Actors, Writers, and Multiple Personality: Is acting a form of multiple personality? Is multiple personality as common among actors as it is among writers?

When a good actor plays the role of a character who has multiple personality, it makes people think that it is easy to fake. But most people could not do it convincingly. Why can actors?

Why are some people good at both writing and acting? Shakespeare did both. And when Dickens did his very popular readings, he got into character.

Speaking of Benoit Constant Coquelin (1841-1909), a pre-eminent actor of the French theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century, American drama critic George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) said, “Coquelin is the only actor who ever lived who proved that he had a critical mind in the appraisal of acting” (1, p. 192). Coquelin may not be the only actor, but he did have a credible opinion:

“…the actor must have a double personality. He has his first self, which is the player, and his second self, which is the instrument. The first self conceives the person to be created…and the being that he sees is represented by his second self. This dual personality is the characteristic of the actor.

“Not that the double nature is the exclusive property of actors alone; it undoubtedly exists among others. For example, my friend Alphonse Daudet takes delight in distinguishing this double element in the personality of the storyteller, and even the very expressions I am now using are borrowed from him. He confesses that he also has his first self and his second self—the one a man made like other men…the other a being…” who takes “notes for the future creation of his characters” (1, p. 192).

I do not know enough about acting to answer the questions in the title of this post, but they are good questions.

1. Toby Cole, Helen Krich Chinoy (Editors). Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the Great Actors of All Times As Told in Their Own Words, Revised Edition. New York, Crown Publishers, 1949/1970.

Rudyard Kipling (post 2): Multiple personality suggested by well-known fact that he was self-contradictory, a two-sided man, a man of permanent contradictions.

“Kipling was not…a racist or an imperialist or a sadist or an anti-Semite or a repressed homosexual—and there is sound evidence, in his writing and in his life, to counter any such simplistic interpretations. But there is also much evidence, drawn from the same sources, to suggest that Kipling was all of the above. It is far preferable to approach this author…as a man of permanent contradictions…

“Kipling’s most successful and polished achievement in prose, Kim (1901), is also dependent on the idea of a double life…The whole action of the story hangs on dissimulation and duality…the epigraph to Chapter Eight…

     Something I owe to the soil that grew—

     More to the life that fed—

     But most to Allah Who gave me two

     Separate sides to my head.

This is drawn from a Kipling poem titled ‘The Two-Sided Man.’ As if to underline its message, Kipling added,

     I would go without shirts or shoes,

     Friends, tobacco or bread

     Sooner than for an instant lose

     Either side of my head.

“If one were to assemble a balance sheet of Kipling’s own explicit contradictions, it would necessarily include his close relationship with the Bible and the hymnal, and his caustic anti-clericalism; his staunch Anglo nationalism, and his feeling that England itself was petty and parochial; his dislike of nonwhite peoples, and his belief that they were more honest and courageous; his love-hate relationship with the Irish; his contempt, and deep admiration, for the United States; his respect for the working class, and his detestation of the labor movement; his exaltation of the empire, and his conviction that its works were vain and transient” (1).

Search “self-contradiction” for previous posts on this clue to multiple personality.

1. Christopher Hitchens. “A Man of Permanent Contradictions.” The Atlantic, June 2002 issue.

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality: Have you, too, found its signs and symptoms in works whose narrators, characters, and critics ignore them?

Please submit a letter that names other writers and other literary works that have unacknowledged multiple personality. Or submit your own essay about them.

Rudyard Kipling’s Multiple Personality: One personality spoke English, the other Hindustani, and the one who spoke English didn’t understand Hindustani.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), who won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature, appears to have had a more traumatic childhood than Charles Dickens: Kipling was separated from his parents and mistreated, at a younger age and for a longer period of time.

“First of all, he was born in India, the son of an English artist and scholar…It appears that up to the age of six Kipling talked, thought and dreamed, as he says, in Hindustani, and could hardly speak English correctly…

“When Rudyard Kipling was six and his sister three and a half, they were farmed out for six years in England with a relative of Kipling’s father. John Lockwood Kipling was the son of a Methodist minister, and this woman was a religious domestic tyrant in the worst English tradition of Dickens and Samuel Butler. The boy, who had been petted and deferred to by the native servants in India, was now beaten, bullied with the Bible, pursued with constant suspicions and broken down by cross-examinations. If one of the children spilled a drop of gravy or wept over a letter from their parents in Bombay, they were forbidden to speak to one another for twenty-four hours. Their guardian had a violent temper and enjoyed making terrible scenes, and they had to learn to propitiate her by fawning on her when they saw that an outburst was imminent.

