David Lodge’s Therapy: Main character’s “absent-minded spells” are the regular personality’s amnesia for the times that an alternate personality came out

Laurence “Tubby” Passmore, a 58-year-old successful TV sitcom writer, has had surgery for his painful knee, but it didn’t help; has a wife who now wants a divorce; has already been having psychotherapy, acupuncture, and aromatherapy, but is still unhappy; and has lately become very interested in 19th century existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard (see recent posts), whose depression, romantic frustrations, and pseudonymous alter egos (alternate personalities) make him a kindred spirit.

This novel does not have any explicit reference to multiple personality. It has no part in the plot. And if Tubby has any symptom of multiple personality, it appears that David Lodge did not knowingly, intentionally, give it to him. (Search “gratuitous multiple personality” in the blog.)

However, Tubby does, indeed, have one of the cardinal symptoms of multiple personality—memory gaps—which occur in multiple personality when an alternate personality comes out for a period of time, and then the regular personality has amnesia for that period of time. In this novel, Tubby’s memory gaps are treated as a running joke: he sometimes doesn’t remember things that his wife, girlfriend, therapist, and lawyer say to him.

“ ‘But that’s what I just told you,’ [his wife said] and I realized I’d just had one of my absent-minded spells” (1, p. 33).

“Sally [his wife] just came into my study to tell me she wants a separation. She says she told me earlier this evening over supper, but I wasn’t listening” (1, p. 129).

“He did go and see his psychotherapist on Monday, but she doesn’t seem to have been much help. That may be Laurence’s fault, because when I [his platonic girlfriend friend Amy] asked him he couldn’t remember anything she’d said. I’m not sure he took in anything I said last night, either” (1, p. 141).

[Sally says] “This last year he’s been impossible to live with, completely wrapped up in himself, not listening to a word anybody says to him. Well, I suppose he must listen to his agent and his producer and so on, he could hardly function otherwise, but he didn’t listen to what I was saying to him” (1, pp. 192-193).

[He was meeting with his lawyer] “but I’m afraid my mind wandered and [he asked his lawyer to repeat what the lawyer had been saying]…‘Repeat how much?’ [his lawyer asked. But Tubby did not have any idea] “how long [the lawyer] had been speaking” (1, p. 219).

The novel treats these memory gaps as a running joke, and as possibly explained by narcissism and depression. But Tubby is not any more narcissistic than the other characters, and as his wife says, he is not so depressed that he doesn’t function well at his work and “listen to his agent and his producer and so on.”

On a trip to Copenhagen to do research about Kierkegaard, traveling with a “young, desirable” woman who “shamelessly offered me all the delights of her sumptuous body, I couldn’t take advantage of it…Call it conscience. Call it Kierkegaard…I think Kierkegaard is the thin man inside me that has been struggling to get out, and in Copenhagen he finally did” (1, p. 209).

There is nothing in the immediately surrounding text to indicate that he was concerned with his weight. He seems to be talking about an alternate personality, whom he has nicknamed “Kierkegaard,” who “has been struggling to get out,” and it just happens that the alternate personality has a thin body-image. Moreover, in the next paragraph, he brings up Kierkegaard’s “pseudonymous works” (1, p. 210), which, as discussed in a previous post, are manifestations of Kierkegaard’s multiple personality.

When Tubby says that he has “absent-minded spells,” it reminds me of past posts about Mark Twain’s “absent-mindedness” (search in blog). It is characteristic of multiple personality that a person will have both an excellent memory and remarkable, puzzling, lapses in memory—the memory gaps that one personality has for the times that another personality came out.

1. David Lodge. Therapy. New York, Viking Penguin, 1995.