William Faulkner’s Multiple Personality: Hidden in Plain Sight

In a short story, written by Faulkner and read to his friends as a “joke,” Faulkner’s alter ego says that he, not Faulkner, is the one who does Faulkner’s writing, that he is Faulkner’s ghost writer:

Faulkner, William: “Afternoon of a Cow” (1937/1947). In Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph Blotner. New York, Random House, 1979/1997.

For a discussion of that story and related issues, see:

Grimwood, Michael: Heart in Conflict: Faulkner’s Struggles with Vocation. Athens, The University of Georgia Press, 1987.

For most of his life, people noticed that Faulkner had puzzling and inconsistent behaviors and attitudes, but multiple personality, per se, was never considered or identified. Why wasn’t it?

Why is it so common for multiple personality like Faulkner’s to be hidden in plain sight? Partly because multiple personality is naturally and intrinsically secretive and camouflaged. And partly because people have never been told what multiple personality is, and what it is really like: which can be remedied by starting with the June 2013 post and then reading the rest of this blog.

Multiple Personality is “more real than real,” the brain’s version of modern technology’s Virtual Reality

How you react to the definition of multiple personality in the last post will depend on whether you, yourself, do or don’t have it.

If you don’t have multiple personality, you may believe that normal people can’t and don’t really think that way. You may think that a person could pretend or imagine that they experience the presence of more than one person. But you can’t believe that they truly experience these “people” as being, in Toni Morrison’s words, “much more real than real people.” 

If you do have multiple personality, you may believe that everyone has their own private people, just as you do. But since it’s a private thing, they don’t talk about it, any more than you discuss your private people with them. If you are a novelist, perhaps you have discussed this with other novelists, and since other novelists probably are like you, that only confirmed your belief that everyone, deep down, is the same (although you wouldn’t be surprised if people without artistic sensibility weren't in touch with it).

Morrison’s phrase (quoted above) is a great way of expressing the point that, to people with multiple personality, it’s very real (subjectively), even though a part of their mind is always well aware that it’s not real (objectively).

Multiple personality might be thought of as the brain’s version of modern technology’s virtual reality. You know it’s not real, but it sure seems real, maybe more real than real.

Definition of Multiple Personality (aka Dissociative Identity or Multiple Identity) for Nonpsychiatric Purposes

1. A person has more than one sense of identity or personhood; that is, they have more than one “I”: Ia and Ib (the alternate personality). What gives Ia and Ib their separate senses of identity?

2. Ia and Ib think and act independently and differently. Sometimes Ia is in control. Sometime Ib is in control. For example, they can have a conversation. Sometimes Ia speaks and Ib listens. Sometimes the reverse. They may have different opinions, attitudes, moods, and self-images (as to age, height, sex, etc.).

3. They have separate memory banks. At least one of them will have known and remembered things that the other one hadn't. For example, Ib may tell Ia a story of events that Ia hadn’t known about or remembered. That is, Ia had had amnesia, a memory gap, for the events (real or imagined) that Ib had remembered or imagined.

All the above may be fulfilled when a novelist has a character or another narrator with a mind of its own.

Does Ib, the alternate personality, have to come out and interact with other people? No. It doesn’t have to. Or it may do so rarely. And even if it does so frequently, other people usually don’t realize it, because alternate personalities generally prefer to remain incognito as far as outsiders (people other than Ia) are concerned.

The essential difference between normal multiple personality (which many novelists have) and multiple personality disorder (the mental illness) is that the latter causes the person a significant amount of distress and/or dysfunction. In contrast, some people with normal multiple personality can be very high-functioning, even winning the Nobel Prize.

Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone Mystery series illustrates the failure of the distinction between Plot-Driven and Character-Driven

What could be more plot-driven than a detective novel? Everything has to be worked out in detail from start to finish, with its clues and red herrings, realistic police and forensic details, etc., so that it meets genre standards. Moreover, in a series like that, Grafton has to keep comprehensive records of every detail from novel to novel so her fans don’t catch her in a mistake.

However, as discussed in previous posts, the writing of Grafton’s novels involves the same character-driven process found in the work of the so-called literary novelists I have discussed. They all involve characters who, 1. as Mark Twain said, were not, in any ordinary sense, created (e.g., Kinsey originally came to Grafton as an “apparition”), 2. are alternate personalities, with minds of their own, and 3. are, to one extent or another, in the driver’s seat.

Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven: Why “Character-Driven”?

