaw) family whom Maki Okumura rightly describes as “ophiolatorous (snake) shamans”5 whose duty is to appease their serpent deity with an annual ceremony. The result is a Wuthering Heights reconceived as a kind of mugen or fantasmal Noh tragedy where Bataille’s shamanic reveries blazing through Inner Experience and Guilty spectrally gleam into Brontë’s intimations of immortality. Equally crucial is Yoshida’s “logic of self-negation” that distills his definition of filmmaking to “the contraposition of two equal sides: those who create and those who look.”6 Yoshida’s dissolution into his audience is of thematic importance to Arashi-ga-Oka, for as Patrick Noonan observes, it implicitly “initiates a relationship between self and other in which both parties mutually comprise one another’s subjectivities while remaining independently discrete.”7
Je est un autre1
—Arthur Rimbaud
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© 2014 Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett
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Catania, S. (2014). The Undying Light: Yoshida, Bataille and the Ambivalent Spectrality of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In: Qi, S., Padgett, J. (eds) The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405159_6
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