Enjoying Negative Emotions in Fictions

John Morreall

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 9, Number 1, April 1985, pp. 95-103(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/phl.1985.0118

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Notes and Fragments

ENJOYING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN FICTIONS

by John Morreall

There is a puzzle going back to Aristotle and Augustine that hassometimes been called the "paradox of tragedy": how is it that non-

masochistic, nonsadistic people are able to enjoy watching or readingabout fictional situations which are filled with suffering? The problem hereactually extends beyond tragedy to our enjoyment of horror films andother fictional depictions of situations which we would not enjoy in reallife. What is it about fiction that turns intensely unpleasant situations intosituations we can enjoy?Of the many solutions proposed to this puzzle, I shall mention just four.

Aristotle held that in viewing tragedy we experience negative emotions —pity and fear — but get pleasure from the experience nonetheless becausewe are thereby purged of excess pity and fear. For Aristotle, too, there is apleasure which tragedy shares with fiction in general, the delight we takein representations.1 Hume put more weight on this latter delight. Ourpleasure in tragedy, he said, is based on our appreciation of the skill withwhich the literary or other artist has depicted the unpleasant scenes.2Susan Feagin has recently located the pleasure we take in tragic art not inour direct responses to the work, which are "unpleasant experiences," shesays, but in our meta-response of moral self-congratulation at theseresponses.3 The fourth solution to our puzzle is really a dissolution: it con-sists of denying that we actually feel fear, pity, and other negative emo-tions in our experience of fiction. The guiding principle here is that inorder to have some emotion toward a situation, we must believe that it is areal situation. This principle is articulated in an influential article byKendall Walton, though he does not apply it to our puzzle.4

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I believe that this last solution is no solution at all because we do in factfeel emotions in our appreciation of fiction (a point I will develop later).The other three solutions above address the puzzle, and the pleasures theyappeal to all have some explanatory power. But these solutions seem to meto overlook perhaps the most basic pleasure we take in tragedy, horrorfilms, and the like — the direct pleasure of feeling (ear, pity, and similaremotions.The idea of enjoying negative emotions seems counterintuitive at first;

indeed it may seem analytically false. But let us look more closely at thoseemotions to see what there might be to enjoy in them. Because the ideathat we experience real emotions in response to fiction is controversial, wewill begin not with fiction but with real life. After seeing how negativeemotions can be enjoyed in real life, we can then consider their enjoymentin response to fiction.Fear is perhaps the most basic negative emotion, and at first glance one

of the least likely to be enjoyed. To feel fear, many have claimed, we haveto judge that we are in danger, and danger is disturbing to us. And so it isnatural that in fear there is the motivation to eliminate the danger, by flee-ing, protecting ourselves, or attacking. Changes in the autonomic nervoussystem and the endocrine system equip us for just such actions. They pro-duce an increase in alertness and muscle tension, a faster and strongerheartbeat, a redistribution of the blood from the skin and internal organsto the voluntary muscles and brain, and a release of stored sugar from theliver into the bloodstream. Now although we may not be able to identifyall these changes when we are in a state of fear, we can feel many of themdirectly, and we certainly feel the overall excitement which they produce.It is this excitement, I think, that makes fear potentially enjoyable.Especially for someone who leads a relatively dull life, the stimulation pro-vided by fear can be pleasurable by contrast with the ordinary lack ofstimulation. Many people, indeed, go to considerable trouble to putthemselves into dangerous situations, in part, at least, for the thrill of fearthat the danger will provide. Consider mountain climbers and skydivers,for instance. Now there are many sources of pleasure in these sports — thescenery, pride in one's skills, the camaraderie, and so on. But a major partof the pleasure, the "rush," comes from activating the innate human fear offalling. Putting oneself in danger for the pleasure of it even has aname — "adventure" — and it is a powerful motivating force for many peo-ple, including soldiers, police officers, and criminals. The danger in anadventurous activity need not be the risk of losing one's life, of course. Ingambling for high stakes, for example, it may be the risk of losing all one's

