Anne McCarthy

“That Willing Suspension”: Nineteenth-Century Poetics and Kant’s Sublime Projection

Writing in volume 2 of the Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge claims that his poetry of the supernatural was composed so as to produce “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes poetic faith.” Taking this well-known formulation as a starting point, my paper outlines a framework for a broader poetics of suspension within nineteenth century literature. Coleridgean suspension of disbelief—and suspension more generally—should be understood in terms of Kant’s discussion of the dynamical sublime in the Critique of Judgment. The sublimity of this confrontation with overwhelming depends on an act of mental projection that allows the subject to feel itself to be absolutely at risk while it remains within a “safe place.” This double motion comes to characterize the  suspension of disbelief as well, making it much more than what one scholar has described as “the happy relinquishment of the reality principle.” More than just a pause among others, suspension consists in a dual motion of withholding and giving-over, opening a space of possibility and uncertainty that is not always easily recovered into a narrative or other determinative process. Suspension, understood in a general sense, holds in abeyance what seems to be natural or inevitable: the rush to judgment, the machinations of law, the teleological progression of plot. As such, it is both liberating and potentially destructive, unsettling seemingly secure modes of signification. The conclusion of this paper gestures towards the implications of suspension in later nineteenth-century work, particularly the generic and epistemological experiments of Victorian poets.

 

Anne McCarthy is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is at work on her dissertation, “Left Hanging: Suspension and Epistemology in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry.” Portions of her chapter on Tennyson’s Maud will appear inVictorian Poetry later this year. She is also a part-time instructor in the First-Year Writing Program at The New School’s Eugene Lang College. 

(She assumes, perhaps erroneously, that Mia will catch and correct any egregious lapses of grammatical judgment in the above.)