Suspension of disbelief

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

The term suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief has been defined as
a willingness to suspend one's critical faculties and believe something surreal; sacrifice of
realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.[1] The term was coined in 1817 by the poet and
aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse
a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend
judgement concerning the implausibility of the narrative. Suspension of disbelief often
applies to fictional works of the action, comedy, fantasy, and horror genres. Cognitive
estrangement in fiction involves using a person's ignorance to promote suspension of
disbelief.

The phrase "suspension of disbelief" came to be used more loosely in the later 20th
century, often used to imply that the burden was on the reader, rather than the writer, to
achieve it. This might be used to refer to the willingness of the audience to overlook the
limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those
premises. These premises may also lend to the engagement of the mind and perhaps
proposition of thoughts, ideas, art and theories.[2]

Suspension of disbelief is often an essential element for a magic act or a circus sideshow
act. For example, an audience is not expected to actually believe that a woman is cut in
half or transforms into a gorilla[3] in order to enjoy the performance.

According to the theory, suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for any kind of
storytelling. With any film, the viewer has to ignore the reality that they are viewing a staged
performance and temporarily accept it as their reality in order to be entertained. Black-and-
white films provide an obvious early example that audiences are willing to suspend
disbelief, no matter how unplausible the images appear, for the sake of entertainment. With
the exception of totally color blind people (achromats), no person viewing these films sees
the real world without color, but some are still willing to suspend disbelief and accept the
images in order to be entertained. Suspension of disbelief is also supposed to be essential
for the enjoyment of many films and television shows involving complex stunts, special
effects, and seemingly unrealistic plots and characterizations.

Coleridge's original formulation

Coleridge coined the phrase in his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, in the context of
the creation and reading of poetry.[4] Chapter XIV describes the preparations with
Wordsworth for their revolutionary collaboration Lyrical Ballads (first edition 1798), for which
Coleridge had contributed the more romantic, gothic pieces including The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner. Poetry and fiction involving the supernatural had gone out of fashion to a
large extent in the 18th century, in part due to the declining belief in witches and other
supernatural agents among the educated classes, who embraced the rational approach to
the world offered by the new science. Alexander Pope, notably, felt the need to explain and
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justify his use of elemental spirits in The Rape of the Lock, one of the few English poems of
the century that invoked the supernatural. Coleridge wished to revive the use of fantastic
elements in poetry. The concept of "willing suspension of disbelief" explained how a
modern, enlightened audience might continue to enjoy such types of story.

Coleridge recalled:

"... It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human
interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that
willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.
Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of
novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by
awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the
loveliness and the wonders of the world before us ..."[5]

The notion of such an action by an audience was however recognized in antiquity, as seen
particularly in the Roman theoretical concerns of Horace, who also lived in an age of
increasing skepticism about the supernatural, in his Ars Poetica.

Examples in literature
See also: Dramatic convention
Suspension of disbelief is sometimes said to be an essential component of live theater,
where it was recognized by Shakespeare, who refers to it in the Prologue to Henry V:

"[…] make imaginary puissance […] 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings […]
turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass."

Psychology
Psychological critic Norman Holland points to a neuroscientific explanation. When we hear
or watch any narrative, our brains go wholly into perceiving mode, turning off the systems
for acting or planning to act, and with them go our systems for assessing reality. We have,
in Coleridge's second, more accurate phrase, "poetic faith". That's why humans have such
trouble recognizing lies: they first believe, then have to make a conscious effort to
disbelieve.

Only when we stop perceiving to think about what we have seen or heard, only then do we
assess its truth-value. If we are really "into" the fiction – "transported", in the psychologists'
term – we are, as Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, "disinterested". We respond
aesthetically, without purpose. We don't judge the truth of what we're perceiving, even
though if we stop being transported and think about it, we know quite well it's a fiction.[6][7]

Suspension of disbelief has also been used within a mental health context by Frank
DeFulgentis in his book Flux. It is an attempt to describe the phenomenon of forgetting
irrational thoughts associated with cases of OCD. In the book, the author suggests
'suspending disbelief' as opposed to forcing ourselves to forget; similar to how one would
put a virus in quarantine. We can thereby allow ourselves to be absorbed in the activities
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around us until these irrationalities vanish on their own accord.

Criticisms
Aesthetic philosophers generally reject claims that suspension of disbelief accurately
characterizes the relationship between people and "fictions." Kendall Walton notes that, if
viewers were to truly suspend disbelief at a horror movie and accept its images as absolute
fact, they would have a true-to-life set of reactions. For instance, audience members would
cry out, "Look behind you!" to an endangered on-screen character or call the police when
they witnessed an on-screen murder.[8]

However, many of these criticisms simply fail to notice that Coleridge's original statement
came in a restrictive clause. The formulation "...that willing suspension of disbelief for the
moment which constitutes poetic faith," of necessity implies that there are different sorts of
suspension of disbelief and specifies that poetic faith is one instance of a larger class. One
need not choose to believe that a character in a horror film is a real person in order, for
example, to choose to believe that the character is looking at the building seen in the
following reverse-shot.

Not all authors believe that suspension of the disbelief adequately characterizes the
audience's relationship to imaginative works of art. J. R. R. Tolkien challenges this concept
in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", choosing instead the paradigm of secondary belief based
on inner consistency of reality. Tolkien says that, in order for the narrative to work, the
reader must believe that what he reads is true within the secondary reality of the fictional
world. By focusing on creating an internally consistent fictional world, the author makes
secondary belief possible. Tolkien argues that suspension of disbelief is only necessary
when the work has failed to create secondary belief. From that point the spell is broken,
and the reader ceases to be immersed in the story and must make a conscious effort to
suspend disbelief or else give up on it entirely.

See also

References
1. Jump up ^ "the definition of suspension of disbelief". dictionary.com.
2. Jump up ^ Welkos, Robert W. (15 April 1993). "From 'King Kong' to 'Indecent
Proposal,' audiences have been asked to buy a premise that can make – or break – a
film". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2010-10-24.
3. Jump up ^ Botos, Tim (21 August 2008). "'Gorilla Girl' sideshow act hangs on
despite changing times". GateHouse News Service; Patriot Ledger. Retrieved 15
October 2012.
4. Jump up ^ Safire, William. On Language; Suspension of Disbelief. New York Times.
7 October 2007.
5. Jump up ^ Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817, Chapter XIV
6. Jump up ^ Holland, Norman (2008). "Spiderman? Sure! The Neuroscience of
Disbelief". Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 33 (4): 312–320. Retrieved 28 April

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 2014.
7. Jump up ^ Holland, Norman. "Literature and the Brain". Literatureandthebrain.com.
PsyArt. Retrieved 28 April 2014.
8. Jump up ^ "Fearing Fictions", Kendall L. Walton, JSTOR (The Journal of Philosophy,
Vol. 75, No. 1 (01-1978), pp. 5–27). Retrieved 3 January 2007.

External links
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV, containing the term

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