Time’s Meandering Borders: Cunningham’s The Hours
Indeed, without Cunningham needing to elaborate, the weight and gravity of the situation allows the reader to know with certainty that the day of Virginia’s suicide will be immortalized in the minds of those that she loves, that her suicide note will linger in Leonard’s mind: “I don’t think two / people could have been happier till / this terrible disease came” (6).
Nearly at the end of the novel, another instance of time distortion occurs when Richard, Clarissa Vaughn’s former lover and longtime friend who is dying from AIDS, throws himself from his apartment window when she stops by to check on him. The descriptions within the text are such that the reader intrinsically knows Clarissa’s mind will lock onto this memory and replay it forever; even before Richard falls from the window, even before it becomes clear that he intends to do so, Clarissa feels “as if she is witnessing something that’s already happened.
It feels like a memory. Something within her, something like a voice but not a voice, an inner knowledge all but indistinguishable from the pump of her heart, says, ‘I once found Richard sitting on a window ledge five stories above the ground'” (197). Time suddenly becomes meaningless to her; it is as though the past and present and future converge haphazardly and emerge as one fluid, rushing entity. For Richard, however, time is an overwhelming force of circumstances that pile up beyond comprehension – he tells Clarissa that he doesn’t know if he can face the party she is planning for him, or the ceremony in which his writing will be honored, “and then the hour after that, and the hour after that. . .and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another” (197-198).
Both characters deal with tumultuous experiences by somehow manipulating time to their advantage – Clarissa feels as though she has been through his suicide already, while Richard somewhat prematurely ends time’s control over his body and mind – yet also to their disadvantage, for in this manipulation, the full experience of the present is either warped or cut short.
The idea of the past merging with the present is brought to the forefront more literally when Clarissa interacts with Mary Krull, her daughter’s friend who teaches queer theory – only this time, it is a matter of past ideologies meeting present ones. The thoughts of each character are revealed to demonstrate the emotional conflicts that may emerge when stubborn past and present bleed together. Of Clarissa, who she identifies as a sort of traitor to the cause, Mary thinks that “anything’s better than the queers of the old school, dressed to pass, bourgeoisie to the bone, living like husband and wife.
Better to be a frank and open asshole. . . than a well-dressed dyke with a respectable job” (160). But in Clarissa’s eyes, Mary is guilty of putting on a radical act to receive attention, and therefore is just a fraud who “may have fooled [her] daughter but [doesn’t] fool me. . .if you shout loud enough, or long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about. . .you’re just as bad as most men, just that aggressive, just that self-aggrandizing, and your hour will come and go” (161). Both women, interestingly, feel that the other’s time is up, that the other is either living in the past or soon will be.
Laura Brown, while her son Richard is still a boy called Richie, struggles through her hours as an unhappy, depressed woman who feels like she is not the perfect wife or mother that she should be – so she deals with time as though she can survive by fragmenting it into segments and smaller pieces, splitting the fear and frustration into manageable chunks. When she finds herself contemplating how she was losing her mind, in “a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief” (142), Laura checks into a hotel to claim a few hours for herself alone, and not for her child or husband: “she is so far away from her life. It was so easy” (150). By separating herself from the realities of the present, she can almost convince herself that it does not exist, that she is not tied to it – and by separating herself from the past, the girl she used to be, she can feel less disappointment in the present when she must exist within it.
