Jonathan Dee
In the following essay excerpt, Dee provides an overview of
The Hours and an analysis of Cunningham's incorporation of Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway into the novel.
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in the 2002 film version of The Hours © Paramount/Miramax/The Kobal Collection/Coote, Clive Michael Cunningham's The Hours, published last fall to admiring reviews and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for the year's best work of fiction, bravely offers as its animating force that most unfashionable of love objects, a book. Not just any book, either, but Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's slim, exacting treatment of one June day in the life of a group of Londoners, some of them related by friendship, some by birth, and some only by a kind of magical transfer of authorial sympathies as thecharacters pass one another on the street. Completed in 1925 (part of a six-year explosion of Woolf's genius that also saw the publication of To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, and The Waves), Mrs. Dalloway is one of the peaks of Woolf's achievement, which is another way of saying that it is one of the signal achievements in all of Modernist literature; still, it takes an unusually ardent devotion to imagine, as Cunningham does, that Woolf's novel might enter the world as an instrument of fate, influencing lives for three-quarters of a century—even the lives of those who have never read it.
The Hours plaits together the stories of three women, each of them observed over the course of one June day in three radically different times and places: 1923 London, 1949 Los Angeles, and 1998 Greenwich Village. The present-day narrative is the dominant one, and it takes the form of a somewhat overdetermined contemporary replay of the very events of Woolf's novel. Cunningham's central figure is Clarissa Vaughan (same first name as Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway), whom we first see in the throes of preparation for an important party at her home that evening (same as Clarissa Dalloway). The coincidences pile up rapidly from there: Clarissa Vaughan's ignorance of them (in spite of the fact that she has even been nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by a friend) is what saves these chapters from reading less like an act of homage than like a particularly highbrow episode of The Twilight Zone. Much more original and affecting is the novel's second, less emulative narrative strand, which concerns the tremulous existence of Laura Brown, a smart young housewife in suburban Los Angeles in the years of the post-World War II boom. Married to a doting war hero, mother of a three-year-old boy and with another child on the way, Laura is on a quiet course toward some sort of nervous breakdown, possibly even suicide; on the June day in question—her husband's birthday—she checks into a hotel room by herself and lies on the bed for two and a half hours reading Mrs. Dalloway. Never far from her mind is what she knows of the ultimate end of the woman who wrote the book she is holding; "How, Laura wonders, could someone who was able to write a sentence like that—who was able to feel everything contained in a sentence like that—come to kill her-self? What in the world is wrong with people?"
The third character in The Hours is Virginia Woolf herself. She, too, is seen on an imaginary June day, eighteen years before her suicide by drowning (a scene that forms the book's prologue), a day on which she is struggling with the opening pages of a new novel—the novel that will become Mrs. Dalloway but whose working title is "The Hours." These chapters are narrated in the same psychologically intimate third-person style as are those chapters centered around the women who are entirely Cunningham's creation. And although there is no mistaking the fact that this narrative—indeed, the whole novel—is conceived by Cunningham as a sincere tribute to a predecessor whom he reveres, still it is remarkable to watch him demonstrate that there is no corner of Woolf's extraordinary consciousness that, for reasons of modesty, he might shy away from attempting to recreate. For the most part, the narrative sticks fondly to the quotidian arrangements of Woolf's day (washing her face in the bathroom, planning a lunch menu); but we are also made privy to the less penetrable mysteries of her creative process:
It seems good enough; parts seem very good indeed. She has lavish hopes, of course—she wants this to be her best book.... But can a single day in the life of an ordinary women be made into enough for a novel? Virginia taps at her lips with her thumb.
We are in Woolf's head when she engages the madness with which her difficult life was fired: "she can feel the nearness of the old devil (what else to call it?), and she knows she will be utterly alone if and when the devil chooses to appear again." And, of course, in the prologue mentioned above, we are offered access to that consciousness even as it extinguishes itself, on the afternoon Woolf walks into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets.
The appropriation of genuine historical figures—people who actually lived—as characters in fiction is an act of imaginative boldness that, through simple attrition, readers of contemporary fiction have come to take entirely for granted. The past several years have seen a torrent of such novels, by Russell Banks (on John Brown), Pat Barker (Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon), Jay Parini (Walter Benjamin), Thomas Pynchon (Mason and
Jonathan Dee 19
Dixon), Susan Sontag (Lord Nelson), John Updike (James Buchanan), and a legion of lesser-known writers ...
But whether or not it's true (and I think it's untrue) that the relationship between the real and the invented in the art of prose fiction hasn't changed significantly since Shakespeare's time, there's no debating that the practice of conscripting flesh-and-blood people into novels has become a veritable epidemic in the last twenty-five years or so. It is more than mere postmodern fashion, this appetite for the real among those whose traditional stock-in-trade is invention. It says something important—and, to those of us who care about making the case for the novel's continued vitality, something ominous—about the way in which fiction writers imagine their relation to the world.
What makes a novel a novel—what distinguishes it from other forms? More, surely than the question of invention: "invention" is a continuum, after all, and I know no fiction writer who would be so bold as to claim that no aspect of his or her characters had its origin in something observed in the real world. More, too, than its dependence upon language, or its use of story as a kind of tonality to be either relied upon or rebelled against, or its deployment of moving, speaking, acting human figures as the elements of art (all of which it has in common with movies and plays and television shows). If there is one thing the novel offers that no other form can approach, it is the opportunity to know those human figures completely, through the fiction writer's full uncompromised access to his or her characters' interior lives, as well as to the ways in which they define themselves through the observable phenomena of speech and action. In a novel, the dicrepancy, large or small, between what a person does and who that person is can be if not exactly erased then at least accounted for so fully as to provide a picture of human nature that we feel is sufficient in its totality. The satisfaction of knowing others—or even ourselves—in that kind of totality is a satisfaction with which our real lives most definitely do not provide us. And it is precisely this imaginary bridging of the gulf between the knowable and the unknowable about human motives that makes of fiction an alternative life: a life that transcends this one, and that brings us into closer contact with our natures than real life—that is to say, the life outside books—is capable of doing.
This idea, of course, is not new. "In daily life," E. M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel, "we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the condition of life upon this globe."
A more historically minded accounting can be found in Milan Kundera's 1986 manifesto The Art of the Novel. Centuries before the invention of the novel, Kundera says, in the work of the great story-tellers like Boccaccio and Dante, "we can make out this conviction: It is through action that man steps forth from the repetitive universe of the everyday where each person resembles every other person; it is through action that he distinguishes himself from others and becomes an individual." Four hundred years later, in the work of proto-novelists such as Cervantes and Diderot, Kundera finds a more complex portrait of existence starting to emerge: the unlucky hero of Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, for instance, "though he was starting an amorous adventure, and instead he was setting forth toward his infirmity. He could never recognize himself in his action. Between the act and himself, a chasm opens. Man hopes to reveal his own image through his act, but that image bears no resemblance to him. The paradoxical nature of action is one of the novel's great discoveries. But if the self is not to be grasped through action, then where and how are we to grasp it?" Out of that last sentence's primary existential problem, the novel as we know it is continually reborn.
Source: Jonathan Dee, "The Reanimators: On the Art of Literary Graverobbing," in Harper's Magazine, June 1999, pp. 76-84.
