Joyce Carol Oates’ multiple personality “secret” in You Must Remember This, Journal, Poisoned Kiss Afterword, JCO and I, Widow’s Story, Lost Landscape

Professor Oates is a major novelist. She has won more than twenty literary awards. What kind of mind, what kind of special ability, can do that?

I will document that she, like most great novelists, has a normal version of multiple personality, which—along with her avid reading, decades of practice, and tireless work—explains her great accomplishment.

I will begin with one of her novels, and a question that I asked her about it, but the rest of this post will quote from her nonfiction: journal, essays, interviews, and memoirs.

You Must Remember This (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1987)

Enid Maria is the protagonist. Angel-face is Enid’s alternate personality:

“Once there was Enid Maria and there was Angel-face but Enid Maria knew very little about Angel-face while Angel-face knew everything about Enid Maria. Sometimes for the sheer hell of it Angel-face scrambled Enid Maria’s bureau drawers to confuse her, mislaid her homework to terrify her, lost her library books so she’d have to pay a fine; she even, sometimes, punished Enid Maria by losing her lunch money—you can do without, you don’t deserve to eat. Enid understood it was dangerous to walk along a busy street in Angel-face’s company because Angel-face might decide suddenly, whimsically, to cross the street—smiling and doing any damn thing she pleased. And she could get away with it!

“The ‘good’ girl, the honor student at De Witt Clinton Junior High, was Enid Maria Stevick…The other girl, Angel-face, was Enid too…” (p. 36).

When I asked Oates why Enid’s multiple personality was not mentioned in the second half of the novel, Oates denied that Enid had multiple personality, and insisted that Enid had “ordinary psychology.”

Why would Oates think that having an alternate personality is ordinary psychology?

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982 (New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2007) acknowledges that she has alternate personalities, and calls them her “secret”

December 2, 1974 “...For quite a while now I have been in consciousness—…and in this phase of personality I frankly find it difficult to sympathize with, to remember, the other phase. My earlier journal, written in longhand—typically!—could be by another person, it’s so thoughtful, solemn, even a little pious, and extraordinarily idealistic—yet very sincere, I suppose. That other self of mine!—and yet I know very well that I will become that ‘self’ again...for consciousness has very little control over itself, very little.”

One of Joyce Carol Oates’ personalities is commenting about another of Joyce Carol Oates’ personalities. The one speaking, who is now out and in control (“in consciousness”) knows about the other personality indirectly, from reading the other personality’s journal entries, which are distinct (“could be by another person”) in both form (“written in longhand—typically!”) and content (“thoughtful, solemn, pious, idealistic”). She expects that the two of them will continue to alternate, since she has very little control over which of them is out at any given time.

February 11, 1975 “…Dinner the other evening with John Gardner and his wife…he believes that art can be ‘directed’…It has not been my experience, however…“I”…Joyce who is his friend…would gladly write such a novel for the edification of all; but unfortunately, that self does not handle the writing…”

March 22, 1976 “...Am I completely normal, and the ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ of the books is a persona...or am I deceiving myself, am I the person[a], and ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ is the reality? Or is there no distinction, really? I have so little to do with the…worldview of Oates’ fiction that it doesn’t engage my thoughts in the slightest…”

In other words, the host personality is wondering who the real person is—she, or the other personality, who does the writing.

June 10, 1979 “...The ‘secret’...which sometimes feels awkward as a hammer stuck in my pocket, getting in my way...at other times small and contained and indeed unobtrusive as a tiny pebble...something foreign to me, yet carried about by me, invisible. I once thought the two or three selves in combat would be resolved, and one would triumph—and the worry of the secret—or whatever I must call it—would dissolve. But this hasn’t happened. It won’t happen.”

May 31, 1982 “…yesterday…Bill Robertson of the Miami Herald, Bill asked me to respond to the fact that virtually everyone he knew in Miami believed I was insane. I asked him to repeat the statement…since I have been teaching at universities since 1961…and have published so many books…So, I thought, it all goes for, what?—nothing?…For this, so many hours of diligent labor; of exacting craftsmanship; of (let’s say) rarely missing a day of teaching in twenty years; of living what I had imagined to be a resolutely “sane” life. (How do I account for it? I told Bill. They must be unusually stupid, your friends.)”

