Times Book Review “The Dark Side” by Walter Kirn, on Daniel Levine’s Hyde, Ignores Multiple Personality, Wrongly Credits Freudian Psychology

In tomorrow’s New York Times, Walter Kirn begins his review by saying that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is “an allegory of the divided self” and that Stevenson “dramatizes human duality.” But Kirn does not mention multiple personality, per se.

Kirn then says that Daniel Levine’s Hyde tells the Jekyll-Hyde story from the perspective of Hyde who is: “the unconscious mind personified,” “an outlet for Jekyll’s buried lusts, a manifestation of his banished id,” “an integral, abiding second self who first emerged during Jekyll’s painful childhood as a defense against severe abuse,” some of it “clearly sexual” by a “sadistic father.” He says that this is “Freudian psychology.”

Kirn makes the following mistakes, all of which are common in book reviews. First, he doesn't mention multiple personality, per se, because he fails to recognize that the story involves multiple personality, per se. Second, he contradicts himself by saying that Hyde has been quite conscious since childhood—“able to observe the doctor’s deeds and draw inferences from his behavior”—but says that Hyde represents “the unconscious mind.” Third, he mistakenly credits Freud with explaining such cases. The fact is, Freudian psychology posits an unconscious, but these cases involve alternate personalities who are quite conscious. Thus, Freudian psychology cannot explain how any such case could ever exist, and classic Freudians usually miss the diagnosis.

Whenever one reviews stories that involve “the divided self,” “human duality,” or any version of “Jekyll-Hyde,” it is a mistake to invoke Freudian psychology or to use psychoanalytic literary theory.

The relevant perspective is Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

Today’s New York Times essay “Poet vs. Novelist” by Pulitzer Prize Poet Philip Schultz is on Multiple Personality

Philip Schultz is an award-winning poet and an unpublished novelist. But the point of his essay is his subjective experience that he has a poetry-writing self and a novel-writing self, and that these subjective selves feel, to him, like separate people, with distinctly different attitudes toward each other.

“I’ve often suspected that the novelist in me resents everything the poet writes, maybe especially the very desire to write poetry…Perhaps the more interesting perspective is that of the poet in me toward the novelist. Courteous and cautious, the poet is something of a gentleman in his behavior toward the fiction writer. He tends to be deferential, even encouraging. The fiction writer could be equally successful if he just tried a little harder. The fiction writer, on the other hand, never wanted anything to do with the poet. His sole ambition was conquest and domination…The novelist can’t stand the idea of needing poetry, however much he likes nice-sounding language.”

Maybe great poets have multiple personality, too.

Gratuitous Multiple Personality in Garcia Marquez’s “Big Mama’s Funeral”

In my post of 13 February 2014, I gave two previous examples of gratuitous multiple personality: Charles Dickens’s Miss Twinkleton and Sue Grafton’s Tom Padgett. Multiple personality is gratuitous when it is included in a story unnecessarily.

When stories include multiple personality gratuitously, it is a clue that the writers, themselves, had multiple personality. Writers casually and unnecessarily give multiple personality to characters, when—based on their own personal experience—they think of multiple personality as an ordinary feature of the psychology of everyday life.

“Big Mama’s Funeral” (1959/1962) (1) “must be counted, without a doubt, the most important short story he ever wrote…’Big Mama’s Funeral’ was something quite new: it is one of the key texts of Garcia Marquez’s entire literary and political trajectory, the one which unites his two literary modes—‘realist’ and ‘magical’—for the very first time, and which paves the way for the whole of the mature work over the next half century, in particular for those two definitive masterpieces, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch”  (2, p. 246).

In discussing this story, I may be the only one who has ever focused on this seeming triviality: “…the youngest of the nieces…terrified by hallucinations…made Father Anthony Isabel exorcise her…” (1).

Of course, you exorcise someone if they are possessed, just as Jesus exorcised the man possessed by demons in Mark 5:1-20. Demon possession is the religious interpretation of multiple personality.

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Collected Stories. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

2. Gerald Martin. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Please Note: Comments Submitted by Telepathy are Not Accepted

I know from the blog software that this blog is visited by many people from about forty countries. No doubt, they have many thoughts about the things I say. Including you.

