Lee Child’s Killing Floor: Jack Reacher has two contradictory, alternate personalities—a silent, violent loner and a talkative, friendly, first-person narrator

Two Reacher Personalities

In this first of the series of Jack Reacher novels, the author wants the reader to enter into a long-term relationship with the protagonist. First-person narration promotes intimacy. I understand that.

But Reacher, the first-person narrator, describes himself as a person who travels by bus, because buses don’t keep passenger lists; who always pays by cash; and who does not carry a mobile phone. He is a reticent, violent loner, who doesn’t want anyone to keep track of him or know his business. This Jack Reacher personality is epitomized in the title of a book (quoted in a previous post), Reacher Said Nothing (1).

Therefore, Reacher’s providing an intimate, talkative, first-person narration is completely out of character. So there must be two personalities, as indicated in the title of this post.

Reacher Hears Voices

No issue is made of the fact that Reacher hears voices. It is mentioned in passing, as though most people hear voices, but most people don’t. In a nonpsychotic person, a rational voice may be an alternate personality, speaking from behind the scenes, which is probably the case here:

“I sat there in the back of the police Chevrolet listening to a tiny voice in my head asking me what the hell I was going to do about that” (2, p. 143).

“I…listened to the tiny voice inside my head saying: you’re supposed to do something about that” (2, p. 150).

“All of a sudden I was glad I had jumped off that damn bus. Glad I made that crazy last-minute decision. I suddenly relaxed. Felt better. The tiny voice in my head quieted down” (2, p. 156).

“I…started answering the question the tiny voice in my head was asking me again” (2, p.159).

Other than one personality’s hearing the voice of the other personality, the only other time that one of Reacher’s personalities is described as being aware of Reacher’s other personality is this:

“I noticed with a kind of detached curiosity that I was screaming, too” (2, p. 511). This takes place after the villains had been vanquished. It is a comment by the violent, reticent personality, who is watching the talkative personality celebrate.

E Unum Pluribus

The motto of the USA is E Pluribus Unum (From Many, One), meaning that the many colonies or states came together to form the one United States of America.

This novel reverses the motto for use as code words, which refer to a plot to make counterfeit hundred dollar bills: “E Unum Pluribus. Out of one comes many. Out of one dollar comes a hundred dollars” (2, p. 427). In the plot, one dollar bills were to be bleached, and then the paper was to be used to print hundred dollar bills.

Coincidentally, E Unum Pluribus could be code words for multiple personality, meaning that, from one person, comes more than one personality. Is that what Lee Child meant? Not intentionally.

1. Lee Child. Killing Floor. New York, Jove Books, 1997/2012.

2. Andy Martin. Reacher Said Nothing. New York, Bantam Books, 2015.

Jack Reacher (protagonist) and Lee Child (pseudonym) are protective alternate personalities, born in a difficult childhood, and all they want is love.

The novelist’s literary friend, Andy Martin, was given access to Lee Child while he wrote Make Me, his twentieth Jack Reacher novel. Martin wrote a book with observations and quotations (1).

Martin noted that when Lee Child writes, he enters an altered state of consciousness or trance in which he interacts with his alternate personality, Jack Reacher, who originated in the author’s childhood:

“When [Lee Child] writes, he goes into a ‘zone’ in which he really believes that the nonexistent Jack Reacher is temporarily existent. [As Lee Child, himself, says,] ‘I know I’m making it up, but it doesn’t feel that way’ “ (1, p. 18).

Lee Child says, “This isn’t the first draft, you know…It’s the only draft!…And remember, I’m not making this up. Reacher is real. He exists. This is what he is up to, right now. That’s why I can’t change anything—this is just the way it is” (1, pp. 32-33).

“Basically,” Lee said, “Reacher is me, aged nine. I used to fight all the time” (1, p. 95).

Pseudonym

Lee Child says that his pseudonym’s first name, Lee, comes from a family joke in which the French word for the, “le,” was pronounced lee (1, p. 102). Thus, his pseudonym, Lee Child means The Child. Additionally, according to the dictionary, the word “lee” means a protective shelter, and so Lee Child is, and writes about, a protector. Since multiple personality is a way to cope with childhood trauma, protector personalities are common.

These originally child-aged personalities may have grown up, but they are children at heart.

Childhood

Lee Child says, “I reckon all writers are trying to compensate for their unhappy childhoods. Or being sick all the time. Lack of affection. They’re all basket cases of emotional insecurity” (1, p. 149).

