Psychological Realism The following are aspects of Literature's Psychological Realism genre:

-Psychological Realism is interested in recording inwardness of experience. This means that there is a focus on interior landscapes, the inside of a character or characters minds.

-Physical aspects are present but evasive.

-Thoughts are sometimes memories, "cinematic flickering" or retrospect. This means the narrative will flash backwards and forwards in time, focusing on the character's mind and memory, instead of daily journey.

-Novelists necessitate heavy imagery--images fuse with sound and sight, forming a perceptual experience.

-No traditional story line.

-Readers presented with character's consciousness and must move through the character's thought patterns and subconscious.

-Use of stream of conscious technique.

-Motif (flexible) of a quest--ceaseless becoming.

-There is a creation of self-by-self for the character(s).

-Fluid reality-- must be captured before becoming aloss.

-Merging of past, present and future through sensory perception. The present loses its static nature and fades into additional levels of time. This forms what Virginia Wolf calls a "luminous halo."

-Memoire involentaire

Themes:

-Alienation

-Loneliness

-Love

-Self

There is an intricate relationship among all four. Famous Psychological Realism authors: -Virginia Woolf-James Joyce-William Faulkner-Henry James Reader-Response Theories Having done a cursory explanation of reading and also what an information-based text and a literary-based text is, we now try to establish a theoretical framework to explain why it is possible for different readers to react differently to the same literary texts; and by literary texts I include those subsumed under the small "1" as well as the big "L."

First of all we will look at some of the reader-response theories that have come forth to address the issues associated with the "reconstruction" of literary text. Many reader-response theories have opposing views as to what determines text comprehension; the text itself or the reader? Wayne Booth, for example, a rhetorical readerresponse critic, has for most of his career regarded the reader as a function of the text, but his book Critical Understanding, offers a compelling portrait of the effect of reader-oriented theories on a critic who was at one time firmly grounded in text alone. Booth currently argues that the "author.... text and reader. join inextricably" in the reading process (1979: 238), and that the text does not contain meaning, but rather, provides only "boundary conditions" of "appropriate response" (214-42). Booth, however, is unable to define these boundary conditions adequately and ultimately suggests that their existence is problematic. Coming from the other extreme, subjective reader-response criticism, Norman Holland tries to argue that texts are a product of a reader's "identity theme" and that, in themselves, they provide no constraints on interpretation. However, like Booth, Holland cannot successfully sustain his position. At times Holland asserts that the text has status as an object - "only as specks of carbon on dried wood pulp" (1975: 12). But as Booth is unable to demonstrate adequately that boundry conditions exist in the text, so Holland is unable to avoid suggesting that they do not. He states that "all literary interpretations interrelate 'objective features' of a text in a 'subjective' way" (1975: 337), suggesting that not only carbon specks, but 'features' of some kind can be said to exist in the text that constrain interpretation. Thus we see that two critics, one who tries to locate the source of meaning in the "facts" of the text and one who tries to locate it in the "interpretations" of the reader, are both unable to maintain their positions because they are influenced by the arguments that oppose their own. Neither is able to develop a vocabulary that can integrate their two positions or that can clearly distinguish the role of the reader from the role of the text. Other reader-response critics such as Stanley Fish, originally from a phenomenological perspective, and Jonathen Culler, from a structuralist perspective, began their study of the reading process by asserting that the reader and the text interacted to create meaning. In Literature in the Reader (1980) for example, Fish proposed that literature should be viewed as "kinetic art" (p.43) that "provokes"

