Dreaming Animal Dreams: Dalloway Intertextualities Show Notes [Part One]
A deep-dive into Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: Cordelivres Club Show Notes
This post contains the show notes for the most recent edition of our Cordelivres Criticism Club podcast; check out the episode if you haven’t yet—it’s free!
This rare two-book episode covers Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, in the lens of their status as Mrs Dalloway interiority-texts.
And there’re a couple photos of my edition down below.
Let’s get into it!
MRSD Centenary Series
This latest meeting of the Cordelivres Criticism Club continued our mini-series looking at Mrs Dalloway in its centenary year. We started off talking a little about the reading and research I’ve been doing, and why I looked at the novels for this episode before re-reading MRSD itself. We also get into some of the member episodes in the series, including an Indirect After Dark convo about the book and Mark Hussey’s recent Biography of a Novel on Dalloway, and the deep-dive I did on the first 538 words, looking at Wittgenstein, meaning, and Woolf’s narration.
We also covered something like a “goal” for this series: to explore the expansiveness of the novel and consider how much Woolf’s seminal book has permeated our literary consciousness. The novels for this week are, of course, great examples: Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a Pulitzer-winning novel published in 1998 and made into a film (which, as we say, definitely features Nicole Kidman and may or may not also include Meryl Streep and Amy Adams), and Robert Lippincott's Mr. Dalloway, a lesser-known (but equally good—maybe even better?) novel published by Saraband Books in 1999. We get into them both, and jump around a little as we think about how these “inter-texts” function.
Style and Ancestry
While both novels employ similar stylistic techniques to Woolf—and, of course, neither Cunningham nor Lippincott is on her level as a writer, so we sort of just state that and move on (mostly)—their blending of scenic immediacy with interior thoughts, especially, showcases the complexities in how exactly the novels operate in relation to MRSD. Mostly narratively, we’re talking about here.
A few things we get into:
Narrative Structure: Mr. Dalloway follows a much more linear timeline centered on Richard Dalloway’s throwing a party for his wife on a single June day. It’s essentially a retelling of MRSD, plot-wise. The Hours, on the other hand, employs a more complicated structure with three interwoven timelines across different eras. While each of those timelines also converges on single days, the fact of having three narrative threads gives more plot-level texture to the work than Lippincott, who stays closer to Woolf’s original approach in relying on memory-based temporal movement.
Relationship to the Original: Lippincott's approach is more direct—essentially pretending to be Virginia Woolf, continuing the same characters, while Cunningham's approach is more meta-textual, with characters aware of MRSD as a novel within their world, as we noted with Clarissa Vaughn.
Prose Style: Lippincott relies heavily on parenthetical and cross-perspective movement (talked about more in the second episode), embracing a playful imitation of Woolf's style. Cunningham probably demonstrates greater prose virtuosity, particularly in the prologue, and is more commercially accessible in method.
A few of the highlights we read from the books.
Narrative Structure and Narrational Departure
We discussed the structure and themes of Cunningham's novel, which interweaves three timelines: one set in present-day New York City following Clarissa Vaughan, another in 1950s Los Angeles with Laura Brown, and a third depicting Virginia Woolf writing MRSD. We talked about the novel's incorporation of meta-textual elements, including a joke about Clarissa's name and her friend Richard's reference to her as “Mrs. Dalloway," reflecting both characters' awareness of Woolf's novel even as she herself is (obviously) a literary descendant of Woolf’s character. This simple yet effective structure of the book, which moves between timelines with short chapters, unlocks Cunningham's ability to create organic narrative propulsion.
Lippincott, on the other hand, more deliberately adopts Woolf’s own stylistic techniques and is clearly less concerned with updating them for a late-20th-century mainstream literary market (perhaps why one of these books won the Pulitzer and one didn’t…). Both novels play with her use of parentheticals and the "basket weave" narrative structure that blends scenic immediacy with interior thoughts, something we’ve talked about before on the podcast. The narrating entity in Mr. Dalloway effectively incorporates information organically into the narrative without excessive exposition, using techniques like character interactions in relatively static moments to convey details about the fictive world. His style, while rich in descriptive detail, differs from Woolf’s far more idiomatic and consciousness-driven narration, though both authors share a focus on the balance between character introspection and social dynamics. In his author's note, Lippincott describes his work as "a creative response" following "25 years of passionate immersion in the life and work of Virginia Woolf," offering it as "a token of admiration,” which is pretty cool.
In The Hours, we see a more robust prosody at work; Cunningham is a formidable sentence-level writer (which also probably helped with that whole Pulitzer thing). The Prologue, especially, is super compelling; we spent a bit of time looking at how he inaugurates both this style and his thematics in this depiction of Woolf's suicide.
While they have vastly different ways of doing it, both Lippincott and Cunningham have pulled off something rather tricky: a retelling/reimagining of a titanic novel that feels spiritually connected to MRSD while being an effective work in its own right. It’s a shame that one of these novels receives so much less recognition than the other; they’re both very cool books that are compelling works of intertextuality with Woolf’s masterpiece. In Part Two of this conversation, we get more into the nuances of their methods and how they each achieve their endgame—in a manner quite distinct from Woolf’s own.
Thanks so much for listening, and I hope everyone enjoyed the talk.
À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.
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