2018 is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a fitting time to consider the relationship of time to structure in the novel. In terms of narratology the structure of the text is one of simultaneity, stories seemingly happening both then and now. Yet, there is also a constant spatial and material hailing of structure; walls hide feelings, characters become space, flowers prompt action.
This paper will consider the ethics of simultaneity in The Hours through Bergsonian durée, the internalized time that resists the tendency to be externalized as structure in the narrative. What are the ethical repercussions of a text that emphasizes gaps in structures and characters, while underscoring there is necessarily an internal understanding of time sans écart? This is not a Bahktinian chronotope; here time does not thicken, it necessarily evaporates. The Hours is a novel of involuntary memory, and I argue that the way Cunningham’s text navigates competing sets of ethics and responsibilities (and thus avoids dissolving into nihilism) is through a constant state of renegotiation of structured spatial and material memory. Not only does the novel consistently borrow to create new textual memory, the novel emphasizes the inability to grasp or tether time (to locate meaning) through a narrative that centres traumatic chaotic triggers- a dead bird, a failed cake, a cancelled party- all of which disperse time.
Work Cited Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York, Picador, 2002.
About the presenterAnn Gagné
Dr. Ann Gagné is an Educational Developer at the University of Toronto Mississauga who works on active-learning strategies and pedagogical development projects. Her research is focused on the ethics of tactility and her current project explores the use of touch in experiential learning in 19th and 21st century pedagogy.