“ ‘Looking back,’ says Mrs. Fleming, Kipling’s sister, ‘I think the real tragedy of our early days, apart from Aunty’s bad temper and unkindness to my brother, sprang from our inability to understand why our parents had deserted us…We were just like workhouse brats, and none of our toys really belonged to us.’

“Rudyard had bad eyes, which began to give out altogether, so that he was unable to do his work at school…and for punishment was made to walk to school with a placard between his shoulders reading ‘Liar.’ He had finally a severe nervous breakdown, accompanied by partial blindness, and was punished by isolation from his sister. This breakdown, it is important to note, was made more horrible by hallucinations…

“He was next sent to a public school in England…

“…in July, 1882, not yet quite seventeen…He went back to his family in India, and there he remained for seven years. The Hindu child, who had lain dormant in England, came to life when he reached Bombay, and he found himself reacting to the old stimuli by beginning to talk Hindustani without understanding what he was saying…That Hindu other self of his childhood…” (1, pp. 345-351).

Most bilingual people feel and think somewhat differently when they speak one of their languages or the other; however, the difference is a difference in roles, not personalities: both languages are known by their one and only personality.

But when Kipling spoke Hindustani and did not know what he was saying, it meant that he had two personalities, and that his English-speaking personality, who did not speak Hindustani, was listening from behind-the-scenes, while his Hindustani personality spoke. That is multiple personality.

Kipling’s Sister

Since Alice MacDonald (Kipling) Fleming was even younger than her brother when their childhoods became traumatic, it would be expected that her outcome would not be as good.

“The sister of author Rudyard Kipling, Alice Fleming adopted the pseudonym “Mrs. Holland” because members of her family were opposed to her involvement in occult matters. She was one of the seven principal mediums involved in the famous cross-correspondences cases…

“In 1893, while living in India, she began automatic writing, often receiving poetry but occasionally letters for friends purportedly coming from their deceased loved ones…

“Fleming continued to do automatic writing until 1910, when she suffered a nervous breakdown” (2).

Kipling became a medium for his characters, while his sister became a medium for the “dead,” the former a healthier and more productive version of multiple personality.

1. Edmund Wilson. “The Kipling That Nobody Read” [1941], pages 344-395 in Edmund Wilson’s Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s: The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow [1941], Classics and Commercials, Uncollected Reviews. New York, The Library of America, 2007.

2. Fleming, Alice MacDonald (Kipling): “Mrs. Holland” (1868-1948). http://www.spiritualistresources.com/cgi-bin/great/index.pl?read=72

Philoctetes (mythological character from the Greek tragedy by Sophocles): The creative personality is the one who uses art as a way of transcending trauma.

“Philoctetes is a mythological character from the Greek tragedy by Sophocles, a warrior who was on his way to the Trojan War when a serpent bit him. The smell of his wound was so noxious that he was left on the island of Lemnos and ostracized by his countrymen. When the war started, Cassandra, the seer, said that without the bow of Heracles, which is only possessed by Philoctetes and which he inherited from his father, the war could not be won. Many believe that it's the Trojan Horse that is the key to winning the war, but actually it's the bow of Heracles…

“The Philoctetes myth reappears in a book by Edmund Wilson called The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. Wilson modernizes the story, tying the wound to psychic trauma and the bow to the healing power of insight. And so the creative personality is the one who uses art as a way of transcending trauma” (1).

1. http://philoctetes.org/story_of_philoctetes/

“Ender’s Game” (post 3) by Orson Scott Card (post 4): Ender is self-contradictory and sees another person in the mirror, both signs of multiple personality.

The reader is told that Ender (age 6) is a genetic hybrid of his older brother and sister, that he is “half Peter [age 10] and half Valentine [age 8]” (1, p. 24).

Since Peter is said to be sadistic and Valentine is said to be nice, Ender is said to have a contradictory nature on the basis of genetic inheritance. But readers of this blog know that puzzling contradictions may be a clue that a person has multiple personality (search “self-contradictions” and “puzzling inconsistency”).

The fact is, Ender’s contradictions go beyond his siblings. He is more sadistic than Peter, since Ender actually kills another boy (Stilson) unnecessarily, while Peter, though he had often threatened to kill Ender, never actually kills anyone. Moreover, Ender is nicer than Valentine, since he is goodhearted and loyal, while she is often manipulative, self-serving, and hypocritical: through much of the novel she allies herself with Peter.

How can Ender or any person be both truly nice and truly homicidal? There are two possibilities, medical and psychological. A nice person could have a brain disease that causes episodes of homicidal rage. Or, a person could have a psychological condition in which one personality is nice and another personality is evil.