In the how-to-write-a-novel literature, and perhaps in creative writing programs, the distinction is made between novels that are plot-driven and character-driven.

I always assumed this meant that plot-driven novels emphasize what incident happens next, as in a page-turning thriller, while character-driven novels emphasize the characters’ feelings, conflicts, and relationships. The former is goal-oriented, the latter is growth-oriented.

Furthermore, I always assumed this distinction meant that the plot-driven novel was written by first figuring out the plot. Once this was accomplished, characters could be made to order, according to what the plot required. In contrast, the character-driven novel was written by first creating a character—whose feelings, conflicts, and relationships were to evolve—and the events of the plot would be secondary to that. (We know from Mark Twain and other novelists quoted in previous posts that most novelists don't "create" their characters.)

But why the term “character-driven?” Why not “character-oriented,” “character-centered,” “character-motivated,” “character-conflict,” or “character-growth”? Why “driven”?

Because, as discussed in the last two posts, the character is in the driver’s seat. (Which makes the narrator a “back-seat driver.”)

Clarification of Yesterday’s Post, with a Quote from Toni Morrison

When Dickens and Faulkner said that they got most of what they wrote from their characters, you might have thought, “Well, so what? All you are saying is that they imagined that their characters told them these things.”

Well, yes, they did imagine it, but not in the usual sense of imagining. For example, suppose I wanted to decide what to have for lunch. I would imagine various foods and decide which I preferred. In doing that, I would have the subjective sense that “I” was in charge of the process and that “I” was doing the imagining.

But that is not what Dickens and Faulkner said happened in their writing process. Their subjective experience was not that they imagined most of what they wrote, but that the characters did. They experienced the characters as being independent, thinking beings with minds of their own (which is the essence of multiple personality).

Novelists experience their characters as real. How real? As Toni Morrison said (see post of October 26, 2013), “much more real than real people.”

When novelists such as Dickens and Faulkner talk about their writing process, most professors don’t take them seriously.

Charles Dickens and William Faulkner said that they didn’t invent most of what they wrote. Once their characters came to life, subjectively, they wrote what their characters told them.

But most professors would insist that Dickens and Faulkner were speaking metaphorically or simply joking. After all, they reason, novelists might have their artistic peculiarities, but they are not crazy.

In contrast, when I read Dickens and Faulkner, and they discuss something as important to them as their writing process, I do take them seriously. There are just too many other novelists, for too many years, who have said similar things.

And in my psychiatric opinion, it doesn’t mean that they are crazy. It means that they have a normal, creative, literary type of multiple personality.

What kind of person was William Faulkner, according to an investigative reporter and Faulkner scholars?

“He prefers to be an enigma and one can believe that he will always remain one, even to himself, for his inconsistencies pass artistic license. His is not a split personality but rather a fragmented one…He is thoughtful of others, and oblivious to others; he is kind, and he is cruel; he is courtly, and he is cold;…a man of integrity who has contributed to a false legend about himself. Of more serious importance, he is a great writer and a bad writer.” —The Private World of William Faulkner, Robert Coughlin. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1953.

Coughlin is today mainly remembered for his article about Faulkner in Life magazine (expanded in the above-referenced book) to which Faulkner famously responded with outrage in his essay “On Privacy” (1955). To assess the credibility of Coughlin’s view that Faulkner’s personality went beyond being split—that it was fragmented—I looked up Coughlin in Joseph Blotner’s respected biography of Faulkner (1974/1984). Blotner says, “…his description of the man himself was the best ever written.”

“Who is Faulkner?” was one of the main questions asked at a conference in 1997 honoring Faulkner’s centenary (Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect. Edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2000). The first five pages of the book are remarks by Joseph Blotner. Pages 18-25 are by a professor of English, Noel Polk:

“…Who was William Faulkner? Only in that split, that bifurcation, which becomes a multiplication, can we hope to locate him…[Polk draws our attention to] a little-read piece [by Faulkner] called ‘Afternoon of a Cow,’ putatively written by one Ernest V. Trueblood, who tells us that he has been ‘writing Mr. Faulkner’s novels and short stories for years’…Ernest V. Trueblood is thus the architect of Faulkner’s literary mansion…The Faulkner-Trueblood split is a particularly interesting one, partly because Faulkner had used the Trueblood pseudonym very early in his career…The two Faulkners, the Faulkner Faulkner and the Trueblood Faulkner…lived side by side with each other, in the same household…The two Faulkners didn’t always live in harmony with each other, and perhaps came at times to hold each other in a kind of disdain or even contempt…Thus we have the Faulkner who could write powerful novels of racial injustice in Mississippi coexisting with the Faulkner who would shoot Negroes in the street to defend Mississippi against the United States…; the Faulkner who could write such powerful portraits of family dysfunction and the Faulkner who could tell his own daughter that nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children…”

J. K. Rowling announces Second Novel written by Robert Galbraith, her Pseudonym and Alter Ego, euphemisms for Alternate Personality

When the author of the Harry Potter novels published The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, but was found out, she explained that she had wanted to see how the book would do without the benefit of her fame. So why, now that everyone knows Robert Galbraith is her pseudonym, is she continuing to use it for a second novel?

