[Vwoolf] BBC Culture on The Hours

[Pat Laurence]

I meant to add that observations on Woolf conferences are, of course, dated
in the review.

On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 1:59 PM Pat Laurence <pat.laurence at gmail.com> wrote:

> Following up on the Lillian Crawford review, here's mine of the Cunningham *novel,
> **The Hours*, that appeared in *English Literature in Translation* (2000)
> in which I assert--that despite certain breakthroughs--he does not "get the
> rhythm right."
>
> Michael Cunningham, *The Hours (*New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1998)
>
>
>
> Michael Cunningham’s *The Hours* is a novel about reading: a homage to
> Virginia Woolf. It is one of many books to come out in the past few years
> in which a writer or critic reflects not only on the process of reading
> itself but also rambles among the works of a particularly-loved author:
> Harold Bloom’s *Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human*; Alain de
> Botton’s *How Proust* *Can Change Your Life*, * Not a Novel*; Stephen
> Marlowe’s *The Lighthouse at the End of the World *(involving Edgar Allen
> Poe). Now in Michael Cunningham’s novel, we have a fictional exploration of
> Virginia Woolf’s *Mrs. Dalloway* that was called *The Hours* among other
> titles in an earlier stage of the project. The idea is a fascinating one
> and in Cunningham’s writing the experience of reading turns in upon itself.
> It is a postmodern critical and fictional turn described by the French
> literary critic, Gerard Genette:
>
>
>
> The text is that Moebius strip in which the inner and outer sides, the
> signifying and the signified sides, the side of writing and the side of
> reading, ceaselessly turn and cross over, in which writing is constantly
> read, in which reading is constantly written and transcribed. The critic
> must also enter the interplay of this strange reversible circuit and thus
> become, as Proust says, and like every true reader, “one’s own reader.” 1
>
>
>
> We are in a hall of mirrors as we read ourselves reading Cunningham
> reading Woolf. We “participate” as readers (and writers!) of this novel in
> new ways.
>
>
>
> Why are so many writers and critics preoccupied with writing about the
> process of reading? Perhaps the images on the computer screen have already
> darkened our reading sky as we intellectually venture into the Internet
> rather than ride the well-worn magic carpet. Are we as a culture already
> nostalgic about the demise of THE BOOK? Browse through any popular
> periodical, and you will find that the number of articles and images of
> technology far outnumber discussions or, indeed, images of books. Perhaps
> then writers and critics turn to the authors they have read and loved to
> pay tribute or to find inspiration and material. Perhaps they are
> preserving authors from the threat of being unread as “story” takes new
> forms in hypertext, and on the Internet, CD-ROMs, television, and books on
> tape.
>
>
>
> Michael Cunningham has written of his own introduction to reading Virginia
> Woolf. He remembers he “was in high school, where a very rough, difficult,
> slightly crazed girl with teased hair and long fingernails, who used to
> hang around behind the gym and smoke cigarettes, proclaimed her to be a
> genius.” Admitting that he was not particularly “bookish,” Cunningham found *Mrs.
> Dalloway* in the local bookstore “and the book just nailed me; I’ve
> thought about it almost constantly ever since” (PW 11/2/98).
>
>
>
> It’s refreshing to me as a Virginia Woolf scholar to read a male reader
> reading Woolf: a male reader, a novelist, a male-homosexual reader-writer
> reading Woolf. In my attendance at the annual Virginia Woolf Society
> Conference over the past nine years, I have always been struck by the small
> number of men who attend or deliver papers. Is Virginia Woolf a gendered
> novelist? Do only women read and like her?  I remember mentioning to a Dean
> in my college that I was writing a book about Virginia Woolf. He looked at
> me patiently and said, “yes, my wife reads Virginia Woolf.” Hmmm. But
> perhaps this is changing, and it is interesting that some of the male
> readers who may be drawn to Woolf and the sexually-liberated Bloomsberries
> are homosexual. Cunningham has also written, *Home at the End of the
> World*, a well-received novel which presents in alternating voices, the
> stories of two boys from Cleveland (one, gay) and their families,
> reflecting new formations of gender and desire. It is this exploration of
> gender and desire as well as Woolf that motivates Cunningham’s Pulitzer
> prize-winning novel. Through reading Woolf and reinventing (and sometimes
> parroting) some of her characters and stories, Michael Cunningham writes
> about new kinds of heterosexual friendship as well as heterosexual and
> homosexual romance. It is this that belongs to him.
