BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Monday, December 1, 2014

Novelist Saul Bellow Experienced His Deceased Friends as Aspects of Himself: Was this a Cognitive Ability Related to the Genesis of Characters?

I am continuing to read Bellow’s biography, which includes the following interesting statement:

“The deaths of contemporaries bring home the fact of one’s own mortality—in Bellow’s case, the process of mourning was intensified by his habit of experiencing his dead friends as aspects of himself” (1, p. 378).

Rather than apply the label introjective identification and leave it at that, I am wondering if this helps explain the genesis of a novelist’s characters.

Various novelists have said that characters in their novels may start as people they have known, but are not really copies of those people. Perhaps these other people serve as a stimulus for a personality-generator in the novelist’s mind, which produces a new personality to serve as a character.

New personalities that don’t serve as characters would be just “aspects of himself.”

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

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment (whether you agree or disagree) and ask questions (simple or expert). I appreciate your contribution.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)