Alternate Personality in the Mirror

As discussed in numerous past posts about other writers, persons with multiple personality may sometimes see one of their alternate personalities when they look in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors”). This happens with Ender in a number of dream or video game sequences:

“And in the mirror he saw a face that he easily recognized. It was Peter…” (1, p. 117). “All the while, the face of Peter Wiggin in the mirror stayed and looked at him” (1, p. 141). “ ‘In my dreams,’ said Ender, ‘I’m never sure whether I’m really me’ ” (1, p. 287).

How could Ender have gotten a “Peter” alternate personality who was more violent than the actual Peter? The alternate personality may have been an identification with Peter at the times that Peter had threatened to kill Ender (as Peter had done on numerous occasions).

Some critics misinterpret Ender’s seeing Peter in the mirror as reflecting Ender’s genetic inheritance similar to Peter’s, but Peter was not the kind of person who actually killed people. And most critics don’t know that seeing someone else in the mirror is a symptom of multiple personality.

What did the author intend?

It is clear that Orson Scott Card has given some thought to multiple personality, per se, as seen in the passage I previously quoted from his book on creating characters:

“Who is telling your story?…It is never exactly your own voice…You have many voices…Each of your voices has its own vocabulary. They overlap, but less than you might suppose. Each has its own sentence structure…

“Does that sound like a split personality? Perhaps the function of our brain that lets us develop these different ‘voices’ is the very function that drives multiple personalities—it seems likely enough…”

But it seems unlikely that Card had read anything about mirrors and multiple personality. And nothing is said about multiple personality by any character or narrator in Ender’s Game. So I do not think Card intended the mirror episodes to imply multiple personality. But why, then, are the multiple personality-indicative mirror episodes in the novel?

It is one more example of what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality” (search it to see previous posts), which is when indications of multiple personality are found in a novel, but they have not been put there intentionally, and the only reason they are there is that they probably reflect the author’s own psychology.

Buggers

In a previous post, I speculated that naming the evil invaders from outer space “buggers” (slang for sodomites) reflected the author’s opposition to homosexuality. But at the conclusion of Ender’s Game, Ender believes that the Buggers have probably been misunderstood, and may have been good guys after all.

Interestingly, Ender says that the Buggers are of one mind: their Queen does the thinking and all the rest of them are connected to her telepathically. In contrast, each human thinks independently. Perhaps Orson Scott Card is implying that the Buggers represent a life form with one personality, while Humans represent a life form with multiple personalities.

1. Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game. New York, Tor, 1985/1991.

“Ender’s Game” (post 2) by Orson Scott Card (post 3): Why does Author’s Introduction completely ignore that child-aged protagonist is victim of child abuse?

I am still reading the novel and have just reread the Author’s Introduction.

“Ender’s Game is a story about gifted children,” says the author in his Introduction. “Ender’s Game asserts the personhood of children…Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves” (1).

But that is a very distorted and misleading description of Ender’s Game. The novel informs the reader that its six-year-old protagonist (Andrew, nicknamed “Ender”) has been the victim of child abuse by Peter, his sadistic ten-year-old brother. Moreover, this issue is not just mentioned in passing and forgotten. Peter is a continuing character.

Thus, contrary to what the author—or, at least, his host personality—says in the Introduction, this is clearly not a novel about gifted children per se or in general, but about a gifted child who has been the victim of child abuse, perpetrated by his psychopathic older brother.

Who wrote this Author’s Introduction? He says something possibly revealing: “…never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like…the same person that I am today.”

That would seem to be a preposterous statement. A gifted child at age six might feel that he is smarter and more advanced than most adults think he is, but a six-year-old child, no matter how gifted, does not feel like the same person he will feel like many years later. Unless the personality writing the Author’s Introduction was a six-year-old child’s “Adult” alternate personality, who saw himself as an adult ever since his creation in the child’s imagination. And since this “Adult” personality has never identified with being an abused child, that issue is ignored in his Introduction.

Of course, I’m not in a position to know anything about the author’s life. I have no inside information. All I can say for certain is that, for some reason, there is a discrepancy between the Author’s Introduction and the novel.

Chapter One (continued)

In my previous post on the novel’s first chapter, I neglected to mention its very beginning:

“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one” (1, p. 1, first sentence). This is said by recruiters from Earth’s main military academy, who are scouting for future military leaders. They have implanted a device in Ender so they can see what he sees, hear what he hears, and monitor his life.

What kind of thing is this for a novelist to imagine? It is not like a psychotic delusion of having a computer chip implanted in your brain (to explain the irrational voices that you hear). Rather, it may be the perspective of an alternate personality, who, when not out and in control, is seeing and hearing everything that the host personality does, but from inside, behind-the-scenes.

1. Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game. New York, Tor, 1985/1991.

“Ender’s Game” (chapter one) by Orson Scott Card (post 2): Suggestible six-year-old boy with two names is threatened by bullies, brother, and “buggers”

In the context of the author’s history of using at least seven pseudonyms (see post 1), it is notable that the protagonist, a six-year-old boy, is referred to by more than one name, “Ender” and “Andrew.” I suppose “Ender” is a nickname for Andrew, but the third-person narrator does not immediately explain how and when each name should be used, and I wonder if the two names imply any differences in attitude and personality.

Andrew/Ender is said to be “too malleable,” except if “the other person is his enemy” (1, p. 1). To illustrate the latter, he viciously beats a bully (p. 7).

The two attitudes, malleable and vicious, are very different; indeed, so different as to suggest two distinct personalities. Perhaps Andrew/Ender got these two attitudes or personalities from his experience of being bullied by his older brother, Peter, who likes to play “buggers and astronauts” (p. 2) with him.

What are “buggers” (p. 1)? Apparently, they are some kind of real-life enemy threatening “the world” (p. 1). Judging from the name of the game “buggers and astronauts,” they are from outer space.

In addition, since the author has publicly stated his opposition to homosexuality (for religious reasons), it must be assumed that the slang meaning of “bugger,” sodomite, was intended. And since the older, bullying brother, Peter (slang for penis) has played “buggers and astronauts” games with Andrew/Ender, Peter may have sexually molested him. Indeed, the title itself, “Ender’s Game,” could refer to sodomy (sex in the rear end).

And since bullying and sexual abuse are things that might lead an intelligent and malleable child to develop multiple personality, “Ender’s Game” may turn out to be a multiple personality story (probably unacknowledged).

1. Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game. New York, Tor, 1985/1991.

Orson Scott Card: Writing a narrator is like switching to the “voice”—viewpoint, vocabulary, sentence structure—of an alternate personality.

“Who is telling your story?…It is never exactly your own voice…You have many voices…Each of your voices has its own vocabulary. They overlap, but less than you might suppose. Each has its own sentence structure…

“Does that sound like a split personality? Perhaps the function of our brain that lets us develop these different ‘voices’ is the very function that drives multiple personalities—it seems likely enough…

“…when I’m at the keyboard telling a story, it’s almost as if I’m acting. I’m ‘in character’…using words and syntax that one of the characters in my tale might use…I find myself writing ‘in character’ even when I’m using third person, even when the narrator isn’t a specific person at all…In reading other writers’ work, I find that, as often as not, they do the same thing…” (1, pp. 126-128).

As noted in Wikipedia, Orson Scott Card has published under at least seven pseudonyms: Frederick Bliss, P.Q. Gump, Byron Walley, Brian Green, Dinah Kirkham, Noam D. Pellume, and Scott Richards. Are these the names of seven alternate personalities?

(Search “pseudonyms” to find previous posts on this recurring topic.)

1. Orson Scott Card. Characters and Viewpoint. Cincinnati, Ohio, Writer’s Digest Books, 1988.

Forensic Graphology finds Authentic Differences in Handwriting among Alternate Personalities in Multiple Personality, possibly correlating with Creativity.

Here are links to three articles (1, 2, 3). One comments on the possible relationship with creativity (1). Two include samples of handwriting (2, 3).

1. Jane Redfield Yank. “Handwriting Variations in Individuals with MPD.” Dissociation, Vol IV, No. 1, March 1991, pp. 2-12. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/1730/Diss_4_1_2_OCR_rev.pdf?sequence=4

2. Eli Somer, Ron Yishai. "Handwriting Examination: Can it help in establishing authenticity in dissociative identity disorder?" Dissociation, Vol. X, No. 2, June 1997, pp. 114-119. http://www.somer.co.il/articles/1997Handwriting.DID.Disoc.pdf

3. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, et al. “Objective Documentation of Child Abuse and Dissociation in 12 Murderers With Dissociative Identity Disorder.” American Journal of Psychiatry 1997; 154:1703-1710. http://checkedinbatesmotel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Objective_Documentation_of_Child_Abuse_and_Dissociation_in_12_Murderers.pdf

Paul Theroux (post 3) quotes V. S. Naipaul (post 7): Good/Bad Memory, Writing as Therapy, Becoming Narrators, Handwriting, Feeling Like Fraud. 

Both Excellent and Poor Memory

“[Naipaul] told me later that he knew each of his books by heart…” (1, p. 18).

“…he complained that he was dull, he was slow, and that he often gave offense without meaning to” (1, p. 146).

