Homage to Woolf

ELT 43 : 3 2000 cepts at the beginning would have been helpful to readers not very familiar with his work. On the other hand, Roughley, a great admirer of Derrida, spends too much time summarizing specific texts by Derrida and not enough time critically assessing and contextualizing Derrida within the Joyce criticism. The bibliography, for example, is rather skimpy. If he had also tackled some of the Derrida and/or Joyce criticism, this would have been a stronger and richer book. At the risk of contradicting myself, I found the second half of the book, which comprised Roughley's close readings of most of Joyce's fictions, the most engaging and interesting. It made me wish that he had developed these chapters more. Ymitri Jayasundera University of Massachusetts, Amherst Homage to Woolf Michael Cunningham. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1998. 230 pp. $22.00 MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM'S The Hours is a novel about reading: a homage to Virginia Woolf. It is one of many books to come out in the past few years in which a writer or critic reflects not only on the process of reading itself but also rambles among the works of a particularlyloved author: Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human; Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Not a Novel; Stephen Marlowe's The Lighthouse at the End of the World. Now in Michael Cunningham's novel, we have a fictional exploration of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway that was called The Hours among other titles in an earlier stage. The idea is fascinating and in Cunningham's writing the experience of reading turns in upon itself. It is a postmodern critical and fictional turn described by the French literary critic, Gérard Genette: The text is that Moebius strip in which the inner and outer sides, the signifying and the signified sides, the side of writing and the side of reading, ceaselessly turn and cross over, in which writing is constantly read, in which reading is constantly written and transcribed. The critic must also enter the interplay of this strange reversible circuit and thus become, as Proust says, and like every true reader, "one's own reader." (Figures of Literary Discourse. Alan Sheridan, trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, 70) We are in a hall of mirrors as we read ourselves reading Cunningham reading Woolf. We "participate" as readers (and writers!) of this novel in new ways. 370 BOOK REVIEWS Why are so many writers and critics preoccupied with writing about the process of reading? Perhaps the images on the computer screen have already darkened our reading sky as we intellectually venture into the Internet rather than ride the well-worn magic carpet. Are we as a culture nostalgic about the demise of THE BOOK? Browse through any popular periodical, and you will find that the number of articles and images of technology far outnumber discussions or, indeed, images of books. Perhaps then writers and critics turn to the authors they have read and loved to pay tribute or to find inspiration and material. Perhaps they are preserving authors from the threat of being unread as "story" takes new forms in hypertext, and on the Internet, CD-ROMs, television, and books on tape. Cunningham has written of his own introduction to reading Woolf. He remembers he "was in high school, where a very rough, difficult, slightly crazed girl with teased hair and long fingernails, who used to hang around behind the gym and smoke cigarettes, proclaimed her to be a genius." Admitting that he was not particularly "bookish," Cunningham found Mrs. Dalloway in the local bookstore "and the book just nailed me; I've thought about it almost constantly ever since" (Publishers Weekly, 2 November 1998). It's refreshing to me as a Virginia Woolf scholar to read a male reader reading Woolf: a male reader, a novelist, a male-homosexual readerwriter reading Woolf. In my attendance at the annual Virginia Woolf Society Conference over the past nine years, I have always been struck by the small number of men who attend or deliver papers. Is Virginia Woolf a gendered novelist? Do only women read and...