Siri Hustvedt (post 3) on how she became her father, like writers become their characters, and people with multiple personality become alternate personalities.

“During the last week I spent with my father before he died…On one of those last nights, I crawled into the narrow, too short bed I had slept in as a child and pulled the covers over me. As I lay there, thinking of my father, I felt the oxygen line in my nostrils and its discomfort, the heaviness of my lame leg, from which a tumor had been removed years before, the pressure in my tightened lungs, and a sudden panicked helplessness that I could not move from the bed on my own but would have to call for help. For however long it lasted, only minutes, I was my father. The sensation was both overwhelming and awful. I felt the proximity of death, its inexorable pull, and I had to struggle to leap back into my own body, to find myself again” (1, pp. 124-125).

Was that a one-time identification with her father, or did she have an on-going identification, an alternate personality, who was patterned after her father? And had she switched to that alternate personality for a few minutes? She notes that her father had once told her of his having had “a trembling fit” (1, p. 126). Was the shaking woman really a shaking man, an alternate personality patterned after her father, inside her? Or was it the shaking of an alternate personality derived from the febrile convulsions she had had as a child? (1, p. 153).

The point here is that Hustvedt becomes other people, psychologically speaking. She becomes her characters when she writes a novel. She became her father as described above.

And who have subjectively realistic experiences of becoming other people? People with multiple personality do, when they switch to their alternate personalities.

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. New York, Frances Coady/Henry Holt, 2009.

“The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves” by Siri Hustvedt (post 2): She has “sense that two Siris were present,” but no evaluation for multiple personality.

Two and half years after her father’s death, speaking at a memorial for him, she “launched into my first sentence, and began to shudder violently from the neck down. My arms flapped. My knees knocked. I shook as if I were having a seizure. Weirdly, my voice wasn’t affected. It didn’t change at all…When the speech ended, the shaking stopped” (1, p. 3).

“Once before, during the summer of 1982…In an art gallery in Paris, I suddenly felt my left arm jerk upward and slam me backward into the wall. The whole event lasted no more than a few seconds. Not long after that…came the violent migraine that lasted for almost a year…I have suffered from migraines since childhood” (1, pp. 4-5).

“The shaking woman felt like me and not like me at the same time. From the chin up, I was my familiar self. From the neck down, I was a shuddering stranger…I decided to go in search of the shaking woman” (1, p. 7).

“I have a vague sense that there are hidden recesses of my personality that I am reluctant to penetrate. Maybe that’s the part of me that shook” (1, p. 19).

“Did I…have a kind of double consciousness—a shuddering person and a cool one?” (1, p. 27).

Recurrent attacks of shaking when giving talks were minimized by taking propranolol (Inderal), “but I felt the quiver internally…It was like shaking without shaking” and she had “a grim sense that two Siris were present, not one” (1, p. 40).

“The strangeness of a duality in myself remains, a powerful sense of an ‘I’ and an uncontrollable other. The shaking woman is certainly not anyone with a name. She is a speechless alien who appears only during my speeches…I have come to think of the shaking woman as an untamed other self, a Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, a kind of double” (1, p. 47).

“Is each of us a singular being or a plural one?” (1, p. 69).

“When I am writing well…the sentences come as if I hadn’t willed them, as if they were manufactured by another being…the sense that I have been taken over happens several times during the course of a book…I don’t write; I am written…What is at work in automatic writing?” (1, p. 72).

“When I write fiction, I see my characters moving around, speaking, and acting…I am usually one of those characters, not I as I but I as someone else, an other self, male or female, projected into the mental world I inhabit as I write” (1, p. 112).

“When I shook, it didn’t feel like me. That was the problem” (1, p. 193). The problem has never been explained or solved, but is under control, and she is at peace with it.

Hustvedt has studied this problem for years. She has been evaluated by various medical, neurological, and psychiatric specialists. And her book has about as many notes and scholarly references as pages.

But only two of her many references are books about multiple personality, and neither of these books has “diagnosis” in its title. Indeed, they are not the kind of books someone would read to find out if she had multiple personality, a condition whose physical symptoms may include pseudoseizures and severe headaches (2). 

1. Siri Hustvedt. The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. New York, Frances Coady/Henry Holt, 2009.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Siri Hustvedt, an eminent writer (1), says her name is Legion, hears voices, feels plural, can inhabit both men and women, sees a stranger in the mirror.

“…all those jabbering voices every fiction writer hears in his or her head. Writing novels is a solitary act that is also plural…” (2, p. 42).

