Saul Bellow doesn’t understand his own novels, because, when he writes, he is often “deaf, dumb, and blind, the slave of” alternate personalities.

“Bellow maintained that his genius didn’t belong to him alone. He was simply the medium. ‘I often feel, when I’m writing, that I’m a composite person” (1, p. 213).

“Bellow professed—indeed, considered it a matter of honor—not to know what his own books were about. [Bellow said,] ‘It’s hard for me to know, because so much of the time I’m deaf, dumb, and blind, the slave of unknown masters.’” (1, p. 269).

If it is permissible to take Bellow at his word, then he is saying that there is more than one writer who writes his books (psychologically speaking), and that he (the host personality, “Bellow”) is, much of the time, no more than a slave of the others (whom Bellow does not know by name).

If there is any metaphor in what he says, then “deaf, dumb, and blind” may mean that, during much of the writing, the regular Bellow personality is not consciously present.

What sense can biographers, professors of literature, and literary critics make of Bellow’s statements? They can’t make any sense of it, because all standard literary theories assume that novelists have one personality, not multiple personality. No standard literary theory considers a novelist to be “a composite person” with “unknown masters.”

What Bellow says makes sense only from the perspective of Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

1. James Atlas. Bellow: A Biography. New York, Random House, 2000.