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savings. But even here the possible loss must be the kind of thing we canfear — which explains why there is no adventure in penny poker.Having considered a few cases of enjoyable fear, then, let us look at

what distinguishes them from the more common case in which fear is notenjoyed. First of all, as Hume pointed out in "Of Tragedy," the emotionmust not be too strong. If a skydiver, say, pulls the ripcord and the mainparachute fails to open, and then the reserve parachute also does not open,what may have been an exhilarating kind of fear will turn into an utterlyunenjoyable terror. This need for fear to remain within certain limitsapplies also to other negative emotions, and it can be explained by appeal-ing to a more general principle, that we can enjoy negative emotions onlywhen we retain our overall control of our situation.5Being in control in any situation is a function of our desires and of what

we are doing in that situation. Control is usually easiest to maintain whenwe are merely attending to something which has no practical conse-quences for us, as when we watch from a distance some event unrelated tous. Here our control requires our ability to pay attention when we want,to stop paying attention when we want, and to direct our attention to thosefeatures of the event that interest us. When we have this ability to start,stop, and direct the experience, we can enjoy a wide range of experiences,even "unpleasant" ones. We may enjoy watching a car crash at a race. Wecan even enjoy mild pain, as when we probe a sore spot in our mouth withour tongue or stretch a sore muscle just for the sensation it produces.6Even with stronger pains, the kind we cannot actually enjoy, we are lessdisturbed by them to the extent that we have some kind of control overthem, as when we have signals worked out with our dentist for when tostart and stop drilling.In activities like mountain climbing where we are doing more than just

attending to something, our being in control will often involve specialskills and so challenges, and pride in those skills is often added to the thrillof fear. The accomplished climber may enjoy climbing a particularlydangerous rock face all the more knowing that the average climber wouldnot be in control in that situation, and so would not enjoy it.Intense fear — terror — is not enjoyable because in such a state we lose

control over our attention, our bodies, and our total situation. We can nolonger even flee as we can in milder fear; instead we freeze in our tracks,are "petrified," or we go limp, perhaps even faint. Objectless fear, orgeneral anxiety, is also not enjoyable because, not knowing its source, wefeel unable to control it and our situation generally.Let us now turn our attention from fear to other negative emotions

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which can be enjoyed. As representative examples we can consider anger,sadness, and pity. Anger is an emotion we have all taken pleasure in.When we are angry some situation is upsetting us — an action of ours hasbeen frustrated, perhaps, harm has come to us or those we care about, orour rights and concerns have not been respected. If we are the kind of per-sons who picture ourselves as unappreciated, longsuffering heroes orheroines, the mere contemplation ofwhatever is upsetting us will give us acertain satisfaction by reinforcing our self-image as martyr. But even if weare not that kind of person, there can be considerable pleasure in thearousal and excitement of getting angry. Physiologically, this arousal ismuch like that in fear, but it seems potentially more enjoyable than that infear, because it accompanies our asserting and expressing ourselves: inanger we are telling whoever has offended us, and perhaps the wholeworld, who we are, what our rights and interests are, and what weexpect — nay, demand — from other people. As young children we developour concept of ourselves as beings separate from the world, largely by run-ning into opposition — something we want is not forthcoming, somethingwe try to do fails or is not permitted. This frustration is disturbing, ofcourse, and that disturbance is our anger, but it helps us define who weare. As adults, too, we are seldom more conscious of who we are than inthose situations that evoke our anger. The pleasure we take in "givingsomeone a piece of our mind" is largely the pleasure of defining andexpressing our self-image.The pleasure possible in sadness is somewhat different from that in fear

and anger, most importantly in that sadness is not a form of arousal. Insadness there is no excitement or thrill; on the contrary, our activity andin general our liveliness are diminished. But this slowing down andwithdrawal can itself be pleasurable, much as staying in bed nursing acold can be. When we withdraw in sadness, too, we withdraw into ourthoughts about ourselves and what we have experienced or lost. The con-centrating on self here can be pleasant, much as it is in anger: we get todevote all our thoughts, often over an extended period of time, to what isimportant to us. Indeed, people sometimes intentionally put themselvesinto a melancholy mood, and even exaggerate their sad memories, just tosavor the bittersweet thoughts that will arise. There can also be pleasure inexpressing our sadness. Besides the mostly physical pleasure of "having anice cry," there is the pleasure, similar to that in anger, of asserting whowe are and what our interests are, to ourselves and to others. When othersare present, too, expressing sadness will usually evoke their sympathy and