“When I write fiction, I also leave my real body behind and become someone else, another woman or a man if I wish. For me, making art has always been a kind of conscious dreaming. The material for a story comes not from what I know but from what I don’t know, from impulses and images that often seem to happen without my directives…” (2, p. 96).

“When I write a book, I am also listening. I hear characters talk as if they were outside me rather than inside me…and I am free to inhabit both men and women and to tell their stories” (2, p. 103).

“Around the age of eleven, I suffered commanding inner voices and rhythms that terrified me with their insistence. They always came when I was alone, and they seemed to want to impose their will on me, to press my body into their marching orders. The danger of madness seemed very real to me then, and I’m lucky they vanished” (2, p. 199-200).

“…I was standing in the tiny student room I had rented, and I turned to look at myself in the small mirror over the sink. I knew the person I was looking at was myself, and yet there was an alien quality to my reflection, an otherness that brought with it feelings of exuberance and celebration. All at once, I was looking at a stranger” (2, p. 221-222).

“Is the wounded self the writing self? Is the writing self an answer to the wounded self?…The writing self is multiple and elastic…is restless and searching, and it listens for voices. Where do they come from, these chatterers who talk to me before I fall asleep? My characters. I am making them and not making them…They discuss, fight, laugh, yell, and weep. I was very young when I first heard the story of the exorcism Jesus performs on a possessed man…‘My name is Legion.’ That is my name, too” (2, p. 228).

Search (in this blog) “name is Legion,” “voices,” and “mirror” to see some related past posts.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri_Hustvedt

2. Siri Hustvedt. A Plea for Eros: Essays. New York, Picador, 2006.

“Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” by Haruki Murakami (post 2): Science-fiction fantasy about protagonist with preexisting multiple personality.

In both the author’s Paris Review interview (see previous post) and the back cover of the novel, the nameless protagonist (search nameless and namelessness in this blog) of this novel is said to have a split mind due to brain surgery. And the character does, indeed, have such surgery.

But the novel also says that the protagonist, prior to surgery, already had multiple personality, possibly due to childhood trauma.

The Professor, who had done brain surgery on the protagonist and twenty-five other people, to make them into split-brained data processors, says to the protagonist (first-person narrator):

“All twenty-five of them died within a half-year of each other…And here you are, three years and three months later, still shuffling with no problems. This leads us t’believe that you possess some special oomph that the others didn’t”…

“So why didn’t I die?”

“…It seems you were operatin’ under multiple cognitive systems t’begin with. Not even you knew you were dividin’ your time between two identities…

“I find that very hard to believe,” I said.

“I can think of many possible causes,” the Professor assured me. “Childhood trauma…”

The protagonist acknowledges “this split personality of mine” (1, pp. 265-273).

In the Paris Review interview (see previous post), Murakami says that he feels “split” when he writes.

And as the Professor says, “Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels” (1, p. 262).

1. Haruki Murakami. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World [1985]. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. New York, Vintage International, 1991/1993.

Writing the way they think: Don’t ask novelists, “Is this autobiographical?” Ask “Is this a literary technique, or does it reflect the way your mind works?”

It is usually unproductive to ask novelists if things in their books are autobiographical, because the answer will depend on whether they take your question to address only their host personality or to include their alternate personalities, too.

For example, a fat character in a novel may not indicate that the author’s host personality ever had a weight problem, but that one of the author’s alternate personalities may have. So you might ask authors if something in their books is autobiographical for any of their personalities. However, I don’t know if novelists would treat the question as a joke or give an honest answer.

It might be better to ask if unusual features of their characters or stories—for example, “magical” aspects—are intentional literary techniques, or are, to some extent, the way the author thinks.

I have previously mentioned this issue. Search “experimental” to see prior posts. But it is worth repeating that most novelists write the way they do, not to make technical innovations, but because that is how they think.

“City of Glass” by Paul Auster (post 4): The theme—that not only writers, but possibly everyone, has multiple personality—is an exaggeration.

There are no real people in this novel, only alternate personalities, who don’t live and die, but instead, come and go: come out where they can be seen and go back inside where they can’t be seen, as alternate personalities do.

The prime example, the protagonist, Daniel Quinn, is described (see previous post) as the least real (in the sense of being out and active in the world) of a triad of personalities, which consists of Quinn, a writer, his pseudonym (William Wilson), and Wilson’s fictional detective. At the end of the novel, since Quinn is not a real person, his disappearance does not need to be accounted for—he is not hospitalized; there is no dead body; he just ceases to be out in the world where he can be seen.

