Catharsis: Why We Care What Happens To Frodo

Is there a point to any of this? Or was Macbeth right?

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing," (V.5.19-28)

There is no doubt that, as Kant says in the Critique of Judgment, life seems "purposive," it seems to have meaning. In the question on Divine Providence in the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas quotes Holy Scripture as evidence that the universe has meaning: "[Divine Wisdom] reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly," (Wis. 8:1).

He goes on to explain that, because all agents undertake actions for a reason, and God is the agent in the creating and sustaining of all the exists, all that exists does so for the reason he intended it to. To put it another way, when I do something, I do it for a reason. Everything that ends up happening as a result of my action (everything that's under my control), then, happened for that reason. But everything that exists, God caused to be; therefore, everything that exists exists for the reason God created it.

We can know, then, using reason alone, apart from faith, that everything has a purpose. Unfortunately, we can't know what that purpose is. Why not? Because we don't know everything. Gandalf said it right, "Even the very wise cannot see all ends," (The Fellowship of the Ring, 74). Because we can't know how everything is connected, and because we can't know how everything will end up, in our own lives or at the end of time, we can't know why things happen the way they do.

Say I built a machine that turned peanuts into peanut butter. Now say you were a sentient peanut. As you went through the machine you would be able to learn a little bit about how the machine worked, but not everything. Also, as you went through the machine, you would have no idea where you were going to end up. Only once you got turned into peanut butter would you realize what it was all about.

In the Poetics, Aristotle called Literature "cathartic," meaning that the reading of Literature (or watching of plays or movies, or listening of music, etc.) purges frustrations pent up as a result of conflict and tension in the narrative. He also says that art imitates life and reality (the Greek is mimesis, as in English "mimic"). In other words, the emotions that we live through in microcosm in works of art be they literary, musical, architectural, or what have you) are the same emotions we live through in real life.

Literature gives us the opportunity to live a second life, to put ourselves in the characters' shoes and do what they did and see what they saw. This is why, as Joseph Campbell points out, protagonists must be relatable. They must be down-to-earth and believable like Luke Skywalker or Frodo or Clark Kent. Or a peasant carpenter from Nazareth, for that matter. Either that or they must be champions, larger than life heroes that can fight on behalf of us little guys and do the things we never could, like Achilles or Superman. Or Christ, the King of the Jews and God Incarnate.

Literature is cathartic because it also allows us to see the ending, to see the meaning behind everything that happens in this second life, to learn lessons about life and reality from the people and events we encounter in art. It's like getting to regret bad decisions and glory in good ones without having to actually make them. This is not to say that the purpose of Literature is to teach us lessons; it is to say that it does, as a result of what it is, potential reality, imagined and given form by an artist.