Chapter 1
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. ‘Mr. Heathcliff?’ I said.
A nod was the answer.
Novelists are frequently concerned with ‘getting it wrong’ and Emily Bronte’s opening to Wuthering Heights presents the world of Heathcliff through the initial eye and vocabulary of a truly fatuous narrator. How ill equipped is Lockwood here to describe the scene before him? The strait-jacketed register of civilised exchange which Lockwood attempts to inflict upon the Heights ironically produces a perspective on this tempestuous world that renders the Heights monumentally ‘Other’ to all that Lockwood purports to know. Indeed the complexity of the narratorial perspective, shared anomalously between the house keeper Nelly Dean and the interloper Lockwood seems to leave much of the novel’s ‘truth’ or purported ‘centre’ literally ‘elsewhere’. For how can two such limited narrators convert the mysterious relationships they look upon at the Heights into any convincing and sustainable reality?
When we read this opening we notice how the setting is apprehended by Lockwood -the- visitor, in a vocabulary that he converts into a parody of the Gothic. Thus he uses words like ‘desolate’ and ‘solitary’ but has no real idea of what these words actually mean. They are empty of signfication being the traces of reading experiences enjoyed in the security of Lockwood’s ‘civilised’ past. Notice how the use of exclamation marks bestow a naive enthusiam upon a world that seems markedly unwelcoming. Lockwood is playing at being Romantic, he is enjoying the signs of isolation without having the slightest concept what such isolation encompasses. Heathcliff’s mute acknowledgement of Lockwood’s presence highlights the chasm between them linguistically and psychically. Lockwood has not the language to know Heathcliff and the latter knows that from the beginning hence his silence.
We are in a space where words fail to seal in meaning safely. Words fail to stabilise the anti-social energies of a world profoundly resistant to cognitive clarity. The listeners within the story cannot understand what they hear; so we as reading listeners have to take our path to an interpretation of the novel and this is not a comfortable at all.
The later scene when Lockwood attempts to decode all the different signatures of Cathy inscibed on wood in her old room is one of most pyschologiclaly astute in fiction. Identity is encrypted in language and this confrontation between failed interpreter and interpretation is foregrounded initially in this opening scene to the novel. Little wonder that such estrangement manifests itself in myth, as myth provides the only interpretation available for that which cannot be apprehended in any other way.