Sunday, July 1, 2018

Deconstruction and Intertextuality: John Fowles’ 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' and 'The Hours' by Michael Cunningham



Top 5 Background Readings:
Intertextuality by Graham Allen
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism by Jonathan Culler
From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature by Malcolm Bradbury, Richard Ruland
John Fowles' Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism by Mahmoud Salami
Derrida, Deconstruction and Education: Ethics of Pedagogy and Research by Peter Pericles Trifonas, Michael A. Peters (Edts.)

Introduction

The category of postmodern literature is an integral part of the historical and most importantly the socio-cultural process of human psychology and physical existence. It is in general noted as a determined way of depicting postmodern culture and life, showing the identity crisis of human beings under the pressure of sexual, ethnic, cultural and social existence and continuous struggle with the same for the establishment of legitimate existence in the hypocritical society (Bertens and Fokkema (edt. 1997).


This paper, in particular, is concentrating on the process of dealing with the postmodernism elements in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Hours by Michael Cunningham, with a specific understanding of deconstruction and essence of intertextuality as used in these narrative arts.

Postmodernism

In the genre of postmodern literature, the essence and concept of authenticity and originality get undermined and even parodied. The works of this genre never pretend to be something novel in character or original, yet uses some old forms of literary art, quotation, kitsch, allusion, etc., recontextualize the entire meaning of the text under diversified cultural and linguistic references to show the variations and differences of the past from the current instances and the representation of contexts in the past and then difference in the present scenario. The Postmodern literary text conveys the authenticity and originality of any text through the deliberate application of plagiarism or the false quotations and kitsch collected from renowned literature or some texts from other genres. Here, the thematic concern of false quotations refers to close imitation by the author of the famous author’s style or idea without offering any bibliographical note (Hutcheon, 2000).

The essence of deconstruction and intertextuality are very prominent in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Though these write-ups are written with two different approaches, the feature of intertextuality and deconstructions are found in terms of illustrating the post-modern ideology and concerns.   

 

Elements of Intertextuality

The post-modern feature of intertextuality can be noted in a text as the author borrowing and simultaneously transforming some prior text or referencing a text by a reader while reading some other text. The technique of intertextuality can be categorised by the connections between different artistic works along with the respective cultures to which they share their platforms; the connection between specific genres and the artistic work of the author; and above all between works of individuals in particular.

This is a feature that is well noted in The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, where Fowles uses a compelling mode of historiographic metafiction related to the contemporary literature of Britain. Fowles interweaves sources from historical as well as literary backgrounds Victorian Era. Such an approach to intertextuality reinforces the connection between historical verisimilitudinous along with the approaches of the Victorian Age, added by the simultaneous materialization of constant conversation with literature from other genres and the literature from the Victorian Age. However, self-consciousness related to the fictional form and intrusion into the modern trend of replacing or surrogating novelists gets interrupted by narrative coherence with disruption of the historical reality of the Victorian age. These kinds of paradoxes related to reality or fictionality, along with past and present are well structured in Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman. In this novel, there is a breakthrough into the trend of traditional literary narration of the Victorian age within the structure of historiographic metafiction, where Fowles employs a parody of the romance of the Victorian age. This is an imitation that offers critical diversification about the process of reconstructing the Victorian age, to subvert the traditional kind of fixed denouement and further the creation of the unique emancipation of French lieutenant's woman, Sarah Woodruff (Landrum, 1996, p. 110).

The essence of intertextuality is also very prominent in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. However, Cunningham’s approach and style are different from that of Fowles. For instance, Mrs Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel “she would buy the flowers herself”, in the opening lines of her novel Mrs Dalloway in the year 1925, is again used by Michael Cunningham in The Hours in 1998, by fictionalizing single day from the regular style of Woolf’s writing approach for her character Mrs Dalloway (Alley, 2006). On one hand, we have the simple sentence of Woolf that is intertextuality by Cunningham in his chapter of The Hours about Woolf as

Mrs. Dalloway said something (what?) and got the flowers herself. […] Virginia awakens. This might be another way to begin, certainly […] But is it the right beginning? Is it a little too ordinary? (Cunningham, 1998, p. 29)

As it can be noted Cunningham uses the first sentence of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and creates the character of Woolf in herself. In this process, Cunningham also is very skilful in using the thread of stream of consciousness by Woolf that exactly encompasses one whole day. The novel Cunningham opens with an early morning scene in Clarissa Vaughan’s life that is Mrs Dalloway ad the first sentence of the chapter is “There are still the flowers to buy”. Consequently, Clarissa rushes to get some flowers for herself. This particular opening scene is very structured in referring back to the opening scene of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, who gets into the city so that “she would buy the flowers herself”.