Regarding the origin of the name, she explains that “When I was a child, I really wanted to be called Ella Galbraith, I’ve no idea why…the name had a fascination for me.”

Is Robert Galbraith a pseudonym for an alternate personality, Ella Galbraith? Is he Ella Galbraith’s brother? Does Rowling know?

Virginia Woolf is described by Professors as having Multiple Personality sort of issues

Woolf possesses and communicates not a single, but a multiple personality. I do not approach this multiple personality as a pathological condition, that is, as a more public and controlled form of the madness [bipolar disorder, aka manic-depression] that periodically overwhelmed her. I take what many may consider an even more perverse position: I treat her multiple or plural personalities as the highest achievement of her disciplined art.

—Maria DiBattista: Imagining Virginia Woolf. Princeton University Press, 2009

For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. —from Woolf’s Orlando

      Orlando’s biographer keeps disassembling and then re-assembling Orlando’s “selves”: a reflection of Virginia Woolf’s sense of her own “great variety of selves.” As she began to develop her ideas for The Waves—of the author as six different voices speaking in solitude—and as at the same time her public, famous self became increasingly established, her life can be seen as a complicated range of performances. Questions about her “selves” filled her mind in the late 1920s. Her battle-cry, “How I interest myself!” was loud in her ears. She knew she had different ways of presenting her own identity. She kept returning to Orlando’s idea of the unstable self.

—Hermione Lee: Virginia Woolf. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

She has begun to use the name “Miss Jan” rather than “Virginia” to describe what happened to her; it is a name that she continued to use throughout 1897 [age 15; two years after her mother died]. She writes: “It is so windy to day, that Miss Jan is quite afraid of venturing out. The other day her skirt was blown over her head, and she trotted along in a pair of red flannel drawers to the great amusement of the Curate who happened to be coming out of Church.” The retelling of this event is significant for it explicitly conveys the reason why Virginia Woolf became agoraphobic: she was terrified because her bottom had indeed been exposed. And she was afraid that everyone would see it.

—Louise DeSalvo: Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston, Beacon Press, 1989

The above quotations from Professors DiBattista, Lee, and DeSalvo raise the possibility that Virginia Woolf—completely separate from, and unrelated to, her bipolar disorder—had multiple personality.

Malcolm Cowley on William Faulkner’s Concern for Privacy and Tolerance for Inconsistency

At a time when Faulkner’s books were mostly out of print, Malcolm Cowley, as editor of The Portable Faulkner (1946), helped to revive Faulkner’s literary career. Cowley discusses his friendship with Faulkner in The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962  (NY, Viking, 1966).

One issue discussed is Faulkner’s famous concern with privacy. For example, when Life magazine asked Cowley to write a story on Faulkner, Faulkner was so upset with this invasion of his privacy that he discouraged his friend, Cowley, from writing it. And so, as Cowley had warned Faulkner, Life then hired someone else, who was not a friend, to write the story.

But Cowley had to write an introduction for The Portable Faulkner, so he still had to write something biographical. And he found that false information had previously been published which exaggerated Faulkner’s military experience. Cowley wanted to correct the record, but Faulkner wanted Cowley to just avoid repeating the false information and to avoid personal information in general. (Perhaps Faulkner had told people different things at different times about his military experience. As Faulkner said in the Paris Review interview, ask him the same personal question on different occasions and you may get different answers.)

Faulkner expressed his attitude this way: “I will want to blue pencil everything which even intimates that something breathing and moving sat behind the typewriter which produced the books.” He also said, “It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.” He wanted his epitaph to be: “He made the books and he died.”

At another point, Cowley, commenting on what Faulkner had described in letters about his writing process, said, “Faulkner had often written as if the author, too, were an imagined character.” Note (added Feb. 16): To clarify what is meant here, the "imagined character" was not a character of the story, but was a narrator who was an alternate personality.

