The Hours, Alice, and the Never-Ending Narrative

The Hours is a rather atypical novel.  I think it is quite fair to say that it does not embrace original thought to the extent that, say, either of the Alice novels do.  Rather than playing on cultural norms and making use of allusions, Cunningham has taken a text and extrapolated from it.  There is no longer one Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway.  There is Clarissa Vaughan a character who is Clarissa Dalloway in a modern context, able to pursue her love for Sally, and able to also pursue her own political motivations.  There is Woolf as well, her mind now an accessible place for readers.  It’s as though Cunningham has given us the frame of mind that Woolf had while writing Mrs. Dalloway.  He has extrapolated from the original text his own literary view, one that he puts forth in his own novel.  Alice makes use of cultural interpolation.  Not in the sense that Carroll did not write parts of the book, but that he considered society and British culture and parodied them within his novel.  In a similar way, Cunningham has taken Mrs. Dalloway but has taken the text, rather than culture, as the primary source for his own novel.  Through the lens of that text, the context of a single day, he seeks to revisit much of which Woolf originally addressed.  Although this is an apt comparison, I’m curious to know what others have to say about the extent to which this occurs within these two novels.

One of the greatest accomplishments of a good piece of literature is not showing what a historical figure actually said, but what they could have said.  A single anecdote can relate more about a figure than anything else.  Victor Hugo never uses the line “to love another person is to see the face of God” within Les Mis, nor did Marie Antoinette say “let them eat cake,” and Voltaire, another famous Frenchman, never said “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” although this statement is certainly in line with his philosophy.  It is the fact that they could have said it that is so significant and sheds light on them in relation to their context and history.  And this is, I think, what Cunningham seeks to accomplish with The Hours.  And perhaps because of this it is the deepest and most intricate interpretation of a work we have read thus far in the semester.  By extrapolating he has created a new and profound discussion of the work of Woolf and its implications.  And he has not simply put words in her mouth, but established an entire narrative on the idea that her work carries weight and resonates through time to present-day.  It’s as though the story of Mrs. Dalloway impossible to confine because it applies so readily to each of our lives.  And what is Cunningham’s conclusion?  That we live for those few precious hours that drip away and come very rarely within the drought of life.

2 Replies to “The Hours, Alice, and the Never-Ending Narrative”

  1. Thoughts i had about this:

    ~ What Carroll does is consider the big ideas of culture and education and parodies them.
    ~What Cunningham does is invent and interpret based on an individual’s major work.
    ~Carroll takes a large thing and writes a wildly original work, changing reader’s outward perceptions for generations.
    ~Cunningham takes one novel, re-imagines it a couple different ways, and uses it as a means to examine very internally-perceptive lines of thought (suicide, happiness, the passing and relevance of time).

    Thinking about these things has caused me to conclude there really isn’t all that much that’s similar in these author’s approaches. Not only that, but the directions they go in are contrary. Carroll wanted to reveal how skewed the outside world possibly was, and Cunningham created characters who mostly failed to come to terms with some of the most common aspects of life (marriage, children, attraction, work).

    I know this doesn’t really conclude anything but this all seemed like relevant information to me.

    -NHP

  2. I thought this was an interesting idea that you presented. Rather than analyzing each work individually, you take a look at them as a whole and find a common thread. I liked that rather than looking at the author’s intent or the meaning of the texts, you recognize the process that each author went through to create a vivid character sketch for the reader. This is something we haven’t discussed as much in class and I found it interesting to think about.

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