Bookplanet: 'psychological realism' under attack

This from The reading experience:
"Responding to Lee Siegel's assertion that 'Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life,' Maud Newton further describes the way in which she decided to focus her own attention on 'books that delve into a character's thoughts and motivations and idiosyncratic take on the world.' Both Maud and Siegel are expressing a preference for 'psychological realism', an approach to the writing of fiction that perhaps gained its initial impetus in the late work of Henry James, but that probably became most identified with the work of such modernists as Joyce or Woolf.

(I think Siegel is wrong in claiming that 19th century writers 'plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance.' Before James (or Flaubert, or Chekhov), the reigning narrative model was the picaresque, which surely emphasizes event over reflection, and which generally produces characters that are flat indeed--although not necessarily without color or vibrancy. One could say that writers such as George Eliot or Hawthorne or Melville plumbed the depths of the human soul, but they did not do so using the techniques of pyschological realism as we have come to know them. It was as an addition to the strategies used by 19th century writers that stream of consciousness and what might be called psychological exposition--in which the writer describes what's going on inside a character's mind in the same way he/she might describe landscape or event--came to be identified as 'modern' in the first place.)

I would argue that it is a misperception of most contemporary fiction to claim that it neglects either character or psychological 'insight.' Siegel identifies 'postmodern and experimental novels' as the main culprits in fiction's deliberate turning-away from psychological depth, its refusal to 'surrender to another life,' but the vast majority of current fiction still focuses resolutely on character, and most of it uses the same strategies pioneered by Joyce and Woolf. Maud thinks that creative writing workshops put too much emphasis on 'externalizing' through the 'show, don't tell' rule, but most writers are neither minimalists nor postmodernists, and the chances are that if you were to pick out at random a work of literary fiction on your Borders shelf, you would find an entirely recognizable attempt both to establish character as the center of interest and to present the character's thought processes as the primary way of making him/her seem 'realistic.'

To this extent, Siegel's essay is just another backhanded slap at literary postmodernism. However, Maud's concern for the 'novel's pyschological possibilities' is not misguided (and to her credit she correctly identifies the temptation to 'endless, largely banal psychological reflection' as one of the pitfalls of psychological realism). That the novel has 'psychological possibilities' is undeniably true. Indeed, the illusion of psychological depth is something fiction can provide more thoroughly than the other narrative arts, and if you think 'imaginative surrender to another life' is finally what fiction is all about, then such illusion is one of the defining features of fiction as a form. But it is an illusion, and in my view if you're going to stories and novels to acquire your understanding of human psychology, you're going to the wrong place. First of all, what gives novelists themselves a superior understanding of the psychological make-up of human beings? Isn't this like expecting them to somehow possess a special wisdom about human life simply because they're novelists? Second, is merely recording in prose what one considers to be the typical operations of thought (which can finally only be done in a kind of shorthand, anyway) really probing human consciousness in anything but the most superficial way?

Better to think of psychological realism as just another strategy a writer might use to give a work of fiction a sense of unity or purpose--another way of getting the words on the page in a way that might compel the reader's attention. This might be done through other means, including the 'self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like "cutting"' Lee Siegel disdains. Privileging 'psychological realism' over all the other effects a work of fiction might convey, all the other methods of creating an aesthetically convincing work of literary art, ultimately only diminishes fiction as literary art. It perpetuates the idea that fiction is a 'window'--whether on external reality or the human psyche--rather than an aesthetic creation made of words. It reduces fiction to a case study in social science just as much as the insistence that it 'reflect' social and political realities. There are plenty of great novels that reveal human motive and the operations of the human mind. But their authors didn't necessarily set out to make such revelations. They set out to write good novels."

Well said, I think. There are so many things that go into a good novel, tone for example (can you imagine The Great Gatsby or Lolita without it?), that the exploration of character is but one.