BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, May 28, 2016

Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”: Does Chapter XI, “Ivan is Split in Two,” indicate multiple personality is key to understanding classic novel?

This post is prompted by “Moscow’s Magic Realism” by Boris Fishman in tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review. His essay is from the foreword to a new edition of the novel. He loves the book, and the appearance of his essay and the new edition remind me that the novel is a classic.

The chapters have titles, and I have peeked at chapter XI. The title says that Ivan, a poet, is split into two personalities, but the text indicates four: old Ivan, new Ivan, a bass voice (“which did not come from either of the Ivans”), and “a mysterious figure” on the balcony.

I may not get to it for a few weeks, but how can I not read a classic novel in which the novelist portrays a writer as having multiple personality?
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