Oscar Wilde (post #3): The Picture of Dorian Gray and who Wrote all those Quotations

“Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages perhaps.” Letter from Oscar Wilde, 12 February 1894

The main characters of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray are three young English gentlemen: Basil, the Artist, who has painted the picture and is infatuated with Dorian; Lord Henry, the Quotable; and Dorian, the pretty-boy who is corrupted by the hedonistic ideas given to him by Lord Henry.

Basil (the character with whom the writer of the above letter identifies) knows Dorian before Lord Henry does, and is reluctant to reveal his name. Lord Henry asks why. Basil explains, “When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It seems like surrendering a part of them. You know I love secrecy.” This is the prototypical attitude of the person with multiple personality. The last thing they will reveal is the actual name of another personality, and their general attitude is one of secrecy.

“Dorian Gray” appears to be the name of a group of personalities. “For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this book [that Lord Henry had given to him]…He procured…no less than five…copies…bound in different colors, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control.” This reminds me of the different colored notebooks used by different personalities in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (see Lessing posts).

One or more of the Dorian Gray personalities is interested in various esoteric aesthetic interests, while one or more other of the Dorian Gray personalities leaves home for “mysterious and prolonged absences” … "under an assumed name, and in disguise” or he “would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature.”  “Curious stories became current about him…It was said that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors…and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade.” He would also ruin women from both the upper and lower classes. Thus, “Dorian Gray” was multiple Jekylls and multiple Hydes.

“Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray’s opinion. He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives…”

To conclude, let’s take a fresh look at the letter quoted at the beginning of this post. The personality of Oscar Wilde who wrote that letter says he is Basil, the Artist, not Lord Henry, whom the world thinks he is. Who is Lord Henry? He happens to be the character who provides most of the novel’s numerous quotable remarks. So the letter writer is saying that he is not the personality responsible for the public’s image of Oscar Wilde as someone who is famous for memorable quotes. The quotes are from Oscar Wilde’s other “Lord Henry” personalities.

Wilde, Oscar. The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

Oscar Wilde (post #2) and Quotations: How did he say enough clever things to fill whole books?

There are many books of quotations published. Many people are quoted. But there are relatively few people who have had books published that include only their quotations. One such person is Oscar Wilde.

Wilde is known for his numerous clever remarks. I wonder how he produced so many of them. Just like I have always wondered how novelists write novels. And since I found that novelists don’t create characters in any ordinary sense, I wonder if something extraordinary is involved when someone like Wilde produces such an extraordinary number of clever remarks.

Theoretically, it would be possible for a novelist to methodically and mechanistically create characters. But in this blog, I have quoted novelists about how they get their characters, and that is not how they do it. And since I found that multiple personality is involved, I now wonder if Wilde had one or more alternate personalities who were dedicated to seeing things in contrary or paradoxical ways.

When writers write things in quantity and quality that the average person couldn’t write, I suspect that their thought process might be different from the average person’s. What do you think?

Baudelaire post prompts Visits from France, but Wilde post prompts No Visits from Ireland or UK

Oscar Wilde (post #1): Childlike, Multiple Personality, and Liar with an Excellent Memory (like Mark Twain) 

My first impression of Oscar Wilde comes from Barbara Belford’s biography, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius (New York, Random House, 2000).

Childlike

Wilde has adult accomplishments—a top student at college, gets married and has children, and becomes a very successful writer—but he is repeatedly described as being, at times, childlike (not childish, childlike):

“I discovered that his childlike nature extended to all his works—from The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Importance of Being Ernest” (from Belford’s Introduction).

“Wilde liked nothing better than to become a child again and play in the nursery with his sons” (p. 145).

“Wilde was little more than an overgrown child himself.” (p. 151).

“In a time of hirsute chins, a perpetually clean-shaven Wilde…” (p. 153).

“Following Baudelaire’s axiom that genius is the ability to be a child at will, Wilde created an atmosphere in which the whole household became children. Bosie [Wilde’s much younger male lover] said Wilde ‘exercised a sort of enchantment which transmuted the ordinary things in life and invested them with strangeness and glamour.’ He told his mother that Wilde was ‘as simple and innocent as a child’” (p. 221).

The significance of being childlike at times is that child-aged alternate personalities are common in multiple personality (because it starts in childhood).

Multiple Personality

“He needed a paradoxical nature to create his brilliant antithetical views…My aim has been to reclaim Wilde in all the brilliant details of his contradictions…” (from Belford’s Introduction).

