One need not have read the works of James Joyce or be intimately familiar with the historical facts of his life to leap a very safe assumption: that he did not just wake up one day out of the blue and decided that stream-of-consciousness was going to be his preferred literary technique for telling a story. The leap from conventional storytelling to the revolutionary and immediately identifiable method of writing a narrative which seeks to replicate the processing of thoughts by the mind is far too great to have been decided overnight. It reveals a process of evolution on the part of the writer himself.
Michael Cunningham has not thus far not appeared to have settled permanently on the multilinear storytelling approach typified by his most famous work, The Hours, but the influence of the structural foundation of that novel upon its follow-up, Specimen Days, is abundantly clear. The Hours is constructed of three self-contained narratives with three separate protagonists set three different time periods. The conceit is that all three narratives are unified into a coherent whole thematically, linked inextricably to each other through the common narrative reference of author Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway. It is an audacious tour de force of how to keep multiple storylines logically connected not through the traditional utilization of recurring characters or setting or literary genre as is more common in similar examples of multilinear storytelling.
It is abundantly clear that Cunningham arrived at his method of storytelling which is taken to an even more audacious degrees in Specimen Days through evolutionary practice. Two novels previous to The Hours, Cunningham published A Home at the End of the World which uses multiple narrators to tell relate its narrative. It is obviously not like his later works in that it focuses upon a single cast of characters playing out their roles within a self-contained story. The evolutionary leap from multiple narrators to multiple stories makes sense within that linear progression. The subsequent leap from The Hours to Specimen Days is perhaps not coincidentally on which covers roughly the same number of years as the gap between A Home at the End of the World and The Hours.
Specimen Days represents what appears to be a kind of Joycean epiphany on the part of Cunningham that with writing The Hours he had stumbled upon the ideal form to match the means by which creative muse inspired content. Anyone who has read a short story by James Joyce like the much anthologized “Araby” only to leap straight to his novel Ulysses—bypassing the wealth of writing in between—can attest to the power of evolutionary progression in an author’s style. While that short story is easily enough understood by the vast majority of population, one can rest secure in the secret knowledge that Ulysses is not read by much of that population and is read by a lot more people who actually understand it. The evolution of Cunningham’s stylistic approach is not so great, but it is still impressive. What was an experiment in unification through theme in The Hours becomes in Specimen Days a multilinear example of novel writing not just from the perspective of multiple storylines, but multiple means of cohesion.
It is not just a common figure that unites the stories in Specimen Days, though here Walt Whitman takes on the role of Virginia Woolf. But where Woolf’s presence hovered over multiple storylines with unique protagonists, here Cunningham pursues three storylines once again, but with the same characters in each. Only they are different interpretations of the same characters. For instance, Catherine in the opening story becomes an African-American named Cat in the second and an otherworldly alien refugee in the third. The audaciousness of style demonstrated in The Hours explodes into outright subversive fervor in Specimen Days. Somewhat astonishingly. Cunningham followed up his Pulitzer-Prize winner with a work that is, arguably perhaps, exponentially more impressive in revealing the extent of his impeccable control over a form which has thus far proven to be a seamless match to its content.
