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Dec. 16, 2008 Introductory Note for the Reader: The following short essay has as its goal to point out three ideas. Firstly that fiction is psychological, secondly that if considered further, all fiction and writing can be termed psychological, and thirdly that fiction can not only border on spirituality, but is more often spiritual, than it is commonly considered to be. The following quote is from Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway. The writer is describing the main character, Thomas Hudson. The topics in these three sentences, quoted form a book of 466 pages, includes the ideas of success, marriage, priorities, vocation, and residence: He had been successful in almost every way except in his married life, although he had never cared, truly, about success. What he cared about was painting and his children and he was still in love with the first woman he had been in love with. He had loved many women since and sometimes someone would come to stay on the island. Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream All fiction is psychology in practice. I would even argue that all writing and reading is psychology in practice, and this applies from reading a street sign to writing a grocery list. In fiction, whether the reader or writer is conscious of it or not, they are looking for answers to life’s questions, conveying and relating to one thousand and one different types of inter-personal relationships, and even trying to cope with or give voice to what I call, ‘the spaces in-between,’ which just means impressions we receive during the journey of life that our minds and spirits want to frame and catalogue. I include ‘spirits,’ because I think that after a thorough examination of the psychology of fiction, after truly shining a light in all corners and crevices of our individual and collective psychology, we would discover a spirit, or at least a strong something or other that we could call The New Set of Psycho-Spirituality in Fiction. At that point in the journey the discussion would be called more aptly such, because as broad a term as it already is, like The Philosophy of Art, the term Psychology of Fiction is destined to become broader. Yes, in reading fiction and perhaps even more so in feeling compelled to write it, we are so immersed in psychology that we might not even pause to realize it. What’s more, it only begins at psychology. It quickly transforms into a spiritual search. Or, maybe it already is. Maybe it always was spirituality in story telling and stories. Do ancient texts, mythologies, legends, or oral traditions ever use the term psychology? Probably not. This word seems like a very modern term indeed. And we are trying to mix it with a very old practice. Doing right by it, yes, but not ascribing it its full potential, which is psychology as a temporary solution to what is ultimately a spiritual quest. It’s only a matter of which writers’ chord strikes best. And it’s his/her highly subjective chord or mode of expressing universal ideas through personal perspective, having to resonate with your highly subjective chord. But, as all readers know, it happens. This is exactly what people are saying when they tell you about their favorite book or books, whether they realize it or not. Some that were great psycho-spiritualists in fiction writing were Malcolm Lowry and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. As a final aside, I will also include two quotes that to me at least, somehow express the idea of what I call psycho-spirituality. The first is by Jane Roberts and is about writing and life. The second is by Joseph Campbell and is about living and life, but I intuitively feel that it has great merit when talking about these topics: “To me at least, poetry-like love-implies a magical approach to life, quite different from the presently accepted rational way of looking at the world. That is, poetry brings out life’s hidden nuances. It delights in forming correspondences between events that seem quite separate to the intellectually-tuned consciousness alone, and reveals undercurrents of usually-concealed actions that we quite ignore when we’re most concerned about thinking rationally. Actually, that kind of vision contains its own spontaneous rationality, and often supplies us with answers more satisfying than purely intellectual ones.” From: The Magical Approach by Jane Roberts. The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal-carries the cross of the redeemer –not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.
From: The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
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