Every kind of writing – all ways and always
The psychodynamics of non-fiction, fiction and kind-of-fiction
Other articles of ours have focused on the essential contribution that an understanding of psychodynamics can make to writers creating compelling worlds in genre fiction. The imperatives of immersive world-building are not, however, restricted to genre fiction – nor even to fiction generally. So we examine the importance of psychological insights to the writing of non-fiction, then literary fiction, before coming around again to genre fiction through respective embedding in the past, in historical fiction, and the future, in science fiction.
Non-fiction in general has become increasingly dominated by the extended discursive essay. In such works, among the most intriguing insights emerge from speculating and elaborating on the psychological underpinnings of the topic under consideration… just from our own bookshelves, discursive works on… gardens, malls, night, tides, walls, sleep, magi, communication technology, authenticity, dreams, cities, myths, ideas, vampires, classical music, reverence, the sea, the soul, the sense of smell, Satan, time… and even cod fish (in fact, Mark Kurlansky’s Cod – A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World has some sound claim to kicking the whole thing off – if not the form itself, at least the publishing phenomenon)… the list goes on, including our own discursive ruminations on wine, The Psychology of Wine – truth and beauty by the glass.
In such works, depth of psychological understanding enriches the writing through the relationship dynamic established and elaborated with the reader. Given that the fundamental form of the discursive essay is to range around its subject, peering into it through an array of different illuminating lenses, psychological reflections and ramifications are among the most rewarding angles from which to vivisect the subject matter. They can provide inspiration and direction for the writer, while for the reader, greater engagement through the affinity of psychological insights for making the unfamiliar familiar and vice versa – each in its own way guaranteed to keep the reader diverted, immersed, delighted… and more likely to buy more of such books.
No less significant as a category in non-fiction is popular history. Psychology is pivotal to the subjective dimension of history, the elaboration of motives and causality that underlies so-called “Historical Imagination.” As a concept, Historical Imagination has been seeing something of an ascendancy in recent decades, but it has been kicking around strongly since people have tried to parse whether Herodotus was more father of history or father of lies. The importance of Historical Imagination, and the underlying importance of psychological understanding to Historical Imagination, was well summed up by Giambattista Vico, Professor of Rhetoric at the Uni of Naples back in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, but better known for his reflections on history and historiography – “useful historians are not those who offer imprecise accounts of the facts and generic causes, but those who search for the ultimate circumstances of facts and search for particular causes.”
these “characters” are the representations of real historical individuals, not fictional creations… but they are necessarily still creations, and will be the more relatable through the intricate positioning of their psyche within the cultural mindset of their time
Vico’s focus on psychology was in its relation to and illumination of an era’s collective cultural beliefs and practices – that is to say, the need for historians, in the creation of their interpretive historical narratives, to understand a culture, its dynamics, its events and the motivations of historical actors who shaped those events, through the psychological apprehension of the prevailing zeitgeist. The particular kind of cultural understanding he was advocating now has an academic field of its own, informative in the literalness of its name – Emotionology.
What could be more fundamental to the creation of an historical world that overwhelms the reader in its saturating sense of the familiar and the unfamiliar, than firmly establishing a collective inner life of periods and places? Attitudes and manners, beliefs and taboos define its cultural landscape, so that individual characters can be drawn in their idiosyncratic adherence to or violations of the spirit of their times. Note – these “characters” are the representations of real historical individuals, not fictional creations… but they are necessarily still creations, and will be the more relatable through the intricate positioning of their psyche within the cultural mindset of their time.
To the reader seeking to be both informed and intrigued by the stories of history, historical verisimilitude is nothing without psychological verisimilitude
Popular history is not a pejorative, not populist in any repellent sense. It is storytelling of the highest order (from the best of them, anyway, from Herodotus himself with all his problematic ornamentations, to the likes of Holland and Stothard writing today on the classical world). It is storytelling that recognizes the extent to which an overly purist conception of “facts” will kill the strongest bases of engagement of any narrative. In this we’re with historian T P Wiseman, “imagination, controlled by evidence and argument, is the first necessity if our understanding of the past is ever to be improved.” That imagination must include, even be dominated by, the application of psychological principles to the explanation of individuals and societies. To the reader seeking to be both informed and intrigued by the stories of history, historical verisimilitude is nothing without psychological verisimilitude.