“…sometimes multiple personae were needed [at college]. The actor in him composed the drama day by day, and before he even realized it, he had invented a new Oscar. The secret was insincerity. ‘Is insincerity such a terrible thing?’ Dorian asks. ‘I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities’” (p. 48).

Sometime Wilde “withdrew into his mythic self, a Celtic phenomenon known as a shape-shifter, one with the ability to become anything: a wave, an animal, another person. His favorite legendary warrior was Cuchulain…” (p. 69).

“‘There were two personalities in him,’ Ricketts said of Wilde: ‘the exhibitor of well-rehearsed impromptus, of which he had a stock, and the spontaneous and witty critic of Life”…He swaggered a lot, acting like his character the Remarkable Rocket, who proclaims, ‘I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself…’” (p. 161).

“Wilde wanted to tell a story of multiple personalities and succeeded in crafting a cautionary tale of his own many selves, making it easy for his enemies to remark behind his back: ‘Just like that Dorian Gray character’” (p. 171).

“…An Ideal Husband, with the fateful line ‘As a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else’” (p. 232).

A Liar with an Exceptional Memory (Like Mark Twain)

“…[Wilde] had an encyclopedic mind and a photographic memory” (p. 28).

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is about “the grand art of lying…Wilde frequently lied about himself” (p. 43).

In several past posts about Mark Twain, I reported that Twain was known for an exceptionally good memory, but also for a peculiar “absent-mindedness.” I speculated that Twain’s humorous admission to being a liar was his cover story for the amnesia that was part of his multiple personality and which caused him to be inconsistent and accused of lying. Wilde has the same combination of exceptional memory and making a joke about being a liar. It is a known feature of multiple personality that some people who have it get a reputation for lying, because of the inconsistencies between different personalities, which people mistake for lying because they are unaware of the multiple personality.

Charles Baudelaire on Creativity as an Evocation of one’s Childhood Mind

I found the following quote online, after it was mentioned in a biography I am reading (not about Baudelaire).

I have not yet seen the quote in context, so am not sure that it supports my posts of March 18^th and 19^th. Maybe it is only referring to childhood experience, as it says, and not to the cognitive talents (imaginary companions, identity assumption, paracosm) that some children use to enhance their experience, and which adult novelists may employ.

After I see the quote in context, I’ll tell you in a follow-up post. Unless you already know the answer and wish to submit a comment now.

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

    ― Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), The Painter Of Modern Life And Other Essays

Who else knows of this blog, and what does everyone think of it?

Professors

Starting last year, I have e-mailed more than a hundred professors of literature, inviting them to visit this blog and discuss its issues. These professors include scholars of specific novelists I have discussed (e.g., Charles Dickens and Mark Twain), authors of books on literary theory, members of the editorial boards of some scholarly journals, and some faculty members of creative writing programs.

Readers and Students

The second group of people who know about this blog are readers and students who are interested in a particular novelist. For example, since I discussed Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” I have had visitors from Malaysia. Various other posts about other novelists have brought visitors from many countries. In short, there are readers from around the world who have heard of Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

Writers

Contemporary writers I have mentioned in the blog are probably aware of it, either from fans’ questions or from their own monitoring of how they are mentioned on the internet. Aspiring writers may have come upon this blog in connection with the various subjects discussed. And, of course, many of the professors mentioned above are writers, know other writers, and teach writing. So there is some awareness of Multiple Identity Literary Theory in various branches of the writing community.

Multiple Personality or Creativity

Other likely visitors to this blog are people with an interest in multiple personality or creativity.

Neither believed nor disproved

Most people don’t change their mind about something unless and until some thought leader whom they respect declares it a breakthrough or a paradigm shift. Since this has not happened yet for Multiple Identity Literary Theory, people can’t, and don’t, believe it. Even though they haven’t found serious fault with its facts or argument.

In any case, I’m happy that you are visiting. And while I’m working on future posts, I hope you will read past posts, some of which are quite good.

Stephen King quote connects Children's Cognitive Talents and Adult Novelists

The connection made in yesterday’s post between adult novelists and children’s cognitive talents was made by Stephen King in a quotation found in my post of September 17, 2013:

King said that, “…to be a writer…you have to imagine worlds that aren’t there. You’re hearing voices…Adults will say [when the writer was a child], ‘You have an invisible friend, that’s nice, you’ll outgrow that.’ Writers don’t outgrow it.”

To “imagine worlds that aren’t there,” that’s paracosm, mentioned in yesterday’s post. When King said “invisible friend,” that obviously relates to what I said yesterday. When he said, “you’re hearing voices,” that indicates how real the imaginary playmates (characters) are. And when he said that writers “don’t outgrow it,” he’s saying that novelists make use of cognitive talents from childhood.