Most people are relatively consistent in how good their memory is. In contrast, people with multiple personality may have both very excellent and very poor memory. This makes sense, since a person’s ability to keep track of their multiple personalities is, in itself, a demonstration of excellent memory, while the memory gaps that one personality may have of what other personalities have done is a kind of poor memory.

Naipaul’s knowing his books by heart is a demonstration of excellent memory. In contrast, he sometimes thinks that he must be slow and dull, and that he must be doing things without meaning to. His giving offense without meaning to may refer to one personality’s having been offensive, leaving another personality holding the bag, and sometimes, perhaps, not even remembering having given the offense that people are now talking about.

Writing as Therapy

Naipaul says, “If you didn’t write, you’d go out of your mind” (1, p. 33). “You’re a writer. That’s why you don’t go insane” (1, p. 89).

Therapy for multiple personality tries to facilitate cooperation among the personalities. One thing that helps personalities cooperate is giving them a chance to do what they like to do and express themselves. This may be accomplished in the creative process of being a writer.

 Quoting, Perhaps Becoming, his Narrator Personalities

“ ‘My narrator has something to say about this,’ Vidia would say in the middle of a conversation, and it was often as simple as a reference to the fluctuating price of land. He was close to all his characters — he quoted them, and he often quoted the narrator…” (1, p. 56). “Vidia talked in his pompous visiting-elder-statesman manner, which was also the tone of his narrator…” (1, p. 64).

Handwriting

“Vidia claimed that handwriting spoke volumes…He had taught me to read the moods in his handwriting, for which he always used a fountain pen and black ink. Large and loopy meant he was idle and calm, regular squiggles indicated concentration, small meant anxious, tiny meant fearful and overworked, and at its most minuscule he was at his wits’ end” (1, p. 144).

In most people, different handwritings represent the different moods or purposes of a single personality. In some people with multiple personality, different personalities have different handwritings. Since the difference between “large and loopy” and “minuscule” seems rather extreme, Naipaul may be demonstrating the handwritings of his different personalities.

Host Personality: Last to Know and Feels Like Fraud

“ ‘Don’t worry about your book,’ he said…‘You won’t know what it is about until you finish it’ ” (1, p. 182).

“The very sight of his books irritated him. He hated talking about them. He felt like a fraud” (1, p. 189).

1. Paul Theroux. Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Clues to multiple personality in “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”: V. S. Naipaul (post 6) is self-contradictory; Paul Theroux (post 2) sees his alternate personality in a mirror.

Theroux is a younger friend and protégé of Nobel novelist Naipaul, whose nickname is Vidia (1). Theroux’s memoir of their decades long friendship is not flattering to either of them.

Inadvertently, the memoir reports two clues to multiple personality: 1. self-contradiction or puzzling inconsistency (the subject of many past posts), and 2. seeing an alternate personality in the mirror, a textbook symptom of multiple personality (also discussed in many past posts: search “mirrors” and “mirror”).

Paul Theroux

“On the train to London, I tried to look out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours” (1, p. 216).

This reference to his “other self” is apropos of nothing in the text and is not elaborated or remarked upon. Evidently, to Theroux, having a second self is a routine feature of ordinary psychology. Although he apparently feels like it is a another person staring at him, he knows that it is only his reflection, since multiple personality is not a psychosis and he is perfectly in touch with objective reality.

V. S. Naipaul

“He was contradictory” (p. 71). “He tried to be high-minded, yet he was the first to confess his contradictions” (p. 151). “He was his usual paradoxical self” (p. 193). “I was aware of his contradictions” (p. 246). “Vidia’s contradictory crankishness" (p. 260). “contradictory genius” (p. 294). “I did not mind his contradictions” (p. 348).

For example, “Once he had written ‘I happen to like Spanish dancing,’ but later in an interview he said he deplored dancing…‘It is something out of the jungle. It’s undignified. I dislike all those lower-class cultural manifestations’ ” (p. 276).

1. Paul Theroux. Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Self-Contradiction: Clue to multiple personality in Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, and Daphne du Maurier.

The following six posts highlight self-contradiction as a clue to the presence of multiple personality.

Note: Since each of these authors has been the subject of multiple posts—not just the one below—search each author’s name to see their other posts for further evidence of their multiple personality.

Table of Contents

1. Lewis Carroll: The Mysterious, Self-Contradictory Inconsistency of Multiple Personality, including Carroll’s Child-Aged Alternate Personalities.

2. Evidence of Huck Finn’s multiple personality in his self-contradictory—not ambivalent or hypocritical—attitudes about freeing Jim.

3. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: He is invisible, because his true emotions and humanity, in the form of alternate personalities, are hidden.

4. Salman Rushdie’s “Joseph Anton: A Memoir”: Third-person narrative of his years in hiding from a death-threat for “The Satanic Verses.”

5. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”: This novel’s blatant self-contradictions reflect multiple narrative personalities that should have been reconciled in rewrite.

6. Daphne du Maurier: The National Book Award Winner’s Male and Female Alternate Personalities.

April 6, 2014

Lewis Carroll: The Mysterious, Self-Contradictory Inconsistency of Multiple Personality, including Carroll’s Child-Aged Alternate Personalities

One of the hallmarks of multiple personality is that—when a person has it, but you don’t know it—you can’t get a coherent picture of them, because, unknown to you, their various personalities differ from each other in such things as attitudes, values, age, or even gender.

A good biography of such a person is Jenny Woolf’s The Mystery of Lewis Carroll (New York, St. Martins Press, 2010). Woolf’s main conclusion is that she likes Carroll—as she has, since, as a child, she read about Alice’s adventures—but that he is a mystery, because he is “self-contradictory.”

One of the perennial controversies about Carroll is the nature of his relationship with the young girls to whom he liked to tell entertaining stories and of whom he liked to take pictures. The issue is traditionally framed as the peculiar, if not perverted, interest of an adult man in little girls.

But if Carroll had multiple personality, the personality who was interested in little girls may not have been either adult or male. Since, needless to say, I have not had the opportunity to interview Carroll when he was in that frame of mind, I can only go by circumstantial evidence. I quote from The Mystery of Lewis Carroll:

“His niece, Irene Dodgson Jacques, looking back to her childhood, remembered [Carroll] sitting beside her on the carpet happily playing with a marvelous bear that opened and closed its mouth as it spoke.”

“[Carroll] in his toy-strewn college rooms was perfectly recognizable as the youth who had loved creating puppet stories for his little brothers and sisters…”

“There have been many condescending remarks made about this characteristic of his, as though a love of childish things somehow prevented him from being a proper adult. Virginia Woolf thought that childhood had lodged within Carroll ‘whole and entire’…”

Not all the young children Carroll played with were girls. For example, there was “Bert Coote, whom he met when Coote was 10. ‘My sister and I were regular young imps,’ Coote recalled later, ‘and nothing delighted us more than to give imitations…but we never gave imitations of Lewis Carroll…he was one of us, and never a grown up pretending to be a child...’”

So, psychologically speaking, the situation may not have been an adult man interested in little girls. And the inconsistency between his adult and child-aged personalities would have made him seem self-contradictory. Other of his inconsistencies included his attitudes toward sex and religion. Sometimes he was the ultimate prude, but other times he wasn’t. Sometimes he was the unquestioning believer, but other times he was wasn’t. Different personalities differed.

Many people have their moral ambivalence or even hypocrisy, but Carroll was known for his unusually marked degree of sincere, but contradictory attitudes. Which is how people come across when they have multiple personality, but when you haven’t knowingly interviewed the various personalities, and you don’t know that this is what is going on.

May 6, 2015

Evidence of Huck Finn’s multiple personality in his self-contradictory—not ambivalent or hypocritical—attitudes about freeing Jim

Many readers have been disappointed with Huck, when, in the last part of the novel, he says he truly believes that he would go to hell for freeing Jim, and when he plays games with Tom while Jim remains literally in chains and fearful for his life. It appears that Huck is a racist at heart, either by ambivalence or hypocrisy.

But there is a third possibility.

If Huck were ambivalent about freeing Jim, he would honestly like to free Jim, but he would not want to become estranged from all his friends and family who believe in slavery, and he would not want to get lynched. People are ambivalent when they are pulled in different directions by conflicting interests.

If Huck were a hypocrite, he would say he wants to free Jim, but he would know that he really didn’t want to, in his heart.

But Huck is neither ambivalent nor hypocritical. He wants to free Jim and he doesn’t want to free Jim. He wants both, honestly, in his heart. How can such self-contradiction be possible?

True self-contradiction is possible only in multiple personality, when one personality honestly thinks one way and another personality honestly thinks another way, and the two ways are incompatible and contradictory.

August 11, 2016

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: He is invisible, because his true emotions and humanity, in the form of alternate personalities, are hidden.

A man is “invisible” when he has repressed, and buried inside him, his true self, his humanity, so that it is invisible from the outside.

“Behold! a walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative…The mechanical man! (1, p. 72).

But what if that repressed, true self were released, discovered, and became visible, so to speak? What form would it have?

Would it seem like an alien, alternate personality that had been lodged deep inside him? Would he hear its voice? Might he hear more than one voice: the voices of several, contradictory, alternate personalities, each singing its own tune inside his head?

“…I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me…” (1, p. 189).