Emotionology, then… “the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression.” In short, emotions as they were conceived, classified and characterized by a particular culture in a particular era. Writing popular, or even fictionalized, history is best served by being able, through psychological insight, to grapple with the timeless aspects of the human psyche – greed, passion, lust, justice, mindsets noble and ignoble – while being able to situate those psychological states within the cultural understanding of the period being written about. Then to drill that down to the relatable mindset of individuals, Caesars and serfs alike. It’s the very essence of the dual tension and simpatico between the familiar and the unfamiliar, “the curious doubleness of history” observed by Professor Ann Curthoys in the aptly titled Is History Fiction?
Moving on, making history history as it were, in the expansion of our non-fiction consideration to other forms and genres. In beginning to examine the non-fiction field of journalism, however, we find we do not move far from history at all. Journalism has, in various phrasing with various attribution, been characterized as “the first draft of history.” And yet, journalism lacks history’s inbuilt philosophical oversight, historiography – what an old prof of one of us used to delight in dubbing “the study of the study of history” (with, always, an ironic inflection on the second “study”). Particularly in our times of mis-and-dis-information, journalists (and their readers) could benefit greatly from greater psychological insight – not merely into conjecturing on the motives, morals and missives of others, but as a basis of self-reflection, particularly as regards confirmation bias, which journalists are uniquely placed to both personify and propagate. The historiographical imperatives of context, personal, temporal, ideological… and the entrenching of allegiances to this consensus view or that contending revisionist argument… these are the checks and balances that historians know will be applied by others to their work. Perhaps greater psychological focus by journos could allow for a parallel standard… journaliography, anyone (?!?!)
Trade books on economics and politics flourish – and in both cases necessitate the informed application of psychodynamics (though frequently, lamentably missing), with the former effectively the marriage of psychology and mathematics, and the latter the marriage of psychology and morality (at least, it should be). The awarding of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, for his shared work on decision-making, is ample testimony.
As to the burgeoning market in books analyzing the socio-cultural dynamics of tech, social media, demographics and social cohesion… such investigations into the machinations of the mob – lacking a decent acquaintance with Le Bon, Freud or Ortega y Gasset – will devolve complex crowd dynamics down to the risible caricature of Hammer horror rampages of pitchforks and flame torches.
In other areas of non-fiction, even lit crit well benefits from psychological perspectives. Trends have swung away from the modernist-into-early-postmodernist denial of authorial autonomy critically enshrined initially by the “Intentional Fallacy,” the American New Critics and structuralist spats between po-mo luminaries Barthes and Foucault, between the former’s death of the author and the latter’s author function. Critics can reflect on how psychological fixations and motivations of authors illuminate aspects of both their form and themes, bringing that text more to life by colliding it with the real inner life.
Psychology’s greatest contribution is as a lens – to intensify different ideas, sharpen their focus or, prism-like, to fragment those ideas into the spectrum of all their hitherto hidden facets
Psychology, even psychoanalysis itself, can provide subject matter for literary fiction. In The White Hotel D M Thomas blended fin de siècle Viennese propriety and sexual repression, pornographic poetry, Freudianism even to the extent of an imitative Freudian case study, with the SS mass murder at Babi Yar, weaving these elements “fuguelike” (as the back blurb of our old King Penguin copy accurately had it) into an alternately heart-rending and soul-soaring work, and a surprise best seller 40 odd years back. And the mutual-admiration-into-vituperation of Freud and Jung was fascinatingly, if circuitously, chronicled in John Kerr’s non-fiction historical account A Most Dangerous Method, adapted for stage by Christopher Hampton as The Talking Cure, and further adapted by both of them, back around to near-enough its original title, as screenplay for David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method.
Psychology, though, has much more to offer literary fiction than just as subject matter itself. Its greatest contribution is as a lens – to intensify different ideas, sharpen their focus or, prism-like, to fragment those ideas into the spectrum of all their hitherto hidden facets.
