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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he of Xanadu fame, first coined the term. He had a very specific meaning in mind. He was publishing Lyrical Ballads along with his buddy William Wordsworth. Wordsworth had the easy job: nature poems. Who doesn't like a good idyll? Coleridge's assignment was trickier: poems of the supernatural. He knew that would be harder for readers to swallow, so he composed a little apologia in his Biographia Literaria. These are his words on the subject:
"In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which 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."
Anyone who's read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner sober knows what he was going on about. He was asking for a mulligan for descriptions of witches and werewolves and things that go bump in the night. This was a necessity in a newly enlightened age, though less so today.
But over the years the term has expanded radically to mean a conscious determination to dismiss rational judgement; necessary for the engagement and enjoyment of story in any medium, be it novels, plays films, or presumably opera and ballet. And mime. The storyteller must pull the wool over the eyes of his audience, so immersing them that they believe they're actually experiencing the events presented.
Horse-puckey.
You're talking about a psychotic episode there. Anyone who wholly buys into the "reality" of a story has serious mental problems. The willing suspension of disbelief is a shibboleth. I don't have to suspend disbelief to listen to Beethoven's Ninth, or look at Picasso's Guernica or read Joyce's Ulysses. The question of belief never arises.Tell me where dramatic contrivance is concealed in Greek tragedy, with its masks and buskins and chorus.
Tell me where it's concealed in Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. Or Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Or Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. It's right out there for every one to see--even marvel at. It's not realistic--but realism is only one style of storytelling.
Let's look at Some Like It Hot. Certainly the other characters must believe Daphne and Josephine are real women, but that's not suspension of disbelief, that's a simple dramatic convention. It's a rule of the game. The rule of the game in opera? Everybody sings! All the time! Okay, we accept the rule, we enjoy the story. The rule in movie musicals? Gene Kelly sings and dances! Or did you think Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were perfectly believable as women?
Let's drop in on our buddy Thespis back in the 6th century B.C.E.
He steps out from the chorus. He starts speaking as, say, Agamemnon. This was the first time in the Dionysian ritual that became theatre. What happened on that historic occasion? Do you think the Athenians gasped and said, "My God, Thespis is gone, and in his place is Agamemnon"?
Or did they reason thusly: "Ah, new rule. Thespis here is supposed to represent Agamemnon. Cool."
Do you think those Greeks had no experience with sign and symbol, with one thing representing another? Do you think Greek boys had never said to each other, "Let's pretend I'm Achilles and you're Patroclus?"
"Willing suspension of disbelief" implies that there is a disbelief which needs to be consciously suspended. It further implies (though not as surely) that belief of some sort is a necessary element of enjoying a narrative, that it must somehow seem real, and that the creator's job is to create an illusion of reality.
Realism is a technique which has its uses and abuses, but is certainly only one of many valid styles of story-telling. It had its vogue in the theatre and literature right around the turn of the 20th century. Those media have moved on. Unfortunately this was the same time as film was being birthed, and film got stuck in realism, partly because it was so good at it (although melodrama was also at its height, which meant music was played as background to the action, something completely unrealistic which persists in movies today). It's still trying to throw those chains off, but some middle class movie-goers, steeped in realism, go into a fit when a black girl is cast as a mermaid. Hollywood, conservative to its core, gets nervous. Does realism still have its place in storytelling? Of course. But it's not the only arrow in our quiver.
Art as illusion occupies a very small space in the history of ideas. I don't need to suspend disbelief when Gene Kelly dances or Chow Yun Fat flies or Harpo Marx shakes a ton of silverware out of his sleeve.
The illusion of reality isn't necessary for narrative, whether it's a novel, a play, or a film. Painting was set free of it over a century and a half ago. Do you think Van Gogh needed to create an illusion in order for his audience to experience his pictures as he intended? Music has never had much use for it, except when cannons roar in the 1812 Overture and program music. Hell, Penn and Teller have proved it's not even necessary for a magic act.
People don't build movie theaters and bookstores to battle the scourge of disbelief. They do it because there are large audiences hungry to be entertained. People seem to be wired to enjoy stories, rather than the reverse. They don't listen to them grudgingly, and only the very bad story-teller can lose them. I know this. I watched Dude, Where's My Car all the way through.
American Splendor juxtaposed the real Harvey Pekar with his avatars, the actor Paul Giamatti and the comic book character drawn by R. Crumb, and it NEVER pulled me out of the story. Audiences aren't looking for an illusion, they're looking for a story, and they seem to be willing to put up with a great deal to get it.
A rabbi, a priest and a minister walk into a bar -- we don't sit there thinking, sounds like a joke coming up, better suspend my disbelief, we think I hope this is a funny joke.
But--you'll say--but--something happens. Something special, when I enter a story. Some sort of transport into another world, another dimension. I can lay down my burdens and lie in the grass, staring up at strange stars.
I agree.
We enter the magic circle. The sacred space. The pentagram. That's how it began. I didn't make up this term. It's a term familiar to gamers, lifted from Johann Huizinga's seminal work Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture. "We love when we play" as the band Yes put it. We're invited to play, not coerced. Participants are not passive, but fully engaged.
Huizinga says: "Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the 'consecrated spot' cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain."
The magic circle is the space in which the normal rules and reality of the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of a game world. The border between worlds is porous. You can still see the outside world from the middle of the circle. You're still grounded. That's what gives you the courage to explore.
Rules are essential in this circle. They create the structures which will guide us. Certain rules are invoked at the beginning of a game or a story. Once those rules are set forth and agreed to by the participants, violations are deemed "cheating" and spoil the enterprise. The key is consistency. You must go directly to jail. Do not pass go. In storytelling, we call these rules genre expectations. Those expectations can be subverted, but they cannot be ignored. Each genre relates its own tensions to be resolved. They each have their own internal logic.
Chekhov's rule: "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.
Jane Austen's dictum: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Logic and realism are not the same. If you tell me in the first act that Spiderman can spin webs, then I'll believe it's logical in the second act for him to stop an el train with his webs. But I won't find it logical in the third act if he flies across the city after Doctor Octopus -- because that wasn't in the rules you set for the game. I'll feel cheated. But in neither case is the reality of a man who spins webs even a question.
The only time belief or disbelief enters into the appreciation of a narrative is when the narrator begins with: This is a true story. Because what we expect from a narrative is that it establish its own rules and remain consistent to them, not that it "suspends disbelief".
There's no question of belief or disbelief in a game. There are conventions, rules (sometimes loose, sometimes absolute) that govern all play -- and storytelling is play.
But you never really thought for a second that you were a Scots terrier with a hotel in Atlantic City.
Am I saying that storytelling is a game? Yes, I suppose I am.
Lastly, I see no reason to posit a suspension of disbelief because, as some people put forward, a story provokes an emotional response. "Ode to Joy" provokes an emotional response. So does "Guernica". So does playing a game of monopoly or chess, or watching a baseball game. None of these activities ask me for belief; none of them try to foist an illusion upon me.
If you want to argue a "willingness to pretend", I'm right there with you. If you want to argue that a work of art needs to have an internal consistency to satisfy its audience, you've got me as an ally. But "the willing suspension of disbelief" lends itself too easily to a pernicious belief held by too many aspiring storytellers that a rigid adherence to the tenets of realism is the only way to write.
Horse puckey.
Thanks.
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