>
>
>
> But this is also a book about translation: “It is New York City. It is the
> end of the twentieth century.” Cunningham translates the story of a 1920’s
> London society hostess, Mrs. Dalloway, into an American context in 1990. *Mrs.
> Dalloway* is now Woolf’s hottest novel given Eileen Atkin’s film version
> starring Vanessa Redgrave last year. In her *Diary*, Woolf announces “I
> want to criticize the social system, & to show it at work” (D 2, 243-44) as
> well as sketch the society ladies she knew, like Sybil Colefax and Lady
> Ottoline Morrell whose lives were shaped by giving parties. They were women
> who like Clarissa “could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the
> Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)”
> (p.182). She worried instead about the flowers, the silver, her dress, and
> most importantly, the “art” of the guest list. For Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s
> exploration of the “party consciousness” just as her other books explore
> other states of mind.  Woolf “deconstructs” the socialite wife of
> Parlimentarian, Richard Dalloway. She “digs tunnels behind her characters”
> and shows us that Mrs. Dalloway is a woman with a youthful past as
> Clarissa, a beautiful vivacious young woman in love with both the intense
> Peter and the scintillating Sally. Clarissa, it should be noted, is one of
> the few married women in Woolf’s novels with a first name (i.e. Mrs.
> Ramsay). She is a woman who finds that “death” happens into the middle of
> her party. She overhears one of her guests, Dr. William Bradshaw, the
> psychiatrist, tell the story of the sad, shell-shocked Septimus, returned
> soldier from World War I, who has jumped to his death from a window that
> afternoon. And so, both the party and death--“What a lark! What a plunge!”
> announces Mrs. Dalloway on the first page of the novel--structures the
> novel.
>
>
>
> Cunningham also uses this structure of the party and the death in his
> novel. In fact, the structure, the themes, the characters, the author as
> character, phrasings, and attempts at Woolf’s writing rhythm could all be
> said to be derived—if we attend to slippery “origins.” But
> deconstructionists have taught us that such pursuits are futile. Let’s
> observe instead how successful Cunningham is in achieving his own effect
> intertwined as he is with Woolf.
>
>
>
> In his novel, he skillfully intertwines three stories all of which happen
> on a single day, each told from a different woman’s point of view. First,
> in Cunningham’s novel, there is the story of Woolf herself trying
> desperately to work on her manuscript of *Mrs. Dalloway* in 1923 as she
> deals with the distractions of a visit from her sister Vanessa and her
> husband Leonard’s work on the Hogarth Press, a press they acquired in 1915
> as part of Virginia’s therapy.  The second tale, takes Woolf’s legendary
> character, Mrs. Brown, from a 1923 article, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,”
> in which Woolf queries how she, as a modernist author, is to describe a
> dowdy woman whom she observes in the corner of a railway car. It is an
> important essay in which Woolf sets out modernist principles for the
> development of “character.”  Here she questions the Edwardian authors, John
> Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, who will describe the legendary
> Mrs. Brown according to “realist” modes—where she resides, how much income
> she earns--what is she like from the “outside.” Challenging this mode of
> character development, Woolf will advance the modernist platform, and her
> interest in interiority. She will be interested in what Mrs. Brown thinks
> and feels, or as described in another novel, “what is unsaid.” Since this
> is a review that is not only about Cunningham reading Woolf  but I, as a
> critic and scholar, reading Woolf and reading Cunningham reading Woolf, you
> may very well say, “leave your knowledge of Mrs. Brown  out of this
> review.” But how can I?
>
>
>
> The traces of Woolf’s Mrs. Brown and Woolf’s larger fictional questions
> are present in my mind as I read Cunningham. How do we describe and develop
> “character” in fiction. I read and observe Cunningham’s transformation of
> Mrs. Brown from a frumpily dressed 1920’s Englishwoman in the corner of a
> railway car to a 1990’s American housewife, mother of a young son, Laura
> Brown. The translation of British themes and times, England in 1921 with
> shell-shocked soldiers struggling with insanity just after the war, to the
> America of the 1990’s experiencing an Aids epidemic and the fallout from
> the women’s liberation movement of the 1960’s. The story of Laura Brown,
> the depressed housewife, is the best of Cunningham’s three. Here he hits
> his OWN stride. The plot is simple. Mrs. Brown is an unfulfilled housewife
> with a  young  child who adores her (much like James with Mrs. Ramsay in *To
> the Lighthouse*), pregnant with another child, living in Los Angeles. On
> this particular morning in 1923, we find her planning a small party, a
> birthday party, and attempting to make a proper cake. Delightfully (for all
> literary mothers with such fantasies), she escapes her unsuccessful baking
> day to go off to a hotel to rent a room (no. 19 where Doris Lessing also
> places her suicidal housewife) for a few hours to read (can you guess?) *Mrs.
