Why Do We Enjoy Sad Stories? 我們為什麼喜歡悲傷的故事？

🔊The puzzle is real. Sorrow and fear are states we go to great trouble to avoid. A sad story produces them on purpose, and we seek it out and recommend it to our friends. Either the feelings we have at a tragedy are not really sorrow and fear, or they are, and something else is going on that makes them worth having.

這個謎是真的。悲傷與恐懼，是我們費盡力氣要避開的狀態。一個悲傷的故事卻是故意製造它們的；而我們去找這樣的故事，還把它推薦給朋友。要嘛我們看悲劇時的感受並不真的是悲傷與恐懼；要嘛它們真的是，而另外有某件事正在發生，使它們值得擁有。

🔊Plato thought the pleasure a weakness. In our own misfortunes, he says, we feel “a natural hunger and desire to relieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation,” and we hold it in check. At the theater we let it loose, since the sorrow is another’s and there seems to be no shame in it. But the habit grows. Poetry “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up,” and a person who has wept freely over a stage hero will find it harder to bear his own troubles calmly. For this reason Plato kept the tragic poets out of his ideal city.

柏拉圖認為這種快樂是一個弱點。他說，在我們自己的不幸裡，我們感到「一種天然的飢渴，想要用哭泣與哀嘆來紓解悲傷」；而我們克制著它。到了戲院，我們就把它放了出來，因為那份悲傷是別人的，看起來沒有什麼可恥。但是習慣會長大。詩「灌溉、餵養了種種激情，而不是讓它們枯乾」；一個為舞台上的英雄盡情哭過的人，會發現更難平靜地承受自己的苦難。為了這個理由，柏拉圖把悲劇詩人擋在他的理想城邦之外。

🔊Aristotle answered his teacher in a single clause. Tragedy, he wrote, is the imitation of a serious action, “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” The Greek word is katharsis, and the Poetics never explains it. On the oldest reading it is medical: the play draws off an excess of pity and fear and leaves us lighter, so that Plato had the effect backward. On another it means clarification: by feeling pity and fear toward the right objects in the right way, we come to understand those feelings better. Aristotle adds a second point that needs no interpretation. We enjoy accurate likenesses even of things that are painful to see, such as “the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies,” because “to learn gives the liveliest pleasure.” A tragedy shows how a certain kind of person comes to a certain kind of end, and seeing how things happen is a pleasure in itself.

亞里斯多德用一個子句回答了他的老師。他寫道：悲劇是對一個嚴肅行動的模仿，「藉著憐憫與恐懼，達成這些情感恰當的淨化」。希臘文的那個詞是 katharsis；而《詩學》從頭到尾沒有解釋它。照最古老的讀法，它是醫學上的：戲劇排掉了過多的憐憫與恐懼，讓我們輕鬆一些；所以柏拉圖把效果說反了。照另一種讀法，它的意思是「澄清」：藉著以對的方式、對著對的對象感到憐憫與恐懼，我們更了解這些感受。亞里斯多德還補了不需要詮釋的第二點。即使是看了會難受的東西，例如「最卑賤的動物與屍體的形狀」，我們也喜歡它們精確的摹本；因為「學習帶來最強烈的快樂」。一齣悲劇顯示了某一種人如何走到某一種結局；而看清事情是怎麼發生的，本身就是一種快樂。

🔊Aristotle also asked which stories do the work. A thoroughly good man brought to ruin, he says, “moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us.” A bad man who prospers satisfies nothing. The fall of an utter villain pleases our moral sense and is not tragic, “for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.” What remains is someone between the extremes, a person better than most of us and not perfect, whose ruin comes “not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.” The word he uses, hamartia, means missing the mark. Oedipus is his example: a capable and well-meaning king who does not know who his parents are.

亞里斯多德也問：哪些故事做得到這件事？他說，一個徹底的好人被帶向毀滅，「既不引起憐憫，也不引起恐懼；它只是讓我們震驚」。一個壞人飛黃騰達，什麼也滿足不了。一個十足的惡棍垮台，讓我們的道德感很滿意，卻不是悲劇性的；「因為憐憫是由不應得的不幸引起的，恐懼是由一個像我們自己的人的不幸引起的」。剩下來的，是介於兩個極端之間的人：比我們大多數人好，但不完美；他的毀滅「不是出於邪惡或敗德，而是出於某個錯誤或弱點」。他用的那個詞 hamartia，意思是「沒有射中靶心」。伊底帕斯是他的例子：一位能幹而用心良善的國王，不知道自己的父母是誰。

🔊The greatest tragedy of the Chinese stage breaks this rule. In Guan Hanqing’s The Injustice to Dou E, written in the thirteenth century, a young widow who has done nothing wrong is framed for murder and beheaded. Before she dies she calls on Heaven for three signs, among them snow in midsummer, and they come. Aristotle would say that the play merely shocks. Chinese audiences found in it what they wanted from a sad story, which was a protest. Confucius had said that poetry can be used to express grievance, and the historian Sima Qian, after his own unjust punishment, wrote that the great books were mostly “the work of sages and worthies giving vent to their indignation.” On this view a sad story exists to keep a wrong from being forgotten.

