Art and Matter

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Cardullo, Bert

"MORE MATTER, LESS ART," is what kept running through my mind as I watched Stephen Daldry's The Hours,1 which aims to be a mainstream art-house movie based on a postmodern novel (of the same title, written by the American Michael Cunningham and published in 1998). That novel was inspired by an earlier work-Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925)-itself a modernist experiment in the use of stream-of-consciousness technique to plumb the depths of one woman's character. So, in a sense, The Hours, which was the working title of Mrs. Dalloway, has three authors: Woolf, Cunningham, and the British playwright-cumfilmmaker David Hare, who wrote the scenario and has written comparable characters in the drama Plenty (1978) and the movie Strapless (1989). That is to say, this picture has no one author and therefore no single voice. Let's call it adaptation à la mode, art by committee, or an instance of the aesthetics of incest. The Hours even has a cinematic relation: Marleen Gorris' 1998 adaptation of Woolf's novel, also titled Mrs. Dalloway, which starred Vanessa Redgrave.

Mrs. Dalloway, the book, spans a single day in the life of its titular character, a London society hostess married to Richard, a conventional chap who is an unremarkable member of Parliament as well. As she prepares for a lavish party, Clarissa Dalloway appears irritatingly chirpy, so much so that we sense her happy face masks a deep, inner weariness or dissatisfaction. In the course of her day, she is invaded by memories of two lost loves-one male, one female-from a time when everything still seemed possible. Clarissa is haunted, then, by the sense of a life misspent, of opportunities missed, but she is able to endure, despite her flashes of loneliness, because she can cling to the present moment and its "ordinary pleasures"-unlike Virginia Woolf herself, the bisexual visionary artist doomed to hearing voices in her head, to suffering from depression, and ultimately to committing suicide-by-drowning. Simultaneously in the novel, a shell-shocked veteran of World War I shares Mrs. Dalloway's unease in tragically heightened form-opting in the end to kill himself-though the two characters never meet.

Three women are the chief subjects of Michael Cunningham's novel, which is a suite of variations on the fiction of, and facts about, Virginia Woolf. This book, like the movie, begins with a snapshot prologue presenting Woolf's death in 1941; then both, flashing back to 1923, follow her through a single day as she labors at the manuscript of her fourth-and first major-novel, Mrs. Dalloway, under the lovingly watchful if hopelessly resigned eye of her husband, Leonard; until finally each work flashes forward, in a kind of epilogue, to that fateful day in 1941 when the English novelist ended her life in the River Ouse, her pockets stuffed with rocks. Alternating with Woolf's story in the novel as well as the film of The Hours, in the manner of the parallel story lines in Mrs. Dalloway itself, are two other narrative strands examining comparable days in the lives of two other women.

The first is Laura Brown, a pregnant, suburban Los Angeles housewife in 1951 who is reading Mrs. Dalloway, who may be a repressed lesbian, whose doting if doltish spouse is a veteran of World War II, and whose adoring young son tries to help his otherwise withdrawn mother as she bakes a cake for her husband's birthday celebration. The second woman is Clarissa Vaughan, a fiftyish New York book-publisher's editor in the present in the midst of fastidiously preparing a party to celebrate the poetry prize that her ex-lover, Richard-who has teasingly nicknamed Clarissa Mrs. Dalloway-has just received. She is now a "partnered" lesbian with a grown-up daughter, he a single or abandoned homosexual afflicted with AIDS in its agonizing final stages.

Cunningham's novel uses multiple points of view and stream-of-consciousness technique (in addition to a time-jumping structure) to tell the stories of Woolf, Brown, and Vaughan, but David Hare wisely rejected the idea of three different, first-person voice-overs as too confusing, as well as the device of an off-screen omniscient narrator as over-literary. he knew he had to make his screen characters speak out loud, to other people, thoughts that were implicit or submerged in the book. The result is not, as one might have guessed, to the film's detriment, for Hare's streamlining of all three narratives meant that he had to mute the novel's concern with gay and feminist sexual politics. Indeed, the novel of The Hours sometimes seems like a veiled but insistent lament for the closeted homosexual, in which Woolf's plangent voice is used to inflate a more limited (and dourly sentimental) agenda: one that valorizes gay higher consciousness. (I was therefore not surprised to learn that Michael Cunningham had originally intended to make his modern, female Dalloways homosexual men.) And according to this agenda being "out," as Clarissa and Richard are, somehow makes you uniquely self-aware-even if "outing" in the end, particularly for gay men, leads only to the freedom to contract AIDS more readily or openly.