My brilliant insight for today is that tragedy and other forms of negative art are kinds of bullying. This occurred to me when I was trying to understand the value of exposure to the bad in life and remembered how fearful of the night I was for a couple of years in childhood–goblins were going to get through my bedroom window while I was lying in bed and do horrible things to me. My mother had to get in bed with me a few times until I went to sleep. But one day I was over my fear. No particular reason, just the constant exposure to it until I naturally worked out a diminishing understanding of it.
Ditto bullies. I spent weeks, possibly months, hiding in a corner of the school playground during recesses when I was in kindergarten because some big kid had once bullied me. Finally, he visited the sandbox I and a few playmates used to play in, and asked who the kid trying to make himself invisible against the school wall was. Another kid told him my name (I guess) and something about me–probably that he didn’t know what was wrong with me but that I was always visiting that spot. The big kid said, “Oh,” then ran off who knows where. I realized he hadn’t chosen me to harass for all of eternity as I’d thought; he, in fact, didn’t know me from Elmer Fudd. I was instantly cured of my fear for him. But I remained susceptible to other bullies, for a couple of years always being afraid to walk past a certain house on my way home from school where Joey and Paulie Hayes lived. They’d picked on me a couple of times.
Let me put in here that I believe all healthy young males are at times bullies. Bullying is a natural response to outsiders, and a way to weed out weaklings–those who can’t bear it. The campaign of the educational establishment against it is thus, in my opinion, idiotic. Anyway, one day Paulie came across the bridge into Harbor View–i.e., for his neighborhood into mine–to play baseball with us, for he was friends with some of the boys in Harbor View. I learned he was a year younger than I! So I could not be afraid of him. More to the point, I made friends with him, and learned his older brother Joey was an okay kid, and didn’t spend all his time waiting to beat up some younger kid passing his house. I’ve never feared bullies since, though later a couple of time set up by one or more. I even did a little bullying myself, but not much. That not for the first time; like every other boy in Harbor View, I’d bullied newcomers as part of the established gang.
All this to explain my belief that negative art acts to make the evil of life easier to take simply by exposing us to evil, in packaging that reduces its lethalness, thereby allowing us to learn it into bearableness. Or: “negative art, as Aristotle has it, arouses pity and fear, the purgation of which through catharsis, makes one feel better (anthroceptually).” One feels mor fit to withstand evil after effective art.
That is an anemic explanation, no doubt, but it’s all I have right now. I have less to say about my three other points. There’s nothing more to say about “3. A work of negative art (or art adventure like a ride on a roller coaster) dealing with ugly, fearsome, horrifying or similar painful material, can, when the artwork is escaped, result in the pleasure of gaining safety.”
As for “4. A work of negative art–an effective tragedy, say–will contain details that give aesthetic pleasure,” I need only specify that I mean such details as the metaphors in Shakespearean tragedy, or the melodic effects of certain sad poems–or vivid scenes or characters.
Related to that is “5. A work of negative art will cause a person the pleasure of seeing something conquered, at least to a degree, by art–that is, by an artist’s organization and expression of it.” This is just another way of saying that finding the exactly right words to eloquently evoke something dangerous or ugly, and arranging them in some kind of pattern (which will “explain” the,” in a manner of speaking, or make them more coherent, more logical, than they are in the chaos of reality) is, of course, a way of giving the antithesis of the beautiful a kind of beauty. That, in turn, will give an engagent aesthetic pleasure, although probably not enough to offset the aesthetic pain of the work. But with the other positive components of the work added to it, it will.
I’ve left out something pretty obvious, which is that much negative art–all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, in fact–has an ending that nullifies its tragic message to some degree. Life is shown restored to The Way Things Should Be. A good king assumes the throne. The bad guys are buried. Civilization has gotten through another time of horror bloodied but alive.
With that, I’ve explained Everything About The Aesthetic Value of Tragedy and Other Forms of Negative Are. Sometime maybe I’ll come back and explain it coherently.