It was, I think, Coleridge who coined the phrase ‘suspension of disbelief’. It stands for that contract the reader makes with the author when opening a work of fiction: in return for the entertainment provided by the work, we readers agree to suspend judgement on the absolute truth of what we are being told. We know that the fiction is, in some way, to some degree, a lie, but we willingly ignore the lie for the story.
But I don’t believe this is an absolute condition. We do not suspend disbelief in the face of absurdity, or laziness on the part of the author, or inconsistency, or the simply unbelievable. The job of the author is to do enough, to be convincing enough, that we feel suspending our disbelief is not too great a stretch. In other words, we suspend disbelief when we feel we are not too far from belief. We can accept the outrageous in a work when we feel that the world in which the outrageous occurs makes sense, or when we feel that those characters who seem closest to us respond to the outrageousness the way we might respond. But if there is something that triggers our disbelief, something in the condition of the story that does not make sense to us, then that contract is null and void. And it is null and void for the simple reason that we are unable in those circumstances to suspend our disbelief. Continue reading →