Unfortunately, people have not been clicking on comments at the end of each post, and have not been submitting their comments and questions in the usual way. There appears to be a rumor that I can read minds.

The truth is, I can’t read minds and am not telepathic. But I would like to know what you think. So please click comments at the end of any post about which you have a question or opinion, especially if you think I have my facts wrong or have said something stupid.

Multiple Personality: What Novels, Novelists, and Avid Readers May Have in Common

Premises:

—Not all people are avid readers of novels.

—Novelists (who have multiple personality) are avid readers of novels.

—A novel, itself, is like multiple personality: a magical world of characters/personalities.

Therefore, avid readers of novels may have multiple personality, and may love novels, because reading a novel is like having their personalities temporarily leave their own world and visit someone else's world and personalities. Like taking their family to Disneyland. Only more magical.

Garcia Marquez Says He Believes in Both Reality and “Parareality”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was interviewed by Ernesto Gonzalez Bermejo in 1971. The interview was translated by Gene H. Bell-Villada. It included the following comments by Garcia Marquez:

“…I’ve come to believe there’s something we can call ‘parareality,’ which…doesn’t have to do with superstitions or imaginative speculations, but which exists as a result of deficiencies or limits in scientific research, and so we still can’t call it ‘real reality’…my commitment is to all reality, to a literature that refers to all reality…And my big problem with One Hundred Years of Solitude was credibility, because I believed it. But how was I going to make my readers believe it?…”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Garcia Marquez believed in the complete reality of all the fantastic phenomena in his novel. But it does mean that he did believe in them to some degree or extent, and that, to him, they were not simply “superstitions or imaginative speculations.”

It is part of my thesis in this blog that perhaps 90% of novelists and 30% of the general public have their own versions of “parareality” subjective experiences, as part of their own normal multiple personality.

One of Garcia Marquez’s “parareality” experiences may have been the basis for his short story about multiple personality, “Dialogue with the Mirror,” which I discussed in a recent post.

Gene H. Bell-Villada (Ed.). Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

Garcia Marquez Says That His Use of “Magic Realism” is a Myth and a Misunderstanding

In literary theory, “magic realism” means that the writer of an otherwise realistic story includes fantastic or bizarre elements that he knows couldn’t possibly be true, but which he treats matter-of-factly as though they were, in fact, true.

The writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez are commonly stated to be among the foremost examples of magic realism. However, Garcia Marquez, himself, denied it. He insisted on…

“…the direct relation between his own novels and his own life: ‘There’s not a line in any of my books which I can’t connect to a real experience. There is always a reference to a concrete reality.’ This is why he has always asserted that far from being a ‘magical realist,’ he is just a ‘poor notary’ who copies down what is placed on his desk” (1, p. 153).

He is saying that all of the magical, impossible things in his books have been based on real, actual experiences of his subjective reality.

Does this mean that he was crazy? No. He knew that these were only subjective experiences.

Does this only mean that he had a good imagination? Not in the usual sense. What we imagine is usually conceived of as things we think of as being only imaginary when we imagine them. In contrast, Garcia Marquez is talking about what, subjectively, to him, felt like a “real experience” at the time.

How real? Perhaps, to borrow a phrase from Toni Morrison, “more real than real.”

1. Gerald Martin. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Dialogue with the Mirror”: A Multiple Personality Story

The connection between mirrors and multiple personality is well known.

In literature, there is Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.”

In psychiatry, the connection is so well known that it has been used as the title of a book about multiple personality: The Stranger in the Mirror by Marlene Steinberg MD and Maxine Schnall (Harper, 2000).

The reason for the connection between mirrors and multiple personality is that each of the various personalities has a different self-image. So if the personality who happens to be looking in a mirror has a self-image that is different from the person’s actual appearance, he won’t recognize himself. He will see a stranger in the mirror.

That is the situation in Marquez’s short story. The man who has been shaving sees blood on the face in the mirror, but not on his own face. “There were no wounds on his skin, but there in the mirror the other one was bleeding slightly.”

That is not Magical Realism. It is multiple personality.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Collected Stories. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

Added March 16, 2021: In addition to what I said above, the host (regular) personality of a person with multiple personality may see, in a mirror, alternate personalities that look nothing like the regular personality. Search "mirror" and "mirrors" to see various posts on this subject.

