Timelines in Emily Brontës «Wuthering Heights». Michael Weber
(1982, pp. 88f.) also rightly points out that Mr. Lockwood is writing a “summary diary with sporadic annual reviews”, and even Heywood himself (2004, p. 436) speaks at one point of “Lockwood’s diary”. But none of the authors has profited chronologically from their findings and realised that all calculations concerning the chronology of the novel have to start with 1800 as the year in which Mr. Lockwood twice visits Wuthering Heights and in which Ellen Dean begins her story. West (1981, p. 52) argues that it is not possible for the date 1801 at the beginning of the novel to be the date of the diary’s composition since a diarist normally notes the day and the month unless it is the beginning of a new year. However, this argument does not hold water because this is indeed the case: Mr. Lockwood begins his report at the beginning of 1801, acting exactly in accordance with West’s view.
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The fact that in some places Mr. Lockwood uses the historic present in keeping with oral storytelling is further evidence of the diary-like character of his report. In diaries, letters and “fictional oral discourses”, oral patterns of narration have survived: “In the process of narrative development from the written codification of oral storytelling via the written composition of texts on an oral model towards a purely writerly conception of narrative structure, the shape and function of the historic present tense necessarily undergo equivalent changes with the result that the oral pattern […] disappears in the realist novel and facilitates the proliferation of other uses of the present tense” (Fludernik 1992, p. 1). Fludernik points out the typical characteristics of the historic present tense pattern: “[…] the oral pattern is based on ‘tense switching’ […], that is to say on the sudden shift into the present tense and the equally sudden shift back into the past tense sometimes even within the same sentence. Whereas the ‘classic’ historic present tense of nineteenth-century fiction […] extends for passages of several consecutive sentences, frequently ranging from between a whole paragraph to a series of paragraphs and entire chapters” (Fludernik 1992, pp. 77–107). There are no such oral patterns in Wuthering Heights, however. The character of the passages that are untypical for the nineteenth century, and the unique narrative function of these passages, will be discussed in more detail in the section ‘Mr. Lockwood the contemporary witness’ in this chapter.
The unconventional chapter division of Wuthering Heights also indicates that Mr. Lockwood keeps a diary. The structure of the chapters only sometimes appertains to the plot or narrative situation; otherwise, it follows Mr. Lockwood’s arbitrary apportioning of the narrative material (cf. ‘The Report and the Story – Temporal and Chronological Aspects’ in this chapter).
The monomaniacal-seeming, one-sided interpretation of the years 1801 and 1802 as the years of the plot is astonishing, not only because of the references in Wuthering Heights-literature to the diary-like character of Mr. Lockwood’s report, but also because in principle and especially in novels of the nineteenth century any dating at the beginning or end of a text must be examined in order to see whether the years date the writing or date the plot action. Stendhal’s famous, intentionally misleading dates at the beginning of Le Rouge et Le Noir and Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 are two examples of such potential difficulties.
The chronological meaning of the grammatical and stylistic signals in the two chapter openings has, incidentally, been misunderstood not only by Sanger and all his successors but also by those who, since the first publication of the novel in 1847, have published or translated Wuthering Heights arbitrarily omitting the dashes, changing their length or adding dots, or even putting the years in italics or placing them differently. As early as 1848 in the first North American Edition, ←27 | 28→there is an “1801. – ” instead of “1801 —”. The same applies to the English Second Edition of 1850 and the Haworth Edition of 1903. It is worth noting that in the first three North American Critical Editions published by William M. Sale jr. (Norton Edition) the years are reproduced correctly, but then in the Fourth Edition of 2003 published by Richard M. Dunn, the years are printed in the same style as they were in 1848 and 1850. Furthermore, in the 2009 Edition of Wuthering Heights published by Oxford University Press, the length of the dash has been changed compared with the previous editions, and for this reason it is not used here for text citations. The English First Edition must be considered the benchmark because there are no other editorially relevant materials (cf. Dunn, p. xii and Small, p. XXIV). Also, in the First and Second Canadian Editions of Wuthering Heights, the typographical style of the opening of the novel does not correspond with the English First Edition.
At first glance it may seem unnecessary or even absurd to assume that the date of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit to Wuthering Heights is not also the date on which he begins to write his report. But, theoretically, Mr. Lockwood could have started his report after the first, second or even third visit. What is crucial in this regard is how Mr. Lockwood begins the first part of his report. The opening sentence is extremely important for the dating of the event and, in its style, it is unique:
1801 — I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. (WH, 1)
Right from the very start, it is possible to rule out the suggestion that Mr. Lockwood begins his diary immediately after his first visit because of the future form used in the first sentence. The “shall” of the second half of the sentence proves that the “trouble” is still to come but that it is already known at the beginning of the report. Since Mr. Lockwood can hardly have the gift of foresight, he cannot have started the report on the same day as his first visit – it must have been after his second visit at the earliest. After his first visit, there are no disappointments and there is no cause for concern. After the second visit, ←28 | 29→however, the situation is quite different – Mr. Lockwood is disappointed and depressed.
In her “critical comparison of two German translations of Wuthering Heights”, Elsbeth Ort actually considers Mr. Lockwood to be a clairvoyant. To explain the second half of the opening sentence and the “shall”, she writes:
Lockwood versucht darin, die unbekannte Zukunft, die vor ihm liegt, zusammenzufassen. Er tut dies aufgrund eines ersten Besuchs auf Wuthering Heights, von welchem er in der Folge berichten wird. So viel ist ihm klar: Heathcliff wird ihn beschäftigen. Lockwood ist in diesem Augenblick so ausschließlich auf die Zukunft ausgerichtet, dass die Gegenwart davor gänzlich in den Hintergrund rückt. Die einzige dieser Zukunftsbezogenheit gemäße Zeitform ist das Futurum. Es ist allerdings zu sagen, dass mit dem Zeitformwechsel die Wahl eines anderen Verbs einhergehen müsste. (Ort 1982, p. 89)4
This means she accuses the author of making a mistake with the change of tense. Whether the “I shall be troubled with” is to be translated as “mit dem ich beschäftigt sein werde” or rather “mit dem ich Ärger (oder Schwierigkeiten) haben werde” may be a matter of opinion, but anyway the connotation of trouble is always negative and it is clear that after the first visit the trouble is yet to happen. Ellen Dean will also use the word “troubles” in the same vein before she begins her story. Until his second visit, Mr. Lockwood is bowled over by Mr. Heathcliff: “A capital fellow! […] how my heart warmed towards him” (WH, 1). After his second visit, “capital fellow” has become “rough fellow”, a “churl” (WH, 40), which indicates that Mr. Lockwood cannot have recorded his experiences until after his second visit to Wuthering Heights at the earliest. Even Ort (1982, pp. 88f.) mentions this as a plausible way of explaining the change in tense but rejects it because she sees it as a threat to the “unity of the plot”. She does not realise the chronological relevance of the tense change nor the circumstances surrounding the writing of the report.
Just like Ort, Knoepflmacher (1994, p. 12) – who quite