to be made to feel a certain way in relation to a situation, but not be
required in any way to act upon it. More importantly, though, Feagin’s
understanding of tragedy seems unnecessarily restricted. For her, tragedies
would appear to have plots, the sympathetic responses to which should be
relatively straightforward, thus enabling a certain satisfaction at getting
them right. We would predict, on her account, that morally complex
tragedies–in which it is not clear how to interpret the ethics of those
involved and to sympathise accordingly–would be less pleasurable, because
they would not allow us to take satisfaction in our responses (we wouldn’t
know what‘getting it right’looked like). Clear-cut moral plots, on the
other hand, would afford good tests for whether we respond in the right
way to the good characters, and so on. But this is hopelessly wrong. If we
praise tragedies at all in relation to their morality, it is hardly because
they present us with characters and plots, the ethics of which are self-
evidently available to all spectators.^40 Often, following fairly standard
interpretations, tragedies offer worlds that are radically incompatible with
the kind of satisfaction that Feagin describes: irreconcilable opposition
between conflicting but legitimate moralities (Antigone); the inability of
human beings to make moral sense of the world and their place within it
(Oedipus Tyrannus); the failure both of social convention and of non-conformism
to provide the basis for a good life (Ghosts,Rosmersholm, or pretty much
any of the late Ibsen plays). I repeat, here, my scepticism (see Chapter 5)
about summing up the moralities of plays in any convincing or exhaus-
tive way–these are merely proposed examples, which the reader can take
or leave; my point is only thatifthese tragedies set our moral gears in
motion, they do not do so in such a way that obviously leads to satisfaction
in the way we respond. Put another way: it seems to me that tragedies
might have the function ofchallengingour responses or revealing various
moral commitments to be incompatible with one another, rather than
simply functioning as triggers for the production of (and satisfaction
with) whatever moral outlook we took with us into the theatre.
The nature of the emotions
A last attempt at explaining the pleasure of tragedy re-examines the
understanding of the emotions that is presupposed by the discussion so
far. Up to now, we have spoken of negative emotions, meaning sorrow,
pity, fear and so on; and we have assumed that experiencing such emotions
is an intrinsically negative experience. In his discussion of the paradox of
tragedy, Kendall Walton challenges just this assumption.^41 Sorrow, he
claims, is not intrinsically negative. But sorrow often arises in relation to
very negative events–a bereavement, for example. By calling sorrow
negative, we confuse the experience of the emotion with the cause of the
Emotions 147