The Hours, by Michael Cunningham

It is one of the greatest acts of literary audacity that I can think of not only to write as Virginia Woolf, but to write Virginia Woolf herself. One of the essential modernist writers who reconceived the novel, her prose is instantly identifiable with its rivers of breathless clauses. Of course she is also infamous for her struggles with what appears to have been bipolar disorder, and finally ended her life midway through the second world war. So it is safe to say writing as Virginia Woolf and writing Virginia Woolf herself requires an enormous amount of talent, research and audacity. And in my humble opinion, Michael Cunningham pulls it off beautifully.

Before I sat down with The Hours, I spent the time rereading Mrs. Dalloway, which was my first Woolf in my second year of university, and I don’t think I really grasped it. On a second reading I appreciated it much more (though still less than The Waves or To the Lighthouse). In any case, for those who wish to read The Hours, your appreciation of it will increase significantly with Mrs. Dalloway fresh in your mind.

There are three stories in The Hours. The first is Mrs. Dalloway almost three quarters of a century later, where Clarissa Vaughn is having a party to celebrate her’s friend Richard’s prestigious poetry award. Don’t be mislead by the name, for this Richard is much more Septimus than Clarissa’s husband, yet he also replaces Peter Walsh in Clarissa’s early love triangle. This is a Septimus not broken by war, but by the ravages of AIDS, and like Septimus he has gathered (in the words of Eliot) “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” And while this narrative follows Woolf’s pattern closely while modernizing it (the Queen in the car is replaced by a modern movie star, Miss Kilman goes from religious fantatic to ardent lesbian feminist), departures such as the one with Richard/Septimus are what really demonstrate Cunningham’s understanding of the original text.

The second narrative is that of Virginia herself, starting with her suicide, which with a lesser writer I would suspect was a ploy for shock value, but here it not only anchors the novel in Woolf, but casts the spectre of death over the remaining stories as each of the women fight routine, but precarious battles. The narrative then goes back to the writing of Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf fighting her demonic headaches that threaten to undo her. We witness a visit by her also-celebrated sister, Vanessa Bell, and her children. Having read portions of Woolf’s extensive journals, it was a pleasure to be in Woolf’s head again, and to see it done so well. Cunningham integrates many of the main image patterns from her journals (of water, of a shark fin emerging, etc) and preserves the rhythms of her writing.

The third story provides a temporal (and eventually a narrative) link between the two previously mentioned stories. Mrs. Brown is a housewife in a suburb of LA in the 1950s. Her story, for me, was the most painful to read, and I approached each new section with dread as she struggles with each moment of being the perfect wife and mother, and wanting nothing more to run away. She is riddled with guilt at the dissonance between who she is and who she should be: “She herself is trapped here forever, posing as a wife. She must get through this night, and then tomorrow, and then another night here, in these rooms, with nowhere else to go. She must please; she must continue.”

In each of these narratives we see three women trying desperately to make, as Mrs. Dalloway says in the original, “an offering.” A book, a party, a cake. Some physical object to assert their right to existence, their contributions to the world. Like Septimus, they struggle with “proportion,” and these undertakings carry much more weight than perhaps the should. They live for the moments when their aspirations and reality meet: “She is herself and she is the perfect picture of herself; there is no difference.” Yet these times of perfect convergence happen so rarely, and they must live through the intervening hours.

And The Hours is a brilliant title, evoking not only the insistence of Big Ben’s chimes in Mrs. Dalloway, but also the endless march of time, of hour after hour of tiny battles which need to be continually fought – the battle to be a good wife and mother, to fight the darkness of mental illness, to support those we love on the brink of despair. As Mrs. Brown says it well: “Think of how wonderful it might be to no longer worry,  or struggle, or fail.” It is also fighting the claustrophobia of modern life that Woolf evokes so well at Clarissa’s party and on the crowded streets, finding pauses without forsaking crucial ties to other people.

Cunningham not only manages to evoke Woolf’s themes and images, but also distills her language wonderfully, making it less overwhelming but maintaining its original rhythms. Take this passage of the narrative of Mrs. Woolf, which, fittingly, Woolf herself could have written [She remembers a kiss with her sister, Vanessa]:

“It will serve as this afternoon’s manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day, in which anything might happen, anything at all.”

It gives me shivers, as much of this novel did. Its writing is luminous, shining through the dark menace that it also creates. It is complex, intelligent, and unbelievably sensitive. This is essential reading for any Woolf fan, but also recommended to whom the hours echo too loudly.

