Eliot noted in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” even the original work shifts and changes when a new piece of writing comes into the world. A writer cannot write anything wholly original, and as T.S. Intertextuality, says Roland Barthes, recognizes that “ny text is a new tissue of past citations.” A new piece of writing builds on the text of works that have come before. Dalloway and then The Hours, I think you’ll be fascinated by two key features of postmodernism – intertextuality and palimpsest – and how they apply to Cunningham’s novel. Wondering just what I mean by postmodern? I won’t go all academic on you, but if you take the time to read Mrs. As it riffs on one of the most important modernist novels, The Hours is, I believe, a great postmodernist novel. Though some of have seen The Hours as a derivative knock-off of Woolf’s masterpiece, others see it as a postmodern tour de force, a bold intertextual response to Mrs. The women’s stories comment on each other in provocative ways, and the reader is in for some unexpected plot twists. The novel’s prologue, which you can read online, tells the story of Woolf’s suicide in 1941. All three women are presented on one key day in their lives. Dalloway in 1949 Clarissa Vaughn, a late-twentieth century American whose friend Richard, a prominent writer, is dying of AIDS and Virginia Woolf herself in 1923 as she begins to write Mrs. The Hours weaves together the stories of three women – Laura Brown, an American housewife who is reading Mrs. It doesn’t claim or conceal the older piece of music, but it takes that music and turns it into something else.” Cunningham says, “I think it’s like the way a jazz musician might do a riff on an older established piece of music. Dalloway and a wholly new work on its own. The Hours is not a rewriting of her 1935 novel per se, but a reimagining, a fractured retelling, both a sequel of sorts to Mrs. Dalloway, which I discussed in last week’s StoryWeb episode. And it felt like something for me to write about very much the way you might write a novel based on the first time you fell in love.Ĭunningham’s 1998 novel, The Hours, is a kind of homage to and deep exploration of Mrs. It stayed with me in a way no other book ever has. I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss. And of course, the great American playwright Edward Albee famously asked Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Īmerican novelist Michael Cunningham is clearly not afraid of Virginia Woolf.

You can buy a Barnes and Noble canvas bag featuring Woolf’s face, and the British National Portrait Gallery sells thousands of Woolf postcards a month. In her fascinating book Virginia Woolf Icon, Brenda Silver examines all the ways Woolf has become a potent international symbol.

The hours by michael cunningham