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.

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Thursday, August 13, 2015

John Cheever said his favorite book was Madame Bovary, and that his aunt didn’t hold his National Book Award novel against him, since he had a split personality

MADAME BOVARY

Interviewer: Do you have a very favorite book?
Cheever: Yes definitely. Madame Bovary. I’ve probably read it twenty-five times, many of those in French.

Interviewer: Why is it such a great novel?
Cheever: Because the writing is absolutely precise and simply perfect. This book was a considerable turning point in fiction, an innovation. Of course, all great novels are innovations but Madame Bovary was, for one thing, the first account we have of controlled schizophrenia…(1, p. 25).

THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE (National Book Award winner)

Interviewer: One almost has a feeling of eavesdropping on your family in that book.
Cheever: The Chronicle was not published (and this was a consideration) until after my mother’s death. An aunt (who does not appear in the book) said, “I would never speak to him again if I didn’t know him to be a split personality” (1, p. 99).

QUESTIONS

Did Cheever mean “schizophrenia” in its correct usage as the name of a psychosis? Or did he mean a split personality (multiple personality), which is not a psychosis, and something completely different?

Was Cheever’s aunt serious? Did he have multiple personality, and was this common knowledge in the family?

1. Scott Donaldson (Editor). Conversations with John Cheever. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

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