Can he recall any good times with his father? “Not an hour. Nothing. Blank. He was like a Martian” (1, p. 149).

“And my mother was a monster of martyrdom too, so no help on that side either. I was totally…disliked. My mother said I was dog shit brought in the house on someone’s shoe. Obviously, I’m writing with an idea of getting people to love me” (1, pp. 149-150).

1. Andy Martin. Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me. New York, Bantam Books, 2015.

Nobel Novelist Toni Morrison’s Puzzling Pseudonyms: Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, wrongly reported as Chloe Anthony Wofford, plus four reasons for Toni

Author’s pseudonyms have been a recurrent subject in this blog, because a pseudonym may be the name of an alternate personality. And since Toni Morrison may have claimed two different birth names, and “Toni” is a pseudonym, her use of names is worth considering.

Toni Morrison’s birth name was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, so why do so many articles about her say that it was Chloe Anthony Wofford? She must have fostered this mistake or let it pass on many occasions. Are Chloe Ardelia and Chloe Anthony two different personalities?

And how did Chloe become Toni? There seem to be four explanations. First, people mispronounced Chloe as Toni. Second, at age 12, she chose the baptismal name of St. Anthony of Padua (the patron saint of finding lost things and people), and she got Toni from this name. Third, her middle name is Anthony (but this isn’t true). Fourth, one of her early manuscripts had the name Toni, and by the time she told the publisher to use Chloe, it was too late, so she became known as Toni. And I suppose these four explanations could be combined, with a little ingenuity.

Are Chloe, Toni, Ardelia, and Anthony different personalities? I don’t know. But as past posts indicate, multiple personality is common in her novels.

American Psychiatric Association, in DSM-5, indexes auditory hallucinations as psychosis, but many nonpsychotic people hear voices

DSM-5

If you look up “hallucinations, auditory” in the index of DSM-5 (1, p. 929), all the pages referenced are in the chapter, Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders. However, DSM-5, itself, in the chapter, Dissociative Disorders, contradicts the view that voices are necessarily psychotic: 

“Dissociative identity disorder may be confused with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders. The personified, internally communicative inner voices of dissociative identity disorder…may be mistaken for psychotic hallucinations…Persecutory and derogatory internal voices in dissociative identity disorder associated with depressive symptoms may be misdiagnosed as major depression with psychotic features” (1, pp. 296-297).

The General Public

Most successful novelists hear voices (2).

Many normal people in the general public hear voices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement#Publications

http://www.hearing-voices.org/voices-visions/

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-28/hearing-voices-in-your-head-more-common-than-thought-study/6504704

Do any, or perhaps many, of the nonpsychotic people who hear voices have a normal version of dissociative identity (multiple personality)? I think so.

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Thaisa Frank, Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Pseudonyms of Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, and Benjamin Franklin: Was it only playful satire? Do their pseudonyms imply multiple personality?

“In his satires, Jonathan Swift used seventeen pseudonyms including Isaac Bickerstaff and M. B. Drapier, following a satirical convention of having silly-sounding, playful, and memorable pseudonyms…Voltaire, whose real name was Francois Marie Arouet, used 173 pseudonyms (174 if one includes ‘Voltaire’)…Daniel Defoe, who holds the record of using 198 pseudonyms, had one called Miranda Meanwell. In his female pseudonym, Silence Dogood, Franklin actually quotes Defoe…Silence Dogood appeared in…1722. Franklin continues to employ both male and female pseudonyms throughout the 1720s with Busy Body, Patience, Martha Careful, and Caelia Shortface. In the 1730s he used the nom de plumes of Alice Addertongue, Anthony Afterwit, Celia Single, and, most prolifically, Richard Saunders [author of Poor Richard’s Almanack].”

Calaway, Jared C., "Benjamin Franklin's Female and Male Pseudonyms: Sex, Gender, Culture, and Name Suppression from Boston to Philadelphia and Beyond" (2003). Honors Projects. Paper 18. http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=history_honproj

I have no information on whether Swift, Voltaire, Defoe, or Franklin had multiple personality, which is the implication of pseudonyms that is previously discussed in this blog. But I thought their having pseudonyms was interesting to note, in case any reader has relevant information or they are ever discussed in future posts.

