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Popular Culture Review
women; it is the underside of a marriage going through its death throes; it is the
lost innocence of Eddie O’Hare, who falls in love with and is abandoned by
Marion; it is a child deserted emotionally (and later physically) by her mother;
and it is also the power of fiction to unleash itself on unwary readers who have
forgotten how treacherous is the world in which we live and how fragile and
temporary is this life.
Part of the difficulty of engaging the role of the writer on an intellectual
level in The Door in the Floor is that Ted Cole is not a sympathetic figure on an
emotional level. We remain detached from him throughout much of his story.
Ted Cole is “in many ways, monstrous, using his charm and talent the way he
uses sex and drink, as a defense against both intimacy and guilt," Scott suggests.
Although Ted Cole has admitted to delivering Eddie to his wife because he
looks so much like his son Thomas, he is brutal with his young assistant. He
critiques the story Eddie brought with him at the first of the summer, telling him
that “it isn't really a story/’ He calls the boy's first effort “an emotional
outburst" and a “collection of personal anecdotes that don't really add up to
much." Arguing that writing involves “a certain manipulation," Ted Cole tells
O'Hare that “everything in fiction is a tool—pain, betrayal, even death. These
are like different colors on a painter's palette and you need to use them." Telling
O'Hare to describe specific smells and tastes and to use details that “create
whole scenes in a reader's mind," Ted Cole argues that fiction should prepare
readers for the ending but then surprise them. Later in the film, O’Hare dares to
tell Ted Cole that his wife has left him and that he can’t imagine she would go to
New York. Cole replies, “You don't have an imagination, Eddie/’
The limited role of critics is addressed when Ted Cole meets a student
at a book signing and learns that she wrote her freshman English term paper on
The Door in the Floor. Flirting with her, Ted Cole asks her the title of her paper,
and she replies, “An Analysis of the Atavistic Symbols of Fear in The Door in
the Floor/ ' She tells him that myths and fairy tales are “full of images like
magic doors and children disappearing and people being so frightened their hair
turns white overnight/' She tells him that for the unborn child, the door in the
floor could even be the vagina. Ted Cole, hiding his amusement, asks her how
long the paper was. The young woman tells him it was 28 pages, not counting
the bibliography.
This scene is a reminder of the way in which we separate ourselves
from fiction through criticism, when we have missed the point of the literature
itself because we are emotionally incapable of engaging it. Rather than
analyzing “symbols of fear” in the narrative, we should account for our own fear
of pain, betrayal, and, of course, mortality. Doing so would not require 28 pages,
but it would be a more honest response to the unsettling quality of fiction.
O’Hare's moment of epiphany comes not as he edits Ted Cole’s prose
or as he sleeps with Marion Cole. Instead, it occurs as he stands beside Ruth at a
frame shop and demands the return of a broken photograph that was to be
repaired but is overdue. When the shop owner (Donna Murphy) asks him to