Thinking fiction pt.2: "The Door" by Magda Szabo

After 50 years of reading fiction I've concluded that only miserable people ever tell the truth, and that this is why no one listens to them even though they're so often the ones who ought to be listened to.

The problem for such a person, a person I'll call the true individual, is finding another true individual to confide in about the project called, civilization. In such a confidence the two can talk together about the vain stupidity of space exploration, driverless cars, robots that deliver burritos to dormrooms, trash on Mt. Everest--the subjects are endless--and have a good cry and much laughter along the way.

The Enlightenment, Romanticism, Democracy, The Age of Technology, and More as they say at Bed, Bath, and Beyond! There's no stopping the march of progress. It's even possible now to mistake homosexuality for sexual liberation and the struggle for civil rights, and billionaires as liberal humanists who say they hope to shrink the economic distance between themselves and the lower classes. 

Poets can't talk about this stuff, realistically. Poets are people who set before themselves impossible projects, having created one of the great glories of civilization, poetry, then having to read Leo Tolstoy's What is Art and continuing to write their poems. The one poet, or possibly two, allowed our current civilization--for there is only one poet, or at the most two, really necessary at any given time--must continue to treat things with the reverence of poetry, a solemn task which once presumed that the poet is the guilty conscience of the human race, as stated by the Nobel Prize winning poet (1). This so-called guilty conscience may partly explain the tremendous upwelling of the number of poets trying to practice poetry in this country, and the creative writing schools churning them out! It's impossible to keep up with all the poetry being written today or the individual poets themselves, each who must be writing a poem-a-day, so great must be the market for poetry. 

Perhaps only fiction can create the kind of miscreant who can talk about the social and cultural problems that need talking about, the great civilizational delusions (progress, man's perfectibility, God) that lead us around by the nose, so often tragic and yet so much fun to hear others talk about. Perhaps fiction is the only literary form left us that has the time and space in which to explore the glory of our follies and the folly of our glory, to provide the physical largesse in which two radically dissimilar characters can form some sort of deeply meaningful, loving relationship. 

Emerence, the miscreant truth-teller in Magda Szabo's The Door (2), is illiterate, lives alone in a house no one may enter, victim of the social & political complications of two world wars. Emerence doesn't know how to not tell the truth, no matter who she's telling it to, her equals or her superiors: she's naturally elite. Magda is a writer, politically aware, a believer in social justice, progress, art, all the good things a loyal member of western civilization is supposed to believe in. They live in the same town in Hungary. Emerence becomes Magda's housekeeper; Magda becomes aware of Emerance's complete rejection of social institutions, her honesty without the armour of self-righteousness, her love of animals, her full living of the life, as improbable and difficult as it's been, she's been given. They misunderstand one another almost constantly, they quarrel, Emerence is often irrational, unforgiving, but there's always, always a logic behind her behaviors that is true to her experience. Magda, the educated one, receives an education from Emerence. And each, each of them true individuals, becomes indispensible to the other.

Rejecting nearly every cultural offering--the church, the political system, mass media, poetry ("she saw our books as only things to be dusted", Szabo writes)--Emerence is one of the great characters in fiction, the miscreant as an equal to the dreamy Quixote or the doomed Anna Karenina or the irrepressible Huck Finn.

1. Saint-John Perse, Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, 1960.  

2.The Door, Magda Szabo, New York Review Books, 2005. Translation by Len Rix. Originally published in 1987. Szabo was born in Hungary in 1917 and died there in 2007 in the town where she was born.