Silence, Power and Suicide in Michael Cunningham's The Hours

This essay aims at highlighting the particular connection between the choice of suicide, and the voices, both abstract and concrete, of power. In every era the malleable materiality of the dead body finds legitimacy in the peculiar hermeneutics of suicide, in sets of institutions, procedures, and beliefs that identify suicidal deaths and assign them meanings. In the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham, the whole narration is permeated by a preoccupation with the meaning of death to the living, and particularly to potential suicide victims and people exposed to the experience of death. In Cunningham's novel, suicide acquires the peculiarities of a meaningful gesture, which could then be interpreted as an expression of personal autonomy and a dissident critique of society. Cunnigham, with postmodern detachment, places suicide at the centre of the arena, shaping it within the complex interplay of political, legal, social, scientific and cultural developments. He underlines the universality and atemporality of the emotional experience, as well as the manifest implications and social communications in suicidal behaviour. The different nuances portrayed by the author regarding this aspect contribute to undermining or at least calling into question the normative conceptions of suicide.