“Voices” in Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (post 3): Anna’s “inner voice” comes out and speaks of love; a “voice” takes one side of her husband’s inner debate.

In post 2, I quoted a literary scholar, making the conventional interpretation of Anna’s “doubling,” that it is a metaphor for her moral and emotional conflicts. But that interpretation does not explain how “her inner voice” can participate in a conversation with Count Vronsky, saying the word “Love” (as quoted below). Only an “inner voice” that is an alternate personality can take part in a conversation with someone else.

“Anna Arkadyevna [Karenina]…listened with delight to what Vronsky was saying…

“…he said, ‘but you know it’s not friendship I need, for me there is only one possible happiness in life, this word you dislike so…yes, love…..

“ ‘Love…’ she repeated slowly with her inner voice, and suddenly…added: ‘That’s why I don’t like this word, because it means too much for me, far more than you can understand…’ ”

Soon after the above, when her husband is debating with himself what his wife is up to, his own “voice” takes one side in the debate:

“…Alexei Alexandrovich [Karenin] found nothing peculiar or improper in the fact that his wife [Anna Karenina] was sitting at a separate table with Vronsky and having an animated conversation about something; but he noticed that to the others in the drawing room it seemed something peculiar and improper, and therefore he, too, found it improper. He decided that he ought to say so to his wife…

“ ‘But, finally,’ he asked himself…, ‘what has happened? Nothing. She talked with him for a long time. What of it? A woman can talk with all sorts of men in society…but…some voice said to him that this was not so, that if others had noticed it, it meant there was something…” (1, pp. 141-143).

The author appears to think, probably on the basis of his own psychology, that voices are a routine aspect of everyone's psychology. The fact is, most people do not have voices. But people with multiple personality do sometimes hear the rational voices of their alternate personalities. And these alternate personalities sometimes do come out and participate in conversations, typically incognito.

1. Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York, Penguin Books, 2000/2002.

Novelists are to Multiple Personality Disorder as Prodigies are to Autism: The idea that an illness may be the worst case scenario of talent or genius.

This blog is about novelists and multiple personality.

The following article is about prodigies and autism:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/opinion/sunday/what-prodigies-could-teach-us-about-autism.html?_r=0

Nonfiction Multiple Personality: Washington Post news story about “The Blind Woman Who Switched Personalities and Could Suddenly See”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/24/the-blind-woman-who-switched-personalities-and-could-suddenly-see/

In The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Ruhl, playwright, assumes that most people “live inside” the books they read, as she does, but most do not.

One reason fiction writers can write things most people cannot is that fiction writers have a different kind of subjective experience.

For example, although most people can suspend disbelief and get emotionally involved with a fictional story, they would not describe it as virtual reality, as “living inside” a book, as Ruhl does:

“I don’t want to meet most of my favorite writers. I want to give them their privacy in the afterlife. It is enough for me to live inside their books.” —quoted in New York Times Book Review interview of February 28, 2016

Nor do most people have such lifelike personalities inside them as the following quote suggests:

“I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,” she has said. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him.” — Wikipedia, quoted from The New Yorker

When most people read such quotes, they assume that fiction writers are speaking metaphorically. And, of course, strictly speaking, they are. They do not actually live inside books or have an opera inside them. But these metaphors are based on a vivid, inhabited, inner world that seven out of ten people probably do not have.

Anna’s “Doubling” in Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (post 2): Is it “moral quandary,” the literary “double,” evil “spirit” possession, or multiple personality?

