January 8, 2007
Section II: Chapter Breakdown, Chapter 3
The Unwilling Suspension of Belief
Chapter 3's focus is on Waugh's semiotic metafictions and on the narrative equivalent of Mitchell's multistable images. Between these two ideas—metafictional addresses to the most basic problems of signification, and representations that insist on being two things—we find the aforementioned concept of the unwilling suspension of belief. The moment that art, ostensibly a collection of signifiers that has the capacity to inspire an intellectual and/or emotional reaction, starts to talk about signification itself, the audience is forced to set aside its habitual suspension of disbelief and look at the object anew, as a construct. Similarly, an artistic representation that refuses to occupy just one state, as it should by all real-world logic, forces the audience to acknowledge that the medium—fiction, pictures, or something else—does not obey real-world logic. Once again, the habitual suspension of disbelief, in which state the audience accepts the art's depictions as "real," must be set aside in favour of regarding the art as a construct. As Waugh puts it, “The effect of [metafiction], instead of reinforcing our sense of a continuous reality, is to split it open, to expose the levels of illusion. We are forced to recall that our ‘real’ world can never be the ‘real’ world of the novel” (33). The metacomics with which this chapter is concerned direct the audience’s attention back at the disbelief that that audience has left suspended in mid-air. They require that the audience embraces its belief, no matter how unwillingly, in order to make sense of the narrative.
Promethea constantly reminds the audience that it is reading and looking at a comicbook. The series employs narrative, ideological, and visual cues; in Promethea’s cosmology, for example, the closer one gets to perceiving the ‘true’ shape of the universe, in spiritual and metaphysical terms, the more the art becomes photographic, until half an issue consists of photo novella panels (Promethea 7.12-13). During the ‘end of the world’ arc, at the end of the series, confused perceptions manifest as collage (Promethea 28.1.1):
While burgeoning enlightenment reveals the construct of the two-dimensional, comicbook page (Promethea 28.10-11).
Though sometimes expressed in Waugh's structural terms, Promethea constantly discusses how signification, representation, and language function within Moore's very language-oriented, epistemological system, which he simply calls 'magic.'
Gaiman and Ellis feature less prominently in this chapter, because their metacomical commentaries tend towards the structural rather than the semiotic. However, the central paradox of Sandman is the nature of the Endless, themselves. Most coherently described as "ideas cloaked in a semblance of flesh" (Seasons of Mist 22.2), they insist on being regarded as both/and, walking concepts and fully-formed (if fictional) characters. To know Dream, the protagonist, the audience employs its willing suspension of disbelief, but in that process, it learns that he is a construct, a representation, and thus is forced to unwillingly suspend belief, as well. In knowing the character as a construct, the audience paradoxically develops an emotional tie to him as a character, which requires rapid, almost constant, shifts from suspending disbelief to suspending belief.
Ellis and Cassaday's Planetary, though also mostly a structural metacomic, posits the creation of the Wildstorm multiverse (the setting of the book) as the result of a later event within that multiverse, which is a paradox that can exist within narrative logic, but not chronological or spatial logic. Science-fiction audiences are not unaccustomed to accepting these kinds of paradoxes, though, so suspension of belief might not be inspired by this plot device, but the specifics details reveal a layer of commentary "at the level of the sign," as it were. The multiverse is brought into existence as a result of turning on a computer, or "Mechanical Brain" (Planetary 1.16.3), that operates in 196,833 states, rather than the simple two-state computers of the real world ('1' or '0'). In this moment, a computer code, a language, speaks the universe into being. This technofetishistic creation myth of the Wildstorm universe goes a long way towards justifying a running plot device, the so-called "Century Babies," a group of superhuman individuals, all born on January 1st, 1900, and who seem to have predestined roles in the larger Wildstorm narrative. The Electronic Brain is more of a fictional/magical device than a scientific one. It runs on a poetic notion of doubling and mirroring, rather than a hard-scientific principle. It should be remembered, here, that Ellis is no technophobe. If books like The Ministry of Space and Orbiter are any indication, he is quite well informed of the basics of science and electronics. The Electronic Brain does not run on those principles, and therefore it creates a multiverse that runs on associations and relationships, which are magical or narrative ideas. It is a synecdoche for the Wildstorm multiverse.
Posted by orion at January 8, 2007 5:54 PM