1 Allison Stinson Dr. Guenzel ENC 1102-0014 March 31, 2014 Fantasy vs.

Reality and Building Off Belief The industry of entertainment evolves from the basis of the Suspension of Disbelief and how that translates to the way we perceive story lines within literature. This term coined by philosopher Samuel T. Coleridge is what he defines as "poetic faith" or the idea that the reader would not judge the work based on any of its fantastical elements or realistic implausibility. Moreover, they suspend their disbelief that a plot element is unrealistic for the sake of the narrative. While the term was used to describe literature at the point of its conception, this ideal can also be translated to film and television. The dismissal of reality for the sake of fantasy in literature is the basis for analyzing narratives in such a way that facts and physics do not constrain the development of the story. The development of these constraints and freedoms within storytelling through the centuries as artistic movements have both refrained from or touched into the realm of fantasy. Starting at the beginning of western thought and philosophy, there is an Semergence of epic poems and plays portraying the cultures religious stories and mythologies. Take Greece for example, with many of its most famous works being from its history and stories that come from longstanding oral traditions such as the Odyssey which is attributed to Homer. (Foley) This Epic poem recounts the tale of Odysseus, King of Ithaca, and his journey at the end of the Trojan War back to his wife and homeland

2 which takes up to ten years. While away it is believed he has died, so men try to court his wife Penelope in order to become King, creating conflict between she and the suitors. This story while at its roots a tale of a man's homecoming from war, has many elements of fantasy, or at the time their core religion, including vengeful gods, a Cyclops, and singing sirens that wish to eat mens flesh. The question can then be raised, was the audience at that time suspending their disbelief that the story was a work of fantasy? To them it was history told generation to generation by storytellers through oral tradition. To these people it was very real. Researchers today believe that many of these stories would change to fit the area in which they were told so there were even changes amongst them based on region. (Foley) What may be myth to us may be seen as history to another, and that influences how we react. When the story is reimagined based on a new age there are changes based on the society of the time and how the plot must fit in a different culture. Taking a leap through time look at the 1800s and the Golden Age of romance novels, which defined by Pamela Regis in A Natural History of the Romance Novel as "a work of prose fiction that tells the story of a courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines". Books such as Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights all lie in this framework of Regis' definition of a romantic novel. In these stories there is a prevalence of the characters conforming to the demands of a restricting society but having love narratives that could be feasible, sometimes going so far as to criticize the society they are conforming to. Take Jane Austen's famous opening lines of Pride and Prejudice "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Of the society of the time this was a "truth" that was universally acknowledged because the man would want an heir to inherit his estate.

3 Romance, for which the novel is known for, was not even relevant to how marriage was arranged. In the novel when Jane is confronted with the proposal by Mr. Collins and subsequently denies him Robert Hume put it best by saying, If this were real life, she would be a reckless fool to turn him downnot only for her own sake, but to assure a decent future for her mother and sisters. In these types of narrative there is no need to suspend our disbelief on the premise of outlandish monsters or gods, but on the idea that it goes against that which is the norm for the time and embodies an ideal version of that reality. People suspend their disbelief not because something can not be real, but because it could be. Unfortunately, everything that could be real should not, such as murder. In the 1920s begins the age detective novels such as Agatha Christie writer of And Then There Were None and Murder on The Orient Express. Christie uses a method of distancing the reader from the fact that a person was just murdered and focuses on the puzzle of finding out who was the killer. The notion of concentrating on the puzzle solving aspect is "for people to sit back and discern patterns, both in real life and in fiction, they need to forget or at least diminish the role of the victims. They need to forget the ethical implications of the crimes and consider their aesthetic possibilities."(Baelo) This means the reader must sometimes take something real and ethically wrong, such as killing someone, and look at it from an amoral perspective in order to find the enjoyment in the chase. Baelo describes this as "the idea of considering brutal crimes as works of art from an aesthetic or disinterested amoral perspective." Instead of the fantasy elements of the Greeks or the wish fulfillment of the Romances, this is a genre in which the suspension of disbelief is used to distance the audience from the crime at hand. By both knowing that it is a work