J. K. Rowling (postscript): No, I had not read, and found multiple personality in, her first Harry Potter novel, before my first post on her pseudonyms

My first post on Rowling’s pseudonyms, in regard to Robert Galbraith, and my speculation that it suggested multiple personality, was back in February 2014, almost two years ago. Since then I have read and discussed one of her Galbraith books, in which I found suggestive evidence of multiple personality. Then I wrote a post quoting a book on the pervasive doppelgängers, the theme-of-the-double, in the Harry Potter series. And finally, earlier today, I wrote a post about the overt depiction of multiple personality at the climax of the first Harry Potter book.

Cynics may suspect that I had read the Harry Potter novel first, but mentioned it last, to make myself look good. But the truth is, I just finished that novel today, and had not known that the ending would depict multiple personality at all, and so prominently.

To me, it is not surprising that a novelist who uses pseudonyms would be found to have unacknowledged multiple personality in her novels. Since even novelists who don’t use pseudonyms often have multiple personality, the use of pseudonyms just increases the probability.

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (post 2): The last chapter, “The Man with Two Faces,” has overt, but unnamed, multiple personality.

The villain, the evil wizard, Voldemort, makes his first appearance in the Harry Potter series at the climax of this first book, as an alternate personality:

“And to Harry’s horror, [an alien] voice answered, and the voice seemed to come from [Professor] Quirrell himself”…”Where there should have been a back to Quirrell’s head, there was a [second] face”…” ‘See what I have become?’ the face said…’I have form only when I can share another’s body’…” (1, pp. 314-315).

Meanwhile, Harry, who has had recurrent headaches throughout the book, has one again, but now accompanied by voices in his head:

“Harry’s…head felt as though it was about to split in two”…”the pain in Harry’s head was building — he couldn’t see — he could only hear Quirrell’s terrible shrieks and Voldemort’s yells of ‘KILL HIM! KILL HIM!’ and other voices, maybe in Harry’s own head, crying, ‘Harry! Harry!’ “ (1, pp. 316-317).

Just as the alien voice coming from Quirrell is the voice of an alternate personality, so, too, would be the voices in Harry’s head. This looks like a foreshadowing of an eventual revelation that Harry, too, has multiple personality (possibly also overt, but possibly also not named or acknowledged as such).

Beside the voices in Harry’s head, his headache—“his head felt as though it was about to split in two”—may be a symptom of multiple personality, as described in a standard textbook:

“The single most common neurological symptom reported in MPD [multiple personality disorder] is headache…The headaches are usually described as extremely painful…Several patients have described these headaches to me as ‘blinding’…a number of therapists have associated the presence of headaches with conflicts and struggles for control among alter personalities…” (2, pp. 65-66).

Although the Harry Potter books depict multiple personality, they don’t name or acknowledge it, so I assume that Rowling hadn't read up on it. How, then, did she know that alien voices in the head—alternate personalities speaking from behind the scenes—are a common symptom of multiple personality, and that splitting and blinding headaches may happen when alternate personalities struggle with each other for control? Maybe she knew it from personal experience.

1. J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London, Bloomsbury, 1997/2004.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

How was J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone written? As a childhood paracosm? Or by a child-aged alternate personality?

Reading this first novel of the Harry Potter series, I have noticed certain unnecessary inconsistencies. I don’t mean big things, like the fact that Harry can fly on a broom instinctively, while other magic needs training, special words, potions, etc. I accept that Harry, as the hero, must be granted some innate superiority. The story requires it, so it doesn’t bother me.

The implausibilities I mean are trivial, unnecessary ones, like the fact that the boarding school for wizards, which is so magical in many ways, has cold hallways in winter. If it doesn’t have central heating, why doesn’t it have some magical way to heat the hallways? I don’t believe that an adult narrator would have been comfortable with that kind of inconsistency. It is not necessary for the story, and it would violate an adult author’s sensibility.

Perhaps the story was written in childhood: a paracosm, an imaginary world, comparable to the one created in childhood by the Brontës. Or perhaps the story was written in adulthood by a child-aged alternate personality.

We know that Joanne Rowling is an adult, but how old is J.K.?

J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London, Bloomsbury, 1997/2004.

