emotion. The death of a loved one is obviously a terrible thing; but the
feeling that one has in relation to that event is not necessarily in itself
good or bad. At a funeral, one would not exactly take pleasure in being
made to feel sad; but one might conceivably feel better as a result. Thus,
there may well be circumstances in which we could say, without obvious
contradiction, that it feels good to feel sad. So, for Walton, there’s nothing
peculiar about enjoying the feeling of pity or sorrow or fear, whether at
the theatre or not. Sometimes, such emotions are pleasurable; sometimes,
they aren’t.
There is something appealingly simple about this solution to the problem
and it has a lot going for it–not least because it is helpful to highlight
the difference between the causes of our emotions and what it feels like
when they are expressed. But, even acknowledging that it might some-
times feel good to feel sad, it still seems a general rule that people, on the
whole, would prefer not to feel sad and would prefer to go out of their
way to avoid it. The opposite is true of feeling happy: one can imagine
feeling happy and not enjoying it, but this sounds like the symptom of
some kind of medical condition or the side-effect of a drug, rather than a
standard, everyday occurrence. Tragedy regularly produces emotions that
are typically thought to be unpleasant; and yet we seem to enjoy such
emotions when at the tragedy. Walton does not offer an explanation of
just what it is about tragedy that enables us to enjoy the emotions that
typically (if not always) are unpleasant. A more satisfying answer might
be able tofill in more of the details.
Another pluralistic solution?
I’ll end my discussion of tragic pleasure in much the same way that
I ended my discussion of feeling forfictional characters. We should be
wary of looking for one solution that completely solves the problem; the
answer may well be different for different kinds of theatrical experience,
and there’s no reason why different spectators or different performances
shouldn’tfit different patterns. Thus some tragedies might appeal to a
kind of sadistic voyeurism, whereas others provoke a pleasurable or sti-
mulating moral reflection; some tragedies may not be all that pleasurable,
but worth sitting through for other reasons; the feeling that you are
empathising with your fellow man may on occasions be a pleasurable one,
and so mightfinally acknowledging that the world works in a way that
you had always known but tried to deny. I have given reasons why these
proposals, in some of their guises, do not give a satisfactory, single solution–
and some of them seem significantly less appealing than others. But they
may help explain instances of tragic pleasure and it may be that explaining
certain instances is all we can do. Understanding the pleasure that you
148 From the Stage to the World