Brief note: teaching Caryl Phillips' The Lost Child

From an instructor's point of view, one of the more interesting ways to teach students to be on the lookout for connections amongst literary works (as opposed to reading them in hermetic isolation) is to teach responses to a famous work--for example, King Lear and Ran, or "Porphyria's Lover" and "The Leper."  This semester, I had a go at Caryl Phillips' recent The Lost Child, which turned out to pose some interesting pedagogical problems.  The Lost Child responds to Wuthering Heights, as its back cover blurb dutifully reports, but its relationship to WH is very different from, say, Wide Sargasso Sea's to Jane Eyre: while adopting some of WSS's narrative strategies (the prequel, for example), The Lost Child relentlessly undermines the reader's desire to layer the response on the original.    That is: the reader coming to The Lost Child and expecting to find a recognizable version of Wuthering Heights will be sadly disappointed.  The novel's opening makes us expect WSS, given that we get Heathcliff's backstory (so, straightforward appropriation), but the book's other two narratives are about the dying Emily Bronte (so, biofiction) and then a very dysfunctional family in post-WWII England (so, realist historical fiction).  The three narrative threads are linked to each other and to WH thematically--for example, multiple generations of characters trying (and failing) to use education to render themselves more "genteel," more English--but the links are, for lack of a better term, exploded, just as the novel's relationship to WSS (which is, I think, its most obvious antecedent) is also exploded.  For example, Monica, one of the novel's key figures, is in some respects like Emily Bronte, but she's also like Heathcliff's mother (an ex-slave abandoned in Liverpool) and like Branwell Bronte and like Cathy I.  Patrick Bronte reappears in Monica's father, Ronald Johnson, but also in Monica's first husband, Julius Wilson (a doctoral student hailing from somewhere in the West Indies) and even a bit in Monica herself. Monica's two sons with Julius, Ben and Tommy, both share aspects of the novel's Heathcliff, but Ben is also Hareton, complete with his own Cathy II at the end.  And despite the singular title, the novel overflows with children lost, both literally and figuratively.  The way in which Phillips fractures his connections among characters and texts, so that no character can ever be said to simply be or stand in for another one, certainly runs counter to our expectations for parallel-plot fiction: succeeding generations don't solve the problems faced by the ones before them (in fact, given that Phillips gives his multiple generations very different kinds of referential status, it's not clear that they could).  This made for a very different kind of teaching experience, because the students really had to hunt for all the thematic links, in a way that isn't all that necessary with WSS or something like Jack Maggs.  Oh--there's Hindley's alcoholism.  Or: Emily Bronte is a ghost, like Cathy I; so too is Monica, in a way (the narrative shifts to her first-person POV to recount events leading up to her institutionalization, but only after she is already dead, chronologically speaking).  Moreover, the fragmented allusions contrast with Phillips' decision to demystify (as my students put it) WH: instead of WH's vagueness about Heathcliff's racial otherness, The Lost Child makes Heathcliff explicitly biracial and the son of Mr. Earnshaw, to boot.  (Critics have long pointed out that, really, Earnshaw's excuse for just randomly picking up a stray child does seem rather, er, odd.)   Heathcliff, that is, comes into being as a result of a very definite British colonial history, one that continues playing itself out via Julius Wilson and, eventually, his children.  It's as though grounding WH in this historical context causes it to blow up.