ABSTRACT
The problem of fiction and negative emotions is most often referred to as the problem or the paradox of tragic pleasure. This terminology isn’t entirely accurate. Tragedy raises the right questions about how and why it is we delight in fictions that arouse pity, fear, distress, and other unpleasant emotions, but the phenomenon occurs in the case of works other than tragedy. Horror, suspense, and melodrama all give rise to negative emotions as well and therefore confront us with the same conundrum. Nor do the pleasure and pain involve an outright paradox, as Aaron Ridley has pointed out in some irritation. There cannot be a paradox involving tragic pleasure if one’s pleasurable and painful emotions happen to take different objects, just as there is no paradox in any given experience’s being agreeable and disagreeable in different respects (Ridley 2003, 410–411). There are still questions to be answered, however. Why do we take pleasure in works which elicit emotions that anyone would describe as painful to undergo? In the words of David Hume, why are people “pleased in proportion as they are afflicted” (Hume 1987, 216–217) when few would regard affliction as anything other than a hindrance to enjoyment? Why should works which arouse painful emotions not prove prime candidates for avoidance? In what follows, accounts representative of the answers on offer will be surveyed. The procedure is intended to be illustrative rather than comprehensive, providing examples of arguments and approaches rather than lists of all the philosophers who may have made them.