(p.27) response. He suggests that "the information an utterance gives (its message), is a constituent of, but certainly not to be identified with, its meaning" (p.32). Such a statement implies that texts can affect readers' assumptions and expectations, but do not have "meaning" until they are experienced by readers and that texts can constrain the determination of meaning without themselves containing meaning. Fish, however, like Booth, found himself unable to explain how the text provokes responses, and eventually he admitted that he could not say what interpretation is "of' (p.165). Currently, Fish has adopted a kind of structuralist stance, arguing that the "formal structures" of texts are simply a product of the interpretive strategies a reader brings to bear on a text and are not in any way a part of "the text, itself' (p.169). Fish suggests that readers "construct" texts, not "construe" them (p.327) according to the interpretive communities to which they belong. Like Fish, Jonathen Culler began his study of the reading process by assuming that the text has "potential properties", "features" (1981: x; 59), or "empty meanings" (1975:119). These features seem similar to Booth's boundry conditions and to Fish's notion that "strings of words" "provoke" readers' activities. Like Booth and Fish, Culler found it difficult to say exactly what these textual features were. Later, influenced by deconstruction, Culler has altered his position on the status of the text. He now argues that it is impossible to "establish well-grounded distinctions between fact and interpretation, between what can be read in the text and what is read into it" (1982:75). It is only Wolfgang Iser, the best-known reader-oriented critic, who has continued to argue that meaning occurs in a dynamic interaction between a reader and a text. Iser distinguishes between the "text" (the words on the printed page), and the "aesthetic object" (the imaginative realization of the text by the individual reader), and he argues that the text is a set of instructions for "producing what it itself is not" (1979: ix). While Iser attempts to distinguish between textual structures, such as familiar norms, conventions, blanks, and negations, and the readers' response to these structures, some of his critics, however, have argued that Iser's "structures" are simply a product of his interpretive strategies and do not have an objective existence at all (Kuenzli, 1980: 55-56). Iser's concept of textual structures also needs to be more clearly defined. By trying to take into account the role of the reader and the role of the social and historical forces in the meaning-making process, reader-

oriented critics find themselves unable to account adequately not only for the role of the text, but also unable to rid of themselves of the nagging sense that the text does, in some way, constrain the production of meaning. Culler suggests that "the story of manipulation [of reader by text] will always reassert itselfbecause it is a much better story, full of dramatic encounters, moments of deception, and reversals of fortune" (1982:72). Reports of the text constraining interpretation keep reasserting themselves not only because they make a good story but also because they are more in keeping with our general assumptions about cognitive processes; that perceivers are influenced in some way by the objects they encounter. As Norman Holland stated in another context, "intellectually it is awkward to suppose that we suddenly reverse our entire cognitive system when we shift from fact to fiction" (Iser, 1980:61). Psychological Realism A theory of reader-response that develops from a theory of general cognition might help to account more satisfactorily for the status of both the reader and the text in the reading process. "Psychological realism" is a modern theory of perception whose central concept is that perception occurs in a mutual interaction between reader and text and the environment he or she is in, Developed by James Gibson (1979) in the area of object perception - i.e. ecological realism, psychological realism has been extended by such psychologists as Michael Turvey and Robert Shaw in the area of action, and has recently been applied to language perception by Robert Verbrugge. Because it is an interactive theory of meaning, psychological realism can be usefully extended to address issues of reader-response criticism: it can provide unique metaphors for understanding the interaction of the reader and the text during the reading process. Reading Turvey, Shaw, or Verbrugge will make most of us shy away from understanding what psychological realism has to offer because of the linguistic and semantic complexity of terms used, and also the background knowledge one must have to fully grasp what they want to say (and which can be said in more simple terms). We will first go back to Gibson on ecological realism and use examples which I think might make comprehension of his ideas and those of the psychological realists easier. Let us take a simple tree as our example. Grown in a fertile area, this tree will bear leaves in profusion (hoping that it is one of those that is capable of doing it). The same tree in a semi-arid area will look