Novels and Multiple Personality depend on the same Childhood Talents

Writing a novel is usually thought of as involving adult literary skills, and it does, but that is not the whole story. To provide the rest of the story, Multiple Identity Literary Theory proposes that novelists have multiple personality, which starts in childhood and entails certain talents that are equally integral to multiple personality and to writing novels.

Multiple Identity Talents

1. autonomous fictional playmates (aka companions or friends)

2. autonomous fictional identities

3. autonomous fictional worlds (aka paracosm)

Autonomy is emphasized. The child experiences the fictional playmate as having a mind of its own. Fictional identities are autonomous in that a child assumes the identity of a fictional character, remains in-character for an extended period of time, and experiences this, at least to some degree, as being beyond their control. The fictional worlds begin as something imagined, but take on a life of their own.

I do not use the word “imaginary,” as in “imaginary playmates,” because the word connotes that the one doing the imagining retains a complete sense of control over the process and over what is imagined. And it is the loss of that sense of control, and the sense that the fiction has taken on a life of its own, which is the key aspect that I am emphasizing.

These are “multiple identity” talents, because they are the same talents that allow a person to develop multiple identity (aka multiple personality or dissociative identity).

In most children, these childhood talents fade away and are gone by adulthood. But they persist in more people than is generally realized. Why do they persist? It may be due to childhood trauma. And whether they develop into a normal multiple personality or into a multiple personality disorder may depend on the severity of the trauma.

The ability to develop fictional worlds is an obvious asset to a novelist. But I should explain, in regard to multiple personality, that many people with multiple personality have complex inner worlds where the identities live when they are not “out.” Like a novel.

Skepticism about Multiple Personality is based on Fear related to Demon Possession and the Layman’s Definition of Crazy

Until I wrote my March 1 post about dictionaries of literary terms, it hadn’t really occurred to me that disbelief in multiple personality is based mostly on fear.

I had always thought that disbelief of multiple personality was based mostly on not having seen it, since I myself had found it hard to believe for the first twelve years I was a psychiatrist, which was before I had seen it with my own eyes. I had also blamed Freud for his mistaken conscious/unconscious model of the mind, which, by eclipsing the multiple consciousness model of the mind, had made multiple personality seem logically impossible. And I still think that these are important reasons.

But I was struck by the fact that the two UK dictionaries had no entry at all for the literary double, and that the closest they came was their entry on ghosts. It was like the dictionaries had a phobic avoidance, a fear of the double, which is the literary metaphor for multiple personality.

And while the USA dictionary did have an entry for the double, it had been afraid to make any explicit mention of multiple personality, per se. So it had shown fear of multiple personality, too, although less so.

Why the fear of multiple personality? There are two reasons. First, there is the ancient religious belief that multiple personality is an invasion and possession by demons, as illustrated in the Christian Bible, Mark 5:1-20.

Second, while I, as a psychiatrist, would view schizophrenia as a worse thing to have—since it is biological and incurable (though treatment may have good results), in contrast to multiple personality, which is psychological and curable (if you have the disorder and need to be cured, which most novelists don’t)—I have repeatedly been surprised to find that many patients think of multiple personality as a much worse, and less desirable, diagnosis. The reason is that multiple personality disorder fits their layman’s definition of crazy: you may not know who you are or what you have done, which would seem like the ultimate in being out of control and beside yourself.

Perhaps it would help people to get over their fear, if, when they thought of multiple personality, instead of being possessed by demons, they thought of Mark Twain or Charles Dickens.

Tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review: Philip Roth addresses readers who do not have Multiple Personality

At the end of the interview, Roth says (and then elaborates at considerable length), “Whoever looks for the writer’s thinking in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction.” Since the interviewer didn’t ask about this, whom is Roth addressing and why is this an issue?

He is addressing readers like me (before I formulated Multiple Identity Literary Theory), who do not have multiple personality. Because, when novelists disavow the words and thoughts of their characters—as many novelists repeatedly do—readers who do not have multiple personality inevitably think that the novelists must be joking or lying. And such readers will continue to think that way until hell freezes over or they read this blog.

I hope the latter is sooner.

Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”: Was it Suicide or Murder?

In this short story (1), Susan Rawlings, who has been more or less happily married with a husband and four school-aged children, decides that she needs to be alone, to go where she is not known as Susan Rawlings, where nobody can disturb her as she sits quietly in a “creative trance.” 

