『시간들』을 통해본 소설과 전기쓰기의 문제

Abstract

Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours, is a deconstructive rewriting of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. This paper is to explore the way the novel conjugates Woolf's life and work, producing a new work of its own right, which may be read as a fictional biography of Woolf as well as a riff of Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. The Hours is made up of three interwoven stories, which involves Virginia Woolf, trying to write Mrs Dalloway in 1920's in England, a housewife, Laura Brown, at the end of World War II in Los Angeles who's baking a cake for her husband's birthday, and an editor, Clarissa Vaughan, residing in Manhattan, preparing for a party for a friend dying from AIDS. These three seemingly unrelated lives are closely linked with one another in terms of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Combining Woolf's actual life story with fictive ones of Laura and Clarissa, Cunningham blurs the generic boundaries between novel and auto/biography. The Hours, thus, becomes a kind of Woolf's biography, a riff of Mrs Dalloway, and a fiction embracing both the elements. Such experimental aspects of The Hours seem to follow the track led by Woolf herself. Although Woolf believed that auto/biography is different from fiction in its nature, her writing practice seems to give a lie to her own generic presuppositions, by actively employing both genres to find new ways of 'truthful transmission of personality' in auto/biography and of creating realistic characters in fiction. Putting Woolf's life and work together, The Hours offers us a kaleidoscopic vision of intertexuality between life and fiction and also between fictions (of Woolf and of Cunningham), opening a new ground for generating meanings through permutations of characters and incidents. The work may be a tribute to Woolf's life and work, made in a style most faithful to Woolf's own.