When Novels Feature Literary Doubles and Multiplying of Personality, Do Literature Professors Ever Infer That The Novelist [Doris Lessing] Might Have Had Multiple Personality?

I just read a book chapter about the best-known novel of a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, but in this post, I don’t want to make an issue of the specific novelist, novel, or English professor, except to say that the latter is a leading scholar on this writer.

The professor says that from first sentence to last, this novel involves “doubling and multiplying of personality,” and is filled with “literary doubles,” “multiplicity of personality,” “doubling, multiplication and interchanging of the self,” “split and merging selves,” and other complex variations of doubling and multiplicity. Moreover, in chapters devoted to other novels by the same writer, the professor finds that they, too, feature doubling.

Yet nowhere in this whole book, devoted in large part to this one novelist’s literary doubling, does the professor ever raise the issue of multiple personality, per se. I could understand this if the novels had been published either early or late in the 20^th century, when multiple personality was a popular subject. Then it would have been understandable for a novelist to take up the subject. But these novels were published mid-century, when multiple personality was thought to be so rare as to be almost nonexistent.

So this novelist must have had personal reasons for being so preoccupied with doubling and multiplicity in those years. And I don’t mean that these personal reasons would detract from the novelist’s achievement. Just the opposite. If a novelist had multiple personality, and won the Nobel Prize, other novelists might want to look into it.