So she rents a room—Room Nineteen—under an assumed name in a cheap hotel. She enjoys her regular visits to Room Nineteen until her husband, suspecting that she’s having an affair, employs a detective, who finds out where she has been going. Susan feels that this ruins everything, so she goes to Room Nineteen, turns on the gas, and kills herself (at least that’s the way it looks).

Lessing does not want the reader to explain the apparent suicide either on feminist/sociological grounds—the kind of misinterpretation of The Golden Notebook that so upset Lessing, as noted in a past post—or as simply a psychotic depression, which are the two ways that this story is most commonly interpreted. Susan is disturbed, but rather than building a straightforward case for either of those causes, Lessing emphasizes idiosyncratic identity issues, suggesting an internal war or struggle.

Susan says, “I feel as if there is an enemy…waiting to invade me…” She felt that she was “not myself.” She was “subject to a state of mind she could not own.” “Something inside her howled with impatience, with rage.” “One day she saw him.” “She recognized the man around whom her terrors had crystallized. As she did so, he vanished.” “He wants to…take me over.”

That looks blatantly psychotic, but like Dostoevsky and The Double (see recent posts), Lessing is not writing “To Room Nineteen” because she had nothing better to do than describe a psychotic breakdown.

Susan commits suicide after she is no longer able to go to Room Nineteen and “let go into the dark creative trance…that she had found there…she craved for it, she was as ill as a suddenly deprived addict.”

What is this about “creative trance”? The phrase does not seem to fit in this narrative. Which I think makes it a clue to where the author is really coming from. In an interview (2) (unrelated to this story), Lessing said that “writing is an act of conscious self-hypnosis.” (In regard to self-hypnosis, see past post on the three things that Stephen King and Toni Morrison have in common.) So I think that this is a story about how Lessing would feel suicidal if she weren’t allowed to write.

But since Lessing had multiple personality (see past posts), I think it may be too simple to say that Lessing would have felt suicidal if she couldn’t write, since there would be multiple viewpoints involved. And in regard to this story, it may be that Susan’s writer personality (or at least her artistic personality, since Susan had once worked as a commercial artist) killed the non-artistic Susan identity in the expectation of being able to take over and write (or draw), making it, psychologically speaking, murder, not suicide.

I don’t insist on the details of this interpretation, since I don’t think even Lessing understood the source of her story. But I do think that the phrase “creative trance,” and all the talk in the story of an angry identity trying to take over, are valid clues.

1. Lessing, Doris. The Doris Lessing Reader. London, Jonathan Cape, 1989, pp. 25-55.

2. Rousseau, Francois-Olivier [interviewer]. “The Habit of Observing” [1985] pp.146-154, in Doris Lessing: Conversations, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 1994.

Review: Margaret Atwood, Sue Grafton, Doris Lessing, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, and Most Other Novelists Appear to Have Had a Literary Form of Multiple Personality

As noted in previous posts: Margaret Atwood, in her nonfiction book on writing, wrote that novelists have multiple personality. Recently, Sue Grafton published Kinsey and Me, which, according to what she said in a TV interview, raises that issue for her, personally. As discussed in other posts, the other novelists mentioned above probably have had multiple personality, too. And it is almost routine for novelists, in their published interviews, to mention the autonomy of their characters, which is the essential characteristic of alternate personalities in multiple personality.

I find this interesting for two reasons. First, I’ve always admired novelists and wanted to know how novels are written, and it appears that having a version of multiple personality is almost a prerequisite for becoming a credible novelist. Second, I think it very unlikely that it is only novelists who have a form of multiple personality which does not require treatment and may even be an asset. It is my guess that 90% of novelists, but also 30% of the general public, have it. So what I am proposing is not only a literary theory, but also a psychological theory. It is not a new psychological theory — see posts on William James and mentions of Pierre Janet — but I think that the prevalence of multiple personality among novelists gives it new credibility.

What do you think? Your questions and comments are welcome.

Dostoevsky declares His Own Inner Duality in a Letter to a Kindred Soul

Letter LXXIII (1, pp. 247-250)

Petersburg, April 11, 1880

To Mlle. N. N.

