My dear friend gave me an incredibly thoughtful wedding gift: Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. He thought this book would be just the thing to help me think about faith, love, and form (all things incredibly important to my understanding of marriage – but that’s another post).
I was absolutely blown away when I finally read it this Thanksgiving. Ostensibly a story of a missionary (gifted in the art of bureaucracy and accounts) who heads off to the island of Fanua to attempt to convert the islanders, the story is really about love, faith, and World War I.
Arriving on the island, Mr. Fortune quickly abandons his attempts at conversion, happy with his one ‘convert,’ Lueli, and his daily walks. After an earthquake, both he and his ‘convert’ lose their god (Lueli loses his icon, Mr. Fortune loses his faith). He reflects:
“How differently to Lueli was he taking his loss! The reason must be that Lueli though losing his god had kept his faith. Lueli had lost something real, like losing an umbrella; he had lost it with frenzy and conviction. But his loss was utter and retrospective, a lightning-flash loss which had wiped out a whole life-time of having. In fact the best way of expressing it, though it sounded silly and paradoxical, was to say that what he had lost for ever was nothing. ‘Forever is a word that stretches backward too'” (95).
I love this description of a “lightning-flash loss” because I think it captures, more than any other writing I’ve read, the way in which belief is “world-constituting” (as suggested by Gauri Viswanathan). The loss of belief is the loss of a world. More importantly, perhaps, this world is lost ‘forever’ – it cannot be recaptured or even accessed once it’s gone.
Knowing that I still believe in God, but don’t believe in the Catholic Church, I wonder about my world. What does it look like? How can I still nurture what Newman calls “the habit of belief?” Should I still nurture it?
Sylvia Townshead Warner closes the novel with silence. Confronted with WWI, Mr. Fortune “felt incapable of comment. He did not seem to have an idea left. Everything that was real, everything that was significant, had gone down with the island of Fanua and was lost forever” (153-4). But even such loss is not hopeless, Mr. Fortune quietly asks for the time and synchronizes his watch.
I take this to mean that beneath the synchronicity of everyday life there is still a difference in meaning, in value, in significance. To find this meaning, and to hold onto it, is precisely how one makes her way in the world.
chronotopic 