“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.