Split Personality?

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

littlemanpoet .... since this has come up before and now you are utilizing the concept again here, I wonder if you could explain (perhaps again) what the serious differences are between 'willing suspension of disbelief' and 'secondary belief'. I read your information when you directed it to my posts a week or two ago and did not see much difference.

I will try with an example.

I just finished reading the final Harry Potter novel (I'll give nothing away here). While reading it, I never came across anything that didn't fit the logic of the story and world. That is to say, I was in the milieu and the story never set anything up that contradicted the milieu. Rowling was quite consistent from beginning to end of the entire project, as far as I can tell. Her ability to do this was an achievement that Tolkien, in On Faerie Stories (a very important essay about writing myth and fantasy that ought to be read by anyone who wants to discuss such things), denoted as successfully subcreating a secondary world; the proof of her success is that it engenders Secondary Belief in her readers. If, at any point, Rowling had written anything in her story such that, say, Newtonian Physics overruled wandlore, it would have contradicted the entire milieu and the "spell" of Secondary Belief would have been broken. At this point I would have had to choose to adopt Suspension of Disbelief in order to overlook the contradiction and try to re-enter the milieu.

In the first case, there is an organic belief occurring such that the reader and writer are more or less communicating mind-to-mind, as it were. In the second, the organic connection has been broken, and the reader must make a conscious effort of the will to make work of interacting with the "breached edifice", trying to ignore the breach.

Are you saying that anyone with negative feelings about LOTR after reading it has these feelings purely because they refuse to understand? That seems like a real Catch-22 situation which attempts to paint with a very wide (an unsympathetic brush) anyone who has read LOTR but does not care for it.

Sorry, I was referring without naming to a specific school of thought, often called on these "the literati", who confronted Tolkien upon the original publication of the works. They did and still do look down their noses at fantasy and myth as not worthy of their consideration as serious literature, because it does not fit the rules they believe every work of literature ought to follow, by which they mean the modern novel with its flawed characters, relative morality, in-the-head characterization, etc. Be sure that I'm not condemning the modern novel; what I don't appreciate is the out of hand rejection of myth and fantasy because the literati refuse to countenance it, demanding it to fit their own terms.

I can see from what I've just written that you would criticize me of doing the same thing to Jackson's movies as opposed to Tolkien's books. But there is a seminal difference: Tolkien didn't buy the rights to Hemingway, for example, in order to write LotR.

Is it not possible that a reader can swallow the entire concept and suspend their disbelief but still walk away with these negative feelings?

One would be foolish to deny such a possibility.

Is it your opinion that there are no such internal logic problems of any kind in the books?

Yes. Being an opinion, it could be wrong, but I don't think so.