“A Chapter on Dreams” by Robert Louis Stevenson: He gives most of the credit for his published fiction to his alternate personalities, his “unseen collaborators”

“…But presently my dreamer…began to write and sell his tales. Here was he, and here were the little people who did that part of his business…

“…how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for himself. Here is one, exactly as it came to him…

[the story is outlined]

“For now [the reader] sees why I speak of the little people as substantive inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer…that he had no guess whatsoever at the motive of the woman—the hinge of the whole well-invented plot—until the instant of that highly dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was the little people’s!…

“But observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told with really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is…psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot better it…

“Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer’s, beyond doubt…only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. Who are they, then? and who is the dreamer?

“Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a person than myself…And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them!…That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. For myself—what I call I, my conscious ego…I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all…so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownies, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise…I am an excellent adviser…I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on the whole I have some claim to share, though not as largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise…”

Robert Louis Stevenson. “A Chapter on Dreams,” Scribner’s Magazine, January 1888, pp. 122-128.

John Granger’s How Harry Cast His Spell: In the J. K. Rowling Harry Potter books, Harry and most other characters are well known to have multiple personality

“A Doppelgänger is a character or creature’s complementary figure or shadow, which reveals aspects of its personality otherwise invisible…Rowling has created doppelgängers that, like Jekyll/Hyde, are in the same body, and at least one, like Frankenstein and monster, that is in separate bodies…

“…almost every character in Harry Potter is something of a doppelgänger. Specifically, the Harry/Voldemort relation is key to understanding the meaning of the books and why they are so popular…

“Many of Rowling’s characters, for instance, are animagi. These are masters of the magical subject of transfiguration who can change at will into an animal shape…The shape each animagus takes is a pointer to his or her hidden character…The animal figure is a shadow, or doppelgänger…

“Doppelgängers of the Jekyll and Hyde sort…are often a simple matter of birth…In addition to these half-breeds and shape-changers, we also have…a metamorphmagus…The books also include a host of ‘threshold characters’…These folk stand in the doorway between two worlds…

“And of course there is Polyjuice Potion. By means of this magic draught, Harry Potter characters can for a brief time transform into other characters…

“So far all the shadow characters or doppelgängers I have mentioned have been internal ones; that is, the mirrored aspects are within a single person or creature. It is just as common for there to be two persons, in which one is a revealing reflection of the other…

“…the outcomes of the books hinge on the relation of Harry and Voldemort, a classic doppelgänger pairing…Order of the Phoenix begins with three mentions of Harry’s feeling that his skull has been split in two…It turns out, as we learn by book’s end, that Harry’s head really is divided and he has an unwelcome guest…Harry has a double nature, or shadow, in his link to Voldemort…Harry’s literal…double-mindedness with Voldemort really evidences itself in Order of the Phoenix, but each of the previous books hints at it…

“…it will help here to recall that Voldemort is not the Dark Lord’s given name. His real name is Tom Riddle, which, because Thomas comes from the Aramaic word for ‘twin,’ is a pointer to how important the doppelgänger structure is to these stories. Voldemort’s given name means ‘twin enigma.’

“The riddle we have to solve, then, is what meaning…there is to this doubling or twin motif in Harry Potter” (1, pp. 42-48).

Perhaps it reflects multiple personality in the multiply-named author (see past posts on her use of pseudonyms).

1. John Granger. How Harry Cast His Spell: The Meaning Behind the Mania for J. K. Rowling’s Bestselling Books. Carol Stream Illinois, SaltRiver/Tyndale, 2008.

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to at least eleven writers who apparently had, and/or wrote fiction that involved, multiple personality.

Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, William Golding, Ernest Hemingway, Doris Lessing, Thomas Mann, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Patrick Modiano, Toni Morrison, Eugene O’Neill, and Orhan Pamuk.

Search these writers in this blog to find the posts in which they are discussed.

Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book (post 2): Its theme of the double—literary metaphor for multiple personality—probably reflects the author’s own psychology.

According to the novel, the gist of its plot is as follows:

“Just before his wife left him, he’d written a novel (his readers called it ‘historical’) about a man who changed places with his double. Later, after his wife left him and he forced himself to become the man he’d once been so as to sleep in peace, he became the man who had written that novel, and when he became the man he’d once been, he was blind both to his future and his own, and he found himself writing his novel about the doubles all over again! It was not long before this world—where everything was a copy of something else, where people were at once themselves and their own imitations, and all stories opened out into other stories—grew to look so real that the writer, thinking no one would want to read a story in a place this ‘realistic,’ decided to invent another, surreal world that might be more fun to write about, and that his readers might enjoy even more…And because everyone can remember being ‘abandoned for no reason.’ Galip imagined they were all curious to know why this particular writer’s wife had left him” (1, p. 165).

