RULES OF RE-ENGAGEMENT

Partly in response to my current line of thought expressed in QUICK NUM NOTES, I re-examined the five essays I wrote about "the suspension of disbelief" as formulated by Samuel Coleridge and responded to by Stephen King. I concluded that quasi-series with the 2023 post STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT, but now I have some new refinements.

First of all, I failed to account for two different levels of engagement: one primary and "unearned," the other secondary and "earned." I pointed out in the course of the essays that a reader's receptiveness to the genres of fantasy does not depend exactly on "suspending disbelief." Some readers may be so invested in naive realism that they can never accept metaphenomenal subject matter in any way; they find it childish and would never, in line with Stephen King's dictum, even trouble to exert their mental muscles to engage. Yet I've encountered fans of the metaphenomenal who are just as naively realistic as any fantasy-hater, but who view their reading material as simple escapism from the rigors of real life. Other fantasy-readers may believe in one or more forms of the metaphenomenal in real life, ranging from psychic phenomena or the return of the Messiah, or they may be agnostic about such matters but open to real-world possibilities. Some may place credence in science fiction but not in magical fantasy, and so on. All of these forms of engagement proceed from individual taste, and so as far as the author of any given "meta" work is concerned, a given reader's willingness to engage is unearned, because the reader approaches the work with a certain degree of receptivity no matter how good or bad the work is.  

The secondary level of engagement, though, is one that the author does have to earn. In QUICK NUM NOTES I asked the question, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" The question was directed to those Gothic authors who thought they were being more "realistic" by revealing that a purported ghost was just a guy in a bedsheet, when in truth there's not much (if any) real-world evidence for swindlers who dress up in bedsheets (and maybe more for real ghosts). A good storyteller like Conan Doyle can cobble together enough suggestive details as to make it seem logical that the villain of HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES would go through the trouble of painting a dog with phosphorescent paint to get across the effect of a ghost-hound. When an author manages to take the reader to the second level of engagement, the reader feels validated in investing in the far-fetched events of the narrative. A contrary example-- just to name the first that comes to mind-- is a dopey "weird western," HAUNTED RANCH, in which the plotters, as unimaginative as their creators, try to create the illusion of a haunting by simply projecting spooky sounds into the ranch-house. 

The same basic rule pertains to marvelous phenomena. In this month's essay AMAZON ATROCITY, which offered an overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN tenure, I called attention to one story in which a fiery giant arises from the ground beneath Paradise Island-- yet the author neglects to give any rationale for the creature's appearance. I know that had I read this particular tale at age 10 I would have been offended by the author's implication that the kids reading this comic were too stupid to need explanations-- and I say this with a clear memory of another Kanigher story of the same period in which he pissed me off with his cavalier attitude toward storytelling.       

Further, I gave a couple of examples of the barest justifications Kanigher might have employed to gain his readers' secondary engagement: "Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians?" Both of these conceits could have been further expanded upon in line with either didactic or mythopoeic abstractions, and such abstractions might have made the story more interesting, thus encouraging readers to continue reading the heroine's adventures.

This idea of an author having to earn the reader's secondary engagement will play into a future essay on related matters.  

STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT

In STRENGTH TO DREAM, THE SEQUEL, I summed up some previous arguments thusly:

I applied some of my observations to King's comments in his 1981 book DANSE MACABRE, concluding that what he and Coleridge called "disbelief" was more like "disengagement." 

Having made that fine point, though, I didn't follow through on the question of whether Stephen King's extrapolations from Coleridge re: the "muscular" nature of disbelief might apply equally to disengagement. Once more, just to keep track of what Coleridge originally said:

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. 

Again I note that Coleridge does not define what he means by "suspension," though he certainly doesn't use any of King's muscular metaphors. If anything, when he speaks of "transferring from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth" in order to overcome some state of "disbelief," it sounds more like he's saying that he the author has to "charm" the disbeliever into putting aside his disbelief in favor of "poetic faith." It's not impossible that, since he's comparing his "endeavors" to those of his partner-in-poesy Wordsworth in a general way, Samuel T. may be covertly implying that Wordsworth's more grounded ruminations aren't capable of delving into "our inward nature," that they are only capable of giving "the charm of novelty to the things of every day."

