The Summer of Disbelief

At the beginning of summer I attended a going-away party for a local writer and writing community organizer. At the party, she distributed parting gifts: past issues of AWP’s magazine The Writer’s Chronicle, each issue matched to its recipient. 

We weren’t as close as we used to be. She mistook a face I made for a sign she was oversharing, rather than my realization that I knew too little of her personal life; I needed to assure her that I do still write. But her gift proved she still knew what was important to my writing.

Inside the magazine issue she gave me was an article titled ‘The Fabuleme: On Belief and the Reactivation of Disbelief in Fiction’ by Brenda Peynado. Published in 2017, the article is written with literary fiction in mind, primarily interested in fabulism and arguing for the unreal’s place alongside the real in creative writing education. I read it through the lens—you guessed it—of the cosmic mystery.

Peynado, frustrated with conversations that begin and end with whether or not something is ‘real’, proposes the fabuleme, a term for an element of a story that encourages this question, but “neutralizes the idea of whether or not the element of fabulism is explicitly unreal.” This points the conversation toward wonder, on “disbelief held in a stasis of tension with belief.”

This isn’t the same as doubt, the reader not feeling committed to either belief or disbelief. That tension, Peynado argues, leads to frustration. “Wonder, on the other hand, keeps belief and disbelief in lockstep and wallows in between in a way that drives mystery.”

Recently I felt the electricity of this tension in Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies. The book was recommended to me with contagious enthusiasm by Troy L. Wiggins, author and editor of Black speculative fiction, and one of my conversation partners for CSI’s most recent Skill Tree podcast episode about I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.

The Conjure-Man Dies is notable for being the first published novel featuring a black detective, Perry Dart. It follows Dart’s investigation into the strange murder of conjure-man N’Gana Frimbo in Harlem, 1932. Dart’s investigation partner is Dr. Archer, and together they square off with belief and disbelief with a sharp humor that carves space for both. (Archer once jokes to a medical examiner that one day he’ll write a murder mystery that will ‘baffle and astound the world. The murderer will turn out to be the most likely suspect.’)

Spoilers for the first half of an almost hundred year-old book—

—but Frimbo is revealed to have impossibly survived the murder. Upon his apparent revival, he says he “‘was wholly immune to the activities of the present, for I had projected my mind into the future… Physically, I was murdered. Mentally I could not be, because mentally I was elsewhere.’”

A fabuleme: Dart responds “‘I never heard of such a thing,’”, but is wary of that declaration, “for nothing could have been more impressive than this cool, deliberate deep voice, stating a mystic paradox in terms of level reason.”

(Peynado’s article is mostly concerned with the belief/disbelief felt by the reader. For sure, that’s usually communicated through and therefore tied quite tight to the characters’ experiences. In genre fiction I find there is a sort of ‘book jacket dramatic irony’ in which the reader’s belief/disbelief is out of sync with the characters. One thing I enjoy about cosmic mysteries is following the arc of belief/disbelief experienced by some character, my own being secondary.)

Upon revival, Frimbo insists ‘I live, but someone killed me. Someone is guilty… Someone must pay the penalty.’ What follows is an interrogation of what law serves to punish—action or result—mirroring a later conversation between Frimbo and Archer that reconsiders the relationship between cause and effect.  Fisher attacks the roles of believability and expertise in mystery fiction from two angles. First in ramping up the suspicion that there may be something to Frimbo’s unbelievable talents by portraying him as a philosophical man with a ‘western’ education, and second in demonstrating the ways in which crime scene evidence like fingerprints and blood tests can be falsified.

I like to joke that mystery authors writing stories set in our world ‘get one’: meaning that the author can (and in the case of weird mysteries, should) choose one unbelievable thing that the reader must believe in exchange for the story. Peynado describes this as “asking the audience to believe in what comes next despite reservations.” Call it a different way of looking at suspension of disbelief, which Peynado also reframes. (Of course, this scales with supernatural, speculative, and stories set in imagined worlds.)

Sometimes it comes at the beginning: in Tana French’s The Likeness, it’s that detective Cassie Maddox is the spitting image of murder victim Lexie Madison, and can therefore slip undercover into Madison’s life to solve the crime. In The Conjure-Man Dies, that’s Frimbo coming back to life halfway through the novel. 

This bargain doesn’t have to be made at the beginning, and as Conjure-Man displays, there’s often  a point to be made about belief and disbelief in delaying it. There’s risk of a rug pull in putting it off until the end, but again, if the story is about that bargain of belief, it can be rewarding. This summer I watched Midnight Mass, a horror miniseries about a small island community beset by a malignant supernatural force that no character identifies, even though it’s so obvious to the audience. Despite, or perhaps because of the show’s message of the importance of context, I believe and cannot believe that none of them had a Sinners-style moment of declaration, ‘This isn’t an x, this is a x!’

But that never frustrated me. “When we are frustrated with the believability of some element in the story,” Peynado writes, “it is because either the piston of belief is not getting any gas, or we are not quite sure whether something is possible in the realm of that narrative world.” One of the unique pleasures of cosmic mysteries lies in sleuthing out those possibilities.

Recently I finished Olga Tokarczuk’s mystery novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. It’s a weird one, with a challenging yet relatable narrator in Janina, a former teacher and bridge architect turned caretaker and hobby astrologer who sees cosmic justice for wronged animals in a string of deaths in her rural Polish community.

A favorite quote (credit to English translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones):

“I’d love to know how a bat sees the world; just once I’d like to fly across the Plateau in its body. How do we all look down here, as perceived by its senses? Like shadows? Like bundles of shudders, sources of noise?”