care about Vanya’s particular concerns and also care about how not to
waste my life. The one does not exclude the other.
The question would be, then, whether we can explain all of what we
feel in relation to the performance, without making reference to feelings
about the characters. This would involve a kind of translation between
claims about the characters and claims about something else. Thus, when
I say that I pity Vanya, I am really saying that I pity (say) people who
reach a certain age having dedicated their lives to something they no
longer believe in and who feel it is too late to make anything meaningful
out of their existence. Because the latter undoubtedly exist, there is no
problem in meeting the third criterion. Hence, although saying I pity
Vanya (the character) sounds a lot like saying that I care about my (real)
niece, Anya, my two claims are actually completely different in kind. One
is about a person–the other refers to general concerns.
But could we really translate every claim about the character into a
general claim? This seems doubtful. One thing I might care about, for
example, is whether or not Helen (the professor’s wife) and Michael
Astrov (the doctor) will have their affair or whether they will part without
seeing each other again. A‘translation’of this might then go as follows:
that I care, in general, about affairs between professors’wives and doctors.
But that is false–I don’t. Or perhaps: I care about affairs between beauti-
ful, bored, unhappy women and aging, overworked, proto-envir-
onmentalists with ridiculous moustaches. But, again, I don’t. Now it is
true, of course, that many people have general feelings of various kinds
about the role of infidelity in their lives and the lives of others. Some
theatrical performances may well offer us the opportunity to work
through our own thoughts and feelings–a platform for understanding
ourselves. But, watchingUncle Vanya, I care about the specific outcome of
the conversations between Helen and Michael; I want to know whether or
not they’ll meet in secret in the forest reservation (which, as it happens,
I also know to be non-existent). And these specific concerns don’t seem
connected to any general concern I have about infidelity. To put it
bluntly: whether or not Helen and Michael get together won’t tell me
very much (say) about whether my partner is cheating on me, or whether
my own infidelity is justifiable, and so on. Yet, still, I want to know what
happens to them. And, because I know that they don’t exist, we haven’t
resolved our problem.
Make-believe
A different way of denying that we are moved (denying 1, above) would
be to deny that what we understand to be an emotion in response to a
character is really an emotion at all. We have already said something
132 From the Stage to the World