 

Elements of Deconstruction

The basic concern of deconstruction is to discover and further inquire about features of binary oppositions in any metaphysical state in a text. These binary oppositions are identified as the apparent juxtaposition of the signifier with the signified; writing with the speech; sensible with the intelligible; autonomy with the heteronomy; passivity with the activity; immanent with the transcendent; normal with the abnormal; sane with the mad; empirical with the transcendental; essence with the appearance; male with the female; the man with the animal; Sovereign with the beast; rational with the irrational and many more of the same kind.

In John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman, the presence of binary opposition is marked in the use of feminism in the novel. Deconstruction starts with a troubled kind of love between Charles Smithson and his beloved Sarah Woodruff. This affair is like any other medieval romance, where the protagonist makes a regular quest for self-discovery with emancipation that again connotes feminism in the modern concept. Fowles offers the character of Sarah Woodruff as a woman with an unusual entity, who is beyond any exclusive illustration. Sarah stands in contrast to many literary conventions and is a representation of an enigma. Her characterization is incomplete in the novel and the readers are left to seek her full description elsewhere in the socio-cultural existence, outside the particular text (Bump, 1988, p. 17). Sarah further gets compared with modern women. In the words of the author, "Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have never understood them" (Fowles, 1992, p. 85). This comment by the narrator makes a connection between the character of Sarah and the feministic ideology of understanding a woman in general and making Sarah a proto-New Woman (Hall, 1996).

Realms of deconstruction are well utilised in the narration of The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Cunningham creates the essence of deconstruction by making substitution of Clarissa Vaughan for the character of Clarissa Dalloway, whereby the latter gets the opportunity to live with Sally. However, on an apparent juxtaposition, Clarissa Dalloway never seemed happy with her stay with Richard and the relationship as noted between Clarissa Vaughan and Sally does not appear ideal either. It is the craftsmanship of Cunningham who is very determined in deconstructing the relationship of Clarissa with Sally as more self-assured and is also underscoring in terms of her insecure and complex character (Leavenworth, 2010, p.518). The feature of deconstruction in The Hours is a regular process of deconstruction and reconstruction, as a kind of pretext, as the same functions in Mrs Dalloway by adding features from other kinds of texts. In the process, The Hours creates space for newer functionalities for the characters and add relevant explanations for the character of Mrs Dalloway (Young, 2011). This is a kind of enhancement that Cunningham did with Woolf’s text. Differences as noted among illustrated events, in these novels refer directly to different ages in which these novels were written and consequently, differences are there in interpreting the events. In a way, the narration of The Hour is a reconstruction of Woolf’s novel, but at the same time, this reconstruction is nothing but deconstruction in itself.

 

Conclusion



From the aforementioned comparisons and contrast, it can be well marked that John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Hours by Michael Cunningham are both post-modern texts but follow different styles of illustrations. Intertextuality in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman is more about interpreting literary art and the Victorian age in particular. On the other hand, The Hours by Michael Cunningham is about looking into the intext meaning of Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway and copying the narrative art of Woolf to get a closer interpretive dominance for his analytical approach. In the case of features of deconstruction, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant's Woman is a fair play of looking into the contrastive features of feminism and understanding the role that a woman can play in offering romance. The Hours by Michael Cunningham, on the other hand, stands as a total makeover of Woolf’s narration and offers the reader those aspects of Woolf’s writing that must have been skipped while reading Mrs Dalloway.    


Sources
Alley, H. (2006). 'Mrs. Dalloway and Three of Its Contemporary Children'. Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 42, no.4: 401-419.
Bertens, H. and Fokkema, D. (edt. 1997) International postmodernism. Theory and literary practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Bump, J. (1988) "The Narrator as Protoreader in The French Lieutenant's Woman." The Victorian Newsletter 74: pp.16-18.
Cunningham, M. (1998) The Hours. London: Harper Perennial.
Fowles, J (1992) The French Lieutenant's Woman. 1969. London: Picador.
Hall, D. E. (1996) Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists. Houndmills: MacMillan.
Hutcheon, L. (2000) A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory and Fiction. London: Routledge.
Landrum, D. W. (1996) "Rewriting Marx: Emancipation and Restoration in The French Lieutenant's Woman." Twentieth Century Literature 42.1, pp. 103-13.
Leavenworth, M. L. (2010) '"A Life as Potent and Dangerous as Literature Itself": Intermediated Moves from Mrs. Dalloway to The Hours' in The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 43, no. 3: 503-523
Young, T. (2011) Michael Cunningham's The Hours. A reader's guide. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group

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