“The reality of the doubling is first suggested by Vronsky’s sense that as soon as Anna begins to speak about her unresolved situation with Karenin, it as if ‘she, the real Anna, withdrew somewhere into herself and another woman stepped forward, strange and alien to him, whom he did not love but feared, and who rebuffed him’…

“…the reality of Anna’s doubling—in the sense that it defines her in her world—is confirmed by how it progresses in her mind. She goes from the repeated feeling of psychological doubling during moments of heightened stress to the sense during her illness that she has actually split in two; she tells Karenin, ‘I’m the same…But there is another woman in me, I’m afraid of her…The one who is not me…’ Because this reads as an aggravation of the condition that beset Anna before her illness, it would be implausible to discount it as merely febrile raving”…

“If this is a psychological state…it appears to be a reification of her moral quandary…The context makes it clear that she is tormented by the competing demands of passion and morality, and the image of doubling in her soul implies the irreconcilability of these demands”…

“…a repeated motif in Anna Karenina about an evil ‘spirit’ that seems to take possession of Anna lends itself to a ‘Gothic’ interpretation that is in keeping with, if not identical to, aspects of the long and influential tradition of doubles in literature” (1, pp. 198-199).

Has anyone interpreted Anna’s doubling as multiple personality?

1. Vladimir E. Alexandrov. Limits to Interpretation: The Meanings of Anna Karenina. Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

The Bestselling D. D. Warren thriller “Catch Me” by Lisa Gardner: Three characters have multiple personality, but D. D. is not particularly interested.

Charlene is a young woman who, as a child, had suffered horrendous physical and emotional abuse by her mother. Since then, she has had the memory gaps—search “memory gap” and “memory gaps”—typical of multiple personality: She says, “Time escapes me, days, weeks. Entire conversations with my best friends…” (pp. 100-101).

Christine, Charlene’s mother, now deceased, but often referred to in flashbacks and retrospect, is described as “powered by madness” (p. 7), “crazy” (p. 101), “Munchausen’s by proxy” (p. 171), “psychopath” (p. 270), and having “psychosis” (p. 349). “She’d been insane in the truest sense of the word. Unpredictable, unstable, unreliable. Driven by wild ambitions and deeper, darker bouts of despair. She loved, she hated” (p. 354). The Munchausen’s diagnosis is not a psychosis and is applied incorrectly to the behavior described. Psychopath is different from both psychosis and Munchausen’s. In short, there is no consistent, serious attempt to understand the nature of the mother’s disturbed behavior.

Detective O, who has joined D. D.’s detective squad in this novel, is eventually discovered to be Charlene’s long lost younger sister, Abigail, and  also a serial murderer. (Charlene had been the primary suspect.)

Detective O is the one who suggests that Charlene has “multiple personalities.” And as noted above, Charlene does have multiple personality. But that is mostly forgotten about when it is discovered that she is not the serial killer.

The real serial killer has left written notes with the victims that have two messages, one in regular ink and the other in disappearing ink. The two messages are contradictory and written in different handwritings, which suggests that the murderer has multiple personality.

In short, both sisters, Charlene and Detective O/Abigail, are found to have multiple personality. But this is mostly forgotten about once the murders are solved.

Moreover, there are indications that the mother had multiple personality, too. In the novel’s Prologue, six-year-old Abigail is described as trying to cope with one of her mother’s episodes of violent, delusional behavior. Abigail's pleas with “mommy” to stop are to no avail, so she changes the way she addresses her mother as follows:

“Christine!” [said the little girl] changing tactics…”Christine! Stop it! This is no time to play with matches!”…Her mother blinked…She stared at her daughter, right arm falling lax to her side…Her mother stared at her. Seemed confused, which was better than crazy” (pp. 5-6).

What appears to be happening is that the mother’s craziness is the behavior of an alternate personality who had some name other than Christine. Since, in multiple personality, the most effective way to prompt a switch in personalities is to address the person by the name of a different personality, when the girl addresses her mother as “Christine,” that causes a switch to the mother’s regular personality, Christine, who was confused to find herself in a situation that she didn’t remember getting into. Unfortunately, this tactic worked only temporarily, and the mother switched back to the disturbed personality.

In short, there is good reason to believe that three characters in this novel have multiple personality: both sisters and their mother. This is two more than is necessary for a multiple personality plot gimmick. So even if D. D. Warren is not that interested in multiple personality, Lisa Gardner may be.

Lisa Gardner. Catch Me. New York, Dutton/Penguin, 2012.