So perhaps Faulkner’s concern for privacy was due to his fear people would discover that no single individual called William Faulkner really existed.

Another issue discussed by Cowley was Faulkner’s attitude toward inconsistencies in his writings. In working on The Portable Faulkner, Cowley had found numerous instances in which the same events were discussed in different books or stories, but with glaringly inconsistent details. The most famous example was how Faulkner changed the story of The Sound and the Fury in an Appendix written many years after the book was originally published.

Faulkner wrote to Cowley: “The inconsistencies in the appendix prove that to me the book is still alive after 15 years…it is the book itself which is inconsistent: not the appendix. That is, at the age of 30 I did not know these people [the characters] as at 45 I now do; that I was even wrong now and then in the very conclusions I drew from watching them [he got the story from “watching” the characters]…”

What does Faulkner mean that “the book is inconsistent,” not he? “I listen to the voices [of the characters],” Faulkner told Cowley, “and when I put down what the voices say, it’s right. Sometimes I don’t like what they say, but I don’t change it.” Unless and until the characters or the book tells him something different.

Charles Dickens’s Miss Twinkleton, Another Character with Gratuitous Multiple Personality

The previous post reminded me of a character in Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood:

“As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism [hypnosis], there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. Every night, the moment the young ladies [at the boarding school] have retired to rest, does Miss Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little, brighten up her eyes a little, and become sprightly Miss Twinkleton whom the young ladies have never seen. Every night, at the same hour, does Miss Twinkleton resume the topics of the previous night…whereof Miss Twinkleton, in her scholastic state of existence, is as ignorant as a granite pillar.”

Dickens’s description, which includes amnesia between the two personalities, is a more definitive description of multiple personality, but Grafton’s is quite sufficient.

In regard to the cases of alcohol and hypnosis, I would disagree with Dickens that those are different. Drugs and hypnosis can facilitate the switching among personalities in multiple personality.

However, my main point is that, as with Grafton’s character, Dickens’s giving multiple personality to Miss Twinkleton is gratuitous.

It is just that both Dickens and Grafton see multiple personality as common enough so that you really don’t need a special reason for a character to have it.

Why does Sue Grafton gratuitously suggest that a character in S is for Silence might have multiple personality?

After my recent posts about Sue Grafton, I decided to read one of her novels, which I had not done for many years. So I just read S is for Silence (2005), which I had never read.

Tom Padgett is described as a man who, with his wife Cora out of town, “was an entirely different man. It was like having a separate personality, one he called forth and wore like a smoking jacket while she was gone. He had two such personalities, as a matter of fact. When he drank, especially at the Blue Moon, he relaxed into the blue-collar type from which he sprang. He was a good old boy at heart. He liked his boots and jeans, adding a western-cut sport coat when he felt like dressing up. Here in Cora’s fancy house, sober and unobserved, he activated another side of his nature, playing the Lord of the Manor. He was jaunty and dapper. He used a cigarette holder when he smoked and affected a snooty accent when he talked to himself.”

The information that this character has more than one personality is neither a clue nor a red herring in this mystery novel. It is gratuitous. There is no reason for its inclusion.

When a novel includes multiple personality for no literary reason, I think the reason is that the author takes multiple personality for granted. It is simply how people are, in that author’s personal experience.

William Faulkner, in various Interviews, describes the Nature of Characters and the Process of Writing

“You can have no more control over [a character] than you would an incorrigible child.”

When Faulkner was asked how he chose such unusual but appropriate names for his characters, he replied that he did not name them: “They tell me their names.” What about the character in Pylon who does not have a name: “He never did tell me his name.”

Q: When you first begin to write a story, do you have a sort of an outline in your mind…?

A: I would say it develops itself. It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is to trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does, that he is taking charge of it. I have very little to do except the policeman in the back of the head which insists on unity and coherence and emphasis in telling it. But the characters themselves, they do what they do, not me.

Conversations with William Faulkner. Edited by M. Thomas Inge. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999

The Sound and the Fury: William Faulkner’s Rashomon, written by four or five Alternate Personalities

In the same Paris Review interview discussed in yesterday’s post, Faulkner tells how The Sound and the Fury was written.

The novel’s first narrator was “the idiot child.” The second narrator was “another brother.” The third narrator was “the third brother.” The fourth narrator was the interviewee, “making myself the spokesman.” The latter says he made a fifth attempt to tell the story fifteen years later in an appendix to another book. “I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.”