Paul Auster, himself, is depicted, by name, as just another character in this novel. And if the protagonist, the most important character, is more like an alternate personality than like a real person, then certainly a less important character like Paul Auster must be an alternate personality, too.

And since both of its writer characters, Daniel Quinn and Paul Auster, are alternate personalities, one theme of this novel is that writers have multiple personality.

Indeed, since all the characters in this novel may be alternate personalities, the theme may be that all people have multiple personality. As one character says:

“…people change, don’t they? One minute we’re one thing, and then another another” (1, p. 83).

However, I think it is an exaggeration to say that everyone has multiple personality. When writers imply that that is the case, they are overgeneralizing from their own personal experience.

Also, I am not saying that Paul Auster intended the precise theme about multiple personality that I have ascribed to his novel. He probably intended to tell an intriguing story about reality and identity, which he succeeded in doing. As the novel says in its opening paragraph:

“Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance…The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell” (1, p. 3).

1. Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy: City of Glass [1985], Ghosts, The Locked Room. New York, Penguin Books, 2006.

“City of Glass” by Paul Auster (post 3): Is the beginning metafiction, postmodernism, or the magical inner world of a writer with multiple personality?

The first novel of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy begins as the story of a man with multiple personality, which is explicitly described, but unlabeled and unacknowledged as such.

The protagonist, a Mr. Quinn, is described as a “triad of selves” (1, p. 6): 1. Quinn, a writer; 2. William Wilson, the pseudonymous author of Quinn’s detective novels; and 3. Max Work, Wilson’s private-eye narrator. (“William Wilson” was the title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous multiple personality story.)

“In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise…[Quinn] had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. If he lived now in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work. His detective necessarily had to be real” (1, pp. 6-9).

At this point, Quinn gets a telephone call from someone asking to speak to “Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency” (1, p. 7). Quinn decides to pretend that he is Paul Auster and meet with the caller, who hires Quinn to protect a young adult, Peter Stillman, from his father, who had kept Peter in a dark room for most of his early childhood. The father, after thirteen years hospitalization or imprisonment, is about to be set free and return to New York.

So far, the only way I can make sense of this story is to think of all the characters as the alternate personalities of one person. What critics refer to as metafiction or postmodernism seems to me like the creative, magical, inner world of a writer with multiple personality.

1. Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy: City of Glass [1985], Ghosts, The Locked Room. New York, Penguin Books, 2006.

“Portrait of an Invisible Man” by Paul Auster (post 2): Why Was His Late Father Invisible? Auster’s Sixty-Nine Page Meditation on His Father’s Contradictions.

In recent posts on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I pointed out that one reason for the Invisible Man’s invisibility was his multiple personality, since his alternate personalities were usually hidden.

In undiagnosed multiple personality, not only are the alternate personalities usually hidden, but when they do come out, they usually do so incognito.

And since the alternate personalities are different from each other, but incognito, you don’t realize that you are seeing them, but you do have a vague sense that the person has puzzling contradictions.

Paul Auster sums up his impressions of his invisible man, his father, as follows:

“The rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction. I understand now that each fact is nullified by the next fact, that each thought engenders an equal and opposite thought. Impossible to say anything without reservation: he was good, or he was bad; he was this, or he was that. All of them are true. At times I have the feeling that I am writing about three or four different men, each one distinct, each one a contradiction of all the others.” (1, p. 62).

1. Paul Auster. The Invention of Solitude [1982]. New York, Penguin Books, 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut: His memory gap for the bombing of Dresden and the dissociative features (suggestive of multiple personality) in his writing process.

Memory Gap

Vonnegut: “…the book [Slaughterhouse-Five] was largely a found object. It was what was in my head, and I was able to get it out, but one of the characteristics about this object was that there was a complete blank where the bombing of Dresden took place, because I don’t remember…There were all kinds of information surrounding the event, but as far as my memory bank was concerned, the center had been pulled right out of the story…”

Q: “Even if you don’t remember it, did the experience of being interned—and bombed—in Dresden change you in any way?”

Vonnegut: No. I suppose you’d think so, because that’s the cliché. The importance of Dresden in my life has been considerably exaggerated because my book about it became a best seller. If the book hadn’t been a best seller, it would seem like a very minor experience in my life. And I don’t think people’s lives are changed by short-term events like that. Dresden was astonishing, but experiences can be astonishing without changing you” (1, p. 94).