Leo Tolstoy, writing Anna Karenina, experienced his characters as autonomous, alternate personalities, who were not under his control.

In what “has often been cited by scholars as Tolstoy’s aesthetic credo…He gave an example: the scene of Vronsky’s suicide…When Tolstoy was revising this chapter, Vronsky, ‘completely unexpectedly’ for him, the author, ‘but quite decidedly, proceeded to shoot himself ’…Tolstoy then leveled his anger at literary critics: ‘And if critics now already understand what I want to say…then I congratulate them and can confidently assure them that they know more than I do.’

“Twentieth-century literary critics tend to read this much-quoted formula as a claim of art’s superiority over other forms of expression, affirming art’s ability—and Tolstoy’s—to produce inexhaustible meaning, perhaps to express the inexpressible. But at precisely the time Tolstoy coined this formula, he was considering retreating from literature and abandoning Anna Karenina. In this context, we may read Tolstoy’s words somewhat differently: as an admission of art’s inherent inability to deliver a clear message and a complaint about the author’s lack of control over his text” (1, pp. 44-45).

1. Irina Paperno. “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy’s Struggles to Narrate the Self. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2014.

Ghost Stories: another of the literary metaphors for multiple personality; for example, “Hamlet,” in which The Ghost is the second most important character.

The three literary metaphors for multiple personality mentioned in yesterday’s post—doubles, doppelgängers, and twins—are not the only ones. Others include the alter ego, second self, voice, shadow, and ghost.

When a story about multiple personality is not recognized as being about multiple personality, it is sometimes called a ghost story. For example, I found Henry James’s “The Private Life” in a book titled “Ghost Stories” (1).

The world’s most famous ghost story, William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” is not usually referred to as a ghost story, but its second most important character is The Ghost, without whom there would be no story.

Search “ghost story” and “Hamlet” in this blog. I have six posts on Hamlet.

1. Henry James. Ghost Stories. Introduction and Notes by Martin Scofield. Wordsworth Editions, 2008.

Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” (post 4): Why are identical twins, a literary metaphor for multiple personality, in this novel?

Its table of contents divides this novel into four quarters, named after the main characters: 1. Archie, 2. Samad, 3. Irie, and 4. Magid, Millat, and Marcus. Magid and Millat, sons of Samad, have deep roots in the novel, but Marcus is more incidental. So the author’s table of contents points to Magid and Millat as the characters who are most symbolic of what the author meant to convey, ultimately.

Since Magid and Millat have major differences between them in their attitudes, and since they are raised apart for a part of their childhoods—one in England and the other in their family’s homeland, Bangladesh—you might think that they symbolize something about culture. But they are described as already different from each other before their separation, and the attitudes they develop do not neatly correlate with whether they lived in England or Bangladesh. So they do not appear to symbolize national, cultural differences. What, then, do these characters symbolize?

The most salient fact about Magid and Millat is that they are identical twins. Since no good use is made of this fact to make any point culturally, the question is: What are identical twins doing in this novel?

Recall my first post about this novel. In the novel’s first section, featuring the character, Archie, it was mentioned in passing that his first wife had symptoms of what I pointed out was multiple personality. So another question is: What was that doing in this novel?

As it happens, the literary metaphors for multiple personality are doubles, doppelgängers, and twins. For example, in Dostoevsky’s The Double, the protagonist’s double thinks and acts quite differently from the protagonist, but looks exactly like him; that is, they look like identical twins. And that is exactly what is seen in multiple personality: The alternate personalities think and act quite differently from each other, but they look identical, of course, because they share the same body.

Mark Twain is the writer I discuss in this blog who is best known for his frequent use of twins. Search “Twain twins.”

Getting back to Zadie Smith, it would appear from the author interview quoted in post 2 that she had no knowledge of her novel’s having anything to do with multiple personality. But she (her host personality?) also said that it felt to her like somebody else wrote it.

Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” (post 3): When you interview any novelist, is it only their host personality, like the writer in Henry James’s “The Private Life”?

