be used to date his visits to Wuthering Heights. This realisation (after the differentiation between the ‘report’ and the ‘story’ described above) is the second crucial step on the way to solving the chronological paradoxes of the novel.
The only rational explanation for the use of both dates is that they indicate the years in which Mr. Lockwood composes his report, that is they do not refer to the reported events but rather to when Mr. Lockwood reports the events. The years “1801 —” and “1802. –” only create the impression that they date the plot. In fact, “1801 —” dates the year Mr. Lockwood sets down on paper his first two visits in 1800, as well as his third visit in 1801 and his report of the visit. On the other hand, “1802. –” dates the recording of his fourth visit, which also takes place in 1801.
The recording of his first two visits and that of his fourth (and last) visit thus occur in the year following the events reported. Only the third visit takes place in the same year in which it is reported. Mr. Lockwood begins his diary at the beginning of January 1801, continuing it until the “second week in January” 1801 when, by his own account, he is “so many days nearer health” (WH, 191). He ←25 | 26→concludes the first part of his report between his third visit to Wuthering Heights and his departure later that same month (WH, 367).
The two dates 1801 and 1802 can therefore only come from some sort of diary kept by Mr. Lockwood, written retrospectively from the perspective of the beginning of 1801 and later of 1802, rather than being composed concurrently with Ellen Dean’s account of events. This explains the use of the em-dash after the date 1801, followed by Mr. Lockwood’s initially reflective then more discursive report of the year 1800. The em-dash is in fact used only once in the critical edition of the novel. A full stop and an en-dash appear after the date 1802, followed by the report of Mr. Lockwood’s journey to the north of England in the July of 1801 and his fourth visit to Wuthering Heights. Similarly, the dash in the first line of Chapter 15 – as will be elucidated – signifies Mr. Lockwood’s mental leap out of the reporting present into the reported past. In January 1801, he initially jumps back in time to his first visit to Wuthering Heights, then to the end of the fifth week of his illness, and sometime in the year 1802 he jumps back to July 1801. All three dashes have a specific chronological meaning.
The idea that the dates “1801 —” and “1802. –” refer to the recording of Mr. Lockwood’s report rather than to the chronology of the storyline has, astoundingly, never occurred to anyone until now. It is evidently so counterintuitive, at least to the authors who cling to the traditional chronologies and to those who are perhaps otherwise biased, that it may provoke violent emotions for some time to come. Heywood (2004, p. 434) prefers to question the reliability of the year 1778 as the unambiguous year of Hareton’s birth rather than consider the chronological relevance of the date “1801 —”, despite the fact that Goodridge (1964, p. 16) has already recognised, and Tytler (1994, p. 138) already mentioned (albeit in passing), that Mr. Lockwood is keeping a diary. Ort (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.
←26 | 27→
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
