Emotional Responses to Fiction

I like Ralph Clark’s view (paraphrased by Susan Feagin) that “Emotional responses to art are the result of entertaining various counterfactual conditionals” (186). In other words, our emotional responses to literature come from imagining that same set of circumstances happening to yourself or to someone you know. This is a possible explanation for why fictional characters who are in a situation you have once found yourself in, or perhaps remind you of your father, are so much more emotionally potent.

Radford’s fifth solution objects this idea. He says that when we weep for Anna Karenina, “we weep for her” (174), not for the situation applied to any person. Since Anna Karenina does not exist, this is not an adequate solution to the problem of emotional response to literature. However, I disagree; I do not think the reader weeps for Anna Karenina. The reader knows she does not exist, can not suffer, and is therefore weeping out of empathy and an active imagination.