Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered on a brisk Thursday afternoon in New York City. After two hours, two acts, and a lengthy requiem—the curtain closed, the room went dark, and the audience wept. Working men hid their faces, young men mourned the lives they had yet to live, and older men grappled with their mortality, clinging to long-lost dreams—assured by self-reliance, driven by the possibility of success, and consumed by the fear of failure.
It’s no surprise that we empathize with characters like Willy Loman. But it’s unclear why. A renowned aesthetician, and proponent of the fiction paradox, Colin Radford thinks that this ability to empathize with the fictional is irrational and inconsistent. He believes that for us to be moved by what we experience, we must first know that it’s real, disregarding that quite paradoxically, we still seem to be affected by fictional narratives, despite understanding their true nature. Most notably, the Thought Theory pushes back against this idea that emotional responses require belief in existence, arguing instead that our response to fiction differs from our response to real-world events. This distinction is not made on the grounds of rationality but rather by the puzzling idea that our experiences aren’t determined by what’s factual. Instead, our beliefs alone are the drivers of emotional response. Simply entertaining the thought of a character, event, or circumstance is enough.
Another objection to Radford's argument is the Pretend Theory. Proposed by a group of theorists, most notably Kendall Walton, it denies premise three of the initial argument, claiming instead that there are two types of emotions: real and perceived. We experience the latter while watching characters on screen or reading about them in a book, and the similarities to real emotions are nearly indistinguishable, physically and psychologically. These emotions only differ from real emotions in their origin. Real emotions can only stem from real-life experiences. This leads to a commonly proposed solution, that these two emotional reactions exist together, and that while they may be indiscernible, they are different.
If an author can create characters with complex backstories and unique outlooks on life, then what is there to say that emotion can’t be similarly derived? If no discernable difference can be made between the flow of chemicals in the brain while watching a horror movie and when confronted by a bear in a dark forest, then there isn’t much difference at all.