different; in a desert, it might be very small, thin, with very small leaves or the tree itself might be non-existent for that matter. These are "pictures" of the same tree which has been uprooted and replanted in different areas. Look at the tree again; this time in its lush surrounding in the morning, the afternoon, the evening, at dusk, and at night. There will be discernable differences in color for the bark, the stems and the leaves in the different light and times of the day. Again "pictures"of the same tree. Look at the tree while standing, stare at it from below, and from above (being in a helicopter might do the trick but trying to make wings might take too long). Look at the tree from one angle and from different angles; again we see something different of the same tree and yet we are looking at the same tree. The "reality" of the tree depends on where it is growing (in a warm climate, a cold one, or an arid one?), in which light it is discerned, and from which angle we look at it. It is like the three (or is it seven?) blind men with the elephant! Gibson's concept of "ecological realism" has now been extended to explain certain phenomena occurring in reading and the interpretation of literary work. However, since we are no longer dealing with trees, soil and light but "modes of thinking" and the "mind", then psychology is the affected domain and the term "psychological realism", therefore, seems apt to describe the phenomena involved. We can assume that was the line of thinking taken by psychological realists such as Turvey, Shaw, and Verbrugge; and instead of looking at trees they look at books and from different perspectives based on different issues relevant at the time when text is read and/or analyzed. Psychological-realism agrees with reader-oriented theories that the meaning of a text can never be pinned down and that, as Derrida puts it, "no context permits saturation" (1979: 81). Psychological realism, therefore, allows for the theoretical possibility of infinite meanings and it recognizes the impossibility of the reader's "mastering" a text, but gives the reader the freedom to establish a single, though partial, interpretation. Psychological realism also allows readers to interpret texts in different manner depending on what aspects of the text they want to study and from which angle they want to study texts from. It is akin to looking at the tree; from the side, from below, and from above. What readers get from these different angles are still "facts" obtained from the text and they cannot be said to have invented things which are not there. At the same time, text itself cannot be said to constrain interpretation

because how one reader interprets part of the text may be different from how another interprets it as each brings his or her own store of background knowledge to bear in that interpretive act. What I have tried to do so far is to address some interpreting constraints imposed on the interpretation of literary texts. Many serious studies on text interpretation have been bogged down by these constraints because the framework offered itself had been constraining. It is like a law which is rigid imposed on "facts" which are always changing. Because of that it is illogical; an illogicality that is man-made and therefore can be subject to change. Teaching Implication The implication to teachers teaching literature from the Psychological Realists' point of view is worth looking at. The basic tenet that needs to be pointed out here is that interpretation of literary texts cannot be the same amongst readers because each can only focus on a certain aspect of the text at one particular time. Interpretation cannot be the same depending on the issues being looked at. Also, based on the fact that English is not our native tongue, interpretation can be different depending on the linguistic repertoire and relevant background knowledge brought to the text. As with all readings, the first aspect dealt with by most teachers is comprehension - i.e. a general understanding of the story read. Take for example Mark Twain's The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Within this "comprehension" mode, the gist of the story may not differ that drastically as the structure of a story is such that there is (often enough) a "setting", "events", and an "ending". Thus, in The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the setting is Huck and Tom meeting "King" and "Duke", the "events" are things that happened that lead to the exposure of King and Duke as impostors and cheaters, and the "ending" sees Huck and Tom running away from them. This is the stage where teachers normally stop. However, the richness of literary texts should not be wasted. Psychological realism has offered us a framework which allows text to be viewed from different angles (perspectives) yet not hold anyone accountable for doing so. Such being the case, it is therefore, plausible to address a literary text not only from its story line per Se, but also from its cultural, class or societal, moral, gender, aesthetic, and/or even psychological issues. By doing this - i.e. to let text undergo the rigors of reiterated reading for different "pictures" of the same text, teachers can make use of a

literary source in a holistic manner, exhausting it of' all possible information it can offer to the students. In this way, individual interest can be given attention. Reading becomes more of putting "different chips" together to make text a more beautiful piece of work to look at. At the same time, reading becomes not more regurgitation of' "information" but an active act where the compilation of "facts" derived from text can be used as a springboard for other learning activities to take place. Application of Psychological Realism when Reading a Literary Text A few of the "angles" or "perspectives" that can be taken to view a literary text will now be discussed. Prior to using these "angles", the first activity should be reading for an overall comprehension of the text. When it is established that students have understood the general outline of the story, the following statements (which could be written on any size cards) may be used to focus (and refocus) students' attention to issues that could be found in the text already read. Moral Literature is something that teaches me and somehow helps me become a better person. All good literature is basically moral and uplifting. I agree with Tolstoy when he said that literature helps to answer the question "How ought I to live?" Class I read literature in order to understand the class struggle at various times and in various places. I believe that the economic exploitation of the mass of people by a privileged few is responsible for almost all human suffering. Psychological "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his or her point of view.... until you climb into his or her skin and walk around in it" (Atticus Finch). The most important thing in literature for me is the study of character because it enables me to extend my understanding of people and their motivation. Gender The literature I prefer to read explores women's experience of the world. Women are consistently denied recognition or real power even