In creative fine literature, informed exploration of psychological phenomena adds texture to the shaping of characters and the whys and wherefores of how they behave. Take, for instance, how the psychological vicissitudes of memory created arguably the dominant theme of modernist into postmodern lit – how we seek through memory, through reminiscence, some kind of reconciliation or resolution of our older selves with the recollected versions of our younger selves – and how, against this urgent imperative, we find only regret and remorse in the irretrievability of the past. This pervasive theme, forged through dissecting the problematic machinations of memory, vindicates the etymology of nostalgia –nostos, “I return”, algho, “I ache.” Deriving from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, profound psychological revelations are reflected in form mirroring content. Woolf’s recruitment of psychology to her writing methodology strongly influenced her modernist peers and provided a model in subsequent postmodern writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, exploring across his own works how self-deception in emergent narrative unreliability reflects the “vagaries of memory,” further conceived by him as “this terribly treacherous terrain.”
the catch – characters in historical fiction, by virtue of being strange in their ways, are particularly at risk of turning out unsatisfyingly one dimensional, if not imbued with psychological depth through the writer’s psychological understanding
The historical novel is no less a beneficiary of the astute application of psychology than the writing of popular history. And it should, while elaborating reflections on cause and effect of historical happenings and personages, be as mindful not to violate known facts as far as they are known. David Malouf’s lyrical novel, An Imaginary Life, is illustrative. This fictional memoir of the certainly invented life of the poet Ovid post-exile, is no opportunistic flouting of historical fact – as nothing is known, anything is possible. The novel is both psychologically and historically authentic, however, to the literary truths derived from Ovid’s own poetry, projecting from that a profound personal metamorphosis onto the writer of Metamorphoses.
No less does Thomas Cromwell come alive on the page in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, the author’s astute creation of Cromwell’s psyche integrating a sensitivity to psychological precepts of our own time, with the authentic capturing of that era’s and culture’s unique emotional cast, its emotionology. So Cromwell is more fascinating to the reader for his intrinsic inconsistencies, the subtleties of self-interest in his stratagems reflecting shifting loyalties, the man’s thought within the context of his time, all portrayed with a cohesion of character that make him live to the reader as familiar figures in their own daily lives might not.
These works are as salutary as they are cautionary to writers of historical fiction, whether literary or genre. The very unfamiliarity of setting provides an urgency to the reader’s need to experience it deeply, satisfyingly, saturatingly… but, the catch – characters in historical fiction, by virtue of being strange in their ways, are particularly at risk of turning out unsatisfyingly one dimensional, if not imbued with psychological depth through the writer’s psychological understanding.
As in the past, so in the future – as the principle of correspondence would have it.
Readers are as drawn to literary speculation on what’s to come as they are to literary recollection of what’s been. Science fiction holds an appeal for readers that is analogous to historical fiction, an appeal equally dependent on psychological insight for its realization – the opportunity to thread the needle of our own contemporary psyche with mindsets and motives that will emerge from the extremities of a different time… in this case, the invented future, as opposed to the evoked past. Michael Moorcock had the audacity to amalgamate past, present and future in his Nebula Award winning Behold the Man. He intertwines the existential ramifications of time travel, the alienness of the spiritual thinking of Crucifixion-era Judea, and swinging sixties ankh-sporting Jungian analysis, through a tortured mindset that knows itself, but not its place, in each time.
The most involving science fiction twists familiar and unfamiliar back on each other, constantly surprisingly, frequently disturbingly – deriving from the recognizable resonances of psychology as we understand ourselves now, the extrapolation of our current psychology to speculative conditions of the future, and the consideration of whole new dimensions of psychology required by the exigencies of some reality to come. This has been the mark of the best, and no less the worst, of Black Mirror. At its most thought-provoking, we see the most aspirational and deplorable aspects of human nature as we understand them now, recast as more redemptive or more execrable in the strangeness of tech-enhanced or, more often, tech-damned circumstances. We tell ourselves we know how we would act, on the basis of the precedent of our behavior in our own lives, but we challenge ourselves to do better, be better… than the characters we’re watching, and better than we suspect we would actually do and be. When it misses the mark (demons and werewolves egregiously aside) it’s because it has not clearly nailed the blending of emotion and emotionology, of the psychological predispositions and suppositions of the now, with the curious slanting of those in the then.
For readers, it’s a more intense engagement with content, with the storylines of writers they already love, but in whose storytelling they can find themselves finding even more
For writers, the abundance of new directions that comes from applying the lens of psychological examination and understanding, even has the added benefit of offering a workable strategy for forestalling writer’s block. In every kind of writing, in all ways and always, psychological insights provide the foundation of a more compelling story – fact, fiction, non-fiction, faction, auto-fiction, meta-fiction, ficto-criticism, autobiografiction… and any coming stylistic portmanteaus or neologisms. For readers, it’s a more intense engagement with content, with the storylines of writers they already love, but in whose storytelling they can find themselves finding even more.