According to Faulkner, telling the story from those four or five points of view was not an innovative technique. It represented his five attempts to tell the story right, which, according to Faulkner, never succeeded.

Objectively, Faulkner did make five attempts to tell the story. But that is not what happened in Faulkner’s subjective experience of it. Because each narrator noted above was an autonomous alternate personality with, in Faulkner’s subjective experience, a mind of its own.

On the page just before he tells how he wrote The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner says the kind of thing that so many novelists acknowledge: “Because with me there is always a point in the book where the characters themselves rise up and take charge and finish the job…”

That is how novels are written. Novelists keep saying so. But nobody believes them.

So The Sound and the Fury was actually written in the way I speculated in previous posts that the Japanese tale—made into the movie Rashomon—was written.

I suspect that a lot of what has been thought of as modern and postmodern literary innovations could be better explained by Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

William Faulkner, lacking a good Host Personality, inadvertently implies that he has Multiple Personality

Faulkner’s interview by Jean Stein in Paris Review (New York City, 1956) begins as follows:

INTERVIEWER: Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don’t like being interviewed.

WILLIAM FAULKNER: The reason I don’t like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different.

Most people would take the above to mean that since Faulkner likes his personal privacy, he will not cooperate with questions that invade his personal privacy, and so he will either refuse to answer such questions or he will give unreliable answers out of spite.

On the second and third pages of the interview, asked how a writer becomes a serious novelist, he says the following:

FAULKNER: …An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done…If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Most people would take this to mean that Faulkner is totally dedicated to his writing, as any serious writer would be. But he seems to be in an obnoxious, irritable mood.

I would interpret the above differently. “If the same [personal] question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different” because you may be talking to a different personality.

Regarding “An artist is a creature driven by demons,” we should keep in mind that Faulkner had continued to read the Bible since childhood. And when they say “demons” in the Bible, they don’t mean it as a metaphor for being determined or irritable, they mean being possessed, which psychiatry now understands to be multiple personality.

Why does Faulkner have such problems with interviews, in contrast to other writers like Doris Lessing, Sue Grafton, and Mark Twain? If you look at videos of interviews with Lessing or Grafton, they are pleasant, polished, and consistent. If you read interviews with Twain, he was similar. My answer is that, with those three, the interviewer would be speaking to their host personality (discussed in previous posts), a kind of personality that Faulkner evidently lacked.

Twenty-Eight Highlights and Brief Notes

1. The idea that novelists have a split personality (multiple personality) has been suspected in the literary community for at least 150 years, said Margaret Atwood.

2. The split personality of Charles Dickens was first pointed out in 1939/41 by Edmund Wilson.

3. The split personality of Mark Twain was first pointed out in 1920 by Van Wyck Brooks.

4. Posts on Dickens and Twain support this with additional facts.

5. Multiple personality in novelists, which they use in their writing process, has been generally ignored by psychologists who study creativity, by literature professors and literary theory, and by psychiatry (which is interested only in multiple personality disorder and does not recognize normal multiple personality).

6. Freud, who himself probably had multiple personality, neither discovered nor understood the unconscious, which, anyway, doesn’t exist. What Freud called “the unconscious” is really multiple consciousness (with one consciousness unaware of what the other consciousness is thinking.)

7. The practical difference between these two views is that people who think in terms of the unconscious cannot understand how multiple personality could possibly exist. But even Freud grudgingly acknowledged that it does exist. 

8. And since psychoanalytic literary theory derives from the mistaken “unconscious” perspective, it is antithetical to multiple identity literary theory, which is newly proposed in this blog.

9. Since being “possessed” has now been recognized to be multiple personality disorder by the official psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-5), it is clear that multiple personality disorder has been known since Biblical times (making it one of the oldest and most established psychiatric disorders) and that Jesus may have been its first therapist (Mark 5:1-20).

10. Normal religious experience may be based on dual consciousness (William James), which is the psychological foundation and simplest form of normal multiple personality.

11. Novelists commonly acknowledge that they experience their characters as having minds of their own. This subjective experience of having more than one personified, independent-minded, psychological entity is the essence of multiple personality.

12. Normal multiple personality—in contrast to the mental disorder, and by virtue of its having more cooperation among the identities—does not cause the person serious distress or dysfunction; indeed, it may be an asset (e.g., to write novels).

13. Dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder, the mental illness) is present in 1.5% of the general population (according to DSM-5), which would make it twice as common as schizophrenia. And although you sometimes hear multiple personality referred to as a “controversial diagnosis,” it is actually more specific and clearly defined than schizophrenia.

