The Inception hours

The Hours by Cunningham is a work that has a constant dialogue with the Mrs. Dalloway novel witten by Virginia Woolf, but it also has an internal dialogue of three voices (Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown and Mrs Dalloway). A series of situations lead to similar problems in three different eras.

1.  Early 20th Century:

The first character is Virginia Woolf, She is an English writer in 1923 is writing Mrs. Dalloway and in 1941 and committed suicide . Between those dates the story unfolds. TIME: POST WORLD WAR I

2. Late 20th Century:

The second woman is Laura Brown, a housewife married to a WW II veteran. This story takes place in one day in 1949. Brown is a young woman living the average post-war socioeconomic class. Like Woolf, she has a double life, except that she only shows one of the the two faces with the rest. Her frustration comes from being a housewife whose past and present are marked by imagination and fantasy from her readings. As presented in the text she is currently trying to adjust herself the life of a married woman, but she consistently fails ( for example, giving kiss to Kitty).

3. 21st Century:

The third woman is Clarissa Vaughan, an independent and successful editor. It is clearly the only dynamic character in the novel. This 51-years-old woman was a beautiful hippie woman and still retains her elegant and erotic appeal. She is a lesbian and maintains a traditional , stable and harmonious relationship with her partner Sally.

For the other characters, the world they live in is superfluous and their life is not full but Mrs Dalloway seems to be the way out for Virginia and Laura.

In the temporal aspect the novel maintains a certain linearity ( from the beginning of the day until it ends). However, there are multiple overlays because we deal with different periods in

time and while we read the novel there is an eloquent dialogue between these women living in different eras.

"Of the existing factors in postmodern narrative the researcher is going to work on, intertextuality, stream of consciousness style, fragmentation and representation respectively, which are used in Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours." ( Narinabad 257)

In this sense we can make a connection between this novel and the movie Inception.

Inception is a science fiction movie produced, written and directed by Christopher Nolan in 2010. Basically, the movie plot is developed in a world in which sience and technology has made possible for people to share the dream space (of course few people know about this), at the same time, to share the mind with others through the dreamspace makes it possible to access the subconcious level of someone to extract valuable information. During the movie they explain that people can also put an idea in the most subconcoious part of the mind od somene that is represented in the dream as a safe, a bank or something similar.

Now, the analogy than can be drawn between this two pieces is the following:

According to the movie: one person has an idea, and creates a new reality  but this person plants this new reality into another person’s mind  having an effect on this person changing the view of the world that this person has.

You may ask: Why this analogy?

Well, in the movie, when someone puts an idea into the most subconcious part of your mind you'll wake up having a different perception of your reality, as if suddenly you realized something was supposed to be or to not to be. But the "stranger" has to go through different stages of conciousness before he gets to were the idea can be planted.

WATCH!!

the idea of entering somebody's mind and having different stages of conciousness can be compared to the literary terms of  Intertextuality is key in Cuningham's The Hours as a literary terms stream of conciousness and intertextuality.

"The postmodern term “intertextuality,” which focuses on the interplay and interrelation of texts, [...]" (Narinabad 258)

Following this line, the intertextual relation in The hours compared to the movie is the following:

Virginia Woolf in The Hours would be the person that enters somebody'smind, which in this case is Laura Braun. Woolf will express her own feelings and will draw her own life somehow in the book she is writting: Mrs. Dalloway. This ideas and feelings will change the perception that Laura Brown has of her own life because she will realize that she wants to be like Mrs Dalloway. the different stages of concoiousness are presented in the book during the dialogue between the 3 women.

WATCH!!

Narinabad, Hajar Abbasi. "A Study of Postmodern Narrative in Michael Cunningham's The Hours." International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 1.4: 257-67.International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature. Web. 9 Oct. 2014. <http://www.ijalel.org/pdf/140.pdf>
Inception. Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2010. Film.