Much-honored and gracious Lady,

Forgive my having left your beautiful kind letter unanswered for so long; do not regard it as negligence on my part. I wanted to say something very direct and cordial to you, but my life goes by, I vow, in such disorder and hurry that it is only at rare moments that I belong to myself at all…

You write to me of the phase which your mind is just now undergoing. I know that you are an artist—a painter. Permit me to give you a piece of advice which truly comes from my heart: stick to your art, and give yourself up to it even more than hitherto. I know, for I have heard (do not take this ill of me) that you are not happy…There is but one cure, one refuge, for that woe: art, creative activity…

After the letter that you have written, I must necessarily regard you as one dear to me, as a being akin to my soul, as my heart’s sister—how could I fail to feel with you? But now to what you have told me of your inward duality. That trait is indeed common to all…who are not wholly commonplace…It is precisely on this ground that I cannot but regard you as a twin soul, for your inward duality corresponds most exactly to my own. It causes at once great torment, and great delight…

Forgive the untidiness of my letter. If you only knew how I am losing the capacity to write letters, and what a difficulty I find it! But having gained such a friend as you, I don’t wish to lose her in a hurry.

Farewell. Your most devoted and heartfelt friend,

F. Dostoevsky

[1821-1881]

1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends. Translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne with an introduction by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York, Horizon Press, 1961.

Recognizing Ann’s Unawareness of Betty and Betty’s Sabotage of Ann: Why Can’t Identities Write a Novel and Cooperate?

In yesterday's post, I said that Ann and her alternate personality, Betty, had been fighting for years over how much of the time each of them would be in control. But that “battle” was Betty’s perspective. Ann didn’t even know that Betty existed.

All Ann knew was that, since childhood, things would happen that were unexplainable. The medication was just the most recent example: She sometimes couldn’t find her medication, but when she did finally find it, she knew that it was not where she had put it.

This kind of experience was part of the fabric of Ann’s everyday life. Maybe it happened to everyone, but they just didn’t admit it. What could anyone do about it?

So Ann had decided many years ago that it was best to ignore the unexplainable. She certainly hadn't mentioned the long history of her mysterious experiences to either me, her psychiatrist, or to her psychotherapist. Anyway, that wasn’t why she had come for treatment. She had come because of anxiety and depression. The pills helped. The therapy helped. And that was that.

Betty didn’t like Ann’s treatment, especially the pills. For it was when Ann had felt overwhelmed that Betty had been most able to take control, and the pills were preventing Ann from feeling overwhelmed. Betty hid the pills, but she wanted to stop them at the source, and since she was co-conscious with Ann, and knew everything that Ann thought and did, she knew Ann’s scheduled psychiatric appointments.

Her plan was to see Ann’s doctor (me), but she would do so incognito, letting me assume that she was Ann—people were so stupid, Betty had found, and could not tell them apart—and she would make me believe that Ann didn’t want the medicine any more. Either I would stop prescribing the medicine or the treatment would be disrupted and discontinued. Betty’s problem would be solved.

During my first twelve years as a psychiatrist, Betty might have succeeded in making me think that Ann was rejecting the treatment, or at least that Ann was “treatment resistant.” But by that time, I had learned about multiple personality, and I realized what was going on. And no, I didn’t tell Ann that all she needed to do was write a novel, but I did tell her that Betty was quite a character and they should cooperate [with each other].

Drugs, Writers, Multiple Personality, and the Balance of Power

In my Post #2 on Dostoevsky’s The Double, I said that the Double triumphed over Golyadkin by getting him medicated and put away.

In my first post (June 2013 on Dickens), there was an anecdote near the end about Sir Walter Scott in which medication played a pivotal role.

Let me tell you how I learned that medication may affect the balance of power between personalities in multiple personality.

Many years ago, I was treating “Ann” with medication. She was happy with the results. So she had monthly appointments for medication renewal. Occasionally, she would mention that she had misplaced her medicine for part of the month, and that she had been worse without it, which only reinforced her satisfaction with the medication and her wish to have it continued.

But one month, as soon as she entered my office, she was IRATE. She HATED the medicine and DEMANDED that it be STOPPED! I tried to remind her that she had always praised the medicine, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She HATED the medicine and DEMANDED that it be STOPPED! And she went on like that. There was no stopping her.

It occurred to me that she was being inconsistent. Acting out-of-character. So I asked her, “Who are you?” (Not who she was to speak to me like that, but what was her identity.) She immediately became quiet and looked at me like I had just caught her with her hand in the cookie jar.

It turned out that she was “Betty” and that, over the years, she and “Ann” had been in a continual battle as to who would be “out” and in control. But whenever “Ann” took the medicine, it somehow shifted the balance of power in her favor and kept “Betty” from coming out. So “Betty” would hide the medicine to keep “Ann” from taking it.

(In case you’re wondering, this really happened. I’m not making it up. Except for the names.)

There is no drug or medicine that cures a person of multiple personality. But a drug or medicine may have different effects on different personalities, and thereby, temporarily, affect the balance of power.