through their contribution to world history has been as important as that of men. Documentary I'd rather read a novel by Dickens or Twain, for example, than a history text book to gain an insight into the way people lived at a particular time. I learn so much about other cultures and other ages from literature. The cards are but some examples of "angles" that students can take to look at a literary text. More "angles" can be found depending on the books chosen for the reading task. These different angles of looking at text are by themselves interesting and valid, and they can offer for a more lively discussion of text and its content. The class, as a unit, can choose what angle it wants to take or teachers can combine two angles that are complementary for discussion purposes later on - e.g. (i) & (ii) or (i) & (iii). Alternatively, groups can choose what they want to see and later share their finding with the class. "Angles" allow for a more comprehensive look of text. At the same time, they also help to direct readers to take a more critical stance in their approach to understand "issues" couched in that text. To quote Derrida (1979, 81) "...no context permits saturation"; there will always be something different to learn from literary text. Like the tree, literary texts will always be viewed differently depending on the ideo-political, and sociological "climate", the "time" or "period", and sentiment of the readers who read them. References Booth, W. (1979).Critical Understanding. Chicago: Uni. Of Chicago Press. Culler, J. (1982).On Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell Uni. Press. Derrida, J. (1979). Living On Border Lines. In H. Bloom et. al. (eds.) Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press. Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge: Harvard Uni. Press. Gibson, J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.Houghton Mifflin. Holland, N. (1975). 5 Readers Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni. Press.

Iser, W. (1979).The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni. Press. _______ (1980).Interview.Diacritics, 10, 57-74. Kuenzli, R. (1980). The Intersubjective Structure of the Reading Process: A Communication Oriented Theory of Literature." Diacritics, 10, 47-56. Martinet, A. (1962).A Functional View of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shaw, R. E. &Bransford, J. D. (1977). Introduction: Psychological Approaches to the problems of Knowledge. In Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum; 103-132. Verbrugge, R. (1977). Resemblances in language and perception. In R. E. Shaw and J. D. Bransford (eds.) Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, 365 - 389. Daisy Miller, A Study(1879) Henry James

Some refer to Jamess brand of realist literature as psychological realism. Psychological Realism: literature that deals with the formation of identity, relationships, self-concepts, morals, etc., and how they all inter-relate. To attempt to give a realistic portrait of what it is like to be a particular individual.

Jamess work frequently explores the moral dilemmas of people who are forced to deal with cultural displacement. Many stories are about newly wealthy Americans coming in contact with European people and society. These Americans often come across as well-intentioned but naive, innocent, simplistic.

James also focuses on the less-dramatic evils that result from passivity or negligence, from people simply allowing things to happen.

He is very attuned to the social nuances (or customs) of his class and his time, nuances that largely escape us today (for example, the terms it seems as if and ever so much--used by Daisy in Daisy Miller--are indications of a lack of culture). Often, James writes about characters that are engaged in "typing" others--identifying and categorizing them as a way of understanding who and what they are. These stories analyze patterns of social organization and definition that societies obsess over, despite the fact that they are always inadequate.

