Suspension of disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is the avoidance of
critical thinking or
logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...
in examining something unreal or impossible in reality, such as a work of
speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment.
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of phil ...
first explored the idea of the concept in its relation to the principles of
theater
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...
; the audience ignores the unreality of fiction in order to experience
catharsis
Catharsis (from Greek , , meaning "purification" or "cleansing" or "clarification") is the purification and purgation of emotions through dramatic art, or it may be any extreme emotional state that results in renewal and restoration. In its lite ...
.
Origin
The poet and aesthetic philosopher
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake ...
introduced the English-language term "suspension of disbelief" in 1817 and 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. Coleridge sought to revive the use of fantastic elements in poetry and developed a concept to support how a modern, enlightened audience might continue to enjoy such types of literature. The term resulted from a philosophical experiment, which Coleridge conducted with
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
within the context of the creation and reading of poetry. It involved an attempt to explain the supernatural persons or characters so that these creatures of imagination constitute some semblance of truth.
In his ''
Biographia Literaria
The ''Biographia Literaria'' is a critical autobiography by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published in 1817 in two volumes. Its working title was 'Autobiographia Literaria'. The formative influences on the work were Wordsworth's theory of poetry, th ...
'', published in 1817, Chapter XIV describes this collaboration called ''
Lyrical Ballads
''Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems'' is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literatu ...
'' (first edition 1798), for which Coleridge had contributed the more romantic, Gothic pieces including ''
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' (originally ''The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere'') is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–1798 and published in 1798 in the first edition of ''Lyrical Ballad ...
''. Here, Coleridge also referred to his concept as "poetic faith", citing the concept as a feeling analogous to the supernatural, which awakens the mind.
Coleridge recalled:
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'' (with the quotation ''
Ut pictura poesis
''Ut pictura poesis'' is a Latin phrase literally meaning "as is painting so is poetry". The statement (often repeated) occurs most famously in Horace's '' Ars Poetica'', near the end, immediately after another famous quotation, "", or " even Hom ...
''). According to David Chandler, Coleridge drew his notion from
Johann Jakob Brucker
Johann Jakob Brucker (; la, Jacobus Bruckerus; 22 January 1696 – 26 November 1770) was a German historian of philosophy.
Life
He was born at Augsburg. He was destined for the Lutheran Church, and graduated at the University of Jena in 1718. ...
's ''Historia Critica Philosophiae'', which cited the phrase "''assensus suspensione''" ("suspension of assent").
Brucker's phrase was itself a modernization of the phrase "''adsensionis retentio''" ("a holding back of assent") used by
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the esta ...
in his ''
Academica''.
Concept
The traditional concept of the suspension of disbelief as proposed by Coleridge is not about suspending disbelief in the reality of fictional characters or events but the suspension of disbelief in the supernatural. This can be demonstrated in the way the reader suspends his disbelief in ghosts rather than the non-fictionality of the ghosts in a story. According to Coleridge's theory, suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for any kind of storytelling.
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. With a film, for instance, 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. Early
black-and-white
Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey.
Media
The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...
films are an example of visual media that require the audience to suspend their disbelief for this reason.
Suspension of disbelief often applies to fictional works of the action, comedy, fantasy, and horror genres in written literature and visual arts. Cognitive estrangement in fiction involves using a person's ignorance to promote suspension of disbelief.
Examples in literature
Suspension of disbelief is sometimes said to be an essential component of live theater, where it was recognized by
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
, who refers to it in the Prologue to ''
Henry V Henry V may refer to:
People
* Henry V, Duke of Bavaria (died 1026)
* Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor (1081/86–1125)
* Henry V, Duke of Carinthia (died 1161)
* Henry V, Count Palatine of the Rhine (c. 1173–1227)
* Henry V, Count of Luxembourg (1 ...
'': "make imaginary
puissance
Puissance is the high-jump competition in the equestrian sport of show jumping.
Description
The competition involves a maximum of five rounds - opening round followed by four jump-offs, not against the clock. The first round consists of four to ...
'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings
turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass". 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
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...
, notably, felt the need to explain and 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.
Psychology
Psychological critic
Norman Holland
Norman N. Holland (September 19, 1927, New York City - September 28, 2017) was an American literary critic and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida.
Holland's scholarship focused largely on psychoanalytic criti ...
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" and so 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 do not judge the truth of what we perceive even though if we stop being transported and think about it, we know quite well that it is a fiction.
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 around us until these irrationalities vanish of their own accord.
Criticisms
Aesthetic philosophers generally reject claims that "suspension of disbelief" accurately characterizes the relationship between people and "fictions".
Kendall Walton
Kendall Lewis Walton (born 1939) is an American philosopher, the Emeritus Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work mainly deals with theoretical questions about t ...
notes that if viewers were to ''truly'' suspend disbelief at a
horror movie
Horror is a film genre that seeks to elicit fear or disgust in its audience for entertainment purposes.
Horror films often explore dark subject matter and may deal with transgressive topics or themes. Broad elements include monsters, ap ...
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 they might call the police when they witness an on-screen murder.
Not all authors believe that "suspension of disbelief" adequately characterizes the audience's relationship to imaginative works of art.
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, ; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''.
From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlins ...
challenges this concept in his essay "
On Fairy-Stories
"On Fairy-Stories" is an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the fairy story as a literary form. It was written as a lecture entitled "Fairy Stories" for the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, on 8 March 1939 ...
", choosing instead the
paradigm of ''secondary belief'' based on inner
consistency
In classical deductive logic, a consistent theory is one that does not lead to a logical contradiction. The lack of contradiction can be defined in either semantic or syntactic terms. The semantic definition states that a theory is consistent ...
of reality. Tolkien says that, in order for the narrative to work, the reader must believe that what they read is
true
True most commonly refers to truth, the state of being in congruence with fact or reality.
True may also refer to:
Places
* True, West Virginia, an unincorporated community in the United States
* True, Wisconsin, a town in the United States
* ...
within the secondary reality of the
fictional world
A fictional universe, or fictional world, is a self-consistent setting with events, and often other elements, that differ from the real world. It may also be called an imagined, constructed, or fictional realm (or world). Fictional universes m ...
. 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, saying that from that point on, the spell is broken, and the reader ceases to be immersed in the story, and so must make a conscious effort to suspend their disbelief or else give up on it entirely.
[Tolkien, J. R. R. "On Fairy-Stories". The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, George Allen & Unwin, 1983, pp. 109–61.
]
See also
References
External links
Coleridge's ''Biographia Literaria'', Chapter XIV, containing the term
{{Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Fiction
Plot (narrative)
Narratology
1817 introductions
1810s neologisms