Post #3 on Dostoevsky’s The Double; Post #2 quoting Mikhail Bakhtin

“But who tells the story in The Double?…one gets the impression that the narration is dialogically addressed to Golyadkin himself, it rings in Golyadkin’s own ears as another’s voice taunting him, as the voice of his double, although formally the narration is addressed to the reader” (1, pp. 217-218).

As I previously said, the story is not really about Golyadkin’s downfall. It is about the double’s triumph. “History is written by the victors.” The double—the alternate personality—tells the story.

So Dostoevsky knows about alternate personalities who have minds of their own and can take over, perhaps in everyday life, but at least in writing.

1. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Blog Update: National Popularity, Most-Viewed Posts, and Unknowns

People from more than 30 countries have visited this blog. The most visitors have come from: China, Germany, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, UK, and USA.

The eight most-viewed posts:

—19 June 2013: Dickens, Multiple Personality, and Writers

—4 Oct 2013: Stephen King’s and Toni Morrison’s Characters

—16 Dec 2013: Multiple Identity Literary Theory

—18 Jan 2014: Henry James and the Host Personality

—24 Oct 2013: Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz?

—20 Nov 2013: Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw”

—10 Dec 2013: Twain’s Excellent Memory & Absent-Mindedness

—4 Nov 2013: Atwood, James, Dickens, Ghosts, Multiple Personality

Unknowns:

—How many writers follow this blog?

—How many professors of creative writing and literature follow this blog?

—How many psychologists follow this blog?

—How many readers of particular novelists follow this blog?

—How many students follow this blog?

—How many people are planning articles or books on Multiple Identity Literary Theory?

—How many people feel that “Multiple Identity Literary Theory” is just a new name for something that they already knew?

Post #2 on Dostoevsky’s The Double: It is NOT the story of Golyadkin and his nervous breakdown.

The conventional view is that Mr. Golyadkin is the main character and that the story is primarily about his nervous breakdown—either caused by, or featuring the delusion of, having a double—and how he was finally carted off to a mental hospital.

There are several reasons to reject that interpretation:

First, the title. Why doesn't the title highlight or even mention Mr. Golyadkin? Why isn’t the title Golyadkin and His Double or Golyadkin’s Double Trouble or, simply, Golyadkin? It is called The Double, because it is the double’s story.

Second, the narrator. At first, the reader is led to believe that the narrator is sincerely interested in, and sympathetic to, Mr. Golyadkin. At the beginning of the narrative, the only important character appears to be Golyadkin, and the narrator refers to him as “our hero.” But as the story progresses, the narrator’s attitude toward Golyadkin is gradually revealed to be mocking and contemptuous.

Third, how long has the double existed? Readers who are uninformed about multiple personality will take it at face value that the double was not present at the beginning of the story, and only arrives in the course of the story, as a cause or symptom of Golyadkin’s mental illness. But anyone who is informed about multiple personality knows that it has a childhood onset.

So Golyadkin’s double had probably been present for many years. The most likely scenario is that the double had been a protector/helper personality who was responsible for much of the success Golyadkin had had in his life up to that point. Either the double had helped Golyadkin from behind the scenes, so to speak, never coming out. Or the double had come out and personally handled things that Golyadkin couldn’t, but had always done so incognito, never taking credit.

However, as often happens in cases of multiple personality disorder, the better functioning alternate personality eventually got tired of doing most of the work and not getting any of the credit. The personality probably came to feel that he could achieve much greater success in life if he got rid of Golyadkin and was completely free to do things, and live his life, his own way. His plan was to drive Golyadkin crazy, to get him medicated and put away.

In short, The Double is not the story of Golyadkin’s failure. It is the story of the alternate personality’s success.

Bakhtin says Dostoevsky created the “polyphonic” novel. But wouldn't that require a “polyphonic” (multiple personality) mind?

In Dostoevsky’s writings “one is dealing not with a single author-artist who wrote novels and stories, but with a number of philosophical statements by several author-thinkers—Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor, and others…The character is treated as ideologically authoritative and independent; he is perceived as the author of a fully weighted ideological conception of his own, and not as the object of Dostoevsky’s finalizing artistic vision…” (1).

“Dostoevsky…creates not voiceless slaves…but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.

     A plurality of independent…consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels…” (1).

“Dostoevsky is the creator of the polyphonic novel…[which has] a plurality of equally-valid consciousnesses, each with its own world…” (1).

“Dostoevsky’s world is profoundly personalized. He perceives and represents every thought as the position of a personality…” (1).

Bakhtin doesn’t say how Dostoevsky was able to write the “polyphonic” novel.

1. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double: Post #1, a Conventional View

The Double (1) is a novella about Mr. Golyadkin, who has a nervous breakdown when his identical twin-like “double” discredits and displaces him at work and socially.

In a letter, Dostoevsky referred to The Double as his own “confession” (2). “Like his character…Dostoevsky was subject to ‘hallucinations’ which may very well have included delusions [paranoia? having a double?] similar to Golyadkins’s” (2). The Double involves “the splitting of Golyadkin’s personality and the appearance of the double: the internal process is simply given dramatic reality” (2).

Early critics of the work complained that “Dostoevsky was simply portraying a case of paranoia and mental breakdown with no larger significance than that of a case history…‘madness for the sake of madness’” (2).

In the Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky acknowledged “that ‘my story was not successful’; but he continued to claim that ‘its idea was clear enough, and I have never contributed anything to literature more serious than this idea’” (2).

“Golyadkin’s double represents the…internal split…Dostoevsky’s first grasp of a character-type that became his hallmark as a writer. Golyadkin is the ancestor of all of Dostoevsky’s great split personalities, who are always confronted with their quasi-doubles or doubles (whether in the form of other ‘real’ characters, or as hallucinations) in the memorable scenes of the great novels…” (2).

“The mature Dostoevsky felt that the discovery of this ‘underground’ type, whose first version is Golyadkin, constituted his greatest contribution to Russian literature…its ultimate source lay in Dostoevsky’s own psychology” (2).

1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Double: Two Versions [1846/1866]. Translated from the Russian by Evelyn Harden. New York, Ardis, 1985.

2. Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821-1849. Princeton University Press, 1976, Volume One [of five], pp. 295-312.

William James, Multiple Personality, and The Varieties of Religious Experience: Its Historical and Intellectual Context

In my post of December 26, 2013, I discussed William James’s conclusion that the psychological basis of religious experience was the same as the psychological basis for multiple personality: the mind’s capacity for multiple consciousness (in contrast to the erroneous Freudian psychoanalytic model of the conscious/unconscious).

If you want to know more about it, I recommend Ann Taves, a professor of religious studies who has a special interest in cognitive science:

Taves, Ann: “The Fragmentation of Consciousness and The Varieties of Religious Experience: William James’s Contribution to a Theory of Religion,” Chapter 3, pages 48-72, in William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience, edited by Wayne Proudfoot. New York, Columbia University Press, 2004.

The Hoax about when Dostoevsky met Dickens: Why did people believe it?

For some years, serious people believed the hoax that Dostoevsky and Dickens had had a chance encounter in which, Dostoevsky was said to have later reported, Dickens had confided that “There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I [Dostoevsky] asked.” (For a discussion of the hoax, per se, see Eric Naiman’s “When Dickens met Dostoevsky” in The Times Literary Supplement of 10 April 2013.)

Dostoevsky’s alleged punch line—“Only two people?“—is funny, because, in response to Dickens’s confession of having multiple personality, Dostoevsky, rather than expressing surprise, implies that writers like they are would certainly have more than just two personalities.

People believed the hoax, because they agree with this blog, at least subconsciously.

A Dance or Ritual to Establish Expertise, Not a “Classic Mistake”

In my last post, I called the interviewer’s failure to pursue what was going on between the writer and his characters a “classic mistake,” by which I meant that writers are always saying those kinds of things about how they don’t create their characters, and interviewers never ask more about it.

However “mistake” may be the wrong word, because it implies that the interviewer really wanted to know all about the characters, that the writer really wanted to tell, and that they were both inept.

But people such as the interviewer and writer in this case are not inept. If they didn’t pursue the issue, it’s because they didn’t want to. So they must have had another reason for her question and his answer.

I think that they were using that question and answer as markers of their expertise. The interviewer was showing that she was no amateur who thought that writers create their characters. Her question about how the characters “arrive” (not how they are created) showed that she is a professional.

And the writer was also showing that he is is a professional. Amateur writers create their characters. Professional fiction writers, quoted again and again in this blog, have characters that, somehow, seem to arrive with minds of their own.

If anyone is making a classic mistake, it’s the readers of such interviews who don’t complain that they are not getting the whole story.

An Interview in The Writer’s Chronicle makes the Classic Mistake

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs publishes The Writer’s Chronicle magazine. In the current issue—March/April 2014, pages 14-28—Richard Bausch, an award-winning writer and professor, is interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson, author of The Art of the Author Interview: And Interviewing Creative People.

The interview includes the following question and answer:

Johnson: How do your characters arrive, in a piece of dialogue, a look, a gesture?

