“You’re Lockwood to my Nelly,” Kay said to me yesterday.
“What?”
“You know, Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean! The frame narrators in Wuthering Heights. Lockwood is the tenant of Thrushcross Grange who asks Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, to tell him the story of Catherine and Heathcliff which he relays to the reader. And by the way, talk about unreliable! But anyway, Wuthering Heights is a frame narrative to beat them all.[1] A story (Nelly’s narration) within a story (Lockwood’s account as transcribed for the reader). A double-frame from the daring mind of Emily Brontë who, in her dark imagination, cast doubt on both narrators.[2] Anyway, you and I are writing a frame story. Who isn’t, you might ask. But certainly, we are.
“It strikes me that like Lockwood, you have arrived from outside the story. In his case, the story of Cathy and Heathcliff. In your case, the story of Jake and Audra. I, like Nelly, reside inside the story for some of the time. But not all the time. I too, must rely on words and memories from deeper inside than I can ever go. I have to draw on other evidence for the years before I entered the story of Jake and Audra as their child. You know, sources such as letters, diaries, photos, little household objects, remembered conversations and events. And like Nelly, I am regularly forced to rely on the narrations of others. So, I tell you; you tell the reader. Sometimes I help you, sometimes I get in your way, and sometimes I become the story. Or I shove you aside and tell the reader myself. But we’re frames, you and I. There is no getting away from it. Now, if only one of us could write like Emily Brontë, we’d be sorted, eh?” Kay laughs and nudges my elbow with hers.
But just as suddenly, her eyes fill with tears and her face creases as she struggles to keep them back. Lord, she’s a labile one sometimes. But I’m getting used to it. And although I feel like telling her that she ‘becomes the story’ a little too often, I swallow that line and instead ask instead why she’s crying.
“I’m thinking about the person who first told me about frame stories. And who used Wuthering Heights as her example, so beautifully, that I have used it ever since. Her first name is Clare and her middle name is Hope. She has a small build and a beautiful face with high cheekbones. Behind a quiet demeanor, Clare – for too many of her years – veiled a fine but fiery intelligence, creativity, and emotion. Those who knew her best respected the veil but looked through it as best we could, went around it sometimes, and found the best of friends.
“Today, as you and I speak, Clare has dementia. It struck cruelly and unnaturally early in her life but is now quite advanced and she lives in a care home. She no longer remembers the times we spent together over decades of close friendship, but on good days and when I manage to visit London, my face and voice still cause her to smile. A few years ago, I could remind her of our shared past, music and films we loved, parties, dinners, mutual friends, country walks we took together. Decades ago when I lived in Yorkshire, we hiked across the moor to Haworth one wintry day. We visited the Brontë Parsonage and then dined in the Black Bull Inn, where Branwell Brontë drank his fill. Over our wine and food, Clare and I reminisced about our student days and our youthful pretensions when we talked about Wuthering Heights and the frame narrative.
“The last time I visited Clare in the care home, I found her university library card on the floor beside her bed. It had fallen from a scrapbook or photo album. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ I said to her. ‘Look at this!’
“Clare stared at the small, laminated card and student photo of herself. ‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s you, Clare.’
“I inspected the date on the card. ‘It’s from the year you were studying for a PhD in Middle English.’
‘No… really? Did I do that?’
‘You did! You were an amazing scholar.’
“‘Well,’ she began, then trailed off, having already lost the information, lost whatever the information had made her feel in the prior instant, lost words, and lost the trace of recognition in the picture of herself. I put the old library card on the desk by her bedroom window. It broke my heart that my friend who had concealed her gifts too well in life should now have forgotten them altogether. Then I looked at her face and realized she was not thinking about such losses at all.
“I don’t feel like talking anymore today,” Kay says finally, looking away from me.
“Just one question before you go,” I say hastily.
“What is it?”
“Did your friend Clare ever meet Jake and Audra?” I suppose this question is my way of keeping Kay on task.
“No, never. Clare is an Irish Londoner. They were a couple of old folks in an American state she never visited. Paths never crossed.”
Kay pauses for a long moment.
“No,” she says, again. “But Clare and Audra share the same birthday. And because Clare and I spent a great deal of time talking about our families and childhoods, I always felt that she knew them. And there is this: I had dinner with her the night before I flew to America when Jake was in hospital after his heart attack. I knew already that he was on life support and probably would not survive. After dinner, I remember standing outside the Embankment underground station with Clare on a warm May night. We were about to go our separate ways, the Northern Line for me, Clare to the Bakerloo Line. Within a few years, her ability to find her way home by tube would be gone. But that evening as we said goodbye, Clare, who had lost her parents much earlier than I lost mine said, ‘Be sure to tell your Dad you love him.’”
[1] “Frame Narrative: A story within a story, within sometimes yet another story, as in for example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As in Shelley’s work, the form echoes in structure the thematic search in the story for something deep, dark, and secret at the heart of the narrative. The form thus also resembles the psychoanalytic process of uncovering the unconscious behind various levels of obfuscating narratives put in place by the conscious mind. As is often the case…a different individual often narrates the events of a story in each frame. This structure of course leads us to question the reasons behind each of the narrations since, unlike an omniscient narrative perspective, the teller of the story becomes an actual character with concomitant shortcomings, limitations, prejudices, and motives. The process of transmission is also highlighted since we often have a sequence of embedded readers or audiences. A famous example in film of such a structure is Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.” See Purdue University, Narratology: Frame Narrative.
[2] If you would like a small graphic guide to Emily’s dark wonder, see “Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights – in charts” The Guardian, 2018.
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