by Donna
The other day I did a book talk to a fairly erudite group, and the conversation turned to the subject of Cabot Cove Syndrome--the way everyone who came into Jessica Fletcher's life exited, sooner or later, either feet first or in handcuffs, Some people think that’s an insurmountable problem for mysteries with an amateur sleuth. How many murders can you plausibly believe that one person can encounter? How many dead bodies can our protagonists find? How can we expect our readers to buy this implausibility book after book?
Easy, I said. Willing suspension of disbelief.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (of
Rime of the Ancient Mariner fame) first used the phrase in 1817, in his
Biographia Literaria. The Age of Reason had made writing about the supernatural out of fashion, and yet Coleridge felt it was still possible to write about " 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."
To put it in more modern terms, to enjoy a work of fiction you may be required to accept a premise that you wouldn't believe in the real world.
Willing suspension of disbelief is vital to the enjoyment of any stage, screen or television production. We know the people we see are actors, the daggers plastic and the blood only fake. People don't really live out their lives before cameras or rows of rapt spectators. Greeks were rarely followed around by choruses commenting on their lives. Shakespeare's audience knew no real people who spoke in blank verse, yet that didn't their enjoyment of his plays.
Suspending disbelief is obviously needed to enjoy fantasy or science fiction. You don't have to believe in the existence of magic to enjoy reading the Harry Potter books. I don't know how many of Charlaine Harris's devoted readers hold it as an article of faith that vampires actually exist, but I'm sure it falls well short of 100%.
Star Trek and
Star Wars offer two very different views of the future of the galaxy, and yet many fans happily enjoy both without being upset by the discrepancies between the two universes. Alternate history is a popular sub-genre, and part of its charm is knowing how things turned out in the real world and putting that knowledge aside to allow the author to entertain and enlighten with a series of ingenious "what ifs."
Perhaps "what if" is just another word for suspension of disbelief. Forget what really happened. What if this happened? It's the basis for all fiction. And perhaps enjoying any work of fiction requires some suspension of disbelief. Letting go, immersing yourself in another time, another place, or even another view of life completely different from your own--that's one of the challenges and also one of the joys of reading fiction.
I would try to say something eloquent about people who avoid whole provinces of the literary world--fantasy, science fiction, romance, or amateur sleuth mysteries--because they find them unrealistic. But it's getting late in the day, and I'm already late posting this, so I'll simply mention that recently I've been rereading a great many of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. Wolfe isn't precisely an amateur sleuth, but very few real life private detectives spend even a fraction of their careers investigating murders. And I wouldn't call Wolfe's world unrealistic, but I doubt if anyone, no matter how much of a genius he is, would ever get away with running roughshod over the NYPD Homicide Bureau as he does. In fact, everything about Nero Wolfe comes perilously close to being over the top, larger than life, and almost too much to believe. And throughout the thirty-year life of the series, none of Stout's characters ever seem to age a day.
When asked about the last point, Stout said, "Those stories have ignored time for thirty-nine years. Any reader who can't or won't do the same should skip them."
Of course, anyone who did so would be missing some of the best reading in mystery fiction. Here's a belated thanks to Jim Huang and his fellow organizers of Bouchercon 2009, who declared
Some Buried Caesar the official "one convention, one book" selection, and reminded me that it had been too long since I'd paid a visit to West Thirty-Fifth Street.
And now I'm going to curl up with
And Four to Go. Anyone else ready for a little eager suspension of disbelief?
Or perhaps, culling another phrase from Coleridge, a little poetic faith.