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And because the movie is also incredible, and because, having seen the it first, I was certainly picturing these actresses as I read, here’s the trailer [though I hate this Hollywood action movie treatment of it, I couldn't find a better one in English]:

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Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

My redmist book is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the acme of Bloomsburyish poppycock, a self-flattering appropriation of English literature and history, distilled from Woolf’s temporarily addled brain by the heat of her infatuation for the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West. Should be sold with a sick bag attached.

Tarquin Hall, writer

The preceding quotation comes from the article in my previous post about critics’ most loathed books. I read this article while reading Orlando, but despite this delightfully venomous criticism, I think dismissing Orlando as a convoluted trifle is a mistake (and just wait, I’m calling in the big guns to back me up). Of course I must admit I’m a lover of Virginia Woolf; To the Lighthouse and The Waves (which also gets slammed in the aforementioned article) are two of my favourite books. I am not, however, an indiscriminate lover of Woolf – I was never taken by Jacob’s Room, and to this day, I’ve been known to say things like, “That’s the Jacob’s Room of Craig’s albums.”

Woolf admits to writing Orlando for fun, for a change of pace from her usual work, but that’s not to say that it should be taken lightly, or that it has no valid points to make. It offers a delightful parody of biography, in which the biographer relies on narrative devices far more than on fact, and endlessly frustrates the scopophilic desires of the reader. At one point the biographer describes a fire that destroyed many important documents containing the particulars of Orlando’s life leaving “only tantalizing fragments which leave the most important points obscure.” And of course Woolf’s narrative is doing much the same.

It is well-known that Orlando is modelled after Woolf’s friend/lover Vita Sackville-West, and the academic editor (I was reading the Oxford World’s Classic edition), certainly drives that home, teasing out all the parallels between Orlando and Vita. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if this is not Woolf’s greatest joke: planting allusions for people to hunt for in their desperation to turn Orlando into the very thing it resists: a literal biography.

And while the satirizing of history, and biography and writers is amusing, Orlando‘s most important contribution is its challenge to static, vigorously enforced gender identities. Orlando is born male, and as a young man is magically transformed by three gender-bending witches into a woman.  Orlando’s change of sex is a theatrical production acted out by the witches, and Orlando must continuously re-enact her own gender throughout the rest of the book. The biographer discusses how Orlando sometimes chooses to dress as a man even after she has become a woman, and how she must modify her behaviour and act the part of her desired sex. She also continues to identify with her male self and is consequently always both male AND female, denying a singular gender identity and inhabiting the space between them.  Woolf writes:

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

Unfortunatley, Woolf is forced to rely on existing sexual stereotypes to demonstrate Orlando’s dual gender (inhabiting a space between the sexes is of course dependant on their separate and identifiable existences). Nevertheless, Woolf highlights the conditions for intelligibility in various historical periods, all the while maintaining that Orlando herself cannot be limited by traditional sexual roles.

The sexual relations in the book also become complicated with Orlando’s sexual transformation – all of the sudden all of his/her relationships of the past and future are homosexual as well as heterosexual. Woolf cleverly escapes the perils of writing of openly gay relationship since Orlando only ever engages in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex; however, if she is still the same person, every heterosexual relationship is shadowed by a homosexual one.

To think all this was written 60 years before Judith Butler wrote about gender as performance and about the discursive construction of sex. Orlando is a literal representation of Butler’s theory – someone whose sex is changed by mere words, and is something that needs to be constantly re-enacted and reaffirmed. The body itself is secondary, and the sexed body is completely absent.  For example, when Orlando gives birth to a baby boy, it is a labour of words, in which Orlando simply comments on the world outside the window in a rushing, breathless stream, until all of the sudden a baby appears, seemingly born of the humanity observed outside the window, rather than of Orlando herself. Interestingly, there is no present father for the child, so it is possible that the baby was born of the male and female sides of Orlando – she is simultaneously mother and father to the child.

I’m going to wind up with a little Butler, who I’ve resisted quoting throughout (partly because I lack the willpower to re-enter the linguistic trenches of her syntax):

“Sex” is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the “one” becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility. (From Bodies That Matter)

And the struggle for cultural intelligibility is exactly why Orlando is so much more than a joke, or the result of an infatuation-addled brain. It pointedly demonstrates the ways in which a body of either gender is acceptable, all the while challenging these social mores with someone who exposes their very superficiality, turning sex not into a fixed restriction, but rather a performance that can be subtly altered over time. Woolf was writing A Room of One’s Own right around the same time as Orlando, and as she articulated the need for women to have their own physical space, it seems she was also calling for a new space for the psyche, an independent corporeal dwelling – a body of one’s own.

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