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we will have the added pleasure of their comforting us, a lesson childrenlearn very early.If there is pleasure in receiving comfort from others, there is also a cer-

tain pleasure in feeling pity for and giving comfort to others. Indeed, weseem to have a general capacity for getting satisfaction from reverberatingto the emotions of other human beings whether positive or negative. Thispleasure of sympathy probably evolved in our species, as in social speciesgenerally, as a way to increase cooperative behavior.In anger, sadness, pity, and other negative emotions which can be

enjoyed, the element of control mentioned earlier is important. Control ismost often lost when the emotion gets too strong. When anger becomesblind rage, for example, we lose the control which makes moderate angerpotentially enjoyable. In extreme anger our higher rational functions aresuspended — we cannot see beyond the immediate situation disturbing us,nor can we reflect on ourselves and what we are doing. We no longerdirect our thoughts or actions: as so many primitive descriptions put it, itis as if a demon had taken control over us. And with this loss of control,the pleasure found in moderate anger, of focusing on ourselves and tellingthe world who we are, is also lost. Extreme sadness or pity also takes usout of control so that the emotion cannot be enjoyed. Unlike the personwho cultivates melancholy, retaining some control over the flow of bitter-sweet thoughts, the person overcome by numbing sadness has lost his orher higher functions, especially self-reflection, and so has lost the capacityfor savoring memories and for enjoying the expression of sadness. Becausedeep sadness involves such great psychological withdrawal, too, this per-son is not even able to enjoy the comfort which other people might offer.Pity is not as likely as sadness to overcome us, because, after all, the suf-fering is that of the other person. But where we reverberate with suchfellow-feeling that we feel a distress or sadness equal to, or even surpass-ing, that of the other person, we may lose control and be unable to findany satisfaction in what we are feeling.Having seen, then, how negative emotions can be enjoyed in real life,

we can now return to the puzzle with which we began, to see how theenjoyment of negative emotions fits into our appreciation of fiction. First,however, it is necessary to say something in defense of the view that weactually experience negative emotions in fiction, against the claim ofKendall Walton that we cannot really feel fear and pity toward what weknow to be fictional, and the claim of Colin Radford that such emotionsare possible but incoherent. There have been many replies to these claims,

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most of them arguing against the principle that one must believe that Xexists before being able to coherently feel emotions toward X.7 Here I willnot rehearse all these arguments, but simply stress one element mentionedin many of them, the role of imagination in reacting to fiction.Walton and Radford get off the track in focusing on the role of belief in

emotion. What is important to our feeling emotion toward a situation isnot whether we believe that the situation exists, but rather how vividly andengagingly that situation is presented to our consciousness, in eitherperception, memory, or imagination. It may in general be easier for situa-tions we perceive to move us, because what we are now seeing and hear-ing is potentially the most vivid in our consciousness. But memories canalso evoke emotions when they are sufficiendy vivid. And though situa-tions we imagine may frequently not have the vividness and engagingquality of situations perceived or remembered, when they do, they canalso evoke emotions. Notice here that what is imagined need not be imag-inary: we imagine not only fictional situations, but situations existing nowand those that once existed but no longer do. We use imagination, that is,just as much in reading a newspaper story or a biography as in reading anovel. And whenever any of these — the present situation, the past situa-tion, or the fictional situation — is vivid and engaging enough in our imag-ination, we can feel emotion in response to it, regardless of whether webelieve that it exists. If it were true that we have to believe that X exists inorder to (coherently) feel emotions toward X, then it would be just asproblematic to say that we now feel admiration for Helen Keller when weread her biography, as it would be to say that we feel pity for AnnaKarenina when we read Anna Karenina. In reality neither Helen's norAnna's nonexistence prevents us from vividly imagining them, gettinginterested in their lives, and feeling emotions toward them.This is not to say, of course, that there are no differences between our

reactions to a current situation, a past situation, and a fictional one. Themajor difference here lies in the presence or absence of practical motiva-tion toward the events in the story. If we read in today's newspaper abouta mother of five going blind, for instance, we may well contact her to offerour help; if the story is in an old newspaper we find in the attic, or in abook of short stories, we would have no such motivation.The lack of a practical orientation not only distinguishes our emotion

toward fiction and toward the past from emotion toward current situa-tions, but also helps to explain why we enjoy negative emotions towardfiction and toward the past far more often than we enjoy negative emo-tions toward present situations. The most important factor in enjoying

