Verisimilitude of the Author in Fiction
Samuel Coleridge once observed that when writing fiction, the author needed “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” [Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817, Chapter XIV] Once this is accomplished, the reader has the advantage of immersing her/himself in the fictional story that s/he supposed, for the moment, to be the truth. Many successful authors resort to rather extreme artifices to accomplish this. Women historically resorted to pen names as did men at times to add stature to the author’s persona.
But authors have gone much further than this to attain credibility and provide a sense of verisimilitude. In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the author opens her story with an introduction, which consists of a tall tale of a visit in the year 1818 to the Sybil’s Cumaean cavern near Naples on the coast of southern Italy. There she describes locating a forbidden passageway and discovering the Sybil’s hideaway, and even more importantly, an ancient text written on leaves. Her story is then supposed to be a translation of the actual text written by the Sybil concerning events thought through prophecy to occur in the year 2073. She and Percy Shelley did visit the ancient site at the time she noted, but she fictionalized the finding of the ancient text, or so we believe. This mingling of personal experience with crucial fictional elements serves to provide the reader with a means whereby to accomplish Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” Mary’s is an apocalyptic novel detailing the end of the human race.
One might be led to believe that such authorial shenanigans are unethical and wouldn’t be tolerated by major publishing houses today. However, one has but to read the wildly popular Illusions and The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach to realize that publishing suffers from no such moral dilemmas. Many of Richard Bach’s books contain a mingling of personal experience and fictional elements so cleverly disguised that where truth leaves off and fairytale begins is not easily discerned.
Another example is the over-the-top popular The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. This smallish novel starts of with a chapter titled “The Beginning,” which is a fictional account presented as fact of a meeting by the author with the children of a middle-aged couple who supposedly had an affair back in the 1960s. The rest of the novel is an account of the extra-marital indiscretion. The man involved in the illicit affair was supposed to have been a National Geographic photographer. So taken were some readers by the seeming-reality of the story, that many enquired of National Geographic magazine concerning in which issues they might locate this character’s photographs. Of course, the story and its characters are entirely fictional, but the popularity of the novel illustrates how important verisimilitude in fact is.
So then we come to me as an author, and the lengths I’ve gone to creating this poetic faith involved in the suspension of disbelief. I have for the past year or so been involved in an experimental project concerning writing fiction under the influence of the psychologist Carl Jung’s psychic process called Active Imagination. Although Jung envisioned this process to be used for therapeutic purposes, I’ve adapted it to writing fiction. Specifically, I’ve used it almost exclusively to write a vampire novel. [See the Iris of Time.] No, I haven’t pretended that the vampire world I’ve created is a part of this reality; however, I have taken some liberties with the origin of the story. I’ve assumed a persona, what would be called a pen name in some writing circles. But I’ve gone them one or two better. I’ve written a biography for my fictional author, given her a blog, and had her blog about her life in the real world, and I’ve created this fictional author-material also using Active Imagination. It’s another fictional element that separates the reader from the author. I’ve stepped back and removed the appearance of myself totally from the work. This young fictional woman’s life is as much of interest to me as is her novel. I’m assuming no one has an interest in a vampire novel written by an old man of seventy from America, but they just might have an interest in one written by a nineteen-year-old girl from Romania.
But let me add another reality twist to this picture that won’t occur to most people. To practice Jung’s Active Imagination, I first clear off a part of psychic space and wait for images or voices to spontaneously appear. I do this mostly at night, in the dark, writing on a notebook computer with its screen and keyboard light turned off. The practitioner of Active Imagination then engages in conversation the psychic personages who spontaneously come forward. For me, this means that I have my surrogate author come to me and tell the story. I but take dictation. Some professional Jungians will tell you that the personages met in psychic space during Active Imagination are as real in that world as we are in this, that the process involves the complexities of the soul. This then makes the author of the vampire novel a real entity and not a fictional presence. Other Jungians might say that this is no different that what actually happens when any author writes a “fictional” story. It all comes from a place Jung called the Collective Unconscious. Accordingly, terming such a story “fiction” is denigrating and not an accurate portrayal of what takes place during the creative process.
Am I channeling a nineteen-year-old girl from Romania? Absolutely not. Am I channeling a psychic presence that wraps the storytelling material in a cloak that represents such a young psychic presence? Of course.
