I’m looking for a word/concept that describes a certain style of reading.
When I was younger, I used to have a very belief-centric approach to reading. Back then, my goal was to put myself in a headspace where the events of the book felt 100% real. Suspension of disbelief was essential. If I couldn’t forget/ignore the implausible aspects of a story, then I couldn’t “believe” the story, and therefore I couldn’t enjoy it. A single plot hole was enough to ruin a book. Everything had to be consistent. Everything had to withstand Neil deGrasse Tyson levels of pedantry.
These days, I have a completely different attitude. Even when I’m reading so-called realistic fiction, I’m keenly aware of the fact that everything in the book is a contrivance, that it’s all just words on a page. I don’t even bother trying to suspend disbelief anymore. My younger self would be shocked, but this hasn’t impacted my ability to get immersed in a story. It still feels like the events of the story are experientially real in the sense that I can see/experience them “happening” almost as if I was there. I just don’t believe any of it. One consequence of this is that I don’t care about plot holes anymore. When I notice “mistakes,” my brain responds with some version of “well, what do you expect, it’s fiction” and then I just keep enjoying the story. It’s a bit like lucid dreaming: you know it’s a dream, but you still experience it.
Is there a word for this second style of reading? I really want a short and easy way to explain to people what I mean, but I can’t find anything about it online. When I try googling it, I just get lots of articles talking about how suspension of disbelief is essential, and how unrealistic or inconsistent writing is inherently bad.
The only time I’ve heard anyone talk about this is in an interview where [David Foster Wallace talked about postmodernism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfjjSj9coA0&t=1936s):
> But I also think that as I’ve gotten older, one of the things I’ve been able to see is that some of the quote-unquote postmodernists, you know from really Nabokov on down, one of the reasons that they’re magical and that they’re giants is that they’re not only doing really smart, cool stuff, they’ve actually got characters who are absolutely alive, in 3D, and in whom I’m able to invest emotion, without any of the regular tricks (and they are tricks) of classic realism. And probably everybody else knew this, but it didn’t occur to me for a long time that postmodernism wasn’t cool because it was like “Look! Here’s all these games we could play”. It’s like, look, here are certain games we can play that are actually going to do the most fatal thing. It’s going to remind you that you’re reading words on a page, and we can still knock your damn socks off. Right? We can still have you cry at the end, or feel suspense, or whatever. It would be embarrassing to admit to you how old I was before I finally kind of got that.
This seems like such a basic thing that it should have a name, but I can’t for the life of me find it. The condescending part of me wants to call it “reading like an adult,” but I know for a fact that a lot of adults don’t read like this…
by pseudoLit
2 Comments
Conscious immersion? You choose to immerse yourself in a fantastical world.
Almost sounds like you’ve gotten _better_ at suspension of disbelief as you’ve aged. You have learned to not let unbelievable aspects of the story completely pull you out of it, like you did when you were a kid.