“…but now a new, painful, contradictory voice had grown up within me…If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison…” (1, p. 197).

Clinically, the counterpart to what Ellison calls “invisible” is what some clinicians refer to as “depleted.” For example, a patient who is noted to have an absence of strong emotions is later found to have alternate personalities—an angry personality, etc.— who have these strong emotions, leaving the host personality emotionally depleted.

1. Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man [1952]. New York, Random House, 1982.

February 16, 2015

Salman Rushdie’s “Joseph Anton: A Memoir”: Third-person narrative of his years in hiding from a death-threat for “The Satanic Verses”

Rushdie’s pseudonym in hiding was “Joseph Anton”: “Joseph” taken from Joseph Conrad, author of the “The Secret Sharer” (see past post).

I don’t know whether Rushdie’s use, in a memoir, of a third-person narrator reflects the author’s multiple personality or is a purely technical choice. It never felt natural to me.

Nor am I sure who vandalized his college room—probably a racist and not an alternate personality:

“…a few nights before his [Rushdie’s own] graduation, some anonymous wit…chose to redecorate his…college room, in his absence, by hurling a bucketful of gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of his record player and clothes. With that ancient tradition of fairness and justice upon which the colleges of Cambridge prided themselves, King’s instantly held him solely responsible for the mess…” (1, pp. 45-46).

“He was a migrant…The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogeneous…multiple rather than singular…” (1, pp. 53-54).

He calls the following alternate perspective his “unconscious,” but it sounds like a second self who has artistic differences: “His conscious mind was, as usual, at odds with his unconscious which kept throwing angels and miracles at his rationality and insisting that he find ways to incorporate them into his way of seeing” (1, p. 73).

Near the end of his memoir, he says: “In the pages of a novel it was clear that the human self was heterogeneous not homogeneous, not one thing but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory…” (1, p. 627).

He goes on to illustrate his comment with things that could represent ordinary roles in life, and not alternate personalities. But a person who has various ordinary roles in life—like most people—usually experiences himself as multifaceted, and the roles as complementary.

However, if a person feels himself to be “not one thing, but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory,” it sounds less like ordinary roles and more like multiple personality. 

1. Salman Rushdie. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York, Random House, 2012/2013.

August 6, 2015

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”: This novel’s blatant self-contradictions reflect multiple narrative personalities that should have been reconciled in rewrite

Now that I’ve read Lolita, I’m no longer interested in whether Clare Quilty is a “double” of Humbert Humbert (HH). No, the main feature of this novel—especially in regard to multiple personality—is self-contradiction.

At the beginning of Lolita, HH spells out his fixation on “nymphets,” who are pubescent girls aged nine to fourteen. But at the end, HH wants to live forever-after with Lolita even though she is no longer a nymphet: She is years too old, not to mention married and pregnant by someone else.

The way that Nabokov glosses over this contradiction is that he calls HH “a maniac,” which is not a valid diagnosis, and is just a poor excuse to account for anything, no matter how inconsistent. (The reason that there is such a thing as psychiatric diagnosis is that symptoms tend to be consistent.)

Either the author had more than one narrative personality, whose differences were not reconciled in rewrite, or the author failed to “prune” (as Stephen King would say) what the characters told him and failed to “control” his characters (as Toni Morrison would say) (as quoted in past posts).

It is like the person who wrote the end of this novel was not the same person who wrote the beginning, and hadn’t even read the beginning.

September 15, 2014

Daphne du Maurier: The National Book Award Winner’s Male and Female Alternate Personalities

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), Lady Browning, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was a novelist, wife, and mother. Her novel, Rebecca, won the National Book Award for 1938. Alfred Hitchcock’s first American movie, “Rebecca,” based on the book, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. Indeed, a number of her stories and novels were made into movies. In short, she was a very successful, well-functioning person.

At the same time, beginning in childhood, she had at least two personalities, one male and one female. She referred to the male personality by different names at different times in her life: “alter ego Eric Avon,” “boy-in-the-box,” narrator, or “personality No. 2.”

“There were no psychological depths to Eric Avon. He just shone at everything…There was a cricket match, and prize-giving, with Eric Avon receiving four prizes, but for what subjects my diary does not state…But it was a sad moment for the captain of cricket. I realized that Eric must now be nearly eighteen, and that this would be his final day at school…I often wonder how he got on at Cambridge, and what became of him. How did he fare in later life?…Yet why did I pick on Eric Avon as an alter ego and not an imaginary Peggy Avon…?…Whatever the reason, he remained in my unconscious, to emerge in later years—though in quite a different guise—as the narrator of the five novels I was to write, at long intervals, in the first person singular, masculine gender, I’ll Never Be Young Again, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, The Flight of the Falcon, The House on the Strand. None of these characters resembled the popular schoolboy hero, Eric Avon; instead, their personalities can be said to be undeveloped, inadequate, sharing a characteristic that had never been Eric’s, who had dominated…For each of my five narrators depended, for reassurance, on a male friend older than himself…The female narrators—and these have been three in number—depended upon no one but themselves…The only timid one of the trio was the nameless heroine in Rebecca, and she found strength of purpose when she discovered that her husband Maxim truly loved her, and had never cared for this first wife Rebecca” (1, pp. 55-58).