He tries to make his role as narrator as unobtrusive as possible: show, but dont tell. First of the Great Psychological Novelists George Eliot is one of the founding-fathers of the modern psychological novel. As W.J. Long points out, George Eliot sought to do in her novels what Browning attempted in his poetry; that is, to represent the inner struggle of a soul, and to reveal the motives, impulses and hereditary influences which govern human action. Browning generally stops when he tells his story and either lets you draw your own conclusion or else gives you his in a few striking lines. But George Eliot is not content until she has minutely explained the motives of her characters and the moral lesson to be learnt from them. Moreover, it is the development of a soul, the slow growth or decline of moral power, which chiefly interests her. Her heroes and heroines differ radically from those of Dickens and Thackeray in this respect that when we meet the men and women of the latter novelists, their characters are already formed, and we are reasonably sure what they will do under given circumstances. In George Eliots novels the characters develop gradually as we come to know them. They go from

weakness to strength or from strength to weakness, according to the works they do and the thoughts that they cherish. Study of Mental Processes A.E. Baker rightly points out, George Eliots sphere was the inner man; she exposed the internal clockwork. Her characters are not simply passive, and they do not standstill, they are shown making their own history, continually changing and developing as their motives issue into acts, and the acts become part of the circumstances that condition, modify, and purify or demoralise the will. According to David Cecil, We get behind the clock face and see the works, locate the mainspring, discover how it makes the Wheels turn. We know just how a character will behave and why; we knew exactly what special mixture of common human ingredients makes him act differently from other people. Adam Bede: Writing from the Inside George Eliots powers of Psycho-analysis, her understanding of mental-processes, the springs of human action, the motives which impel a character to act in a particular way, are shown to great advantage in Adam Bede. Indeed, parts of the novel which have been most highly admired are those in which she analyses and dissects the souls of her characters and lays them bare before the readers. This is so much so, the case that many critics have called Adam Bede the first psychological novel. What makes Adam Bede the fore-runner of the psychological novel, as later exemplified by Joyce and Woolf and countless others, is that the psychology of the main characters, Adam, Seth, Hetty, Dinah, Arthur, and the Poysers, is a major theme. Eliot has written this novel principally from the inside of her characters, not from the outside, as most of her contemporaries and predecessors had done. Analysis of Causes and Motives For example, in the chapter called A Journey in Hope, Eliot spends far more time in Hettys poor brain and heart than Hetty spends on the road in her unwise search for her runaway lover. This is psychology. And the chapters immediately before and after this similarly look deeply into Hetty, and Adam, too. Although there is sufficient activity to keep the story rolling, there is much more inner activity than outer. Each chapter is concerned with only a

single major episode or action, or sometimes the several parts of one action, but the analyses of the causes of the actions go on throughout. Eliot is very deft in her psychological approach. Sometimes she simply allows us to put an instrument into a characters brain to let us see not only what is going on there, but often also to let us see what the character himself does not see, Shortly after the death of Thias Bede, his wife Lisbeth was in the Bede home, alone with the body. After an almost ritual cleansing and purification of the chamber where Thias lay, she slumped into a chair in the kitchen and contemplated her grief: At another time, Lisbeths first thought would have been, Where is Adam? but the sudden death of her husband had restored him in these hours to that first place in her affections that he had held six-andtwenty years ago: she had forgotten his faults as we forget the sorrows of our departed childhood, and thought of nothing but the young husbands kindness and the old mans patience. This sentence is remarkable not only for its brilliant psychological insights, but also for the skill and seeming ease with which Eliot handles a sentence of almost 70 words, and the little flash of knowledge it gives us about Eliots own unloved childhood. When Eliots characters think, we share their thoughts, much as we would the thoughts of people in novels of the 1960s. For example, when Adam accidentally comes upon Arthur and Hetty embracing in the woods, Hetty scurries away, and Arthur, with deliberate and elaborate carelessness, saunters forward to Adam. He thought, After all, Adam was the best who could have happened to see him and Hetty together: he was a sensible fellow and would not bable about it to other people. Arthur felt confident that he could laugh the thing off, and explain it away. Grasp of Psychological Essentials: Arthur Donnithorne George Eliots grip on psychological essentials enables her to draw complex characters much better than her predecessors. Writes David Cecil in this connection, Drawing from the inside out, starting with the central principle of the character, she is able to show how it reveals itself in the most apparently inconsistent manifestations, can give to the most varied coloured surface of character that prevalent tone which marks it as the expression of one personality. Her characters always hang together, are of a piece, their defects are the defects of their

