Suspension of Disbelief
William Safire’s latest On Language article for the Sunday Times magazine takes a look at the meaning of the phrase “suspension of disbelief,” and how its usage has changed over the years. Lately, it’s been in vogue among the political set: Hillary Clinton said it would be required to believe General David Petraeus’ report on the progress of the war, Republican Mitt Romney in turn used it to question the validity of Clinton’s statement, and Senator John McCain used it as a noun, declaring that “It’s a willing suspension of disbelief that Senator Clinton thinks she knows more than General Petraeus.”
What’s all the hoopla about? And who, if anyone, used the phrase correctly? Safire first gives us a little history:
“The phrase ’suspension of disbelief ,’ ” noted the columnist Alan Nathan in The Washington Times, “is a literary term of art referring to one of Aristotle’s principles of theater in which the audience accepts fiction as reality so as to experience a catharsis, or a releasing of tensions to purify the soul.” He went on to characterize the general’s testimony as “more in keeping with Bertolt Brecht’s philosophy of Verfremdungseffekt, or distancing from that suspended belief, in order to maintain a clearheaded appreciation of the drama in focus.”
He then takes us from politics to poetics, pointing out that Coleridge and Wordsworth had plenty to say on the matter as well. Read the entire article here.
