A puzzle about fiction

1. Is it irrational to be moved by the
fates of fictional characters?

2. The Puzzle
• Radford’s point here is that there is nothing
untoward about being moved by reports, or
historical documents, or even historical re-
enactments, in so far as they remind us of the
real suffering of real people. However, the
philosophical puzzle manifests itself when we
think of similar reactions that people have to the
fates of fictional characters. We do not have the
belief that someone has suffered, no one has
suffered, Anna Karenina does not exist.

3. Rejected Responses
• We get caught up in the play and forget that it is fiction.
As Radford puts it “this turns adults into children” we
are aware that what we are watching is fiction.
• We suspend disbelief in the reality of fictional
characters. We certainly do but we are also never
unaware that this is a play, etc.
• We are only moved by the fate of fictional characters
because these fates could befall real people and we
can identify with that. But all over again how can we do
this knowing that neither she nor Mercutio ever existed,
that all their sufferings do not add one bit to the
suffering of the world?”

4. Hume
• “It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the
spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from
sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that
are in themselves disagreeable and
uneasy…The whole art of the poet is employed
in rousing and supporting the compassion and
imagination, the anxiety and resentment, of his
audience. They are pleased in proportion as
they are afflicted, and never are so happy as
when they employ tears, sobs, and cries, to give
vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart,
swoln with the tenderest sympathy and
compassion.”

5. • “All the passions [when] excited by eloquence, are agreeable in the
highest degree, as well as those which are moved by painting and
theatre…[The] extraordinary effect proceeds from that very
eloquence with which the melancholy scene is represented. The
genius required to paint objects in a lively manner, the art employed
in collecting all the pathetic circumstances, the judgement displayed
in disposing them; the exercise, I say of those noble talents,
together with the force of expression, and beauty of oratorical
numbers, diffuse the highest satisfaction on the audience and excite
the most delightful movements. By this means, the uneasiness of
the melancholy passions is not only overpowered and effaced by
something stronger of an opposite kind, but the whole impulse of
those passions converted into pleasure, and swells the delight which
the eloquence raises in us.”

6. Kendal Walton
• “we do not actually pity Willy Loman or grieve for
Anna Karenina or admire Superman… nor do
we feel contempt for Iago or worry about Tom
Sawyer and Becky lost in the cave”
• “it is fictional that we feel sorrow or terror.”
• “constellations of sensations or other
phenomenological experiences characteristic of
real emotions.”

7. Radford’s Response
• “Although being moved by what one believes is
really happening is not exactly the same as
being moved by what one believes is happening
to fictional characters, it is not wholly different.”
• “So a similarity exists, and the essential
similarity seems to be that we are saddened.
But this is my difficulty. For we are saddened,
but how can we be? What are we sad about?
How can we feel genuinely and involuntarily sad,
and weep, as we do, knowing as we do that no
one has suffered or died?”

8. • This leads Radford to his famous (or
infamous) conclusion, “I am left with the
conclusion that our being moved in certain
ways by works of art, though very ‘natural’
to us and in that way only too intelligible,
involves us in inconsistency and so
incoherence.”