14. Normal multiple personality is present in up to 30% of the general public and 90% of novelists (these figures are educated guesses).

15. In the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5, dissociative identity disorder is in the chapter on Dissociative Disorders, which are not psychotic. Schizophrenia, a psychosis, is in a different chapter and is in a completely different diagnostic category.

16. Dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personality disorder) is considered to be mainly a psychological disorder—originating in childhood as a way to cope with trauma—and is treated with specific psychotherapy. In contrast, schizophrenia is considered to be mainly a biological disorder whose primary treatment is medication.

17.  Multiple personality is usually hidden and camouflaged. Often the only clues that a person might have it are that they have a puzzling inconsistency (because, without your realizing it, you are meeting, or seeing the effects of, different personalities) and memory gaps (when one personality has no memory of what another personality did). Moreover, you are mostly meeting the “host personality,” who may know very little about the other personalities. (See also Henry James and Doris Lessing, below, about the host personality.) However, once it is diagnosed or recognized, and the personalities see that hiding is futile and you are no threat, they may become quite overt and you can speak with each of them.

18.  In literary criticism, the term alter ego is used in two ways. First, if the author is writing a philosophical novel with a character who is expressing the author’s philosophical views, that character may be referred to as the author’s alter ego, in the sense of being the author’s spokesperson. Second, if the author has a character who has certain superficial similarities to the author, and, perhaps, is a recurring character in that author’s novels, that character may also be referred to as the author’s alter ego. But in this latter case, alter ego is a euphemism for a character who is an alternate personality with a mind of its own. Examples of the latter would be Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.

19.  Toni Morrison and Stephen King illustrate the same three basic components of the process of writing novels: First, alter one’s state of consciousness. Second, experience autonomous characters (alternate personalities) coming forward. Third, control and prune the characters.

20.  Rashomon may have originated when the author decided not to control or prune the characters (alternate personalities), but rather to let them each tell the story from their own perspective.

21. The post “Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz” discusses that it is not just the characters who may be alternate personalities. The narrator may be an alternate personality.

22. Indeed, when an alternate personality not only wants to take over the narration, but wants to publish on its own, this may take the form of an author’s publishing under a pseudonym.

23. Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” is a short story about how multiple personality is used to write fiction.

24. Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” is not ambiguous. It is inconsistent, probably due to multiple narrator personalities who didn’t get their act together.

25. Henry James’s “The Private Life” is about multiple personality’s “host personality.”

26. Doris Lessing, in her autobiography, said that among her personalities was a “Hostess.”

27. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey and Me (2013), according to what Grafton stated in an interview, reveals that she has “several personalities.”

28. A post on J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan pointed out that the story of a boy “who never grows up” is not about immaturity, but about multiple personality, since people with multiple personality usually have one or more child-aged alternate personalities who never grow up. And especially since NBC television in the USA has plans for a live broadcast of Peter Pan this coming Christmas holiday season, I expect to discuss Barrie further, including his writer alternate personality, whom Barrie called “McConnachie.”

Sue Grafton Experiences “Kinsey Millhone” and “Kit Blue” as Persons, Not Just Characters

Since Kinsey Millhone and Kit Blue exist only in the writings of Sue Grafton, readers jump to the conclusion that Grafton experiences them as being only invented characters. Grafton certainly knows that they are invented characters, but that doesn’t mean she experiences them as such.

I know this from what Grafton says in her book Kinsey and Me (2013), mentioned in my two previous posts. To understand what Grafton means, you have to assume that she is good at expressing herself with the written word, and then you have to read what she actually wrote.

Grafton says, “Kinsey Millhone entered my life, like an apparition, sometime in 1977.” That means Grafton saw Kinsey as a visual hallucination or vision. “Often I feel she’s peering over my shoulder, whispering, nudging me, making bawdy remarks.” That means Grafton also hears the voice and feels the touch of Kinsey. Of course, Grafton knows this is her imagination and that she invented Kinsey, but Grafton’s imagination is so vivid that she sees, hears, and feels Kinsey, and experiences Kinsey as a thinking being with a mind of her own.

Grafton says, “Kit Blue is simply a younger version of me.” That is not exactly the same as saying that Kit Blue is Grafton when she was younger. If the latter were the case, Grafton could, should, and would have replaced the fictitious name with her own name in the current tell-how-it-really-was publication. There is no reason to retain the Kit Blue name unless Grafton experiences Kit Blue as a person distinct from herself: as an alternate personality of a younger age than Grafton.

