Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief by Tomko Michael

Author:Tomko, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780935928
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

The willing resumption of disbelief

This inquiry into the “willing suspension of disbelief” as a persistent critical category began with justified ambivalence over literature’s capacity for psychagogia, or the quasi-magical guidance of souls and spirits associated with Prospero. On the one hand, the books of the wizard presented a threat, a power to overawe an individual’s autonomy before the grandiloquent reanimating words of an Ozymandias or the pyrotechnical advertising of an Oz. On the other hand, such spells also presented a singular chance for something more, a uniquely unexpected opening into personal transformation and communal formation sketched in Gandalf’s strokes upon the door of the barrenly bourgeois and comfortably cul-de-sac-ed Bilbo. The difficulty for literary theory was that an absorptive openness to the catalytic power of literature exposed a reader to the imperiousness of a misleading ideologue, but a critical vantage that removed such vulnerability also dissolved the necessary illusions that promised human goods available through art. The “willing suspension of disbelief” has consistently, and most recently in New Historicist theory, attempted to bridge this gulf by offering an engaged aesthetic experience, but one safely curtailed by a guarded gaze that “goes along” with aesthetic tolerance. Yet critics such as Susannah Monta as well as writers such as Wendell Berry and J. R. R. Tolkien have seen this interpretation of Coleridge’s concept as a middling compromise that is unsatisfactory on all fronts, a static dual double negative that neither liberates nor enchants. The previous chapter proposed that taking Coleridge’s theological terminology seriously, rather than vestigially, suggests that the “willing suspension of disbelief” should yield to “poetic faith,” a more robust but still reasonable investment in the aesthetic encounter that potentially provides a way beyond the seeming ultimatum presented by the polarizing Prospero.

While The Tempest’s interdependent epilogue illustrated the potential of such committed and insightful “poetic faith” in the preceding chapter, Berry has offered an even more expansive example in The Unsettling of America (1977), his wide-ranging political, agricultural, sociological, and anthropological exploration of modern sadness, aggression, despair, and cupidity in the United States. Witnessing to art’s role in mitigating problems that are as much existential as ecological, he turns to an episode of King Lear in which the exiled, but loyal son, Edgar, comes to the aid of his father, the once hubristic and naïve Earl of Gloucester, whose eyes have been gouged out by the ruthless regime supported by his duplicitous son, Edmund (IV.i, vi). Playing a “madman and beggar” (IV.i.30), Edgar pretends to lead the suicidal Gloucester over the cliffs of Dover, but then, following a staged drop of only a foot or two, switches roles to a passerby who guides his fallen father’s interpretation of the simulated event. “Thy life’s a miracle,” he assures the stunned nobleman (IV.vi.55). Playing this new character, Edgar explains that the supposed madman on the edge above had been an evil spirit, “some fiend” with a “thousand noses,” and that Gloucester should turn to “free and patient thoughts” after the “clearest gods” had saved his life from the bad spirit and the lethal plunge (IV.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.