The Hours (1998), like its template Mrs. Dalloway, unfolds over one day, but it refracts that day through different periods and places—Virginia Woolf’s Richmond in 1923, Laura Brown’s Los Angeles in 1949, Clarissa Vaughan’s Manhattan in “the late twentieth century.” Across seventy years and thousands of miles three women’s lives are given a mysterious harmonic resonance, reinforced by the bold pastiche of Woolf’s stream of consciousness in which the novel is written. In Specimen Days (2005), Cunningham’s wildest experiment, three disjunct periods are handled through the conventions of three distinct genres: the Victorian ghost story, the contemporary police thriller, and the futuristic sci-fi dystopia. Here the presiding literary presence is a different kind of poet of the self, Walt Whitman, his words channeled by a nineteenth-century child visionary and adopted as arcane mantras by twenty-first-century child suicide bombers.
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