Grafton wrote Kinsey and Me to say what she did say, explicitly, in the television interview: “I have several personalities.” Which would make her like Dickens, Twain, etc., except that Grafton has had more best sellers.

Sue Grafton Discusses her “Shadow” (secret sharer, subconscious, imaginary companion, alternate personality) in Three other Interviews

In my last post about an interview for her book Kinsey and Me (2013), Sue Grafton mentioned “Shadow” as being one of her “several personalities.” Looking through a few of Grafton’s past interviews, I find it may be new that she is framing the issue in terms of multiple personality, but she has been mentioning Shadow for more than fifteen years.

She says that she got the term “shadow” from a Jungian therapist whom she had seen for writer’s block. The Jungian therapist said that she should listen to her unconscious, her “shadow,” for creative insight. Since then, Grafton says that she loves writer’s block, because it’s a message from her unconscious, her shadow, about what to do with the story she is writing.

However, what she now refers to as her Shadow—a nice, publicly acceptable term, since, according to Jungians, everybody has one—actually originated in her childhood as a sort of imaginary companion. “I guess that’s where Shadow comes from. I’ve been having a constant conversation with my dark side for most of my life.”

So Shadow is a personified psychological entity whom Grafton has been having conversations with since childhood. It seems to be a friendly, constructive relationship, but Shadow can be quite critical and arrogant, evidently due to superior knowledge. Grafton quotes Shadow as once saying to her, “Oh sweetie, you don’t have the foggiest idea what this book is about.”

A key feature of Grafton’s writing process is that she keeps a long and detailed journal of her thoughts about the book she is writing. One purpose of the journal is that it serves as a medium of communication between Grafton and Shadow. “I leave her notes in my journal, you know. ‘Dear, dear Shadow, please help me. Your friend, Sue.’” Sometimes the questions and answers are quite specific to the characters and plot of the book she is writing.

Grafton says, “I try not to create so much as I discover. One of my theories about these books is that they already exist.” She attributes this attitude to her religious background and the Presbyterian belief in predestination. But the idea that her books already exist and that she just has to discover them would also seem to be implied by the way her books seem to be already known to, and provided by, Shadow.

Sue Grafton, bestselling novelist, says, “I have several personalities” including “The Shadow, who does the work…”

Sue Grafton is the author of a series of bestselling novels featuring private detective Kinsey Millhone. The title of each book starts with a letter of the alphabet, and it won’t be long before Grafton has published her 26th bestseller.

In 2013, Grafton published Kinsey and Me, half of which is a collection of short stories featuring her alter ego Kinsey Millhone, and half of which is a series of autobiographical reminiscences in which she calls herself “Kit Blue” and describes episodes in her difficult childhood.

I recall that a number of years ago I read an interview online in which Grafton told the interviewer that sometimes she and Kinsey disagree about how the plot of a novel should go. Kinsey wants it to go one way and Grafton wants it to go another way. So, Grafton said, “You’ll think I’m crazy,” but Grafton will stop writing, leave the computer, and come back later “when Kinsey is not around,” so Grafton can write it her way. So when I recently heard of the publication of Kinsey and Me, I got it, in the hope that Grafton would elaborate.

Well, the book does not elaborate on Grafton’s relationship with Kinsey. And the part of the book featuring “Kit Blue” will just be puzzling to most readers.

So I found a public television video in which Grafton is interviewed about Kinsey and Me.

http://video.azpbs.org/video/2342088975/

In the interview, you will see and hear Grafton say the things I quote in the title of this post (if you don't blink, it is so brief). And she wouldn’t have published Kinsey and Me and then said, publicly, what I quote, if she hadn’t wanted to discuss her “several personalities.” But when novelists bring up this subject, interviewers never pursue it.

Rashomon Postscript: Wasn’t That “Multiple Identity” Interpretation Arbitrary and Silly?

Since Rashoman, the movie, there have been many derivative works for cinema and television, and the whole idea is well known. See Wikipedia, the “Rashomon Effect.” And these derivative works may have been written with the conscious plan of doing a Rashomon plot.

As for the original Japanese tale from the 12^th century, I have no information about its author or how it was written. So, as long as any interpretation of the original story is just speculation, why not think of something more likely, such as that it was based on a real event or that the author, a keen observer, had noted that people sometimes don’t tell the truth?

You are right. I have no real basis for my interpretation. It was pure speculation. Except that, based on my discussions of other writers in this blog, I think that that is the way that many original works of fiction are written.