Bausch: It feels like they walk into the sentences I’m fumbling with and make their own space, and refuse to be subject to my will about them. So I let them do what they seem to want to do. Whenever they are the real thing, they surprise me. I don’t know what they’re going to do, and then they do it and I’m surprised without being incredulous. I know this sounds mystical and all that, but I really don’t mean it that way. I’m talking about how it feels.

This question and answer did not follow any discussion of character, and the question after it changes the subject. So what we appear to have is a routine question which assumes (based on the interviewer’s experience) that characters will “arrive” (as opposed to being created), and an answer by the writer that fulfills all the interviewer’s expectations.

Apparently the interviewer is not surprised to hear the writer say that his characters are not consciously created: They just walk in when he’s fumbling around and make their own space; they are not subject to his will, but do what they want to do, and surprise him; and it all appears to the writer to be a sort of mystical experience, in that it seems to be out of his control and to defy rational explanation.

The classic mistake in this interview is its failure to pursue what’s going on with the writer and his characters.

Hearing Voices: When is it, and when is it not, psychotic?

If a person hears voices, there are three possibilities:

[NOT PSYCHOTIC] No diagnosis or condition. Some people hear a voice at times. If the voice is religious, it is considered normal in that person’s culture. The person knows that other people cannot hear what they hear. Unlike multiple personality, the perceived speaker (if any) is not three-dimensional, is not highly interactive, and is not like a person with their own story. It does not cause distress or dysfunction. 

Psychosis. As in schizophrenia (or any of numerous other psychotic illnesses). Psychosis means an impaired ability to distinguish what is subjective from what is objective. (“Everyone can hear it, or they would, if they had the same computer chip in their brain.”) The main causes and treatments are biological (but psychosocial issues must be addressed, too).

[NOT PSYCHOTIC] Multiple Personality. The voices are the voices of personified psychological beings—they think, therefore they are—with minds of their own. It is not psychotic: Even though it is experienced as very real, the person knows that it is subjective. It is psychological (originating as a way to cope with traumatic experiences in childhood). The alternate identities and their voices are not treatable with medication. It is a diagnosable mental illness only if it causes distress or dysfunction. Otherwise, it is normal, and may be an asset (e.g., to write novels).

Many years ago, when psychiatrists realized that hearing voices did not necessarily mean that a person had schizophrenia (or some other psychosis), Dr. Kurt Schneider proposed that there were certain kinds of voices (and other symptoms) that were seen in psychosis only. These are called “Schneiderian first-rank symptoms.” For example, he said you could be sure that people had psychosis if they heard voices talking among themselves. But he was wrong.

It turns out that this and certain other of his so-called first-rank symptoms are more common in multiple personality than in schizophrenia (Kluft R: First-rank symptoms as a diagnostic clue to multiple personality disorder. Am J Psychiatry 1987;144:293-298.) If someone hears voices conversing, it is less likely to be a person with schizophrenia, and more likely to be a novelist whose characters are talking to each other.

Why did Freud worry that he, himself, in real life, might have a Double?

Please see the post of November 7, 2013.

Dictionaries of Literary Terms (“the Double”; “Ghost Story”) show Blind Spot for Multiple Personality in Literary Theory

I tried to look up “the Double” in three dictionaries of literary terms, two from England (1,2) and one from the USA (3). The two dictionaries from England had no entry at all for the Double.

The American dictionary defines “Double, the” as “a device whereby a character is self-duplicated (the Doppelganger, ‘mirror image,’ or ‘alter ego’), as in the case of…Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, or divided into two distinct, usually antithetical, personalities, as in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde…” Other works cited include Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dostoevsky’s The Double, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It says that this literary device represents an interest in the “divided self.” But it makes no mention of, or reference to, multiple personality, per se; none whatsoever.

The two UK dictionaries don’t have an entry for the Double, but they do have for “ghost story” (the American dictionary doesn’t). Indeed, the Penguin entry is encyclopedic: eight pages. It defines a ghost story as “a fictional narrative…in which the spirit of a person…, no longer bound by natural laws…‘haunts’…as a kind of ‘presence’.” Two stories by Robert Louis Stevenson are cited, but not the one about Jekyll and Hyde.

Now, having a “divided self” or experiencing a “presence,” does, at the very least, suggest the possibility, and raise the issue, of multiple personality. But professors of literature, as reflected in dictionaries of literary terms, don’t think of this, because it is not encompassed by any of the literary theories with which they are familiar.

1. Baldick, Chris: The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

2. Cuddon JA (revised by Preston CE): The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London, Penguin Books, 1999.

3. Beckson K, Ganz A: Literary Terms: A Dictionary. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989.