BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Friday, October 25, 2013

Literary “Voice” Misunderstood?

When literary dictionaries and theory talk of voice, they are not talking about hearing voices.

So, in the last post, when I quoted Toni Morrison as saying that she looked for a voice to narrate her novel, Jazz, and she went on to describe how the narrator voice interacted with the character voices, people naturally think that she was speaking metaphorically. And if she was, then my interpretation of it all in terms of multiple personality was really stupid.

But when Dickens (June 2013 post) and other novelists speak of voices—as in hearing the voices of their characters—they are not speaking metaphorically. They are hearing voices.

Does that mean Dickens and other novelists are crazy? No. Because there are two kinds of voices: 1. psychotic voices, as in schizophrenia, and 2. non-psychotic voices, as in multiple personality (dissociative identity). Psychotic voices are incoherent and/or delusional. Non-psychotic voices are coherent and rational, and are the voices of alternate personalities.

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