내포에서 외연으로: 소설 『시간들』에서 영화 『디 아워스』로

『The Hours』 was Virginia Woolf’s working title for what later became 『Mrs. Dalloway』. Sixty years after her death, an American author Michael Cunningham brought back this title and even the author in his own novel, 『The Hours』. Cunningham incorporates every facet of Woolf’s novel and life, patterning his theme as variations on Woolf’s 『Mrs. Dalloway』. His novel has three strands, each tracing a day in the life of a woman: Virginia Woolf in 1925, Clarissa Vaughn in 1990’s, Laura Brown in 1949. The lives of the three women in 『The Hours』are singularly determined by Virginia Woolf’s decisions in her novel and the relationship between the two novels goes beyond that of allusion, and even beyond the borrowing of previous literary structures.
This paper examines how Cunningham reinstates the lasting significance of Virginia Woolf as an author into his novel, not only using it as the source of his inspiration, but also creating the effect of “literary symbiosis” for both his and Woolf’s novels. By defining “literary symbiosis” as a specifically postmodern phenomenon in which meaning in the prior text is affected and highlighted by its hypertext, I argue that Cunningham’s extension of meaning in 『Mrs Dalloway』 into『The Hours』 produces revived interest as well as new possible interpretations of 『Mrs. Dalloway』. Furthermore, Cunningham’s work of extension provokes a wider extension of meaning, as his novel has been recently filmed. What makes this proliferation of meanings in 『Mrs. Dalloway』 possible, in my opinion, is the “plastic incompleteness” embedded in Woolf’s novel, the “plastic incompleteness” inherited by Cunnlngham.

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