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Chapter 2 Suspended Animation and the Poetics of Trance There is an interval . . . of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis . . . Experienced interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at this moment the source is far more open to suggestion. Central Intelligence Agency, quoted in Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 16 I think I’ll will my heirs to revive me one day a century. That way I can observe the fate of all mankind. Dick, Ubik, 6 Among the more enduring legacies of Romantic-era literary criticism is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s suggestion that literary works demand from readers a “willing suspension of disbelief.” Coleridge employed this phrase in his famous discussion of the reception of poetry, recalling in Biographia Literaria (1817) that his contribution to the coauthored Lyrical Ballads (1798) was to describe “persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic” such that readers would be encouraged “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.”1 Since the Romantic era, the concept of “willing suspension of disbelief” has been applied to the reception of various artistic media, leading Thomas McFarland to describe Coleridge’s phrase as “undoubtedly the single most famous critical formulation in all of English literature.”2 Though “disbelief” is the most well-known object of Coleridge’s thoughts on suspension, he was equally interested in another modality of abeyance, suspended animation. “Suspended animation” emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth century around the efforts of the newly founded Royal Humane Society to con- 44 experimental life vince lay and medical readers that individuals who had apparently drowned might still be alive, albeit in states of “suspended animation” (a state that we would now likely describe as a coma). The phrase was quickly taken up by medical and literary authors. Coleridge, for example, used the concept to describe processes associated with literary production and reception: in the introduction to Christabel (1816), he excused his lack of literary productivity with the claim that his “poetic powers [had] been, till very lately, in a state of suspended animation” (v), while elsewhere, he contended that some forms of mass print media induced a “morbid Trance, or ‘suspended Animation’” in readers.3 Mary Shelley drew implicitly upon the concept in Frankenstein (1818), in which she described her creature’s efforts to “restore animation” (165) to a small girl who had apparently drowned in a river and made explicit use of the term in “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman,” a short story inspired by reports that a man from the seventeenth century had been revived after having spent more than a hundred years frozen in ice.4 P. B. Shelley, for his part, sought to demythologize the purported miracle of Jesus’s resurrection by noting in Queen Mab (1813) that the Royal Humane Society frequently “restores drowned persons,” but “because it makes no mystery of the method it employs, its members are not mistaken for the sons of God” (201). That Coleridge’s brief comments on the willing suspension of disbelief have been of greater interest to literary critics than his claims about suspended animation is no doubt a function of the clearly demarcated psychological domain of the former. As psychological acts, “willing” and “disbelief” are phenomena that literary critics feel competent to assess; suspended animation, by contrast, seems to concern physiological and ontological dimensions about which literary critics are, perhaps justifiably, more skittish. Thus, while it has seemed reasonable to take Coleridge’s psychological claims about the willing suspension of disbelief literally, it has appeared more prudent to treat his comments on suspended animation as “simply metaphorical,” hence, of limited use in discussions of the creation and reception of art. This chapter moves against the grain of these assumptions, drawing on Romantic-era approaches to suspended animation as a means for better understanding the reception and formal structures of creative literature, especially what Jonathan Culler has described as the “rhythmical shaping and phonological patterning ” of verse.5 Romantic-era discussions of suspended animation are useful in part because—even when used as a metaphor—the concept links epistemology to ontology, emphasizing embodied modes of trance produced by printed media.6 These discussions thus help us to articulate further the specific ways in which Romantic-era authors understood literary experience as embodied, and point to the importance of rhythmic aspects...

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