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TWO PARADOXES
Michael Clark

We know that Desdemona in Shakespeare’s play Othello is not a real person, and that
she isn’t really killed on stage. Yet we typically have feelings about her character and
about what seems to happen to her. Is this irrational? How can a horror movie scare
us when we know very well that the events shown are fictional? How can spectators
enjoy tragic theatre when they are often moved to tears by what they witness? Here
Michael Clark (1940– ) investigates the related questions of the apparently paradox-
ical nature of our responses to fiction and to tragedy.

*
THE PARADOX OF FICTION

We can be afraid of something that does not in fact exist, but it seems we must
at least believe it exists. Again, we cannot hate or love anything unless we believe
it exists. But we also have emotional responses to fiction: we can be afraid of a
fictional criminal in a film or feel vengeful when fictional injustice is perpetrated,
and in these cases we know the objects of our emotions do not exist.

Does this mean that our emotional responses to fiction are therefore incon-
sistent or incoherent? Surely not. Failure of emotional response to fiction in
many cases betokens insensitivity, which we regard as a defect of character.
It is true that we talk about a ‘suspension of disbelief’ when engrossed in
fiction, and if this suspension were genuine – as perhaps in dreams – the
paradox would disappear; while engrossed in a novel, play or film we would
temporarily believe in the existence of the fictional characters. But generally
we know we are in the cinema or reading a book: we don’t jump on to the
stage or into the cinema screen to protect a killer’s victim, we don’t try to tell
From Michael Clark, Paradoxes from A to Z, 2002
 Two paradoxes 509
1111 the police, or send a wreath for the dead victim – not if we are sane, intelli-
2 gent adults. (Those who send wreaths for characters who die in television soap
3 operas are regarded with amusement.) And features that bring out the artificial
4 nature of the work – the broad brush strokes of impressionist paintings, the
5 high-flown arias of operas – can make the work more, not less, emotionally
6 engaging.
711 Nor when we react emotionally to fiction do we generally fear thoughts,
8 images or representations. We fear the monster, or at least we fear for char-
9 acters with whom we identify who are threatened by the monster, and we
10111 pity Tolstoy’s great fictional creation, Anna Karenina. You can indeed fear
1 thoughts, say obsessive distressing thoughts you are trying to keep at bay.
2 But that is not what is typically happening when we respond to fiction.
3 And it is not simply a matter of pitying those members of the human race
4 like Anna Karenina, even though the novel may remind us of such human
5 tragedy. Sometimes, admittedly, fiction induces moods in us, with no specific
6 objects: sadness, euphoria, boredom or cynicism, for example. But when we
7 pity Anna Karenina, we don’t just feel in a pitying mood, we pity her.
811 On one prominent view fiction is a sort of make-believe, in which we engage
9 as producers or consumers. Pity for Anna Karenina, for example, is construed
20111 as a quasi-emotion, because it is make-believe. But whereas (unless they are
1 method actors) actors and actresses typically make-believe they are in
2 emotional states without feeling them, spectators feel their responses to fiction
3 and these feelings are not under the control of the will, as make-believe is.
4 So if we are genuinely afraid of a fictional monster or angry with a fictional
5 cheat why don’t we take action as we would in a real case? In non-fictional
6
contexts inclinations to take action may be absent if we know the behaviour
7
is inappropriate in the circumstances, because the object is far in the past or
8
in a distant land, perhaps. There is nothing much we can do in these cases.
9
But our contempt for a past injustice or pity for the plight of distant victims
30
are none the less real. Similarly in fictional cases we don’t attempt to inter-
1
vene when someone is being murdered in a play or film, nor normally do we
2
3 take evasive action – run from the cinema, call the police – when we fear a
4 fictional object. Yet if emotions directed at past or distant objects are not merely
5 ‘quasi-emotions’, then why should emotions directed at fictional objects be
6 characterized in this way?
7 It is true that our fear of a non-fictional object normally subsides if we
8 learn that the object doesn’t exist. For example, we were afraid that a hurri-
911 cane would strike, but now we hear that the hurricane has died down our fear
40 disappears. Nevertheless, when we are involved in fiction, even though we
1 know the objects are fictional, we do have emotional responses to them. In
2 fact, in the fictional case there is an analogue of emotion disappearing with
3 belief in the object. We are afraid the fictional township and inhabitants are
4 going to be hit by a hurricane, but as the story develops it emerges that the
4511 hurricane has died out 100 miles away. Typically our fear would disappear.
510 Michael Clark
These considerations suggest that the way to resolve the paradox is simply
to recognize fiction as a special case, where we do not need to believe in the
existence of objects in order to have emotions towards them.
Some writers can evoke empathy in us for fictional characters who are
the sort of person we would normally despise: Gregory Currie has called this
‘the paradox of caring’. [ . . . ] Currie attributes this to imaginative simulation
of the character’s feelings, but this won’t do for cases where, for example, I
am afraid or disappointed for a character who doesn’t have that emotion
because he doesn’t yet know that he is in danger or that he has had his hopes
dashed. Perhaps our empathy is to be explained by nothing more than the
writer’s skill in making us see in an understanding and sympathetic light what
normally repels us. In any case the phenomenon is not confined to fiction –
unpleasant historical characters can be depicted sympathetically too.
[...]