Also search "magical realism," which is often not a literary technique, but a description of the fiction writer's actual experiences, because one or another of the writer's alternate personalities has a fanciful view of reality (which may be useful for writing fiction). But since the host personality, and most alternate personalities have an objective view of reality, multiple personality is not a psychosis.

How I Write Novels Using My Multiple Personality: A Literary Genre That is Inevitable

But is it inevitable? Is it even possible? Could novelists write such books? And if they could, would they want to?

First, how many novelists even know that they have multiple personality? I have cited Margaret Atwood as saying that she and other novelists have known about it for at least one hundred and fifty years. But do they have more than a very vague idea about it?

Second, how would they write such a book? Would one identity be in charge? Which one? Would each identity get a chapter? The process seems problematic.

Third, would such a project disrupt the novelist’s usual creative process and make future novels less likely?

Fourth, would such books be like telling everyone how magic tricks work, and take all the fun out of reading novels?

I think such books are inevitable, and that the only questions are: sooner or later, first or last.

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: a Multiple Personality Story

Peter Pan is not an immature man or a man who wishes for eternal youth. He is a prepubescent boy who never ages. He has hardly any memory of the past and hardly any sense of the future. No such boy has ever existed. And most men would not want to be one.

Such boys are found only in multiple personality. Indeed, as noted in yesterday’s post, they are one of the most common types of alternate personality.

“Child and infant personalities are found in virtually every MPD [multiple personality disorder] patient’s system of alter[nate] personalities. Usually there will be a number of child personalities, and they often exceed the number of adult personalities. The child and infant personalities are usually frozen in time; they are locked into a given age…” (1).

The other thing that I wish to highlight is found in “J. M. Barrie’s Introduction to the Play Peter Pan,” which begins:

“Some disquieting confessions must be made in printing at last the play of Peter Pan; among them is this, that I have no recollection of having written it…I remember writing the story of Peter and Wendy many years after the production of the play, but I might have cribbed that from some typed copy. I can haul back to mind the writing of almost every other assay of mine, however forgotten by the pretty public; but this play of Peter, no…How odd, too, that these trifles should adhere to the mind that cannot remember the long job of writing Peter” (2).

J. M. Barrie’s amnesia for writing Peter Pan reminds me of Sir Walter Scott’s amnesia for writing one of his novels, which I discussed at the end of my Dickens essay (June 2013 post).

The point is this, that if a writer had multiple personality, it would have been possible for one personality to have written something and have remembered doing so, but for another personality to have no memory of it.

It may be that the one who remembered writing Peter Pan was M’Connachie (see May 14th post).

1. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

2. J. M. Barrie. The Annotated Peter Pan: The Centennial Edition, Edited by Maria Tatar. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Alternate Personalities in Multiple Personality: The Most Common Types

—Host Personality

—Child Personalities

—Persecutor Personalities

—Suicidal Personalities

—Protector and Helper Personalities

—Internal Self-Helper

—Memory Trace Personality

—Cross-Gender Personalities

—Promiscuous Personalities

—Administrators and Obsessive-Compulsive Personalities

—Substance Abusers

—Autistic and Handicapped Personalities

—Personalities with Special Talents or Skills

—Anesthetic or Analgesic Personalities

—Imitators and Impostors 

—Demons and Spirits

—Original Personality

Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Who Wrote Peter Pan? J. M. Barrie? Or M’Connachie? His “Writing Half”

James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) gave the Rectorial Address at St. Andrew’s University on May 3, 1922. His title and theme was Courage (1). However, the speech is most remembered for Barrie’s mention of “M’Connachie,” whom he called his “writing half.”

According to “Barrie’s Other Self,” an article in the New York Times of May 21, 1922, Barrie “revealed that McConnachie, whom he called his other self, really wrote the plays and not the Sir James Barrie known to all.”

Let me help you decide whether to take Barrie seriously or to dismiss M’Connachie as a joke (the latter being conventional wisdom).

Someone who knew him said, “Barrie, as I read him, is part mother, part hero-worshipping maiden, part grandfather, and part pixie with no man in him at all” (2, p. 301).

His secretary described him as “an extraordinary plural personality” (2, p. 307).

