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.

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Thursday, February 5, 2015

Magical Realism and Multiple Personality: A Character’s Telepathy is based on Co-Consciousness of the Author’s Alternate Personalities

In my post of May 20, 2014 (search “magical realism”), I quoted Gabriel Garcia Marquez as rejecting the label of magical realism. He explained that what people call magical realism is just the way he thinks.

Why would he think that way? Because great novelists have multiple personality.  And one way of describing multiple personality is to say that it is magical thinking by a person who is grounded in reality.

For example, suppose that a character in a “magical realism” novel is telepathic; that is, he can read another character’s mind. Well, that is routine in multiple personality—when one identity reads another identity’s mind—only instead of “telepathy,” it is called “co-consciousness.”

Why, then, don’t all great novelists write magical realism novels? Literary fashion and self-control.

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