In the author interview quoted in post 2, Zadie Smith said that she had thrown up her hands toward the end of her novel: she couldn’t understand what it all added up to. So is it silly for any reader or critic to pretend to find this novel’s (or any novel’s) true meaning, the author’s true intent, when the author, herself (if she is as honest as Zadie Smith) does not seem to know?

Another possibility is that most author interviews are misleading. For if what I say is true—that most novelists have multiple personality—then you are usually interviewing only the personality who does interviews, the host personality, and not the personality who is responsible for most of the writing.

That is the theme of Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life,” which I have previously discussed. In that story, James divides a writer into literally two persons, one who speaks to people in public and the other who does the actual writing in private.

James’s “The Private Life” is one reason that I call the multiple personality of fiction writers an open secret.

Fiction writers say they hear voices, but literature professors, literary critics, and novelists themselves do not understand it, and the public thinks they are joking.

Please search “hearing voices” to read my posts about fiction writers’ hearing the nonpsychotic voices of their narrator, character, and muse personalities.

If you dispute that fiction writers actually hear voices as a normal part of their creative process, or if you have a better explanation than that they have a normal version of multiple personality, please submit your comment.

Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” (post 2): Author on her traumatized characters, confusion about women, and feeling that “somebody else wrote” this novel.

From a 2002 interview (1):

“Zadie Smith is living the fairy-tale story dreamed of by young (and aged) writers everywhere.  Her first novel, White Teeth, received a rumored 250,000 pound advance based on only two chapters and a plot-synopsis; the completed novel (of epic proportions) was written while completing a BA at Cambridge University; her literary debut has been hailed a formidable achievement by none other than Salman Rushdie, with whom she recently completed a New York book tour; rave reviews have appeared in the British and the North American Press alike; and all of this has been achieved by the ripe old age of 24…

ZS: …If you take the whole of human history as a body or as a person then there are events within that which are like trauma, like childhood trauma…And likewise the characters in the book are [traumatized]…

Multiple personality originates as a way to cope with childhood trauma.

ZS: …I don’t write women very well and I don’t really enjoy writing about them particularly. At the moment, maybe that will change at some point. I find them quite confusing as a group of people. I think a lot of the women in White Teeth are failures more or less in terms of rounded portrayals of people and that is kind of a shame…

Why would a woman not enjoy writing about women, and find them confusing? Is Zadie (the author changed her name from Sadie) a transgender personality?

ZS: …all the difficulties with the end of the book, about the end being too fast, and all the rest of it, are just me not being able to — not having the kind of hardware in my brain — to deal with the software — I couldn’t resolve a lot of the issues that the book brought up. In the end I kind of threw up my hands and so do all of the characters really…

She speaks like some kind of bystander in the writing of this novel; as if “the book” wrote itself and “the characters” had minds of their own; as if the book were software (written by whom?) (an alternate personality) that was downloaded into her brain (her regular personality), but which had been too much for it. The interview concludes:

Interviewer: Anything else you’d like to add about White Teeth?

ZS: …The book to me is not a dead thing, but it doesn’t feel like mine. When people ask me about it I feel like “Oooh, What should I say”. I can’t think what to say about it. It feels like somebody else wrote it. And that’s the honest to god truth, it’s not a kind of pose. When I’m reading it aloud sometimes I’m kind of impressed — this is good stuff — but I can’t remember much about the writing of it or how it came about…”

The personality being interviewed does not identify with, and has amnesia for, the work of the alternate personality who did most of the writing. "And," psychologically speaking, "that's the honest to god truth."

1. Kathleen O’Grady. “White Teeth: A Conversation with Author Zadie Smith,” in Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal, Vol. 27.1 (Fall 2002): 105-111. http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/ogrady/zsmith2004.htm

“White Teeth” by Zadie Smith: Multicultural comedy begins with joke about a character’s literary madness, which confuses multiple personality with schizophrenia.

Samad says that Archie married the wrong woman. “He referred to Ophelia’s madness, which led her to believe, half of the time, that she was the maid of the celebrated fifteenth-century art lover Cosimo de’ Medici” (p. 11).

