On Psychological Novels

What is a “psychological novel”? It means one in which the author laboriously details characters’ thoughts, analogous to the “voice-driven novel,” which means using dialogue instead of action to move the story along. Both terms are really modern publishing code for dumbing down. The underlying premise is that readers are too dull to figure things out for themselves, so it all has to be spelled out. Both forms are very popular today.

Here is an excerpt from a 2021 lecture given by the late American philosopher Fredric Jameson, and published in THE YEARS OF THEORY: POSTWAR FRENCH THOUGHT TO THE PRESENT.

“…pure consciousness…is what Sartre calls freedom. It’s not a very pleasant idea…and it is a very difficult and demanding kind of system. That’s why psychology is of no use to us. Psychology is a kind of a lie. The psychological novel. What are my characters thinking now? That’s all made up….Pure consciousness doesn’t have a language.”

I’m sure there’ll be many readers delighted with this panning of psychology. It’s particularly striking that Jameson considered the sentence “The psychological novel” as not even requiring a verb to convey his contempt.

And so it is that JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA generally avoids things along the lines of “I thought…,” not so much for philosophical reasons as simply the principle that the story itself should reveal thought. Explicitly spelling it out is, to this author’s sense, lazy writing and dreary reading.