The ground is never entirely dry. Fine trails of moisture seep between the slabs, nourished by constant condensation; the air saturated with sea spray liquefies upon contact with the rocks, cooler during the night. This phenomenon favors an almost invisible microfauna… fortunately for Lucian… He does not see the translucent woodlice, the ash-brown crawling insects, the beetles whose striated elytra resemble sculpted cinders observing him. He, gazing into the far distance, walks in the footsteps of the Moon Child and Don Carotte. He advances courageously along a path that gives him a slight vertigo, and he does not truly know where he places his feet. Certainly, he has been prepared by what he has seen and read… it is willingly… and temporarily… that he has suspended his disbelief… but what he perceives exceeds him somewhat and causes him to shiver slightly. The surrounding sea and sky possess a mineral blue, often crossed by pink and mauve streaks, residues of recent flows of ash and suspended gases, or fragrant currents of organic debris. In places, the water literally boils, stirred by submarine geothermal activity; abnormally high temperatures are measured there, and at times sudden bubbles appear, steaming islets, or strange convolutions that seem to him distinctly alive.
The expression “the suspension of disbelief” is generally attributed to the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who employed it at the beginning of the nineteenth century, notably in Biographia Literaria (1817). The complete formula is famous: he speaks of a “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.”
The context is important. Coleridge seeks to understand why we can be moved by things we know to be fictional. Why do we weep before a character who does not exist? Why do we believe, during reading, in specters, prophecies, metamorphoses, impossible worlds? Why do Don Quixote, Hamlet, Pinocchio, or Kafka truly act upon us even though we know they are not “real” in the ordinary sense?
Coleridge’s answer is subtle: the reader does not believe naively. He temporarily agrees to suspend his demand for rational verification. He enters into a kind of pact. Not a pact of absolute credulity, but a bracketing of immediate doubt.
The word suspension is essential here. For it does not mean the destruction of doubt. Doubt remains, suspended like a bridge over emptiness, like a held breath. The spectator both knows and does not know at once. He inhabits an in-between.
And this in-between is profoundly linked to theater, ritual, the mask, even the circus itself. When the circus is erected, no one ignores that it is a temporary construction. Yet, as soon as the lights come on, something changes. Ordinary laws seem slightly displaced. The acrobat becomes almost a being defying gravity; the clown appears to come from another world; the animal trainer converses with archaic forces. The spectator accepts this temporary modification of reality.
It is therefore not simply a matter of “believing in an illusion.” On the contrary, the suspension of disbelief often reveals a truth deeper than simple material observation. A child speaking to a puppet knows it is made of wood; yet something truly speaks through it. Greek theater, myths, religious icons, novels, the drawings of the Moon Child function in this way: they open a space where reality ceases to be reduced to the merely factual.
That is why this notion resonates so strongly with the narrative universe of Lucian, Félix, or Igniatius: the drawings act precisely because they are situated within this suspended zone. No one can say with certainty: “this is only a drawing.” Something is there insisting behind the image. Something speaks. Not as proof, but as presence.
And perhaps this is the deepest point of the suspension of disbelief: it does not consist in abandoning truth, but in accepting that another form of truth may appear when immediate rational surveillance relaxes slightly.
In a certain way, the Moon Child lives entirely within this suspension. His great hat covering his eyes acts almost like a symbolic device: it reduces the domination of ordinary visibility so that something else may appear. He does not look upon the world as a stable object to verify. He inhabits it as a continuous apparition.
There is also a discreet connection with the vertigo spoken of by Camille de Toledo. The sapiens narrans is a being who inhabits narratives; but the suspension of disbelief describes the intimate mechanism that makes such inhabitation possible. We collectively accept entering symbolic worlds: nations, religions, money, family stories, ideologies, memories, characters. An entire society perhaps rests upon organized forms of shared suspension.
This also explains why the rupture of this suspension often produces a very particular shock. When a poor actor performs falsely, when a special effect fails, when a line sounds artificial, “the spell is broken.” This popular expression is remarkably precise. The spell designates precisely that intermediate state where the mind consents to remain open to an uncertain presence.
In Maurice Blanchot, in Franz Kafka, even in Henri Maldiney, this suspension becomes almost a fundamental structure of artistic experience. The work opens a breach where habitual categories momentarily cease to reign sovereign. The reader remains upon a threshold. He advances without complete guarantee. He consents to being displaced.
And perhaps that is, ultimately, what distinguishes living fiction from simple falsehood. Falsehood seeks to make one believe definitively. Fiction, by contrast, keeps open the consciousness of the threshold. It knows itself to be passage. It does not entirely conceal its constructed nature, and it transforms that very fragility into a power of appearance.
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