instead also respond to courage, style, and achievement (and failure) under
conditions of risk and threat, often enough no matter whether the achieve-
ments and failures are actual or fictional.
While it is correct to emphasize the similarity of emotional responses to
fictions and to actual events, whether via affective appraisals as Robinson
holds or simply as a natural propensity and power, as Cohen holds, there are
also important differences between characters in fictions and characters in
life. As Deborah Knight has noted, fictional narratives are closed for the sake
of thematization, unlike the open messiness of life, and fictional characters,
unlike actual people, do not act freely.^57 These observations remind us of the
importance of authorial (or compositional or painterly or plastic) artistry in
developing and maintaining a point of view on the subject matter presented,
if imaginative attentiveness and emotional involvement are to be sustained
over time. Attentiveness and involvement can be defeated by cliché or inco-
herence. They require the sense that an initiating perplexity and emotional
involvement be developed and worked through via cogent arrangement.^58
This explicit, structured working through distinguishes our emotional
involvements in art from our mostly unstructured emotional involvements
with happenstances in life.
Against talk of natural powers of involvement that are also distinctively
cultivated by art,, Walton, Levinson, Feagin, Robinson, Lamarque, and Car-
roll can reply that their own talk of making-believe, quasi-emotion, simula-
tion, entertained thoughts, or noncognitive affective appraisals provides a
deeper analysis of what is going on. Danto describes theapprehensionof
oneself asAnna Karenina or Lambert Strether in the text, and Cohen
describes metaphorical identification as an imaginative act. Walton, Levin-
son, Feagin, Robinson, Lamarque, and Carroll can each plausibly be under-
stood to be specifying what such apprehensions and imaginative acts consist
in, that is, to be explaining exactly what we are doing when we do them.
These explanations are appealing. But just why do we feel ourselves to need
them? Perhaps it is because at bottom these theorists each take the
(^57) Deborah Knight,“In Fictional Shoes: Mental Simulation in Fiction,”inPhilosophy of Film
and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006),
pp. 271–80 at p. 278.
(^58) This is a central argument in Eldridge,Literature, Life, and Modernity; see especially
chapter 4 on Wordsworth’s“Preface.”
Art and emotion 217