Is this psychologically autobiographical, a reflection of the author’s own mind, beginning in childhood (when multiple personality starts)?

The protagonist’s identity-switching (and perhaps the author’s own) did, indeed, start in childhood:

“As a child he’d often imagined himself shedding his body and his soul to become someone new…” (1, p. 224).

However, the author never mentions multiple personality, per se, which, after all, is the psychological condition that corresponds to the theme of the double and to personality-switching since childhood.

And, according to Multiple Identity Literary Theory, when a novel has unacknowledged multiple personality, it probably reflects the author’s own psychology, which would put Orhan Pamuk in the company of many other writers, including other Nobel Prize winners previously discussed in this blog.

1. Orhan Pamuk. The Black Book [1990]. Translated by Maureen Freely. New York, Vintage/Random House, 2006.

New Edition of MacKinnon, Michels, Buckley The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice fails to integrate its new chapter on multiple personality

Having read the first edition of this book back when I was in psychiatric training, I was curious to see how it has evolved, especially since the new edition includes a chapter on multiple personality for the first time.

The first thing I noticed was that the three editors, who wrote most of the twenty-one chapters, had to get someone else to write the chapter on multiple personality. Evidently, their approach to the psychiatric interview has prevented them from having sufficient experience with this diagnosis.

Two problems with their approach are that they don’t ask patients if suicide attempts are remembered, and they don’t know that some nonpsychotic people, such as those with multiple personality, may hear voices.

Suicide Attempts

In the chapter on interviewing the multiple personality patient (by Brad Foote, M.D.), a case begins as follows:

“A single mother in her twenties presented for treatment after hospitalization for a suicide attempt…The clinician…noted that the patient was never able to give a detailed account of the attempt…” and further noted “subtle discontinuities in conversations in sessions in which the patient, who was intelligent and alert, would seem confused as to what was being discussed. Finally, at one of these junctures, the clinician asks the patient if she remembered what they had just been discussing. The patient replies ‘of course,’ but when the clinician follows up…she admits that she cannot remember” (1, p. 386). After discovering the patient’s memory gaps, her alternate personalities are eventually found and the correct diagnosis made.

The key to making the correct diagnosis was the clinician’s interest in whether the patient actually remembered her suicide attempt, or, instead, had a memory gap. This is something that the editors of this book (and most other psychiatrists) don’t ask about, as indicated by its omission from the editors’ chapter on interviewing the depressed patient (including suicidal issues).

You have to ask if the patient actually remembers, and doesn’t just know of, her suicide attempt. Patients may know of their suicide attempt by making inferences from circumstantial evidence (e.g., a bandage, or what other people have said). But does she actually remember all the details (both subjective and objective) that she would remember if she were the personality who did it?

You might wonder why, if a patient did have memory gaps, the clinician couldn't depend on the patient to complain about them. Why does the clinician have to ask? Because what happens during a memory gap is none of the “host” personality’s business. It is the business of the alternate personality who was out during that time. Moreover, the host personality has been having memory gaps since childhood; they make no sense to the host personality; nothing can be done about them; so they are just something that the host personality tries to ignore.

Hearing Voices

The editors say, “One would no more ask an obviously nonpsychotic patient if he hears voices than ask an obviously comfortable medical patient if he is in great pain” (1, p. 57). This is wrong in two ways. First, there are some psychotic patients whose psychosis will not be recognized unless you screen even seemingly nonpsychotic patients. Second, there are truly nonpsychotic people who do hear voices, such as people with multiple personality, who sometimes hear the voices of their alternate personalities speaking from behind the scenes. Indeed, one reason for a clinician to suspect multiple personality is the finding of superficially psychotic symptoms in a person who functions and relates too well to be psychotic.

In conclusion, I am happy to see a chapter on multiple personality in a book where it was previously ignored, but I hope that the next edition will integrate that chapter with the rest of the book.

1. Roger A. MacKinnon MD, Robert Michels MD, Peter J. Buckley MD. The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice, Third Edition. Arlington VA, American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2016.

Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) The Cuckoo’s Calling (post 2): a murder vs. suicide detective novel with the most glaring omission in the history of the genre

Lulu Landry, a supermodel who once cut her wrist, and who takes lithium for bipolar disorder, has fallen to her death from her balcony. Was it an accident, murder, or suicide? The police and official inquest have concluded that it was suicide. Now Lulu’s bother hires Cormoran Strike, private investigator, to prove that it was murder.

But the biggest mystery of this detective genre novel is why neither the police nor Strike investigate her psychiatric treatment, and why they never interview, or even mention, her psychiatrist. Had she been taking her medicine? Was the lithium level too high (possibly causing delirium and dizziness) or too low? Had she told her psychiatrist that she had been threatened or felt suicidal? Characters in this genre should want to ask such questions, even if the answers are only red herrings.

I cannot explain this glaring omission, and can only wonder if it reflects some quirk of the Cormoran Strike character or of Rowling’s Galbraith personality.

Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) The Cuckoo’s Calling: Why does the novel unintentionally portray Cormoran Strike, the protagonist, as having multiple personality?

The following brief passages from the novel are a realistic description of how a person with multiple personality would feel the presence, and hear the voice, of an alternate personality:

“Through all these mundane acts, he felt as though he was accompanied by the specter that had haunted him during his months in hospital. It lurked in the corners of his shabby office; he could hear it whispering to him whenever his attention on the task in hand grew slack. It urged him to consider how far he had fallen; his age; his penury; his shattered love life; his homelessness. Thirty-five, it whispered, and nothing to show for all your years of graft except a few cardboard boxes and a massive debt. The specter directed his eyes to cans of beer in the supermarket, where he bought more Pot Noodles; it mocked him as he ironed shirts on the floor. As the day wore on, it jeered at him for his self-imposed habit of smoking outside in the street, as though he were still in the army, as though this petty self-discipline could impose form and order on the amorphous, disastrous present” (1, pp. 106-107).

“…a lucid voice in his mind urging him not to let desire lead on to humiliation…” (1, p. 351).

The question is why the author would describe the protagonist as having this kind of subjective experience, which only a person with multiple personality would have. After all, the author does not intend to portray him as having multiple personality. It has nothing to do with the plot of this detective novel. The portrayal of multiple personality, per se, quoted above, was unintended. It is gratuitous.

Novels have gratuitous multiple personality, because the author thinks that the subjective experience being described is an aspect of the ordinary psychology of most people. Why does that author think that? Because the author experiences it and takes it for granted.

1. Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J. K. Rowling). The Cuckoo’s Calling. New York, Mulholland/Little Brown, 2013.

Multiple Personality and Names: Robert Galbraith novels say the author’s name is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling, but J. K. Rowling is itself a pseudonym.

The usual rationalization for “J. K. Rowling” is that the name of a female author on the Harry Potter books would have hurt sales to boys. But why wasn't the author’s real name put on the books after boys learned that a woman wrote the books and were not deterred from buying them? And why are the “Robert Galbraith” books still published under that pseudonym even though everyone knows, and the books themselves disclose, that they were really written by “J. K. Rowling.” And why do the Galbraith books say that they were really written by “J. K. Rowling,” when that is only another pseudonym, and not the author’s real name, which is Joanne (no middle name) Rowling?

Why has Joanne Rowling not wanted her own name on her own books, even after everyone knows that she wrote them?

My guess is that she is just being honest: “Joanne Rowling” is only one of a number of personalities, and not one who writes books. So the “Joanne Rowling” personality, being honest, does not claim authorship.

Multiple personality, Illeism (third-person self-reference), Nosism (first-person plural self-reference): Vera Caspary’s Laura and the case of Waldo Lydecker

One of my favorite old movies is Laura (1944), but until now, I had never read the book, in which several of the characters take turns in first-person narration, beginning with Waldo Lydecker:

“I offer the narrative, not so much as a detective yarn as a love story. I wish I were its hero. I fancy myself a pensive figure drawn, without conscious will, into a love that was born of violence and destined for tragedy. I am given to thinking of myself in the third person. Many a time, when I have suffered some clumsy misadventure, I am saved from remorse by the substitution for unsavory memory of another captivating installment in The Life and Times of Waldo Lydecker. Rare are the nights when I fail to lull myself to sleep without the sedative of some such heroic statement as ‘Waldo Lydecker stood, untroubled, at the edge of a cliff beneath which ten thousand angry lions roared.’ I make this confession at the risk of exhibiting absurdity…” (1, p. 20).