4 of fiction and focusing on the problem solving aspects the reader can contrive enjoyment out of murder. The ideals of how and why these stories are viewed in such a way brings us back to Homer and The Odyssey. There are many rewordings of these epics into modern adaptations such as the Coen brother film O Brother Where Art Thou?. This adaptation based in the southern United States in the 1930's, takes major plot points from the epic poem.. Tracy Seeley says," While many borrowings seem mere fodder for jokes, more serious implications emerge in the film's comic distance from its original." This means that even though most of the stories plots are similar, the comedy and jokes presented in O Brother Where Art Thou? are able to create an aesthetic distance between the two novels. This distance gives it the ability to compare the works and the cultural implications associated with them. Both have mythologies to them, such as the Cyclops in The Odyssey being a mythological beast or the guitarist Tommy Johnson from O Brother Where Art Thou? selling his soul to the devil in order to be good at guitar. These concepts are both based in religious belief and can be written off as fictional in the stories, but to the religious practitioners is it real? The Cyclops in The Odyssey was the son of Poseidon who prayed for his father to curse Odysseus for making him blind, this being the reason the journey takes so long. Tommy Johnson was a real guitarist who lived in the 1920's and was rumored to have sold his soul which is where the movie gets it's material, but where does fantasy end and reality resume.(Koda) So even with all this time the same questions can be drawn from stories. Throughout the ages while stories keep getting more complex and the social issues keep changing, the belief or disbelief in the realities of fiction still remain. The

5 easier to spot fantasy elements can be ignored as something not real but still relevant to the advancement of the plot or the enjoyment of the audience. They know it is fictitious, but that does not constitute worthless. Romances and books that touch on real world relationships and are based within the spectrum of reality give to us the idea of wish fulfillment. These characters are idealized versions of reality that give to the reader a sense of wanting to be like them, have relationships like them, or simply be able to articulate like them. These characters are able to personify things we cannot, and live lives we only wish we had. But we can't get away with everything within the parameters of a realist perspective and that is when we have to distance ourselves from the work by knowing that it is not real. The suspension of Disbelief is not that cut and dry though, with many of these parameters bleeding into different genres and storylines. Suspending a readers Disbelief is not the same for everyone and what is real for one person is fake for someone else, but the argument isn't whether what they believe is correct, it's about how they perceive a work and how that can impact the ways we look at the world around us.

6 Works Cited Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Print. Baelo Allu, Sonia. "The Aesthetics Of Serial Killing: Working Against Ethics In The Silence Of The Lambs (1988) And American Psycho."Atlantis: Revista De La Asociacin Espaola De Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 24.2 (2002): 7-24. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 11 Feb. 2014.

Campbell, Teri. "'Not Handsome Enough': Faces, Pictures, And Language In Pride And Prejudice." Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 34.(2012): 207-221. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 11 Apr. 2014. Coleridge, Samuel T. "BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA CHAPTER XIV." BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. N.p.: n.p., 1817. N. pag. Biographia Literaria. Web. 31 Mar. 2014. <http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html>. Foley, John Miles. "Reading" Homer Through Oral Tradition." College Literature 34.2 (2007): 1-28. Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. Hume, Robert D. "Money In Jane Austen." Review Of English Studies 64.264 (2013): 289-310. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. Koda, Cub. "AllMusic." AllMusic. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Apr. 2014. <http://www.allmusic.com/artist/tommy-johnson-mn0000617492/biography>. "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190590/>.

"Rooting for Affairs: The Blurry Lines of Pop Culture Romance." Mockingbird. N.p., n.d. Web.11 Feb. 2014.<http://www.mbird.com/2013/05/pop-culture-affairs-andthe-search-for-love/>. Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P,2003. Seeley, Tracy. "O Brother, What Art Thou?: Postmodern Pranksterism, Or Parody With A Purpose?." Post Script: Essays In Film And The Humanities 27.2 (2008): 97106. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.