Michael Cunningham
The Hours
Quotations at the beginning

If we take Cunningham's The Hours as one possible model of postmodern art echoing earlier art, what would its components look like? First, this is a movement that defies linearity. Perhaps the idea of rippling outward might also illuminate the way many postmodern works of literature (and film) defy a linear or chronological structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead they spin off stories like ripples in all directions, points of contact and connection as the circle widens. Here is an attempt at dialogue with undetermined others, a dialogue that is carried on in widening circles, ever expanding its reach. This is to extend whal Virginia Woolf implied, when she wrote in her diary in 1923 of her novel that she originally called The Hours: I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal aboul The Hours. & my discovery; how I dig oul beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly whal I wan!: humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the cave shall connect. & each comes to daylight al the present moment. In including this passage as one of the epigraphs of The Hours. Cunningham is signaling the source of his title. He may also be suggesting that a work ol art is an offering, an effort at making the caves connect. In the case of a second work of art, these connections are simply extended in wider and wider circles, passing beyond the connected caves of the characters to more connections, this time between characters and readers. Some of those readers, in turn, become writers themselves. What we learn from Cunningham's effort to renew and extend what Woolf had begun (partly in tribute to Shakespeare and others before her) is that postmodern art carries the tradition beyond itself, adding more circles in the water.
Implicit in this process, at least in The Hours, is an awareness of the impossibility of reaching perfection or totality, as we see in the passage from Borges that constitutes the other epigraph of the novel: We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like the others this one loo will be a form of what I dream, a structure of words, and not he flesh and bone tiger that beyond all myths paces the earth. 1 know these things quite well, yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me in this vague, unreasonable, and ancient qucsl. and I go on pursuing through the hours another tiger, the beast not found in verse. We know that for Borges the tiger stood as a symbol of the perfection that the writer is denied, even in dreams (Manguel 12). Yet instead of perfection "some force" drives the artist onward in "this vague, unreasonable, ancient quest," which he continues to pursue "through the hours." A distinction between Borges and Woolf is worth noting. Borges knew that there would always be a gap between the tiger that is a structure of words and the flesh-and-blood tiger that paces the earth,^ whereas Woolf believed that "[o]ne of these days Mrs. Brown will be caught" {Essays 3:388). For Borges, who certainly anticipated postmodern literary forms with his infinite labyrintb of mirrors, the writer's quest will never entirely be realized.