Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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In The Hours, the American novelist Michael Cunningham undertakes perhaps one of the most daunting literary projects imaginable: the complete reworking of one of the great novels of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Woolf's novel follows Clarissa, the wife of Member of Parliament Richard Dalloway, through a single day in London. At the same time, the novel also tracks Septimus Smith, a young ex-soldier who reads as a negative double of Mrs. Dalloway. At the end of the novel, their lives intersect in passing, illustrating Woolf's contention that all lives are interconnected.

Borrowing the names and key traits of the characters of Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham interweaves versions of the two plots of the Virginia Woolf novel with imagined scenes of Woolf herself at work on the book. The result, written in lyrical prose that evokes Woolf's and set variously in 1980s Greenwich Village, 1940s Los Angeles, and Woolf's London, succeeds brilliantly-with a few reservations.

Chief among these is the tension created by Cunningham's approach to Woolf. His characters are far more of their time-mentions of protease inhibitors and AIDS ground his characters more firmly in their era than Woolf's more ambiguous references to the First World War place her characters in theirs. At the same time, Cunningham's reinterpretation of Woolf suggests that his aim is to broaden her themes, to depict them in a new context in order to emphasize their universality. Given the odd tug-of-war between these two seemingly opposed goals, one must ask: Is it possible to comment decisively, or even fruitfully, on a great work of literature simply by relocating it to a different age? Does updating a classic make it resonate anew?

If Cunningham had simply reset Woolf's story, the answer would probably be no. But he has done far more than that; he has recombined various elements of Woolf's characters to produce people who at first seem to correspond neatly to Woolf's but who eventually blur the roles apparently assigned them. Thus, while Cunningham's Richard initially parallels Woolf's-both are successful, well-respected, perhaps a bit commonplace-this Richard turns out to resemble Septimus Smith far more than his Woolfian namesake. Eventually, too, we meet the true Richard Dalloway figure: Clarissa's partner, Sally (a conflation of Clarissa Dalloway's husband and Woolf's Sally, a mysterious figure whose fleeting kiss Clarissa Dalloway remembers in a flashback). The identity of the Septimus figure is equally uncertain. Is it really Richard who fills his role, or is it Laura Brown, Cunningham's dissatisfied and vaguely suicidal 1940s housewife?

Reshuffling Woolf's characters in this way, Cunningham beautifully illustrates the central thesis of Mrs. Dalloway: all human beings are interconnected in ways they may not fully understand. This point becomes even clearer at the novel's end, when the two main plot threads suddenly merge in a brilliant, unexpected denouement.

But Cunningham makes this case again, in an even farther-reaching way, with another major structural device: his interweaving of Woolf's own life with his two more blatantly fictional plots. Though he takes pains to state that his Virginia Woolf is a fictional character, he also cites a long list of sources for his imagining of the tormented author, from biographies by her husband and nephew to her own diaries. The result may be fictional, but we are invited to believe that it is not that far from the truth.

Regardless of its veracity, Cunningham's portrait of Woolf is heartbreaking. He clearly believes that Clarissa Dalloway is in some ways a Woolf figure, and the structure of the novel reinforces this parallel. Beginning with a stunning account of Woolf's suicide, he reminds us that in Woolf's initial plans for the novel (originally titled The Hours) Clarissa Dalloway was to have killed herself. In doing so, he blurs the lines between life and literature; if we are all really as interconnected as he (and Woolf) would have us believe, are we really so neatly separated from the fictional characters we resemble or create?

Cunningham asks this question again and again, not only by turning Virginia Woolf (whose life as he imagines it closely resembles her characters') into a character in his fiction, but by consciously invoking his own characters' Woolfian namesakes. His Clarissa has in fact been nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by her friend Richard, who insists that she resembles her literary predecessor. Clarissa doesn't think so, but Mrs. Dalloway is very much on her mind as her day progresses, creating yet another layer of allusions to the Woolf novel. Here, as throughout the novel, conscious allusions to Woolf by the characters are added to the more straightforward account of Mrs. Dalloway's creation, and the reference to the Woolf novel that is the center of the book, although the characters are unaware of it.

And to all these allusions to Mrs. Dalloway must be added one more: Cunningham's style, which beautifully recalls Woolf's. Without resorting to mimicry, Cunningham has managed to write prose that evokes hers. The style is not Woolf's exactly, but it seems to arise from the same circle; this novel could almost be a newly-discovered manuscript from a previously unknown member of Woolf's Bloomsbury group.

Almost. For there are still the mentions of protease inhibitors and AIDS, the substitution of Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon for Woolf's half-glimpsed celebrity (the Prime Minister? We never quite learn his identity). These references are sufficiently contemporary that they break the spell of timelessness, of universality, that Cunningham elsewhere manages to cast. For the most part, though, he succeeds in turning spots as well-known as Greenwich Village and Los Angeles into the equivalent of Clarissa Dalloway's London: half-familiar dreamworlds not quite concrete enough to contradict the universality of the author's vision.

With The Hours, Cunningham has done the impossible: he has taken a canonical work of literature and, in reworking it, made it his own. His characters are not piecemeal borrowings from Woolf, nor is his style a slavish imitation of hers. His novel is not inferior Woolf, nor is it an improved version of a classic. It is simply new, and as such it stands as a potential classic in its own right.