Learning Paths » 5C Interacting

Notes on The Hours
by CMauro - (2011-11-29)
Up to  5C - The Hours. Reading a novel. Up to task document list
It is a text that connects the lives of three female characters having apparently no relation. It is Cunningham’s game-like attitude to the structure of the novel that becomes of interest for the intelligent reader because he understands that in a de-centered world the only connection is provided by a text which becomes the survival island for a series of characters that provide a superb example of the multi-faceted identity never totally grasped by the same character and the reader as well. Post-modernism finds in The Hours its realization : differently from modernist attitude where characters are generally living a quest to find balance or a form of order that might give them a reason for living, according to a metaphysical principle, Cunningham characters, male and female all the same, can only display their different aspects where one’s identity is only provided by the mirror image returned by their interlocutor/s. There exists no unique essence or finite soul and that is why The Hours is an appropriate title. It reminds fragmentation, a dissociation of sensibility where the different identities of one character come into focus according to context and content: the content of their interactions. The intelligent reader, therefore, can identify with the essence he/she feels closer to. There is no protagonist if not the text which stands in the middle of the discourses their life is made of. It follows that Cunningham’s novel might be considered the celebration of textuality: a cross-section, a network of discourses where it is the reader’s task to find a possible direction.