In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously coined the term “suspension of disbelief,” meaning a willingness to silence one’s critical faculties and believe in something purely conjectural for the sake of art. Since the publication of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, his provocative ideas about cognitive estrangement—and the claim that we can so easily abandon the rules that govern our minds and hearts—have become indispensible for our understanding of how we experience works of literature. For Coleridge, some degree of trust in the storyteller, and a willingness on the part of the reader to take risks, is essential for a work of literary art to fully realize its aesthetic potential, to convey its meaning, and to assert its effects on the spectator.
In two recent hybrid texts, Coleridge’s seminal writings on the “suspension of disbelief” are brought to bear on provocative and necessary sociopolitical questions. Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s dolefully, a rampart stands and Sara Veglahn’s The Ladies interrogate the structures of power that determine which narratives, and which storytellers, have the privilege of an unwavering trust, that startling absence of skepticism. In the work of these visionary writers, disbelief is revealed as a show of power and, more often than not, an all too familiar unwillingness to empower others.
Both Ackerson-Kiely and Veglahn share an investment in shining light on the politics implicit in disbelief, and examining its entrenched place in our culture as a tool of disempowerment. This impulse comes through most visibly in the relationship that these writers create between the text and its audience. As their work unfolds, they confront a kind of readerly disbelief, that tacit assumption that female practitioners will be rewarded for certain types of narratives, those stories of love, distress, and triumph that are familiar and culturally legible, while other narratives—and modes of narration—are supposedly suspect. As Ackerson-Kiely herself writes, “I wrote a victim impact statement the way I’d want to hear it.”
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Ackerson-Kiely’s dolefully, a rampart stands sketches a landscape in which sexism and economic oppression are indelibly linked. Though her gorgeously rendered lines are filled with female speakers and women characters, the narratives themselves are marked by a striking contentiousness, as Ackerson-Kiely evokes the ways culture divides individuals from historically marginalized groups against themselves, if only to prevent them from rising up.
Ackerson-Kiely reveals the ways that power, censorship, and disbelief are internalized, as they live with us in our most solitary moments, and they circumscribe what is possible within our dreaming. In doing so, she challenges many of the myths of a shared feminist consciousness. For instance, she writes in “Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed,”
I don’t mention the dreams: Roadkill comes back to life, the answers I don’t have but am asked for by an angry mob. What we do with details is not unlike touching a thing that doesn’t want to be touched, a thing that would wheel around and bite the hand if only it could. The part of hunger we deserve.
The speaker, whose community has borne witness to so much violence, ultimately resists the invitation to narrate it in her own voice, preferring instead the “crackle and splinter” of a distant radio. The disbelief that inhabits this fictive town has been gradually internalized, becoming a deep silence, not unlike the “river that moves a body toward its banks.”
In Ackerson-Kiely’s presentation, this silence and self-censorship arises from an abiding suspicion surrounding women’s voices, and stories that fail to adhere to familiar ideas how a life unfolds. In this fictive terrain, master narratives like these are as subtle as they are pervasive. “I know what you’re thinking right now,” Ackerson-Kiely writes in “Laconia,” “It’s true she took her first job after high school. What can you do.” Here, and the throughout the book, she reacts against the assumptions that the reader likely brings to the poem, their belief that they can situate images, archetypes, and symbols within a framework culled from a shared cultural memory. Though acknowledging the familiar features of the story, Ackerson-Kiely does not want us to limit what is possible within it. “You were given everything,” she tells the reader in “Meadow Redaction.” Now they will learn be a good steward of the gift.
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Veglahn’s The Ladies continues this interrogation of disbelief and its implicit power dynamics. She shows us, subtly and skillfully, that the boundaries between self and other, and the perceived ownership of language and narrative, are often a precondition for readerly belief. Presented as a polyphonic text, in which a mysterious “we” plans, documents, and sings a revolution into being, the story takes as one of its central questions the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Within Veglahn’s richly imagined text, the women’s voices that comprise the chorus, the luminous “us” that populates these discrete prose episodes, never break away from the group. As the story unfolds, one begins to wonder whether they are encountering a multitude, or a self that contains within it multitudes. Like Ackerson-Kiely, Veglahn gestures at the ways shared culture, and its implicit power dynamics, give rise to a consciousness that is, at its core, divided.
Veglahn writes,
In the chapels. In the cathedrals. In the small country churches. In the basements of churches. In their rooms in the dark. In their kitchens. In their doorways and hallways. Inside our heads. In our minds, they spoke. They spoke through us. We do not know how to explain this. It was not like voices. It was not like thought.
Here Veglahn confronts and reacts against the readerly assumption of a unified self, a self that can claim ownership over his or her place in language. She resists this kind of textual ownership as a precondition for belief, that willing suspension of skepticism. “Inside our chests something was burning,” Veglahn tells us, “We couldn’t identify what it was. We couldn’t get it out.” Like Ackerson-Kiely, Veglahn makes the reader suddenly and startlingly aware of the limitations they places on language before it has a chance to unfold before them. For both Ackerson-Kiely and Veglahn, it is the master narrative, that “small container,” that limits the possibilities for belief, trust, and the creation of community.
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If univocal utterance is a precondition for readerly belief, then what of the storyteller that contains within her the world? How do we create fictions when our voices have been halved by a flawed culture, its abuses of power, and their inevitable internalization? For Veglahn and Ackerson-Kiely, seeing, and fully acknowledging, these rifts and fissures is a first step toward change. These gifted writers, through their experimentation with poetic voice and readerly participation, remind us that a leap of faith can open up rooms within what we once thought was a single room—a chapel of light that has been there all along.