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negative emotions, as we saw earlier, is our maintaining control, andbeing in control is a function of our desires and what we are doing in aparticular situation. It is usually easiest to maintain control, I suggested,when we are merely attending to something that has no practical conse-quences for us. Then being in control requires only the abilities to start,stop, and direct our attention and thought. By contrast, when the situa-tion evoking the negative emotion has practical consequences, especiallywhen it requires action from us, it is unlikely that we will feel in control. Inmost cases, if we were in control, the undesirable situation would not havearisen in the first place. The exceptions here are cases like mountainclimbing in which we put ourselves into a fear-evoking situation, say,knowing that we have the skills to remain in control; and cases likecultivated sadness or anger in which, though we may not have initiatedthe emotion, we know that we could "snap out of it" if we chose. Now mostof the time when we feel negative emotions toward fiction, and much ofthe time when we feel such emotions toward the past, we experience thecontrol mentioned above, of attending to something which has no prac-tical consequences for us, and being able to start, stop, and direct thisattending. And maintaining this control, we are able to enjoy these nega-tive emotions, as we are frequently not able to enjoy negative emotionstoward real life situations.The lack of a practical dimension in a fictional or past situation is not

enough to insure our control in feeling negative emotions toward thatsituation. As we saw earlier, control can also be lost if the emotion gets toostrong. In real life our emotions often get too strong to be enjoyable, but infiction this is far less likely, because there is someone — the dramatist,novelist, painter, or other artist — who has created the situation we areresponding to for our appreciation. Part of the artist's job is to present thatsituation in such a way that we can stay in control while feeling negativeemotions, so that we can get satisfaction from the experience, rather thanbeing overwhelmed and utterly distressed by it. We feel that the artist hasslipped up if the fictional work is, say, so graphic in its depiction ofviolence or suffering that most of the audience is disgusted and has to stopreading the book or watching the movie screen. We even have aestheticcategories like "grotesque" and "macabre" for those works which walk theline separating enjoyable from unenjoyable negative emotions.Besides allowing us to remain in control, the artist has other ways to

make our negative emotions in fiction more enjoyable than such emotionsusually are in real life. The most important lies in the organization andcoherence the artist gives the work. Because a story, for instance, typically

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has a structure in which each part contributes to the whole, the emotionswe feel in response to the story will have a structure, and usually a pro-gression and resolution, that emotions in real life often lack.There are other differences, too, between our enjoyment of negative

emotions in fiction and in real life. A significant one, in light of our discus-sion of anger and sadness, is that we are far less likely to concentrate onourselves in our appreciation of fiction than in real life. A character's plightcould remind us of a similar situation that we were or are in, so that theanger or sadness evoked involved our thinking about ourselves. But moreoften the plight of fictional characters evokes our emotions in a way thatdoes not take our attention off those characters. Rather, we identify withthem and feel what they are feeling in their situation. And to the extentthat we can "enter into" the characters, we can vicariously feel theirpleasure in focusing on themselves when they feel emotions like anger andsadness, just as we can when they feel positive emotions like pride.To go into more detail about what is special in our enjoyment of

negative emotions in fiction, we would have to examine the relation ofemotion in fiction to such things as character development and plot, andenter into a wider discussion of our enjoyment of fiction generally. I amnot ambitious enough to do either here. My purpose has been the moremodest one ofmaking room for such discussions by showing the coherenceof the idea that part of our enjoyment of fiction is our enjoyment ofnegative emotions.

University of Santa Clara

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Western Division of the American PhilosophicalAssociation in 1984. I am grateful to Susan Feagin, John Deigh, and Paul Tellerfor their comments onthat paper.1.Aristotle, Poetics, chap. 6.2.David Hume, "Of Tragedy," in Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays (Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).3.Susan Feagin, "The Pleasures of Tragedy," American Philosophical (Quarterly 20 (1983):95-104.

4.Kendall Walton, "Fearing Fictions,"youraa/ of Philosophy 75 (1978): 5-27. In conver-sation Walton says that he does not hold what most critics have taken him to hold — that

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emotions presuppose beliefs — and that he does think that "quasi-fear" (toward fictions) isan emotion, though a different one from fear. See also Colin Radford, "How Can We BeMoved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 49(1975): 81-93.5.For many of my ideas about control I am indebted to Marcia Eaton's essay "AStrange Kind of Sadness," Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (1982): 51-63.6.I am grateful to Virginia Warren for these examples.7.See Ralph Clark, "Fictional Entities: Talking About Them and Having FeelingsAbout Them," Philosophical Studies 38 (1980): 341-50; Peter Lamarque, "How Can WeFear and Pity Fictions?" British Journal ofAesthetics 21 (1981): 291-304; H. O. Mounce,"Art and Real Life," Philosophy 55 (1980): 183-92; David Novitz, "Fiction, Imaginationand Emotion,"Journal ofAesthetics andArt Criticism 38 (1980): 279-88; and Harold Skulsky,"On Being Moved by Fiction," Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 39 (1980): 5-14. MikeMartin's "Imaginative Emotions," presented at the American Philosophical Association,Pacific Division, 1983, also helped me here.