Livingstone and Mele

 
Livingstone, Paisley, and Alfred R. Mele. "Evaluating Emotional Responses to Fiction." Emotion and the Arts. Ed. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 157-176.
Summary
 
The chapter by Livingstone and Mele is one of several in this collection on "the paradox of fiction" -- how it is possible to feel genuine emotions for fictional characters or events when we know they are not real. The problem arises because emotions involve belief in the reality of the object towards which they are directed and they motivate us for action. Neither condition obtains in the context of fiction. Is it possible, therefore, to establish despite this that our emotions in response to fiction are rational or appropriate?  
To feel emotions in the context of fiction seems to involve us in a contradiction: either we do really believe (for the moment) that the characters or events are real, or we admit that such emotions are irrational and cannot be explained (158). In ordinary life, emotions normally involve supporting evidence showing that the emotion is appropriate, such as fear in the case of an imminent attack - although it may be prudent to avoid the emotion. In addition, the authors point out that emotions may be moderated or controlled by internal means (thinking appropriate thoughts) or by external means (changing one's behaviour) (159-60). Real life and fictional emotion appear to require parallel structures. To feel emotion for a fictional character suggests belief in that character's life "in the pertinent fiction" (161).  
They examine emotional responses to aesthetically literary texts with the help of Gregory Currie's work (162). Evidence for the validity of an emotional response is that the emotion is congruent with the emotions expressed in the work, a notion that depends on the concept of the fictional author. Currie's supposition is that we respond to a fiction as if someone (the fictional author) were telling the story as fact. The emotions of the work provide evidence that the fictional author experienced them (162); the reader is capable of experiencing the same emotion, except that the reader's state is one of "make-belief" (162-3). The sophisticated reader knows which works are worth response and what emotions are congruent. But readers may dissent from the emotions offered by a given work, e.g., on moral grounds (164). An incongruent emotion may be appropriate if a work seems inconsistent in its emotions (165). In such a case the reader will see this as a failure to manage the implied author; or, more simply, that the real author failed to realize his or her intentions (167). But the authors doubt the validity of Currie's fictional author, and suggest that competent readers feel emotions without attributing them to this figure: events or characters have their own rationale, or coherence (166).  
To justify emotional response to fiction, they argue, we need to answer two preliminary questions: first, what determines what is true in the fiction; and second, how do pragmatic factors influence assessment of emotional responses to non-fictional and fictional works.  
For the truth question, they argue that as readers we accept the counterfactual world of the fiction, insofar as it diverges from the familiar real world (168), but that we must infer what the author intended for the fictional world. In this context the emotions of the reader will for the most part be congruent with the author's implicit aims (169).  
In the pragmatic dimension, they claim that if a given emotion is congruent with events in the real world, it will normally be appropriate in response to similar events in the fictional world (171). But congruent emotions are only justified if the context is appropriate, if they are morally acceptable (172), and if the work is of some aesthetic merit (173). Emotional responses, then, are justifed when they satisfy the morality, pragmatic, and artistic criteria (173).  
Critique
 
The authors open their chapter by discussing the paradox of fiction, but it remains unclear whether the second half of the chapter that examines the appropriateness of emotion is intended to resolve the problem. They make what they regard as a "very simple" claim: that appropriate responses to real world causes of emotion allow for parallel responses in reading fiction, provided the fictional circumstances can be regarded as circumstantially "true" (171). But this leaves aside our awareness that fictional events are not existentially true; so questions about the moral or pragmatic validity of the emotion are not directly relevant. Having dismissed Currie's contention, that we experience those emotions that we surmise were felt by the fictional author whom we treat as real, Livingstone and Mele seem to have no alternative hypothesis to offer that would overcome the central difficulty - accounting for the contrast between emotions that require belief in response to fictions that suspend disbelief.  
Elsewhere in this collection Emotion and the Arts Levinson's opening survey provides a succinct summary of the main approaches to the paradox, and other approaches are canvassed in other chapters. Susan Feagin, for example, suggests that in fictional empathy we imagine what the individual's beliefs and desires might be, and that we then actually have such ideas, actions, impulses, etc., imitating what might be the case if one had that emotion (56). For Gregory Currie, to read fiction is to simulate a reader of a factual account of a character; we then imagine having the beliefs and desires of that character, but without the actual consequences in the real world. "The novel works by persuading me to engage in a certain piece of imaginative role-play, not by getting me to have false beliefs" (69). In his survey, Levinson's preferred solution is the proposal that we imagine or pretend to believe in the character in order to have emotions about him/her (25): "to classify our emotions for fictions as imaginary is to say that they are ones we imagine ourselves to be having, on the basis of experiences, contributory to emotion, that we are actually having" (27). The question of congruence is an interesting one, but by their focus on it Livingstone and Mele seem to be bypassing the key issue that they and these other authors raise: how are emotional responses to fiction possible in the first place.  
The solutions proposed, as Levinson's chapter suggests, are all unsatisfactory to some degree. A sketch of a possible resolution might take the following form. First, in their opening section, Livingstone and Mele let us know that they will be discussing tokens of emotion, not types. Yet types are, I suggest, one key to how a given emotion functions: a given case of anger, for example, has not only the power to preempt all other thoughts and feelings, but also to cause the individual to read the world in the framework of anger, that is, to put in place this case of anger as an instance of a class (a type) of anger-inducing causes (explicit memories of previous occasions of anger may be evoked). These implications of the current experience of anger run off more or less automatically, as it were. Second, we naturally tend to endow signs of movement with life (a bush in the wind becomes a lurking predator), and we carry this tendency into the signs of fiction. As Rolf Zwaan has recently suggested, words automatically activate experiences of their referents. Thus to experience emotion in response to a fictional character suggests that in some respect we are treating the character as real (which is, evolutionary-speaking, a prudent move to make). At the level of emotion, a description of a character carries no marks distinguishing fiction from non-fiction, thus the emotion is invoked regardless of the reality of its object. The consequences regarding congruence that Livingstone and Mele consider may then require consideration (is my emotion appropriate to the context; is it moral; is it aesthetically fitting, etc.), but the problem is to explain how the emotion gets started in the first place.  
References  
Zwaan, Rolf A. "The Immersed Experiencer: Toward an Embodied Theory of Language Comprehension." The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 44. Ed. B. H. Ross. New York: Academic Press, 2004. 35-62.

Document created March 8th 2005