The space between reality and fiction is a shoreline, which changes with every breaking wave. Reality and fiction are not the same (I would kill Superman a thousand and one times over if it would give me back my father), but we spend our lives on that shoreline. My memories of my father’s sunset years are made bearable by the red, yellow and blue of Superman, and when I think of Superman, there is, I am sure, a touch of my father in the way I imagine him. The world and the story overlap.
The contemporary sociologist Arthur W. Frank says that ‘life and story imitate each other, ceaselessly and seamlessly, but neither enjoys either temporal or causal precedence’.5 So-called ‘real’ life and stories are echoes of one another: we tell stories about the things that happen to us, and the things that happen to us are in turn shaped by the stories we tell. Real life does not happen before stories, it happens together with them. I was flying with Superman while tending to my father.
I say that I love mushrooms, but I remember (or do I?) that I only started eating them after reading The Lord of the Rings: hobbits adore mushrooms, and hobbits know one or two things about the finest pleasures of life. Beans are another of my favourite foods, and my liking for them also derives from stories: Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, who appeared in a series of Italian comedy-adventure films, wolfed down platefuls of beans on screen (indeed, one of Bud Spencer’s films had the title Anche gli angeli mangiano fagioli, ‘Even Angels Eat Beans’). And these are only two instances of which I am aware – there must be many, many more cases of events that happened only in stories and yet exerted an influence on my life. I would not be at all surprised to discover that the almost-monk I saw was born of some story I once read – which wouldn’t mean, of course, that I didn’t really see it.
In Philipp Meyer’s masterful novel The Son there is a character, an old frontiersman, who ‘always complained about the moment his cowboys began to read novels about other cowboys; they had lost track of what was more true, the books or their own lives’.
As we navigate our lives, we are continuously telling stories about ourselves and about others, which means, as Scheherazade knew, that by changing the stories we tell, we can change the way we live. Stories shape reality. Give them enough Western books, and real cowboys will start playing book-cowboys.
So what books do you give to cowboys when you want to turn them into bank clerks? What books did they give you at school, to turn you into a respectable adult? If you have never deviated from the path that was laid out for you, now is the time to do so, by searching for different stories.
There is a form of modern psychotherapy, called Narrative Therapy, which, like Scheherazade, helps people to cope with the troubles of life by giving them new stories to tell. The therapist, having established with the patient the values and characteristics that they believe make up their identity, works with that person to create new narratives about themselves that explore how they came to develop those qualities. It has been used successfully, for example, with older patients who are adjusting to a new stage of life.
Superman can haul himself up from the page and fly to our help because the veil between our world and his own is as thin as the cheap paper of a comic book. Stories bleed into reality, reality bleeds into stories. Sometimes, spectacularly so.
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The second thing Scheherazade knew is that poetic faith is a formidable tool of enchantment.
Grant Morrison, one of the best writers to have worked on Superman, once met the great hero in the flesh. Morrison was with his editor in San Diego, where a famous comic book convention is held every year. The two of them had spent a good part of the night in a hotel room, scratching their heads about a problematic storyline. At around 1 a.m., exhausted, they went for a walk. In a deserted street by the harbour, they saw two people. One was a comic book fan; the other was Superman.
Here is how Morrison describes him: ‘He was dressed in a perfectly tailored red, blue, and yellow costume; his hair was slicked back with a kiss curl; and unlike the often weedy or paunchy Supermen who paraded through the convention halls, he was trim, buff, and handsome.’6
Morrison and his editor asked him if they could interview him; Superman, ever the do-gooder, agreed. He sat in the relaxed position you would expect from an invulnerable being, and for the next hour-and-a-half he talked about himself, his relationship with Lois Lane, his friendship with Batman. He laid bare his life for Morrison and his editor. After getting back to the hotel, they spent the rest of the night writing.
Morrison admits that meeting a guy dressed up as Superman while there is a comic book convention in town is anything but unusual. But he also makes the point that it is less common to meet one so uncannily similar to the original, and by night. Morrison says that he had two options: he could decide that the guy was either just another costumed fan, or that he was indeed Superman, and ask him for help. He went for Superman.
This is the only part of the story that I don’t buy. I don’t think Morrison ever had a choice. Someone else, maybe; but not him, not a gifted writer who had long been acquainted with Superman. To him, the encounter had to be a hard-ish fact of life.
Morrison’s experience had little to do with what we sometimes refer to as ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, defined as the idea that, in order to enjoy stories, we must make an effort to believe things that we know are not true. By this definition of suspension of disbelief, Superman won’t be able to help us if we do not make an effort to believe that people can fly, broad chests can stop bullets, and dead people can be resurrected. This is a disenchanted definition, one that cultivates the illusion that we are in control. We are not.
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who coined the expression ‘suspension of disbelief’ in 1817, intended a rather different meaning. While writing about fantasy elements in poetry (he used the words ‘supernatural’ and ‘romantic’ to describe them), he said he wished 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’. In other words, Coleridge did not think it was the reader’s job to suspend their disbelief – he was not begging people to listen to him. He was saying it was the poet’s job to put readers in a state of mind where they are happy to surrender control. When poetry works, it sweeps readers away with no effort on their part.
The tag line for the first Superman film was ‘You’ll believe a man can fly’; it wasn’t ‘Please, believe a man can fly’. As long as you do not pull against the story, the story will work on you and for you (and even when you do pull against it, the right story at the right time might still work: you start watching a rom-com sneering at the clichéd nature of the plot, then you surprise yourself by laughing at a joke halfway through, and by the time the unlikely lovers are kissing at the end of the movie, you are, to your embarrassment, in tears).
Coleridge was convinced that a successful poem will instil a ‘poetic faith’ in the reader. You know that the poem is true, even when it is not literally so.
Poetic faith, as Scheherazade knew, makes all the difference. Poetic faith is what Superman instils in the likes of Grant Morrison and me, and poetic faith is what Scheherazade was cultivating in the Sultan Shahryar. The sultan was not at all willing to live and let live – quite the contrary. He was not particularly interested in stories either: after-sex murder was more his thing. And yet, he listened.