virtues. We are not surprised that a man, so anxious for the good opinion of others as Arthur Donnithorne, should selfishly seduce Hetty, because we realise that the controlling force in his character is the desire for immediate enjoyment; so that his wish to sun himself in the pleasant warmth of other peoples liking goes alongwith his inability not to yield to the immediate pleasure of Hettys embraces. George Eliot can follow the windings of motive through the most tortuous labyrinths, for firmly grasped in her hand is always the central clue. Mixed States of Mind: Triumph of Temptation Her power of describing mixed characters extends to mixed states of mind. Indeed, the field of her most characteristic triumphs is the moral battlefield. Her eagle eye can penetrate through all the shock and the smoke of struggle, to elucidate the position of the forces concerned, and reveal the trend of their action. We are shown exactly how the forces of temptation deploy themselves for the attack, how those of conscience rally to resistance, the ins and outs of their conflict, how inevitably, in the given circumstances one or the other triumphs. She is particularly good at showing how temptation triumphs. No other English novelist has given as so vivid a picture of the process of moral defeat, as Donnithornes gradual yielding to his passion for Hetty. With an inexorable clearness she repeals how temptation insinuates itself into the mind, how it retreats at the first suspicious movement of conscience how it comes back disguised, and how, if once more vanquished, it will sham death only to arise suddenly and sweep its victim away on a single irresistible gust of desire when he is off his guard. Portrait of Moral Chaos With equal insight she can portray the moral chaos that takes possession of the mind after wrong has been done. She exposes all the complex writhings of a spirit striving to make itself at ease on the bed of a disturbed conscience, the desperate casuistry by which it attempts to justify itself, its inexhaustible ingenuity in blinding itself to unpleasant facts, the baseless hopes it conjures up for its comfort; she can distinguish precisely how different an act looks before it is done, shrouded in the softening darkness of the secret heart, and after, exposed in all its naked ugliness to the harsh daylight of other peoples judgment. The guilt ridden conscience of Arthur Donnithorne is analysed in this way and we

are shown the scorpions that sting him and prevent sleep, With rare penetration and insight, George Eliot isolates and detects the various warring elements in Arthurs mind, his genuine compunction, his horror of being disapproved, of his instinctive resentment at disapproval, however justifiable, his inextinguishable hope that things will come right in the end, his irrational conviction that with him, at least, things always must come right. One grows quite uncomfortable as one watches so merciless, so delicate an exposure of human weakness. The truth it embodies is universal. In exposing Arthur Donnithorne, she also exposes her reader. (David Cecil) Arthur: Analysis of Semi-Conscious Motives She lays bare the conscious as well as semi-conscious motives of Arthur. We see the workings of his innermost mind: He had been awake an hour, and could rest in bed no longer. In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past, sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories. For with Arthurs sensitiveness to opinion, the loss of Adams respect was a shock to his selfcontentment which suffused his imagination with the sense that he had sunk in all eyes; as a sudden shock of fear from some real peril makes a nervous woman afraid even to step, because all her perceptions are suffused with a sense of dangerArthur would so gladly have persuaded himself that he had done no harm. And if no one had told him the contrary, he would have persuaded himself so much better. Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciencesout of suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused; there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon. Our moral sense learns the manners of good society, and smiles when others smile: but when some rude person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt to take part against us: And so it was with Arthur. Adams judgment of him, his grating words, disturbed his self-soothing arguments. Conclusion It is George Eliots psychological insight into the springs of human action, the subtle analysis of character and motive accompanying the external action, which gives her peculiar and individual place

among the Victorian novelists. She is one of them and yet how very different and original. She is the first of the great modern novelists who have a high conception of their art, who regard the novel as a serious art form, and who are given to the probing of the human psyche, to the subtle analysis of the subconscious and even the unconscious.