The Suspension of Disbelief, Again

How does narrative fiction manage the unusual, the surprising, or the supernatural? For several hundred years, the common answer to this question has been variously known as fictionality, the suspension of disbelief, or ironic credulity. This essay begins with this most familiar description of literary art, which has helped to write a history of literature as a mode of secularism, allowing irrationality a certain amount of free play but without existential risk. Yet this mode no longer seems adequate to a contemporary world in which fake news, reality TV, and Instagram influencers trouble the very boundary between reality and fiction upon which the suspension of disbelief depends. The essay offers Kendrick Lamar's track “Real” (2012) as a work more suitable to our postfictional age. Lamar uses autobiography and family photographs, and especially voice recordings, to distinguish between the real and the scripts of authenticity with which he is surrounded. This use of the formal affordances of sound offers a model for the various experiments with reality that characterize the autofictional novel. One surprise of autofictional form is that its full immersion in the banalities of immanent life also licenses religious and theological speculation of a kind impossible in more traditional fiction. In dispensing with the distinction between author and narrator, person and character, novels by Sheila Heti, Teju Cole, and Karl Ove Knausgaard also dispense with the distinction between natural and supernatural. Belief and disbelief are categories with little purchase when the call from outside might come at any moment.