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, page 48:

“…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 am sure there will be many readers delighted with this panning of psychology. It’s notable that Jameson considered the statement “The psychological novel” as sufficient to convey disdain, despite the absence of a verb.

And so it is that JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA generally avoids anything along the lines of “He thought…” or “She 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.