I told Grim I'd post a few of Corb Lund's darker pieces but then got to wondering why I enjoy them. And why do any of us enjoy tragic stories? They've been around since the beginning of storytelling, so there must be some attraction.
It turns out, David Hume has some thoughts on this. The SEP quotes him thus:
It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end.
One answer is that tragedies refine or clarify our emotions in a kind of catharsis, which seems to have been suggested by Aristotle in his Poetics. There are a number of other answers in the SEP article if you are interested, but this one seems the most interesting to me. The SEP describes it like this:
... a plausible construction of the idea is that we come to learn about some of our emotions when their expression is elicited by highly affecting works of art, in the case of tragedies specifically by the “release” of the negative emotions of fear and pity that comes with the narrative resolution of the plot. There, the expression of our emotions does not leave them unchanged; rather, they are exposed, fine-tuned, and given a salient form when arising in conformity to a work of tragedy’s prescriptions for how to feel.
A further development of this idea suggests that part of this catharsis allows us a kind of "enlightenment about the nature of suffering."
Whatever the reason we enjoy tragic stories, here are half a dozen or so of Corb Lund's tragedies for you.
