I have found this interesting blog that
shows us some of the techniques used by Michael Cunningham in his writing of The Hours. Through my reading I realized
that many of the things said by the blogger were covered for us in class. What
took my attention was the importance given to the blurred boundaries in the
book, and how Cunningham used this tool in order to create this world that
overlaps and creates fiction from reality, and a reality from fiction.
The intertextuality in the books is mainly
represented by Clarissa, which is the main character in Mrs. Dalloway, even
though in this book she lives a completely different reality. The boundaries
become more blurred when we find Virginia Woolf character inside the book. She
is the author and creator of Mrs. Dalloway, but in The Hours she is presented at the same level of his characters:
Clarissa and Richard. The reality that we found in Woolf is portrayed as
fiction in the book, so she becomes a fictional character that comes from
reality to make it fictional. In the same aspect, we have Richard Dalloway, who
is a character of Woolf’s and Cunningham’s novels, writing a book inside a
book, using one of the characters in the book (Clarissa Vaughan) as a fictional
character in his own book; so, this took us again to a limbo between fiction
and reality, because inside the book they are fictional characters who are
making fictional characters of themselves. The case of Laura Brown and her connection with Mrs. Dalloway is also interesting, but I think this does not demonstrate the blurred boundaries I was talking about as well as the other relationships in the book. Inside the blog you could find some
quotes from the book that can help you to understand the intertextuality and
the connections between the characters in both books.
I thought these demonstrations of the not
defined lines in the book would be really helpful for us to have a better
understanding of the book and also to understand Michael Cunningham’s vision of
literature, taking into account the different techniques he used to get us into
the book and make his fiction more real for the readers.
NOTE: The blog is written in Spanish first and then in English. I think you should read it in English!
As you say, Catalina, intertextuality─ shaping of a text's meaning by another text─ can be seen through Mr. Cunningham’s work, honoring to Ms. Woolf’s Mrs Dallaway. Though I thought this unique way of writing a new book was only used by Cunningham and post-modernist artists, I have realized that other important authors have done something very similar before like James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which bears an intertextuality relationship to Homer’s Odyssey, and also “recently” (1991) in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, which closely follows Shakespeare’s King Lear. The good thing I see in this kind of works, especially in Cunningham's book, is that the authors let us see that you can keep the same argument and the character of the original book, as mentioned in the blog you posted, but there are still many ways one work could be developed no matter if it relies on another. I would also like to say that it is very wise of Cunningham to mix reality with fiction for he “make his fiction more real for the readers,” as you said. Also, being aware of this and the blurred lines you mentioned in the post is certainly very important for us to fully understand the book
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