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.