The biographer comments that “He was as unpredictable to himself as he was to others; he allowed moods to overwhelm and encase him until the strange M’Connachie who had him temporarily in thrall suffered James Barrie to be released again” (2, p. 368).

A story Barrie wrote called The Body in the Black Box had “the still fashionable Gothic theme of the doppelgänger. Here, Barrie is speaking about himself, about his own shadowy identity” (3, p. 60).

“Divided soul that he was…” (3, p. 114).

“The many selves that constituted J. M. Barrie…” (3, p. 195).

“…his complex personality—his many personalities…his warring selves…” (3, p. 247).

In the above context, I quote from Barrie’s speech, Courage (1):

He said that his work as a writer “may be described as playing hide and seek with angels. My puppets seem more real to me than myself, and I could get on much more swingingly if I made one of them deliver this address. It is M’Connachie who has brought me to this pass. M’Connachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half. We are complement and supplement. I am the half that is dour and practical and canny, he is the fanciful half…

“…I sometimes talk this over with M’Connachie, with whom, as you may guess, circumstances compel me to pass a good deal of my time…

“…M’Connachie is the one who writes the plays…

“…My so-called labors were just M’Connachie running away with me again…

“…Another piece of advice; almost my last. For reasons you may guess I must give this in a low voice. Beware of M’Connachie. When I look in a mirror now it is his face I see. I speak with his voice…He has clung to me, less from mischief than for companionship; I half like him and his penny whistle…he whispered to me just now that you elected him, not me, as your Rector…” (1).

It took courage for Barrie to talk about this publicly. I don’t think it should be dismissed as a joke.

1. J. M. Barrie. Courage: The Rectorial Address Delivered at St. Andrews University May 3, 1922. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930, 49 pages.

2. Janet Dunbar. J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970.

3. Lisa Chaney. Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2005.

In Multiple Personality, how many identities is normal? Does a Great Novel have few characters or many?

The number of identities or characters can range from two to thousands, but it doesn’t correlate with anything.

However, I would make two generalizations. First, there are only a limited number of identities or characters who are well-developed. Second, there are probably more identities or characters—sometimes many more—than you meet at first.

In multiple personality, you might initially meet two identities. If this were the nineteenth century, and the two cerebral hemispheres—like two brains!—was big news, you might be inclined to stop looking after you found these two identities, and declare it a case of dual consciousness.

But if you remain open-minded, you will soon realize that the person has engaged in witnessed behaviors, and has various other documented issues, that can’t be accounted for by either of these two identities. And you will eventually meet the identities that do account for these things.

I have seen people who had only a dozen identities, others who had dozens, and one who had hundreds. The one who had hundreds did just as well.

In short, the number of identities is no more significant than the number of characters in a novel.

They Think, Therefore They Are: The Essential Feature of Multiple Personality

Stereotypical Multiple Personality: John suddenly behaves differently and calls himself Robert. After a while, he switches back to his usual behavior and name, but has amnesia for the time he had called himself Robert. This happens repeatedly. It is obvious. You couldn’t miss it.

Typical Multiple Personality: Although John has had multiple personality since childhood, the overt scenario described above is seen very rarely. In practice, when John does switch to Robert, the latter will almost always remain incognito (answering to the name of John among people who know him as John). Moreover, neither John nor Robert will tell you they have multiple personality, because neither one sees it that way.

Even the incognito switches from John to Robert may be rare. For example, if Robert is a protector personality, he may come “out” only if John is threatened with serious bodily harm, which may now be rare. So Robert, though always there and monitoring what is happening with John, usually remains behind the scenes. Which is where most alternate identities usually prefer to be.

In short, John has had multiple personality continuously since childhood, but if you are thinking in terms of something overt and dramatic, you will never suspect that he has it. Stereotypical multiple personality is rarely seen, and is, really, atypical.

What, then, is essential to multiple personality? Simply this: One person has the conscious thoughts of two or more autonomous thinkers.

Two Kinds of Conscience: A Judgmental Other Self and Moral Judgment

The mention of conscience by someone quoted in my last post prompted me to look it up and think about it.

I find that people use the word “conscience” in two very different senses. Some people use the word as an abstract concept that refers to their moral judgment and feelings.