As Mark Twain said, he never created a character in his whole life. His characters started from someone he had known or read about, and then they took on a life of their own. For Toni Morrison, they come from a magical place in her mind, with stories and minds of their own, and then she may or may not control them. And Charles Dickens, as described in the June 2013 post, would watch and listen to his characters tell their tales, and he would write it down (subject, of course, to revision).

So I think it’s reasonable to speculate that the author of the original Rashomon tale got his or her characters the way that Twain, Morrison, and Dickens have, but decided, instead of controlling or pruning them, to let them have their own say, even if it stretched credulity to believe that witnesses would ever differ as much as they did in that story.

Rashomon: An Akira Kurosawa Movie, Based on a Ryunosuke Akutagawa Short Story, Based on a 12^th Century Japanese Tale, in Terms of Multiple Identity Literary Theory

The title of the short story, “In a Bamboo Grove,” tells where the rape and murder took place. The story consists of testimony by the various eyewitnesses. Since each eyewitness tells a very different story, the word “rashomon” is now used to mean that different people have different perspectives and that eyewitness testimony may be unreliable.

However, “rashomon” may have another meaning if we interpret the story in terms of Multiple Identity Literary Theory (discussed previously in this blog). According to this theory, the process of fiction writing involves the interaction of autonomous narrator and character identities.

Recall the posts in which I quoted how Toni Morrison and Stephen King controlled and pruned their independent-minded character-personalities. They had to control and prune them in order to keep everything consistent with the story that the narrator wanted to tell.

But what would happen if an author did not control or prune what the narrators and characters wanted to do or say? Suppose each identity were allowed to tell the story the way he or she wanted. Well, the result would be Rashomon.

Let me apply this meaning of “rashomon” to Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Recall that in my post about that story, I concluded that it was not ambiguous, but rather was inconsistent, because it was written from more than one voice or perspective, which had not been controlled or pruned. If I wanted to review or critique that story using just one word, I could say: rashomon.

Postscript About the ISSTD and Readers of This Blog

In my post earlier today, I hope that I didn’t come across as too negative about the ISSTD. After all, I used to be a member, myself, when I first became interested in multiple personality. Indeed, for years, I was very active in their local branch. And as far as I know, they are still a fine organization.

You might want to visit the ISSTD website for information or just out of curiosity.

Members of the ISSTD, especially those who read or write novels, you are welcome here.

Professors of literature, you should not feel intimidated by this blog. Learning about multiple personality is not beyond you. Most of what you need to know is in this blog. Just begin with Dickens in the post of June 2013.

And readers, you don’t have to be a professor of any sort to be welcome here. You just have to like novels or write novels and be interested in how it is done. Of course, you novelists already know how you, personally, use multiple personality to write, but you might be interested to read how other novelists have used multiple personality, too.

Why Members of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD)—Multiple Personality Experts—Avoid This Blog

The ISSTD is the principal organization for mental health professionals who treat and study dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). Its members do not read this blog, because this blog is about normal multiple personality, which is not a psychiatric disorder. Dissociative identity disorder is in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-5); normal multiple personality is not. So this blog is beyond their scope.

If members of the ISSTD ever did see this blog, I think they would take a dim view of it. For any talk of normal multiple personality would remind them of one of the favorite attacks of skeptics. Skeptics like to derisively say that, in a sense, everyone has multiple personality: the psychiatric disorder is just a foolish, gullible, mistaken reification of normal psychology. And ISSTD members would not want to admit that anything the skeptics say is even half right.

Now, the skeptics are wrong about multiple personality disorder. This disorder is actually one of the oldest, most clearly defined, best proven disorders in the diagnostic manual. And it is certainly not true that everyone has multiple personality. Nevertheless, it is true that a substantial minority of the general public does have what I call normal multiple personality: a version of multiple personality that 1. is too common to call an illness, 2. does not cause significant distress or dysfunction, and 3. may be an asset (e.g., in writing novels).

So while most professors of literature avoid this blog—they think it’s preposterous and, anyway, beyond their expertise—most of those mental health professionals who do have expertise with multiple personality disorder avoid this blog, too. They would fear that it could inadvertently support the skeptics. And besides, most multiple personality experts have never studied literature in this regard, and so they, like the literature professors, would see this interdisciplinary blog as going beyond their scope.

Which leaves me with a very select readership.

I wouldn’t want to exaggerate how select. You are not alone. This blog is read by people from more than thirty countries. But in absolute numbers of serious readers? How many people in this whole world are as open-minded and perceptive as you?