In Joyce Carol Oates’ Note and Afterword to The Poisoned Kiss, she says that it was written by an alternate personality named Fernandes, and not metaphorically

Oates’ introductory Note

“The tales in this collection are translated from an imaginary work, Azulejos, by an imaginary author, Fernandes de Briao. To the best of my knowledge he has no existence and has never existed, though without his very real guidance I would not have had access to the mystical “Portugal” of the stories—nor would I have been compelled to recognize the authority of a world-view quite antithetical to my own.”

From Oates’ Afterword (1, pp. 187-189)

“In November of 1970, while I was occupied as usual with my own writing, I began to dream about and to sense, while awake, some other life, or vision, or personality…One day I wrote a story that was strange to me…I did not understand the story and in a way I felt it was not my own…

“…I was never able to designate myself as the author of the stories; they were all published under the name ‘Fernandes’…

“Contrary to what one might believe, an experience like this—either real or imagined ‘possession’—is not really disturbing…I was able to keep up with my own writing and my university teaching without much difficulty…

“…Years later, writing this afterword, I am almost tempted to return to my earliest and most conventional diagnosis of the experience and claim it to be only ‘metaphorical’—the stories, the book they gradually evolved into, the afterword itself. But in truth none of it was metaphorical, any more than you and I are metaphorical.”  —Joyce Carol Oates, March 1975

1. Fernandes/Joyce Carol Oates. The Poisoned Kiss and other stories from the Portuguese. New York, The Vanguard Press, 1971-1975.

Joyce Carol Oates quotes Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges and I” (also see my past post) to illustrate every writer’s multiple personality

In “Does the Writer Exist?” (April 22, 1984, The New York Times Book Review) (available online), Oates says that a fiction writer’s social self and writing self are two distinctly different personalities. They are so different that when you meet the social self, it makes you wonder if the person who did the writing even exists.

In this regard, she mentions Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson, Robert Frost, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). But the two writers she cites at length are Jorge Luis Borges and Henry James.

Oates says, “Jorge Luis Borges has written so powerfully of the split in himself that it is a temptation to quote him in (near) entirety from ‘Borges and I’ “:

''It's to the other man, to Borges, that things happen. I walk along the streets of Buenos Aires, stopping now and then - perhaps out of habit - to look at the arch of an old entranceway or a grillwork gate; of Borges I get news through the mail and glimpse his name among a committee of professors or in a dictionary of biography. I have a taste for hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the roots of words, the smell of coffee, and Stevenson's prose; the other man shares these likes, but in a showy way that turns them into stagy mannerisms. It would be an exaggeration to say that we are on bad terms; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his tales and poems. . . . Little by little, I have been surrendering everything to him, even though I have evidence of his stubborn habit of falsification and exaggerating. . . . Years ago, I tried ridding myself of him and I went from the myths of the outlying slums of the city to games with time and infinity, but those games are now part of Borges and I will have to turn to other things. And so, my life is a running away, and I lose everything and everything is left to oblivion or to the other man. Which of us is writing this page I don't know.’’

Oates discusses Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life,” at even greater length, but I have already discussed that story in a past post.

In short, when Joyce Carol Oates wrote “ ‘JCO’ AND I (After Borges),” she was, like Borges, revealing her own split personality.

“JCO” and I (After Borges): A brief essay by Joyce Carol Oates, published in one of her nonfiction books

“ ‘JCO’ is not a person, nor even a personality, but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts…I, on the contrary, am fated to be ‘real’—‘physical’—‘corporeal’—to ‘exist in Time.’ I continue to age year by year, if not hour by hour, while ‘JCO,’ the other, remains no fixed age…perhaps…a precocious eighteen years old…

“ ‘JCO’ occasionally mines, and distorts, my personal history…

“It would be misleading to describe our relationship as hostile…we are more helpfully defined as diamagnetic, the one repulsing the other as magnetic poles repulse each other, so that ‘JCO’ eclipses me, or…I eclipse ‘JCO’…

“For once not she, but I, am writing these pages. Or so I believe” (1, pp. 153-155).

The alternate personality who wrote this brief essay says that “JCO” is a process, not a person or personality, but, then again, JCO may be like a precocious eighteen-year-old. What does this mean?

