How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?

DESDEMONA LIES innocent and helpless on the bed. Over her towers Othello who pronounces with solemn finality: Thou art to die. The enormity and horror of what is about to happen fills us with anger and dismay. Desdemona pleads for her life. But Tis too late. Othello has resolved to act and, deaf to his wifes most pitiful pleas, he suffocates and kills heT. As we watch this tragedy unfold, can we truly be described as feeling fear and pity? Are we really in awe of Othellos violent jealousy and moved by Desdemonas innocent suffering? But how could we be when we know full well that what we are watching is just a play? Such questions have a long history1 but recent discussion has thrown up a number of puzzling suggestions. It has been argued, for example, that our fear at horror films is only a quasi-fear occurring as part of a game of make-believe that we play with the images on the screen.1 It has been argued, too, that although our fear and pity might be genuine and quite natural they nevertheless in-volve inconsistency and incoherence.3 And different again, it has been argued, in contradiction to Aristotle, that what emotional responses we do have to fiction are not only quite dissimilar from real life emotions but are in no way integral to a proper literary response.* At the heart of the issue there seems to lie a paradox about beliefs. On the one hand, it is assumed that as reasonably sophisticated adults we are not taken in by fiction; that is, we do not believe or come to believe, when knowingly watching a fictional performance, that the depicted sufferings or dangers involve any real suffering or danger. No one is in fact murdered in the performance of Othello, just as no one is in fact jealous or innocent. And we know that. On the other hand, we respond often enough with a range of emotions, including fear and pity, that seem to be explicable only on the assumption that we do after all believe there to be real suffering or real danger. For how can we feel fear when we do not believe there to be any danger? How can we feel pity when we do not believe there to be any suffering? This apparent tension between the beliefs we hold about the nature of