Merely A Gifted Eccentric: Dalloway Intertextualities Show Notes [Part Two]
Cordelivres Club Episode Nine 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, through the lens of their status as Mrs Dalloway interiority-texts.
And there are a couple of photos of my edition down below.
Let’s get into it!
A Playful Seriousness
In Part Two of this conversation, we continue the discussion on Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. One thing that’s interesting about these two episodes, being about two books, is that they have a different focus than previous ones we’ve done so far, emphasizing a broader compositional scope and, of course, the intertextual connections.
In this second half, we talked about the various ways in which Lippincott and Cunningham “win”—by which we simply mean how they seek to execute the plans/goals of their work and, ultimately, achieve an emotional resonance.
Mr. Dalloway is a much more playful book; we got into this a little last time, and talk about it here, too. We ended up saying that while both novels have a certain core of seriousness to them, Lippincott’s is much less self-serious than is Cunningham’s; this probably has to do with how much more of a MRSD re-telling Mr. Dalloway is; it wouldn’t work, I don’t think, if it couldn’t have a little fun with it’s own concept, in that way. Both of these books are super compelling, though, and stand alone as strong novels in their own right.
A few elements we looked at vis-à-vis this playfulness vs self-seriousness idea:
Lippincott's "Mr. Dalloway" is considered more playful than Cunningham's "The Hours" for several reasons:
Tonally, as well as in the plot, Lippincott is much more obviously having fun with it, while Cunningham is clearly aiming to write a Serious And Grave Novel (which, to be fair, he does).
Lippincott’s long endgame—as an unexpected party scenario where everyone is riding on a train to a mysterious destination—allows readers to interact with virtually every character from Woolf's original novel (save, of course, Septimus), in a fun setting that is obviously smitten with the fact of itself (in a good way!). Cunningham doesn’t do anything like this; the sections with Woolf are deathly serious (literally), and otherwise he’s, essentially, trying to construct a fairly conventional late-20th-century literary fiction novel.
While they both have Virginia Woolf as a character in a scene (an entire timeline in The Hours), for Lippincott, this moment reads almost as an in-joke. This is an outgrowth of a key difference between the two novels: in the fictive world of Mr. Dalloway, there is no such novel as “Mrs. Dalloway,” because we remain within that novel. The Hours’ fictive landscape is the exact opposite; the historical fact of MRSD as a book is central to all three timelines. I think this distinction has a lot to do with why one of them is about as famous as a contemporary novel gets, and the other is, well, not that. The general reader probably encounters The Hours as a much more serious work. One that is “not just Dalloway fan fiction,” or something.
The opening of The Hours is a remarkably effective rendering of Woolf’s suicide; the opening of Mr. Dalloway is “Mr. Dalloway said he would buy the flowers himself.” That more or less sums it up, tonally.
A few of the highlights we read from the books.
Perspective vs. Point of View in Dalloway Intertextualities
We then segued into the distinction between perspective and point of view in fiction, defining perspective as the character whose interior life is accessible to the reader, while point of view refers to the technical method used to render that perspective. We’ve talked about this before, but there’s a clarity into this dichotomy offered by these texts that makes it worthwhile to investigate. We emphasize (yet again) that these terms should not be used interchangeably, as they represent separate concepts: perspective is about whose inner world is being shown, while point of view is about how that is shown. Whatever terms we want to use, they’re different ideas; that’s the key point.
Mrs Dalloway itself, of course, uses a roving, close third-person perspective that consistently presents thoughts and actions from multiple characters' viewpoints. We highlighted the novel's use of parenthetical expressions to mark shifts in perspective (sometimes) and continually change speeds and texture in composition. Both Lippincott and Cunningham adopt this method, albeit in a somewhat more accessible manner that lacks the complexity of Woolf.
As we said, Lippincott's strongest stylistic skill is moving between characters' perspectives while maintaining a single point of view, which makes the novel engaging and fun for readers familiar with MRSD itself: that last, long scene on the train is a wild ride. One of the photos we have up here is of a page in that passage where the narrating entity is moving us between perspectives nearly line-to-line—again, all while maintaining the same point-of-view.
The Hours is a little more straightforward in this way—Cunningham is counting on the weight of his language and situations to carry the reader. The three timelines are, internally, fairly uniform; for the most part, the novel establishes a single fixed third person and carries it throughout.
We spent most of the discussion looking at a passage from the “main” storyline, about Clarissa Vaughn and Richard Brown, lifelong friends / one-time lovers in their mid-fifties who live in Manhattan. We read from a section where Clarissa, on her way home from buying flowers for a party given for Richard, stops at a street corner and recalls a moment when they were 19, involving an unresolved kiss and an argument about what happened between them over the summer, which led to the end of their brief romantic involvement. This section really brings into light Cunningham's approach to the “basket-weave” narrational device, bringing together the past and the present while hitting on the central themes of unfulfilled potential, nostalgia, love, regret, death, aging, and the complexities of friendship.
We didn’t have a chance to get into it in the show, but there’s a really interesting connection between the tension that Laura Brown—in the “middle” timeline of The Hours—feels between the generic and the individual form—which comes out of her anxiety around the birthday cake, and which the narrating entity refracts as “platonic”—and the intertextual work writ large of which, of course the novel itself is a prime example. Laura lives at a crossroads between a world of ideas and a notion of herself that inevitably come into conflict. The invocation of Plato is an especially ripe trigger for that, of course, which Cunningham sort of simply dashes off and could probably have been deepened a bit in the novel.
We drew a quick (mad?) parallel between Cunningham's narrative style and Proust's "Madeleine" moment, emphasizing the balance between scenic immediacy and interiority that, in many ways, comes to the novel from Woolf. There’s so much more to say about these books—including an entire Hamlet progression in Mr. Dalloway that we didn’t have time to cover—and they’re both definitely worth the reader. We closed with their concluding maneuvers.
Endgames
Somehow (and this is not intentional!), The Great Gatsby came up once more on the show. We looked at how, ultimately, The Hours and Mr. Dalloway both construct endgames starting from narrative rather than narration—meaning that the emotional punch, or the “why” is gotten to via the plot structures rather than, broadly, the composition. Woolf, conversely, builds her novel’s resonance around the access granted into her characters' minds and interiority; their personal worlds. The artistic beauty of MRSD comes from its limitless capacity to render ordinary events with profound depth; the novels under discussion today—like Gatsby—ultimately rely on something “extra-ordinary” to occur, using set-piece actions within plot-driven narratives.
That’s not to say that both The Hours and Mr. Dalloway fail to achieve stretches of compelling writing or narrational ingenuity—they do. But they’re constructed in a fundamentally different manner than the novel to which they respond, which I think is perhaps the best manner in which we can at once comprehend the lasting legacy of Mrs Dalloway alongside the singularity of Woolf’s most significant work.
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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