This kind of “madness” is what I call (see recent posts) “literary madness”: Literary scholars and novelists tend to confuse multiple personality with schizophrenia.

People with schizophrenia never switch to an alternate personality. People with multiple personality do.

I think that what a novelist would find “mad” in Ophelia’s behavior is that she makes a public spectacle of her personality switches. There is nothing wrong with sometimes thinking that you are someone else—novelists do so when they write—but you should do it in private.

If your alternate personality wants to participate in everyday life, they must do so incognito.

And if one of your alternate personalities is a maid from the fifteenth century, you should consider writing a historical novel.

Zadie Smith. White Teeth. New York, Random House, 2000.

Moods, Roles, Multiculturalism, Multilingualism, Multiple Personality Disorder, Normal Multiple Personality, and the Magical Multiplicity of Art.

Moods: Different facets of your one and only personality are brought out by different moods.

Roles: Different facets of your one and only personality are brought out by different situations and people.

Multiculturalism: Your parents or other important people in your life are from different cultures, and/or you have lived in more than one place or culture. Different facets of your one and only personality are brought out by whichever culture is being emphasized.

Multilingualism: There is a saying attributed to Charlemagne: “To have a second language is to possess a second soul.” That is an exaggeration. Most multilingual people have only one personality. Different facets of that single personality are brought out by whichever language they are using.

In moods, roles, multiculturalism, and multilingualism, per se, you feel like one person (however variable and multifaceted that one person may be). You experience only one “I.” You have only one memory bank: When speaking one language, you remember everything you said, did, and thought when you were speaking your other language.

Multiple Personality

You can have moods, roles, multiculturalism, and multilingualism without having multiple personality, but multiple personality can include the others: Various alternate personalities may have their characteristic moods, roles, cultural interests, and even languages.

In multiple personality, you have the subjective experience of having more than one “I,” of having more than one thinker with a mind of its own. This is psychological (you are not possessed).

Some personalities are well aware of each other. But in clear-cut multiple personality, there is at least one personality—classically, the regular or “host” personality—who is not aware of an alternate personality. The host may be only vaguely aware of having had occasional memory gaps (for the periods of time that the alternate personality was in control).

Most people with multiple personality are not diagnosed, because the host personality often does not know about it, while the alternate personalities go about their business incognito. Once recognized or diagnosed—once their cover is blown, so to speak—the alternate personalities may be quite obvious and talkative, but they would have preferred to remain secret. And so, if you then ignore them, they are only too happy to resume their activities in secret and incognito.

Most multiple personality in novelists is not diagnosed for two reasons: 1. the known alternate personalities are not called alternate personalities, but instead are called narrative voices, muses, shadows, characters, etc.. and 2. the regular or host personality may have amnesia for other narrative personalities, evidence for which may be found in some novelists’ unedited journals.

Multiple personality can be either normal multiple personality or multiple personality disorder. The former is not a mental illness, and can even be an asset; for example, in writing novels. Multiple personality disorder is a mental illness in that it causes the person distress and/or dysfunction, but it is not a psychosis, has nothing to do with schizophrenia, and is treatable by psychotherapy to help the personalities integrate or cooperate with each other.

Novelists, who have normal multiple personality, have good cooperation among their alternate personalities. The writing, in giving the alternate personalities a forum to express themselves, and in fostering cooperation, is therapeutic. But exactly how all this works is unknown, even to the writer. It is the magical multiplicity of art.

“The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor”: In this news article, neither the criminal nor the police nor the journalists raise the possibility of multiple personality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/nyregion/jeremy-wilson-a-compulsive-con-man.html?_r=0

This is real life. It is not a novel. It is a long, detailed news story in today’s New York Times.

Literary critics are not the only ones with a blind spot for multiple personality.

Must literary critics know any psychiatry? Are critics incompetent if they fail to note the unacknowledged multiple personality that is present in many novels?