It may mean that “JCO” is not any one person or personality, but refers to a group of personalities, perhaps one of whom stays eighteen-years-old and never ages. (In multiple personality, some personalities age, but others, like Lewis Carroll’s Peter Pan, never age.)

It would not be unusual for a group of personalities to be known by one public name. That situation was illustrated in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. As I pointed out in a past post, “Dorian Gray” was a name that actually referred to a whole group of distinct personalities.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. New York, ECCO/HarperCollins, 2003.

Joyce Carol Oates’ Interviews: She describes how her mind works, including her sense of having “strangers” (characters) appear in her mind, whom she becomes (which makes them alternate personalities)

“When I’m with people I often fall into a kind of waking sleep, a daydreaming about the people, the strangers, who are to be the ‘characters’ in a story or a novel I will be writing. I can’t do much about this habit. At times my head seems crowded; there is a kind of pressure inside it, almost a frightening physical sense of confusion, fullness, dizziness. Strange people appear in my thoughts, and define themselves slowly to me: first their faces, then their personalities and quirks and personal histories, then their relationships with other people, who very slowly appear; and a kind of ‘plot’ then becomes clear to me, as I figure out how all these people come together and what they are doing. I can see them at times very closely, and indeed I ‘am’ them—my personality merges with theirs” (1, p. 16).

“I seem to be always dreaming, awake or asleep, though when I’m awake I know I’m awake. I wonder if this is normal…? My husband evidently doesn’t experience this” (1, p. 20).

“My characters really dictate themselves to me. I am not free of them, really, and I can’t force them into situations they haven’t themselves willed. They have the autonomy of characters in a dream. In fact, when I glance through what I have tried to say to you, it occurs to me that I am really transcribing dreams, giving them a certain civilized, extended shape, clearing a few things up, adding daytime details, subtracting fantastic details, and so on, in order to make the story or the novel a work of art” (1, p. 24).

Interviewer: Are the novels of Rosamond Smith [one of Oates’ pseudonyms] the kind of novels that Joyce Carol Oates would write?

Oates:…All the Smith novels are about twins of one kind or another (1, p. 165-166)

Interviewer: How important are names for your characters?

Oates: Absolutely important. I spend a long time naming names. If I can’t get a name right I can’t write, I can’t begin. I have a lot of names that begin with J, especially men. It’s like my alter ego” (1, p. 169).

“I am always working. I can be riding a bicycle or jogging, which I love to do, and I’m still working in my mind. I have a short-term photographic memory, so when I’m away from my writing I can see the pages I’ve written that morning, and I can edit them in my head—even punctuation” (1, p. 181).

“My process as a writer is to build character simply by inhabiting him or her obsessively. During the course of writing a novel, I am immersed in my protagonists’ souls virtually all my waking life. (And perhaps much of my dream life as well.) I see my own world, which I move through myself, through ‘fictitious’ eyes, and note what my characters would think or do in similar situations” (1, p. 196).

“I think that people who are artists have twin souls. There is the domestic self and then there is an imaginative self…These two are very often like twins who are at war with each other” (1, p. 197).

Interviewer: Lately you’ve also undertaken a new pseudonymous identity, Lauren Kelly…

JCO: Rosamond Smith seems to have metamorphosed into Lauren Kelly, a somewhat younger variant; more svelte, seemingly, since the novels are shorter, more succinct and narrative-driven, though turning still upon the phenomenon of linked doubles, twins, “soul mates.” (1, pp. 240-241).

1. Greg Johnson (Editor). Joyce Carol Oates Conversations 1970-2006. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 2006.

Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story: “I have walled myself off from ‘Joyce Carol Oates,’ " says the memoir’s main narrator, who is not the fiction-writing personality

At least one reviewer of this memoir accused Oates of hypocrisy, since it was only six months after her first husband’s death in 2008—after a marriage of forty-seven years—that she met a new man, whom she married in 2009. In my view, her remarriage and continued literary productivity show resilience and mental health.

