JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #59
July 8, 2021
Most writers are familiar with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase, the "suspension of disbelief," that is meant to describe the reader’s ideal approach to a story with potentially unbelievable elements. Coleridge tells us that he strove to write in such a way that the reader’s "suspension of disbelief" be "willing," that nothing should jolt the reader out of this state of mind so that she begins to question the plausibility of what she’s reading. Coleridge insisted that his writing should "transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." Although we’ve extended Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief beyond supernatural elements, what he is really after seems to be "poetic faith," wherein the writer earns a reader’s unquestioning faith in auctorial authority.
J. R. R. Tolkien was arguably the most famous fantasist of the 20th Century, but he took issue with Coleridge’s phrasing. In his famous 1939 defense of fantasy storytelling, "On Fairy-Stories," Tolkien described the artistic process as "sub-creation," creating not "a suspension of disbelief" but rather what Tolkien called "literary belief." He considered the "suspension of disbelief [to be] a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying . . . to find what virtue we can in a work of art that has for us failed." Nevertheless, Tolkien’s "literary belief" seems akin to Coleridge’s "poetic faith": Tolkien describes "the story-maker . . . [who] makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed." What the writer must engender in the reader is heartfelt belief, or true faith, in the depicted world.
Although both Coleridge and Tolkien were talking about depicting fantastical elements of a story, just as we’ve adopted "suspension of disbelief" to the wider application of fiction in general, it might be useful to consider the creation of "literary belief" or "poetic faith" as an important goal when we compose our fiction, no matter its genre.