Acknowledged Multiple Personality

When Alfred Hitchcock directed “Psycho” and Charles Dickens wrote “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” they assumed that everyone watching the film or reading the book would know some psychiatry: When the character’s multiple personality was finally revealed, everyone would recognize it. And any critic who didn’t recognize it would be incompetent.

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality

Novels discussed in this blog illustrate that unacknowledged multiple personality is relatively common, much more common than acknowledged multiple personality. In these works, the author hadn't intended to raise the issue of multiple personality, and it is there only because it reflects the author’s own mind and own concept of ordinary psychology.

The Critic’s Responsibility

One of the traditional responsibilities of literary criticism is to explain why a novel has the impact that it does. Unacknowledged multiple personality gives characters and plots an aura of hidden meanings and psychological depth. It is one of the things that makes a novel “serious” and “literary.” Critics should know about this.

An Open Secret—Normal Novelists have-use-enjoy Multiple Personality—and J. B. S. Haldane’s Four Stages in the Acceptance of New Ideas

The Open Secret

My new/old idea—that most fiction writers have a normal version of multiple personality—is more or less common knowledge among novelists. They may not think of it as multiple personality, per se, but, to paraphrase Margaret Atwood: Most novelists have a sense of having one or more personalities in charge of everyday life, and of having one or more other personalities (aka narrative voices, muses, shadows, characters, etc.) involved in the writing.

What do most people think of this idea? How might their attitudes evolve? They will probably go through four stages. I assume that most are still in the first.

Four Stages of New Ideas

by J. B. S. Haldane (1963) 

1. this is worthless nonsense;

2. this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;

3. this is true, but quite unimportant;

4. I always said so.

“Madness” in “The Bluest Eye” (post 2) by Toni Morrison (post 11) confuses multiple personality with schizophrenia, a common mistake in literature.

The last page of this novel says that Pecola had “stepped over into madness” (p. 206). But on pages 193 through 204, she has just had a long, coherent conversation with an imaginary companion, something which does not happen in schizophrenia or any other psychosis, but only in multiple personality (including when a novelist converses with her characters, an example of normal multiple personality).

Another example of literary “madness” is when Pecola looks in a mirror and hallucinates that her eyes are blue. How did that hallucination come about? She had gone to a faith healer, asked him to make her eyes blue, and was granted her wish by the power of suggestion: Highly suggestible people can get hallucinations like that through the power of suggestion, but truly psychotic people are usually not that suggestible.

Some people with multiple personality are highly suggestible, which is why hypnosis is sometimes used in their treatment. But hypnosis is not used in the treatment of schizophrenia; indeed, if anyone diagnosed with schizophrenia were found to be highly suggestible, it would probably mean that they had been misdiagnosed.

Also see my previous post on “literary madness, a misnomer.”

Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye [1970]. With an Afterword by the author [1993]. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

“The Bluest Eye” (post 1) by Toni Morrison (post 10): Pecola demonstrates the self-hypnotic process by which traumatized children create alternate personalities.

I have just started Toni Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye.”

Pecola, once again, is witnessing a very frightening, violent fight between her parents.

“She struggled between an overwhelming desire that one would kill the other, and a profound wish that she herself would die…” (1, p. 43).

“Please, God,” she whispered into the palm of her hand. “Please make me disappear.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away…Her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes, that was good. The legs all at once…Her stomach…Then her chest, her neck. The face…only her eyes were left…” (1, p. 45).

I don’t know what will happen in the rest of the novel, but the above seems to be a description of the way that a traumatized child would develop multiple personality.

Once the regular self completely “disappears,” an alternate personality, who can better cope with the situation, can take over. From then on, whenever Pecola gets frightened, she could instantaneously switch to the alternate personality. When the frightening situation ends, she would switch back.

Since the regular personality would have “disappeared” for the period of time that the alternate personality was out, the regular personality might have a memory gap for that period of time.

But I have just started reading, and I don’t know if any kind of multiple personality scenario will play out in the rest of the novel.

1. Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye [1970]. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.