THE PARADOX OF TRAGEDY (HORROR)

It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators [of works of tragedy]

receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves
disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are
they delighted with the spectacle . . . They are pleased in proportion as they are
afflicted, and never so happy as when they employ tears, sobs and cries to give
bent to their sorrow.
(David Hume, ‘Of Tragedy’)

How can this be? For one thing, Hume is too ready to assert that the nega-
tive emotions are disagreeable. Many people enjoy a certain amount of danger
and risk and the frisson of anxiety and fear they produce (why else scale moun-
tains or race cars as an amateur?) and there are those who derive a certain
satisfaction from sorrow, grief and pity.
But deep sorrow, paralysing terror and obsessive anxiety are highly
unpleasant. When the objects are merely fictional, however, these emotional
states can be absorbing and gratifying and do not cause the same distress as
when their objects are real. We need to distinguish the emotional feelings
from the objects of those feelings. The misery or misfortune in the object of
pity will not necessarily be reflected in our feelings towards it. When we
believe the object is real, natural human sympathy is more likely to make the
pity an unpleasant experience, but if the object is known to be fictional we
can derive satisfaction from the feeling without lacking sympathy for our
fellow human beings. Disgust, on the other hand, is more likely to be
unpleasant, even when its object is known to be fictional.
Many people derive aesthetic satisfaction from tragic drama. The interest
in the unfolding of a tragic plot is heightened by the emotions, and our atten-
tion can be held by both our emotional and our intellectual absorption. And
we can even derive comfort from tragedies through imagining people far worse
 Two paradoxes 511
1111 off than we are. It is relevant to the parallel paradox about our responses to
2 works of horror – a genre unknown in Hume’s day – that many are fasci-
3 nated by Gothic weirdness in horror stories and films. All this goes some way
4 towards explaining why tragedy and horror play such a large part in human
5 entertainment.
6 Those, like Kendall Walton, who resolve the paradox of fiction by regarding
711 our affective responses to fictional objects as quasi-emotions, on the ground
8 that we must believe in the existence of the objects of our genuine emotions,
9 may claim that we can derive satisfaction, even pleasure, from these responses
10111 to works of tragedy and horror because those responses are not the true
1 emotions of sorrow, terror, pity or anxiety. Yet, even if we recognize quasi-
2 emotions, that does not of itself provide a resolution of the paradoxes of
3 tragedy and horror, merely a way of restating them, since it will have to be
4 admitted that quasi-emotions feel very much like genuine ones. In any case
5 the entry on The Paradox of Fiction offers good reasons for rejecting the view.
6 Unlike the paradox of fiction, the paradoxes of tragedy and horror are not
7 resolvable in purely philosophical terms but require an appeal to human
811 psychology, which is more complex than the paradox suggests.
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