Though both Coleridge and Stephen King were somewhat at odds with literary trends toward naturalism in their respective times, the kind of literature that Coleridge above calls "romantic" had made a modest comeback, and this is at least part of the reason that later critics lumped Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others into the category called "Romantic poets." In contrast, both during King's youth and his writing career, the general consensus in American literary culture was that Naturalism had essentially won the battle against Romanticism. This culture might admit to the existence of a handful of post-Renaissance literary works worthy of being called "good literature." But most "romantic" works, particularly those that involved metaphenomenal fantasy-content, were considered trash, and they generally appeared in such trashy media as pulp magazines, comic books, and kiddie television. (Fantasy-films arguably gained a greater stature than fantasy-works in other media during Stephen King's youth, but the possible reasons for this would comprise a separate essay.)

King's statements in DANSE MACABRE and the essay "Why I Chose Batman" show that he was fully invested in fantasy-fandom, though he, like many fans, formed his own non-academic criteria for what was good and what was bad. Yet I suggest that he was always conscious of the scorn of majority culture for many if not all of the fantasy-stories he favored. I also suggest that King didn't really have much of a rebuttal to naturalism except the idea that one's imagination might possess something like "muscles" that fantasy-fans regularly exercised while realism-fans did not. It's a stimulating idea but does not really speak to a deeper issue. It's true that realism-fans may dislike metaphenomenal fiction because they think it important that all fiction should emulate "the things of every day." But I've pointed out that most fantasy-fans don't literally "believe" that the fantastic content in their favored stories is real. Rather, they choose to engage with such content for reasons of aesthetic taste, not cognitive assessment. 

I think that when Coleridge speaks of how "suspension of disbelief" can foster "poetic faith" by way of the aforementioned "inward truth," he's a lot closer to stating that the human psyche draws equally upon both "inward truth" and what might as well be called "outward truth." In the second part of 2022's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS, I related these categories to the Greek ideas of "the limitless and the limited."

I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation.

Since both categories have relevance to the human condition as a whole, it is not so much that "realism-fans" disbelieve in fantasy-content as they do not engage with it as strongly as they do with realism-content, and the reverse formula would apply to "fantasy-fans." And of course there are those who can engage strongly with works in either category. Though I have a fascination with the complicated dynamics of how fantasy-content is expressed, I appreciate the rigor of a well-conceived "realism-work."

My theory of aesthetic engagement also speaks to reader-preference in terms of the two major categories of the uncanny and the marvelous. Possibly for the last time, here's King's statement as to why he "chose" Batman over Superman.

I remember the ads for the first SUPERMAN movie...the ones that said YOU'LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY. Well, I didn't... But when Batman swung down into the Joker's hideout on a rope or stopped the Penguin from dropping Robin into a bucket of boiling hog-fat with a well-thrown Batarang, I believed. These were not likely things, I freely grant you that, but they were possible things.

I don't really credit that Young Stephen King liked these uncanny Bat-feats simply because they were more believable, and in part I dismiss this recollection because King had almost certainly allowed himself to "believe" in marvelous phenomena no more extraordinary than Superman in many other fantasy-works mentioned in DANSE MACABRE. I think the dynamic of the uncanny engaged him more than that did the dynamic of the marvelous, possibly because the former seemed to have a greater supply of what I've called "rigor." And given that King also WROTE quite a few stories with marvelous content-- some of which, rather improbably, tried to compete with the secondary-world mastery of J.R.R. Tolkien-- I think he could engage with the marvelous whenever he pleased, irrespective of his "belief" systems.

ADDENDUM: I may as well note that the reason I've gone so long about the use of the word "disbelief" is that I don't think anyone who knows what fiction is comes to it with the idea of "believing" in it, since the essence of fiction is that it is not factually true. One can accept a lot of fictional propositions and reject others, but always in the context of what I once called "relative meta-beliefs." Engagement or its lack, however, is crucial for anyone's appreciation of fictional narrative-- and it's anyone's guess whether I'll leave things at that pass for the near future.