Gossip About Imaginary People
“Novels are not gossip about imaginary people.” - attributed to Gayatri Spivak
I’d like to summarize two visions of how fiction works, and then explain why one of them is stupid and the other isn’t.
Vision #1: Suspension of Disbelief
This was first postulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, when he wrote the following about his aesthetic goals in writing his portion of Lyrical Ballads:
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.
Let’s unpack that a little - the idea that Coleridge is proposing is that he would write poems about supernatural and unbelievable things, but that by grounding them in human nature and human truth he would avoid the problem of them not being taken seriously because of their implausibility. At the heart of it is the phrase “that willing suspension of disbelief… which constitutes poetic faith."
In other words, the way that fiction works is that we agree, when reading it (I’ll use "reading” to refer to the general act of consuming fiction), to pretend that it’s real. In this vision, fiction runs into problems when things that jeopardize the suspension of disbelief come up - that is, things that are simply so out there that we cannot help but disbelieve them.
A slightly refined version of this is presented by Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” where he posits the idea that fiction creates a “secondary world” in which we have “secondary belief” that is then endangered if the coherence of this world is threatened.
This was first postulated by Aristotle around 335 BCE in the Poetics, which is an explanation of how the specific dramatic form of Tragedy works. He postulates that fiction is best understood as “imitations” of people, and that it works because of a natural human instinct towards imitation. As he puts it:
The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.
In this model, the reason we’re engaged by fiction is that, in looking at it, we recognize similarities between it and ourselves, and thus invest in the fiction because of our natural instinct towards imitation. For Aristotle, what holds fiction together is not based on the coherence of some imaginary world, but on the idea of dramatic unities. Successful fiction is an imitation of a single human action from start to finish. Its power comes from this succinctness, and specifically from the way in which events at the start of the story make the ending likely, while events at the end make the ones at the start necessary. (See also Chekov’s Gun.)
The Problems With Suspension of Disbelief
The most obvious problem with suspension of disbelief is, of course, that it’s simply not true. Fiction isn’t real. To forget this, even as a temporary game played with a text, turns art into a sort of psychotic state that highlights many of Plato’s objections to art. Even Tolkien’s modified version of it requires deliberately embracing things we know not to be true. There is no fictional world. It’s not a secondary world - like the real world, only without the actually being real. That’s not how it works, and we know that tacitly.
(To take just one example, consider the question of how the backstory of Middle Earth is filled in, and the way in which what is and isn’t true about Middle Earth is determined primarily by Tolkien’s authority. Things only become true about Middle Earth because Tolkien says they are. It’s not the coherence of the world that makes it function - it’s the fact that we recognize that Middle Earth is not a world, but rather a story related by a singular artist with dictatorial authority over said story.)
Any approach based on suspension of disbelief runs, if not aground, at least into extremely choppy and awkward waters here, having to constantly toggle back and forth between the supposed suspension of disbelief and the incontrovertible fact that people are aware that fiction is fictional. It is, at the very least, a terribly messy theory. Even secondary belief requires us to endlessly weigh our secondary beliefs against our primary ones.
Notably, none of these problems apply to imitation, because it acknowledges fiction as fiction up front. If we simply accept that imitations can produce strong emotional reactions, we don’t need to ever get into any messy pretending something we know to be false to be true.
Everything Suspension of Disbelief Explains Can Be Explained By Imitation
We’ve already seen how imitation can explain all of our emotional reactions to fiction - that seeing something that resembles human emotions and actions can provoke emotional reactions. But that’s not actually the issue that suspension of disbelief was created to explain. Coleridge was trying to understand what sorts of things break that emotional investment.
But imitation gives us a way of dealing with this via the idea of dramatic unities. The problem with all of the things that supposedly “break the suspension of disbelief” isn’t that they remind us that the thing we’re looking at is fictional. It’s that they don’t seem to be part of the same fiction as what we’ve previously seen. If you suddenly, two-thirds of the way through a story that has so far seemed to be a kitchen sink drama about a working class family in Ottawa, drop a giant spaceship into the narrative, the problem isn’t that we stop believing the working class family in Ottawa. It’s that it feels like we’re watching two different stories at once. There’s no unity to the imitation anymore. Or, put another way, the problem is that nothing has made this development seem likely, and it doesn’t make anything from earlier seem necessary.
Which lets us take a somewhat subtler approach to the idea of surprises in stories. Because it means we can dramatically change the shape of a narrative, but only so long as the new shape can still be understood as a singular, unified imitation. If, in the course of our kitchen sink drama, the father has periodically been seen talking on a shortwave radio to some mysterious other entity and we, two-thirds of the way in, reveal that this entity has actually been Zarg the Galactic Conquerer, well, it’s certainly a sudden twist, but when Zarg is revealed we at least go “oh, OK, this has been a story about a man who secretly talks to aliens, I see how this all fits together."
So what’s important isn’t the coherence of some imaginary world. Rather, it’s the coherence of an answer to the question "what sort of thing is this story?” As long as that question has a coherent answer, we can invest in the imitation of the story.
Suspension of disbelief requires some weirdly complex mental gymnastics whereby we keep going back and forth on whether we accept something we know to be untrue. It also doesn’t actually explain anything that can’t be explained just as well if we accept that things we know are untrue can still emotionally affect us if they remind us of things that are true. It is thus a theory with significant disadvantages compared to imitation, and no advantages. This makes it a self-evidently inferior way to consider fiction. We don’t suspend our disbelief. We just invest in imitations. It’s simple.