“Her alter ego, ‘Eric Avon’, in whom she believed implicitly, went to Rugby and was bold and fearless and did all the things she would have done if she had been a boy…It was all rather charming and nobody was disturbed, nobody realized quite how much Daphne genuinely hated being a girl. What her family also did not realize, and this was much more serious, was that Daphne actually convinced herself she was a boy” (2, p. 14).

“The boy could sometimes be shut up in the box inside her, it seemed, without causing any strain” (2, p. 39).

“What puzzled [Clara, Daphne’s friend] were the two sides to [Daphne]: on the one hand the genuine love, after all, of the simple life, but on the other the contradiction, to Clara, of a rucksack full of ‘cosmetics, vanishing creams…lotions…and also scents’. Daphne’s clothes fascinated her too: ‘a white jockey cap, socks, mountaineer’s boots with yellow laces, linen blouse and a zip linen skirt on top of white cotton shorts, then in villages she zipped it back up—‘she was feminine…[then] on the yonder side up rolled the skirt and she strode forward like a boy’” (2, pp. 263-264).

“[Daphne] wrote…she had always been able to feel within herself two quite separate personalities—‘When I get madly boyish No. 2 is in charge, and then, after a bit, the situation is reversed.’ The point was that…one had to make friends with No. 2 and say ‘now don’t get carried away…No. 2 can come to the surface and be helpful’. She explained that when she was writing she felt all No. 2—‘he certainly has a lot to do with my writing’—but when she was not, No. 2 caused trouble…But sometimes her No.2 came into its own and she felt ‘a power thing’…Daphne was trying hard to explain the tremendous contradictions she knew existed in her own personality…the problem of aligning her No. 1 and No. 2 has something to do with her writing self being different from her real-life self…’The people I write about in books are more real to me than the people I meet’…in order to function at all she had to suppress her No. 2” (2, pp. 276-279).

“She could tolerate only a few months without writing before being plagued by her discontented No. 2 which had no other outlet” (2, p. 287).

1. Daphne du Maurier. Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer. Garden City NY, Doubleday & Company, 1977.

2. Margaret Forster. Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. New York, Doubleday, 1993.

Comment

A person without multiple personality might say he loves chocolate on one day, and the next day say he does not want any, but he will have a reason for not wanting it, such as being on a diet. However, only a person with multiple personality will say he loves chocolate, but then later say that he has never liked chocolate. True self-contradiction is a clue to the presence of multiple personality.

Another way of saying self-contradiction is “puzzling inconsistency.” Ordinary inconsistency or ambivalence can be explained in ordinary ways if you know enough about the person. But if you know a person very well and their inconsistent behavior still does not make sense, it may be due to alternate personalities, as in the case of Daphne du Maurier, who was unusual in publicly acknowledging it.

“The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul” by Patrick French disparages Naipaul (post 5) on its front and back covers.

The photograph on the front cover appears to show Naipaul in the process of tying the lace of his right shoe, while he stands on his left leg. At first, I thought the photograph was complimentary, a small demonstration of athletic prowess. But then I noticed that the sole of Naipaul’s right shoe has something sticking to it or perhaps even a hole. And the photograph is credited to Lord Snowden, whose only mention in the biography is as follows:

“ ‘What is more,’ V. S. [Naipaul] shouted, his slim frame trembling with irritation, ‘I do not like the photographs taken by that jumped-up little photographer of the Sixties.’ He was referring, of course, to Lord Snowden” (1, p. 392).

The back cover has eight blurbs, including this one by Paul Theroux:

“[An] astonishing biography…It seems I didn’t know half of all the horrors.”

Ten years earlier, Theroux had written a memoir (2) of his soured friendship with Naipaul. It had been reviewed as unfairly negative. And the new biography does say that Theroux’s memoir contains factual errors. But the inclusion of Theroux’s comment on the back cover of the authorized biography seems like Theroux’s ultimate vindication and Naipaul’s ultimate comeuppance.

I will see if Theroux’s memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, has anything of interest here.

1. Patrick French. The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

2. Paul Theroux. Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.