HAROLD ROSENBE.R6
phrase about poetry inducing a "suspension of disbelief" need
only be given its socio-political dimension and it becomes a fonn–
ula for the service rendered by art to holders of social power.
If
it weren't for art, men's disbelief would not be suspended. Would
not curiosity press them then to chase after the hidden truth?
Form, beauty, calls off the hunt by justifying, through the mul–
tiple feelings it arouses, the not-quite-real as humanly sufficient.
Thou, silent
fOIm!
dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity.
Wasn't it in Richard's discussion of Keats' drugged lines about
beauty being truth, truth beauty, in which the poet so perfectly
draws the curtain of ecstasy over
his
vision of painful fact, that
"suspension of disbelief" first entered the contemporary vocabu–
lary of literary criticism?
Plato's
Republic,
which was organized "transparently," and
hence had no disbeliefs to suspend, banished the
poet.
Actual
states tolerate him, not because their rulers are more sympathetic
than Plato's sages to the semi-stupors of creation but because no
historical community has ever so totally perfected its means of
coercion (its "order") that it could dispense with the pacifying
influence of dreams reflected in broad daylight from one art to
another. In the past, governments took for granted the cultural
Chinese walls which the arts built .around them; today, the cost
of reinforcing these walls against the siege of rival concepts
is
included in every defense budget.
2
Considering the function of the arts in transferring
~to
familiar experience the hallucinations bred
in
the centers of
authority, one might decide that the
arts
are by nature reaction-
2. Note to ideology-enders.
In the war of ideologies, history grows more and
more talkative, i.e., rhetorical, which means that image assaults image,
until all have lost their sacredness and 'none inspires a defense to the
death. Thus ideological conflict, which promotes rather than suspend•
. disbelief, is the only kind of conflict among great powers in which hope
can exist for a non-violent resolution.
