Impersonation is Novelist Philip Roth’s Word for Normal Multiple Personality

Multi-award-winning novelist Philip Roth has said, “…everybody’s split…Everybody is full of cracks and fissures…Hiding them is sometimes taken for…not having them…It’s all the art of impersonation…That’s the fundamental novelistic gift…His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down…Millions of people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of making literature…I am somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing” (1).

In short, Philip Roth’s concept of impersonation anticipates my concept of normal multiple personality (see blog glossary).

1. Hermione Lee. “Philip Roth: The Art of Fiction” (1984), in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV. New York, Picador, 2009, pp. 203-235.