THE CITY

The City
watches the game in a state of full secondary belief; he urges on the
players, shouts at the referee, and is plunged into joy or gloom by the
events he sees on the screen. The same degree of involvement is not felt by
his neighbor, who simply wishes to be sociable. He must take an interest
in the game or else it will be a rather dull evening, even if there are good
snacks, and so he cheers for his chosen team willingly enough. However,
in so doing he has merely ‘suspended his disbelief ’: which, as Tolkien puts
it, “is a substitute for the genuine thing.” 10 Insofar as he enjoys himself, he
enjoys the camaraderie for which the game is the excuse rather than the
game itself, and he is unlikely to watch other games on his own initiative.
So, too, with fantasy novels. The full, immersive experience of readers in
a work of fantasy literature is much more than ‘suspension of disbelief.’ A
reader who is self-consciously aware of the artificiality of the secondary
world may play along with the author, as it were, but such an effort would
indicate that ‘secondary belief ’ never came fully into effect at all.
To be sure, the reader’s intention, interests, and prior experiences
have an effect on the formation of secondary belief; some readers are
much more readily drawn into the secondary worlds of fiction, just as
some authors are particularly skilled at exciting secondary belief in even
reluctant visitors to their literary world. The production of secondary
belief is, of course, not limited to fantasy; it is a feature of other genres
as well, including the realistic novel. While we are reading Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice, we feel that Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are real
people in a real world.
What, then, makes fantasy different from other genres? For one thing,
fantasy can operate more freely than realistic fiction, since the author is
not limited to writing about things that exist or could exist in the Primary
World. This creative freedom is a two-edged sword: it helps the fantasist
to achieve what Tolkien views as the necessary quality of “strangeness and
wonder”, 11 but it also makes it more challenging to achieve the equally
necessary “inner consistency of reality” 12 for the imagined world. Tolkien
goes on to say:
Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say
the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is
not enough... To make a Secondary World inside which the green
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., 59.
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