> Dalloway*. The wickedness of modern brainy moms: an illicit day in June
> spent in a hotel room reading Woolf. As Mrs. Dalloway says in Woolf’s
> novel, “It is very very dangerous to live even one day.” And one of the
> messages of this novel is that reading can sometimes save one from danger.
>
>
>
> For in the third story in Cunningham’s novel that artfully intertwines
> with the second, is about Richard, the young son of Laura Brown. He has
> watched her every unhappy mood, thought and action with unnatural attention
> and love, and he grows up to become a writer born of his mother, the
> reader. He is now dying of Aids. One of his best friends is Clarissa
> Vaughan, a woman of about fifty, a lesbian who lives in Greenwich Village,
> with whom he has shared intimacy of a certain sort in youth. He is modelled
> on Peter in Woolf’s novel but there is a homosexual reversal in the plot.
> Judith Butler’s challenge to the “heterosexual matrix” of literature is
> actualized in Cunningham’s new glance at relationships. The happiness of
> the traditional marriage plot (Laura Brown and her husband) is
> reconsidered; homosexual relationships become more central.  Clarissa, a
> lesbian in Cunningham’s novel is planning a party for Richard who has just
> received a literary prize. But the party never happens for this Richard
> like Septimus in Woolf’s novel plunges out of a window to his death, unable
> to deal with his deteriorating physical condition. Is there an implied
> connection implied between Laura Brown’s depression, thoughts of suicide,
> and her son’s plunge to his death? In this novel, the party, a metaphor for
> the continuing celebration of life, does not prevail as it does in Woolf’s
> novel. The party never happens; death does. And herein lies the difference
> between Woolf and Cunningham’s vision.
>
>
>
> His novel is the underside of Woolf’s: he teases out the homosexual
> subtext that Woolf critics have observed. He plays upon the knowledge of
> Woolf’s brief physical relationship with Vita SackvilleWest which began in
> 1925 just when *Mrs. Dalloway* was published. Though Clarissa makes a
> heterosexual choice in Woolf’s novel, Cunningham’s Clarissa and Richard
> make another, questioning and creating new forms of romance and
> relationship, culturally and fictionally.
>
>
>
> But another reader, not the scholarly reader, but the “common reader”
> might say to this reviewer: I’ve never really read Woolf. Or I tried to
> read *To the* *Lighthouse* in college but nothing ever seems to happen or
> didn’t Woolf commit suicide or wasn’t she a lesbian or I don’t know who
> Mrs. Brown is or I’ve only seen the movie. Such a reader might say, “I like
> Michael Cunningham’s novel because he helps me to read Woolf.” Woolf is now
> so burdened with the cult of personality haunting most authors today: her
> manic-depressive patterns, her notorious suicide, walking in a trance into
> the River Ouse with her walking stick. Death in the middle of the river of
> her words. Perhaps for these readers—for this essay is about different
> readers—Michael Cunningham has done a service. We read a version of Woolf
> through reading Michael Cunningham.
>
>
>
> But for those of us who do read and love Woolf, Cunningham can be clever,
> yes; imaginative, yes; slick, yes: a writer of ambition. Given that he has
> created three ingenious plots and taken his characters and inspiration from
> Woolf, what might we now say about his writing style and presentation of
> mind on the page, Woolf’s great gifts to the twentieth-century novel.
> Cunningham himself mentions in interviews that he greatly admires her style
> and has ambitions to achieve it in his own writing, and reviewers, in turn,
> praise his “poetic” style comparing it to Woolf’s. Let’s compare parallel
> scenes to illuminate the differences. Interestingly, as someone who knows
> Woolf’s novel well, one feels the ghostly presence of Woolf throughout, as
> if Cunningham has Mrs. Dalloway open before him as he pens his shadow
> novel. Let’s compare Cunningham’s passage about Clarissa on 8th Street & 5
> th Avenue in New York with Woolf’s Clarissa crossing Victoria Street in
> London:
>
>
>
> She straightens her shoulders as she stands at the corner of Eighth Street
> and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the light. There she is, thinks Willie Bass,
> who passes her some mornings just about here. The old beauty, the old
> hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray, out on her morning rounds in
> jeans and a man’s cotton shirt, some sort of ethnic slippers (India?
> Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certain sexiness; a certain
> bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morning she makes a tragic
> sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting
> the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar,
> taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant,
> pretending to contemplate the tender grasses waiting on the far bank when
> it is beginning to know for certain the it will remain here, trapped and
> alone, after dark, when the jackals come out. She waits patiently for the
> light. (Cunningham, p.13)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Woolf’s Clarissa:
>
>
>
> She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A
> charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know
> people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about
> her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty,
> and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing
> him, waiting to cross, very upright.
>
>      For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty,--one
> feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was
> positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a
> suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza)
> before Big Ben Strikes. There! (Woolf p. 4)
>
>
>
> Woolf’s sentences here pass through time, minds, and emotion as she
> collapses the partitions of the mind, boundaries between narrator and
> characters, speech and thought, indeed, what is outward and what is inward.
> She weaves in and out of different kinds of consciousness: from third
> person narration to Scope Purvis’s mind, to the narrator’s brilliant
> metaphor that merges narrator and character, to Clarissa’s mind. Deftly,
> she describes Clarissa with “a touch of the bird about her, of the jay.”
> She is never physically described; indeed Clarissa like many of Woolf’s
> characters does not seem to have a body. On the other hand, note the leaden
> adjectives in Cunningham’s description: his Clarissa “treads” the ground in
> ethnic slippers, “a female mammoth,” with a slick “good-witch sort of
> charm.” Mired in literal, cliched adjectives, Cunningham barely touches the
> flight of Woolf’s mind, sentences and metaphors. And herein lies the
> difference.
>
>
>
> Woolf said of her own writing of a morning: “style is a very simple
> matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words”
> (*Letters* III, p.242). Those who know the pulses of Woolf’s
> scintillating, dancing sentences and expressions of mind and heart on the
> page know that Cunningham--despite his accomplishments in this novel--does
> not get the rhythm right.
>
>
>
> 1 Gerard Genette, *Figures of Literary Discourse*. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
> New York: Columbia
>
>       UP, 1982, p.70.
>
>
>
> Patricia Laurence,
>
> Professor Emerita
>
> English Department
>
> City College of New York
>
> *English Literature in Translation* (2000)
>
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> On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 1:29 PM Neverow, Vara S. via Vwoolf <
> vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Online ones would be more fun…. !!! Vara Neverow (she/her/hers)
>> Professor, English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program
>> Managing Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany Southern Connecticut State
>> University New Haven, CT 06515 203-392-6717
>> Online ones would be more fun….!!!
>>
>> Vara Neverow
>> (she/her/hers)
>> Professor, English Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Program
>> Managing Editor, Virginia Woolf Miscellany
>> Southern Connecticut State University
>> New Haven, CT 06515
>> 203-392-6717
>> neverowv1 at southernct.edu
>>
>> I acknowledge that Southern Connecticut State University was built on
>> traditional territory of the indigenous peoples and nations of the
>> Paugusett and Quinnepiac peoples.
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Mark Hussey
>> via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
>> *Sent:* Thursday, August 10, 2023 1:27:26 PM
>> *To:* vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
>> *Subject:* [Vwoolf] BBC Culture on The Hours
>>
>> I am seeing refs to this article pop up in various places, and wondered
>> what people think of the headline’s accuracy: did The Hours (I guess they
>> really mean Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of VW in the film) really “change how
>>
>> I am seeing refs to this article pop up in various places, and wondered
>> what people think of the headline’s accuracy: did *The Hours* (I guess
>> they really mean Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of VW in the film) really
>> “change how we see” VW?  Offline responses welcome!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230808-the-hours-at-25-the-book-that-changed-how-we-see-virginia-woolf__;!!KGKeukY!3EawJB0aA8bZJeJZypZAKzdkXIrlEdrzR79zaCIhm1nP71giXA5PVmZdV5IfsYrTF1eNHuT7WPrkKApj47iHjKwhKg$ 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230808-the-hours-at-25-the-book-that-changed-how-we-see-virginia-woolf__;!!KGKeukY!w5PVwvRZFQykXOrinAgSOKgcVuep8KtG_uyBIN2_DYpnUfd9xGQ1QtQAvolGGnzW_TN93bZ4PxNdejQl3hc9Zg$>
>>
>>
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>
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