The memoir’s relevance to this blog is its evidence of the author’s multiple personality, which is seen in three interrelated ways: first, in its multiple narrative voices (sometimes highlighted by the text’s change to italics); second, by the distinction that the narrator makes between herself and the Joyce Carol Oates who does the fiction writing; and third, by its repeated, passing comments, such as: “ ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ doesn’t exist, except as an author-identification” (p. 170) and “I’ve come to think of my ‘self’—my ‘personality’—as an entity that collapses when I am alone and unperceived by others; but then, as if by magic, when I am with other people, my ‘personality’ reassembles itself” (p. 233). (The latter is like what Henry James dramatizes in his short story, “The Private Life.”)

Oates use of her own name is complicated, and I can only guess at exactly what she means. I think she uses “Joyce Carol Oates” in two senses. One sense is “Joyce,” her social self or host personalty. Joyce “collapses” (goes to sleep or behind the scenes) in private, non-social situations, when her writing personalities take over. Her writing personalities are collectively known as “Joyce Carol Oates.” When she comes back into a social situation, “Joyce” comes back out.

In Oates’ A Widow’s Story, the wife/widow, social personality (the main narrator) distinguishes herself from the “Joyce Carol Oates” personalities as follows:

“In our marriage…I walled off from my husband the part of my life that is ‘Joyce Carol Oates’—which is to say, my writing career [he never even read her novels]…but then, I [the wife/widow personality] have walled myself off from ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ as well.” (pp. 123-125).

In this sense, “Joyce Carol Oates” is all the various personalities involved in the author’s writing career, which might include the personality who teaches creative writing at college, as well as the various, more hidden, personalities involved in the actual writing of novels. As she says, “Writing can be a descent into one’s deepest, most hidden…selves” (p. 318).

Joyce Carol Oates. A Widow’s Story: A Memoir. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2011.

Joyce Carol Oates. The Lost Landscape (New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2015): This just published coming-of-age memoir includes dissociative amnesia (a feature of multiple personality) and implies the existence of alternate personalities

Dissociative Amnesia at Age Five

The chapter “Happy Chicken” has a different narrator from most of the memoir. Here, Joyce Carol Oates is usually referred to by the narrator as “the little girl.” When the little girl was five years old, she was allowed to help “the Grandmother” collect eggs on their family farm. The narrator says:

“Grandma was the one, you know. The one who killed the chickens.

No! I did not know.

Of course you must have known, Joyce. You must have seen—many times…

No. I didn’t know. I never saw.

But…

I never saw” (p. 27).

“Sometime the little girl was breathless and frightened but why, the little girl would not afterward recall” (p. 29).

This alternate narrator—in the rhetorical, humorous guise of Joyce’s pet chicken, Happy Chicken—may be an alternate personality who knew things that little Joyce did not want to remember, like who killed the the cute, innocent chickens on their family farm.

Probably Alternate Personalities; Possibly Dissociative Fugues

In most of this memoir, Oates describes herself as a shy, timid, nice girl. So it is quite out of character when she engages in dangerous, solitary, wandering or reckless stunts. The wanderings were probably directed by an alternate personality, and may have included some dissociative fugues (search “dissociative fugue” in this blog).

“…I must have loved aloneness. Until the age of twelve or thirteen my most intense, happiest hours were spent tramping desolate fields, woods, creek banks near my family’s farmhouse…No one knew where I went. No one could have guessed how far I wandered…Our answers are vague…We learn to obfuscate the truth even when the truth is not harmful to us…” (p. 85). [Is that a slip into using the multiple personality plural?] She took dangerous paths and encountered solitary fishermen. Did anything untoward happen with the fishermen? “I have no memory” (p. 86).

Another “memory divorced of all context and explanation” is walking where she risked a fatal fall or being crippled for life. And, “In the company of other children, I was compelled to be the most reckless” (pp. 87-88). Compelled by whom? Perhaps by an alternate personality like the fictional Angel-face, mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Conclusion

Joyce Carol Oates, according to what she says about herself—beginning with her Journal, in which she reveals her “secret”—has a normal version of multiple personality.

Professor Oates, who may or may not still consider an alternate personality to be ordinary psychology, may disagree with me. And certainly, my idea that 90% of novelists, and possibly 30% of the general public, have a normal version of multiple personality, is not conventional wisdom.

However, I will keep writing this blog, and by the time I get to the hundredth novelist, my thesis may become conventional wisdom, because, as you see in this post, it is really rather obvious.