Other people use the word in a personified sense, to mean an inner, other self who gets involved when moral issues arise. They speak of the “voice” of conscience. They may “wrestle” with their conscience. Or “obey” it. Their conscience may be a “witness” or an “accuser.” For some people, it is “evil.” For others, it is “a higher or deeper self.” For Charlotte Bronte, it was a “friend”:

“If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”

Now, there is a temptation to think that the only difference between these two uses of “conscience” is that the personifiers like to use metaphors. But that would be a mistake. It would be the same kind of mistake you would make if you thought that someone who has synesthesia was just using metaphor when he or she said that a particular number always has a particular color. They would not be using metaphor: that’s the way they really experience it.

When sane people hear a recurrent voice—such as the voice of conscience—the voice comes from another self; that is, an alternate personality, as in multiple personality, usually normal multiple personality.

Wall Street Journal article about Multiple Personality in Everyday Life

Inadvertently, Elizabeth Bernstein’s article “Self Talk” (May 6, 2014) points to evidence of normal multiple personality in everyday life.

“Self-talk,” she explains, “is what happens when you make yourself the target of your own comments…You’re having a conversation with yourself.”

But an important distinction which is not made in the article is that many people do, but many other people don’t, self-talk. When alone, the people who don’t self-talk may speak out loud or mutter, but they address Life, Luck, a medical condition, a particular group or person—what- or whomever—but not themselves. Thus, self-talk is not just a generic type of thinking that everyone does. It is something that some people do and other people don’t.

The article interviews only one person in any depth about his self talk. It is a 77-year-old retired CEO, who “has been talking to himself for more than 70 years. He was a lonely child…and invented three imaginary friends [each of whom was named]…with whom he had regular conversations.” As an adult, “He says it’s his conscience speaking,” but it is the type of “conscience” who will sometimes use “barnyard words.” He wasn't asked if he has more than one “conscience” who speaks to him.

Since the CEO has evidently been a quite normal person, whose self-talk has been reasonable and not dysfunctional, this would be an example of normal multiple personality (as opposed to multiple personality disorder).

The Brothers Grimm tale "Rumpelstiltskin," an Allegory of the Secret, Incognito, Alternate Personality in Multiple Personality

In a previous post about Edgar Allan Poe, I discussed that in real life Poe had an alternate personality named “Nobody,” which is the kind of name sometimes used by alternate personalities to remain secret and unidentified. I noted that it was the same kind of naming trick used by Odysseus to fool the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey, suggesting that Homer knew things about multiple personality.

Poe and the Odyssey illustrate that, in multiple personality, alternate personalities like to carry on their lives, and go about their business, incognito. Indeed, to understand multiple personality, you have understand that it is, by nature, hidden and secretive.

In the Brothers Grimm tale “Rumpelstiltskin” (1812), a young woman must spin straw into gold or be killed. A magical imp, Rumpelstiltskin, gets the straw spinned into gold for her, but to pay him, she will have to sacrifice her first-born, unless she can guess or discover his name.

So this is a story about a secret person, who acts behind the scenes, and who maintains his personal power relative to a regular, well-known person by keeping his identity and name secret.

The tale is an allegory of multiple personality, in which the young woman represents the regular or host personality, while Rumpelstiltskin represents the hidden, behind-the-scenes alternate personality.

In multiple personality, the host personality often knows little or nothing about the alternate personalities. And the alternate personalities are often particularly reluctant to divulge their names.

“Writer’s Voice” is what Multiple Personality is called in Creative Writing Programs

Margaret Atwood (27 Oct 2013 post) isn’t the only writer who has said that novelists have multiple personality. In The Love of the Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald said:

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

“Voice” is a literary euphemism for multiple personality

When Margaret Atwood and F. Scott Fitzgerald say that novelists have multiple personality, most writers and professors of literature agree. However, they may not realize that they agree, because they are used to thinking about it other terms. They don’t call it multiple personality. They call it “the writer’s voice” or, simply, “voice.”

Voice, like multiple personality, has roots in childhood

“Voice is nothing fancy. It’s simply the way you, the writer, project yourself artistically” (1, p. xv). It’s everything that makes your writing uniquely you. “Our own experience of voice began, as it does for many writers, with the exuberant, natural voice we had as children” (1, p. xv). “All children are natural storytellers and natural improvisors” (1, p. 29). Coincidentally, as noted in this blog, multiple personality starts in childhood.

