“The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey (post 2): Thoughts vs. Voices, Simple vs. Complex Dissociation (Memory Gaps), and Multiple Personality.

This novel has one instance of the protagonist’s hearing from his other self. Inspector Grant gets a tip from “a voice in his mind” who says, “But Thomas More was Henry the Eighth” (1, p. 80), meaning that Thomas More belonged to the reign of Henry the Eighth, not the reign Richard the Third.

People without multiple personality have the experience that a thought occurs to them, not that a voice speaks to them. Hearing a voice implies a second thinker. Since the person’s mind is split into two thinkers, hearing a voice is a dissociative (split mind) experience.

Another example of dissociation in this novel is described as a common experience of actors (Tey wrote plays under a different pseudonym) when their plays have a long run:

     “I haven’t come to stay, my dear, I’m on my way to the theatre. It’s matinée day, God help me. Tea trays and morons. And we’ve gotten to the frightful stage when the lines have ceased to have any meaning at all for us. I don’t think this play is ever coming off. It’s going to be like those New York ones that run by the decade instead of by the year. It’s too frightening. One’s mind just won’t stay on the thing. Geoffrey dried up in the middle of the second act last night. His eyes nearly popped out of his head. I thought for a moment he was having a stroke. He said afterwards that he had no recollection of anything that happened between his entrance and the point where he came to and found himself half-way through the act.”

     “A black-out, you mean?”

     “No. Oh, no. Just being an automaton. Saying the lines and doing the business and thinking of something else all the time.”

     “If all reports are true that’s no unusual matter where actors are concerned” (1, p. 23).

The actress telling this anecdote interprets her fellow actor’s experience as an example of behavior that is so well learned that it can can be carried out automatically, without being conscious of it, while the person thinks of something else.

A similar experience might be carrying on a conversation while walking or driving: you are so engrossed in the conversation, and walking or driving is so well-learned and automatic, that you haven’t noticed how far you have walked or driven.

Does it matter how complex the “unconscious” (dissociated) behavior is? If you are a very experienced novelist, could you carry on a conversation while you are writing your latest novel, and, after carrying on the conversation for an hour, find, to your surprise, that you have written another chapter of your novel?

Is acting in a long-running play an automatic, well-learned thing like walking, so that a person can do it using lower, non-thinking parts of the brain, while higher levels of the brain do real thinking? Or would the actor need two personalities, two thinkers, one thinking of the play while the other thinks of other things?

1. Josephine Tey. The Daughter of Time [1951]. New York, Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.