中國舞台上最偉大的悲劇，違反了這條規則。在關漢卿寫於十三世紀的《竇娥冤》裡，一個什麼也沒做錯的年輕寡婦，被誣陷殺人而遭斬首。臨死之前，她向天發下三個誓願，其中一個是六月飛雪；而它們都應驗了。亞里斯多德會說，這齣戲只是讓人震驚。中國的觀眾，卻在其中找到了他們想從一個悲傷的故事裡得到的東西；那是一種抗議。孔子說過，詩「可以怨」；而史家司馬遷在自己遭受了不公的刑罰之後寫道：那些偉大的著作，「大底聖賢發憤之所為作也」。照這個看法，一個悲傷的故事之所以存在，是為了不讓一樁冤屈被遺忘。

🔊Hume proposed that the pain is real and is transformed. A tragedy gives two things at once: a painful subject, and the delight of eloquent language, vivid imagination, and skilled imitation. When the second is the stronger, it takes over the energy of the first, so that “the whole impulse of those passions is converted into pleasure.” Bad writing on the same subject would only distress us. The theory explains why craft matters. It has less to say about why a painful subject should be better than a cheerful one.

休謨的提議是：那份痛苦是真的，而它被轉化了。一齣悲劇同時給了兩樣東西：一個令人痛苦的題材，以及動人的語言、生動的想像與高明的模仿所帶來的愉悅。當後者比較強的時候，它就接管了前者的能量；於是「那些激情的全部衝力都被轉化成了快樂」。同一個題材寫得很差，只會讓我們難受。這個理論解釋了技藝為什麼要緊。至於一個痛苦的題材為什麼會比一個歡樂的題材更好，它能說的就比較少。

🔊Modern philosophers have pressed a prior question. We know that Anna Karenina never lived. It seems that to pity someone one must believe that she exists and suffers. And yet readers weep for her. The three statements cannot all be true together. Colin Radford concluded in 1975 that our response to fiction is simply irrational. Kendall Walton argued that what we feel is not quite pity. We take part in a game of make-believe, and within the game it is true that we grieve, as a child playing at monsters is “afraid” and does not run from the room. A third answer gives up the claim that emotion requires belief. Vivid thoughts are enough to move us, which is why we can be frightened by imagining an accident that has not happened.

現代的哲學家緊追一個更前面的問題。我們知道安娜・卡列尼娜從來沒有活過。看起來，要憐憫一個人，必須相信她存在、而且在受苦。然而讀者為她流淚。這三句話不可能同時為真。柯林・瑞德福在 1975 年得出結論：我們對虛構作品的反應，根本就是不理性的。肯德爾・華頓則主張：我們感受到的，並不完全是憐憫。我們參與了一場「假扮」的遊戲；在遊戲之內，我們悲傷是真的，就像一個玩怪獸遊戲的孩子很「害怕」，卻沒有跑出房間。第三種回答，放棄了「情感需要信念」這個主張。生動的念頭就足以打動我們；這就是為什麼想像一場還沒發生的意外，也能讓我們害怕。

🔊Confucius set a measure that Aristotle would have recognized. Of the first poem in the Book of Songs he said that it is “joyful without being wanton, and sorrowful without doing injury.” A good sad poem lets grief be felt fully and leaves the reader whole. This is a claim about art and about character at once, since it supposes that feeling can be given a form that the person is able to carry.

孔子立下了一個亞里斯多德會認得的尺度。關於《詩經》的第一首詩，他說它「樂而不淫，哀而不傷」。一首好的悲傷的詩，讓悲傷被充分地感受，而讀的人仍然完好。這同時是一個關於藝術、也關於品格的主張；因為它假定，感受可以被賦予一個人承擔得起的形式。

🔊Nietzsche made the largest claim of all. The Greeks, he wrote in his first book, knew the terrors of existence. Their folk wisdom said that the best thing is not to be born and the next best to die soon. Tragedy was how they faced this and went on living. In the theater the worst was shown, with music and in beautiful form, to a whole city sitting together, and the spectators went home stronger. The pleasure of tragedy, on his account, is the pleasure of finding that one can look at the truth and still say yes to life.

尼采提出了最大的一個主張。他在第一本書裡寫道：希臘人知道存在的可怖。他們的民間智慧說，最好的事是不要出生，其次是快點死。悲劇，是他們面對這一點而繼續活下去的方式。在劇場裡，最壞的事被呈現出來，配著音樂、以美的形式，呈現給坐在一起的整座城市；而觀眾回家的時候更堅強了。照他的說法，悲劇的快樂，是發現自己可以直視真相、而仍然對生命說「是」的那種快樂。