Anchalee Kamnoedkaeo

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 3, 2009

Reading Response #1

Beds that Fly

In the movie Basic Instinct (1992), the character Catherine Tramell, played by Sharon Stone, notoriously invokes Coleridge’s idea of “suspension of disbelief” as an alibi.  “You make it up,” she says, “but it has to be believable.”  Tramell is being interrogated as a murder suspect and her defense is a literary pact between writer and reader.  “I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about a killing and then kill him the way I described in my book.  I’d be announcing myself as the killer.  I’m not stupid.”  In effect, she can’t be the murderer because she wrote about the murder.  That the story is convincing shows her skill as a fiction writer, not as perpetrator.  Putting your disbelief on hold is why you can enjoy Harry Potter.  You are willing to ignore your disbelief for the moment of reading that paintings can talk, that sprinkling powder over your head can get you from one place to another across town in a flash.  Put another way, if you want to enjoy reading, you should be willing to believe.  This is the demand of Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book which offers us such fantastic notions as Snack Beds with automatic dispensers “Just a finger to stick in / The slot, and out come / Cakes and cold chicken” (39–41).  We are not stupid.

Plath’s poem asks us to “see if the Big Dipper’s / Full of stew” (173–74) and dares us to revel in springing “From a Bounceable Bed” even though “You bounce into the blue—” (l. 163–64).  I did not feel lost in that open blue.  In letting go of my preconceptions and inhibitions, I was too busy entertaining new combinations of things, actions and ideas, and the outcome is better than cakes.  For me, having traveled with Plath from Timbuktoo to Aunt Joan’s and enjoyed every minute of it, reading is believing.

Works Cited

Anchalee Kamnoedkaeo

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 3, 2009

Reading Response #1 (revised)

Beds that Fly

Suspension of disbelief is what makes fiction come alive.  This pact between writer and reader coined by Coleridge is notoriously invoked as an alibi by the character Catherine Tramell played by Sharon Stone in the movie Basic Instinct (1992) when being questioned for murder: “You make it up, but it has to be believable.”  Fiction can be made to seem real but it is not reality, Tramell reminds her interrogators, “I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about a killing and then kill him the way I described in my book…I’m not stupid.”  The writer agrees to verisimilitude, the reader agrees to put their disbelief on hold, and the fictional world is enabled for our enjoyment: thriller dramas where writers can kill without being killers, fantasy series like Harry Potter where sprinkling floo powder can get you across town via fireplaces, and, in this case, Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book where Snack Beds come with automatic dispensers “Just a finger to stick in / The slot, and out come / Cakes and cold chicken” (39–41).  We are not stupid, and our enjoyment does not come at the price of intelligence.

The opposite is true.  Plath’s poem shows us “An Elephant Bed” that can give “A trunk-spray shower” (129, 139), asks us to “see if the Big Dipper’s / Full of stew” (173–74), and dares us to revel in springing “From a Bounceable Bed” even though “You bounce into the blue—” (163–64).  I did not feel lost.  In that wide open blue, I let go of my white little preconceptions of beds and of my jam rambling inhibitions and was fantastically busy eating up new combinations of things, actions and ideas, and the outcome is better than cakes.  For me, having willingly suspended my disbelief in traveling with Plath from Timbuktoo to Aunt Joan’s and enjoyed every minute of it, reading is believing.

Works Cited