“Voice” means hearing voices

“As you begin to explore voice, you will undoubtedly begin to hear many voices speaking inside you. Some voices arise as if disembodied, offering mysterious sentences or phrases…Others will be attached to characters, who begin to give hints about who they are…Some will seem to start a story…One of the most startling things about your inner voice may be its diversity. It’s not one voice, but many. You’ve got a lot of company: voices that seem to come from nowhere, others that make return visits, some that have been chattering away for as long as you can remember” (1, p. 38).

The voices are autonomous and have secrets

The kinds of voices include character voices, narrator voices, and editing voices. Their essential feature is their autonomy. For example, “Characters think to themselves, dream, have memories; they have an autonomous life that you, the writer, are not part of. In crucial ways, they live beyond you” (1, p. 117).

To learn the voices’ secrets, interview them

Indeed, characters have their own secret life, which the writer can only find out about by interviewing them. “Take a character whose voice you’ve heard speaking inside you, whom you want to get to know…When you (and she) feel ready, start the interview” (1, p. 118).

As E. L. Doctorow said in a 1988 published interview, “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” Of course, he didn’t mean schizophrenia, but rather multiple personality.

1. Thaisa Frank, Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

New York Times Book Review asks “Why is it so hard to capture the writer’s life on film?”

Tomorrow’s two Bookends essays could just as well have asked, “Why is it so hard to capture the novelist’s writing life in the interviews of authors that are published in newspapers and literary magazines?”

The answer is that they usually interview only the novelist’s host personality, as discussed in my last post.

On Author Interviews and what if 90% of novelists do have multiple personality

Which of the novelist’s identities do you plan to interview? If you don’t consider this, you may be interviewing the novelist’s host personality, who may have had only a peripheral role in writing the novel. Is that whom you want to interview?

You might ask the novelist how many different identities were involved in writing this novel, and which of them will participate in the interview. If the novelist is not acquainted with multiple identity literary theory, and doesn’t understand what you mean, you can substitute “parts of your mind” for “identities.”

Or you can say that many novelists have more than one voice, narrator, and/or character who have played active roles in producing a novel, and only they can give a truly inside perspective on how the novel was written. 

So each of them is invited to participate in this interview, letting the interviewer know, at any given time, which of them is speaking.

Now, this approach may not work with some novelists, because it is the host personality’s job to do interviews, and the other identities may feel that interviews are simply not what they do.

Not to mention that some novelists will suspect that you are trying to trick them into admitting that they have multiple personality, and they may feel that such an admission would be harmful to their reputation.

But this approach will be acceptable to other novelists, especially if their various identities have already participated in past interviews: each one coming out when a particular question happened to address their issues. So the only difference this time will be that the different identities acknowledge their presence when speaking.

And regarding reputation, the novelist may realize that the public will interpret their multiple personality as having been a joke, anyway. After all, the public has always considered it a joke when novelists have told how a character tried to take over and get the story written their way. As Mark Twain said, when he told the truth, nobody believed him.

Multiple Personality—Not Crazy, Not Psychotic—may Not be recognized by a novelist in one of his own characters

Most novelists, book reviewers, literary critics, and professors of literature think of multiple personality as crazy and psychotic. But the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, DSM-5, does not categorize multiple personality as a psychotic disorder. Even way back before 1980, when earlier editions of the DSM were still using the term “neurosis,” multiple personality was categorized as a neurosis, not a psychosis.

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, which I discussed in a recent post [April 24, 2014], is typical. In the novel itself, as well as in most literary criticism, Catherine Bourne—who is written as switching back and forth from one personality to another—is referred to, not as having multiple personality, but as being “crazy.”

For two reasons, I suspect that Hemingway did not recognize that his character had multiple personality. First, in terms of the novel itself, if Hemingway had been aware of it, I think that at least one of the other characters would have mentioned multiple personality, per se [but they didn't]. Second, in another novelist’s work, I once found a character who clearly had multiple personality—including personality switches with memory gaps—but book reviews had never mentioned it, and when I asked the novelist, himself, about it, he denied that the character had multiple personality, and claimed it was just ordinary psychology.

Someone who has it might think so.