Why are some people inclined to think of themselves in the third person? I googled the issue and discovered the terms “illeism” and “nosism” in Wikipedia, which gives various reasons for people to refer to themselves those ways, but doesn’t include the reason I had in mind, multiple personality:

“From time to time, multiples will slip (perhaps on purpose) and make self-reference in the first person plural or the third person” (2, p. 84).

And I recall that when Charles Dickens confided his plans for the plot of Edwin Drood, he said that John Jasper, the murderer, was to be revealed as having multiple personality when he refers to himself in the third person (see my Dickens post).

There is nothing about multiple personality in Vera Caspary’s Laura, unless Waldo Lydecker’s proclivity to third-person self-reference is interpreted that way, which most people would consider far-fetched. But I think his trying to kill Laura was rather out-of-character, in an evil Mr. Hyde kind of way.

Otherwise, I just can’t relate to a person’s using illeism or nosism, but perhaps that is my limitation.

1. Vera Caspary. Laura. Impress Mystery, 1943/1970.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Saniye Çancı Çalışaneller’s “Doppelgänger in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book”: The Nobel Prize novelist’s theme about multiple personality in writers. 

“Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book narrates Galip’s search for his wife Rüya and his journalist cousin Jelal…this reading of The Black Book claims that although it seems there are two different characters as Galip and Jelal in the novel, Galip and Jelal are the same person since Jelal symbolizes the second self or author self of Galip…

“Throughout the novel, although Rüya and Jelal seem to have material existence, their existence could be called into question…In Turkish, rüya means dream and, in certain passages in The Black Book, it is not possible to comprehend exactly whether the narrator talks about a person whose name is Rüya, or just a dream… while Galip is trying to find his wife Rüya, he accomplishes his dream (rüya) of being a writer…

“As for Jelal, he is mentioned in the novel only when Galip reads Jelal’s articles… According to Galip, when Jelal narrates something, ‘the world would make sense, transforming the “hidden” realities right under our noses into the rich fare of an astonishing story that we already knew but didn’t know that we knew, thereby making life more bearable’… Galip’s search for Jelal turns out to be a search for writing… Jale Parla, who claims that Galip’s identity is split during his search for his double or other self Jelal, defines The Black Book as an allegoric story that narrates the birth of a writer…

“… after Jelal disappears, Galip moves into Jelal’s flat, wears Jelal’s clothes, sleeps in Jelal’s bed, and pretends to be Jelal by answering the phone…The first subjective persona…is Galip who leads an ordinary life, while the second objective one is Jelal as Galip’s author self. The third persona, who is described as “the dark persona,” refers to the third person narrator of this book…

“ Galip feels that he gradually loses his own identity…‘I sensed at once that the person whom we watched in the mirror sitting in the chair was not “I” but somebody else’…In this passage, the person who looks through the mirror is Galip, but what he sees in the mirror is the columnist Jelal…Thus, the fact that Galip sees Jelal in the mirror indicates that Galip has split identity…”

Search “mirror” or “mirrors” in this blog for further discussion of mirrors in multiple personality.

bilig, Spring 2011/Number 57, 1-15: https://eresearchm.ozyegin.edu.tr/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10679/276/Doppelg%C3%A4nger%20in%20Orhan%20Pamuk%E2%80%99s%20The%20Black%20Book.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Saniye Çancı Çalışaneller is Lecturer, Baskent University, Faculty of Science and Letters, Department of American Culture and Literature, Ankara.

J. K. Rowling explains pseudonym: As a child, she had a personality Ella Galbraith. Rowling’s male personality has same surname. But what is their relationship?

At her Robert Galbraith website, J. K. Rowling explains: “…I rather enjoy having another persona…my inner bloke!…[His surname] Galbraith came about for a slightly odd reason. When I was a child, I really wanted to be called ‘Ella Galbraith’, and I’ve no idea why. I don’t even know how I knew that the surname existed, because I can’t remember ever meeting anyone with it.”

Judging by what Rowling says, she does not know what the relationship is between Ella and Robert, or anything else about her Ella personality. Indeed, does Rowling, herself, actually remember wanting to be called “Ella Galbraith”? Or does she have amnesia for Ella, and knows about her only as a family story that she has been told?

In any case, Rowling’s explanation is consistent with my theory: Most novelists have a normal version of multiple personality, and their pseudonyms are often the names of alternate personalities who want to publish.