People with multiple personality have memory gaps that go beyond ordinary forgetting. His memory gap for the bombing of Dresden may be significant in that regard. Search “memory gaps” in this blog for previous posts.

Writing Process

Vonnegut describes automatic writing, becoming his characters, and getting messages from his “intelligence,” all of which suggests that his writing process involved alternate personalities.

“All this falls into the area of automatic writing, really. There isn’t time to be rational about it and plan what you’re going to do” (1, p. 50).

“When I write I also act, and I think this is true of most novelists. I will walk around talking to myself, saying out loud what a character is going to say, so that I will become one character and then another one, trying each on for size. So in the process of writing I have identified with every reasonably complex character in any of my books” (1, p. 68).

“…I know that if I spend enough time at the typewriter the most intelligent part of me will finally make itself known and I will be able to decode what it is trying to talk about. It’s a little like a ouija board. I will get a clue to what my intelligence wants to talk about, and then I will try to talk about it more and more” (1, p. 73).

Q.: What sort of things do you plan to write from now on?

Vonnegut: I can guess. It isn’t really up to me. I come to work every morning and I see what words come out of the typewriter. I feel like a copyboy whose job is to tear off stories from the teletype machine and deliver them to the editor” (1, pp. 109-110).

“…after a day when I’ve been at it for hours and am dissatisfied with what I’ve produced…if I’m patient, a nice egg-shaped idea emerges and I can tell my intelligence has gotten through. It’s a slow process, though, and an annoying one, because you have to sit so long” (1, p. 199).

1. Willian Rodney Allen (Editor). Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Ulterior motive of Novelists use Normal Version of Multiple Personality. Psychiatrist meddles in literary criticism to present new view of normal psychology.

First, since childhood, I had always wanted to write a great novel, which was why I specialized in psychiatry, since I thought that understanding people would help me to write great characters. But I had never been able to understand how novelists could do what they did.

Second, although my psychiatric training had led me to expect that I would never see a case of multiple personality, and, for my first twelve years as a psychiatrist, I never did see even one case (so I thought), I eventually did learn how to recognize this camouflaged condition, and I gained clinical experience with it.

Third, once I knew about multiple personality, I eventually recognized that, when novelists, in published interviews, said that their characters had minds of their own, these novelists weren’t speaking metaphorically or joking. They were describing the essence of multiple personality as found in their own personal experience.

Fourth, since, bad jokes aside, novelists are neither freaks of nature nor mentally ill, it must be the case that a surprisingly large minority of the general public has a normal version of multiple personality, and that some of these people have found their way to an occupation like fiction writing, for which it is a major asset. I estimate that upwards of 90% of novelists have it, but that so do perhaps 30% of everyone else.

Fifth, this warrants a revised view of normal psychology. It means that imaginary companions in childhood are not just a cute phase, but a window on how many normal minds work. It means that, just as many people have some anxiety, but relatively few have an anxiety mental disorder, many people have multiple personality, but relatively few have multiple personality disorder (also known as dissociative identity disorder).

Thus, the ulterior motive behind this blog and its Multiple Identity Literary Theory—the theory that novelists have and use a normal version of multiple personality—is to present a new view of normal psychology.

Of course, the ideas that people have “multiplicity” or “subpersonalities” are not new. But those views tend to assume that everyone has multiplicity or subpersonalities, and that it is something quite distinct from the supposedly rare mental illness, multiple personality.

In contrast, I don’t think that everyone has a normal version of multiple personality. And I think that those who do have it have the same thing that people who are mentally ill have, except that they deal with it in a way that does not cause them distress or dysfunction; indeed, so that it even becomes an asset in certain ways. For example, some have used it to write novels and win the Nobel Prize.

Ralph Ellison (post 5): Multiple Personality character from Invisible Man became core of the novel Ellison worked on for the next forty years.

“Ellison’s Opus II composition book makes it clear that the second novel belongs to 'Rhinehart,' as he spells the name throughout. Bliss Proteus Rhinehart is the hidden name and complex fate of this transitional character belonging both to Invisible Man and to the second novel…

“As Ellison actually began writing the novel, Rhinehart would go by other names—first Bliss, the child evangelist of indeterminate race…then Movie Man, an itinerant scam artist…and finally Adam Sunraider, a ‘race-baiting New England Senator’…

“An agent of transformation, Bliss Proteus Rinehart is a metaphor for the second novel as a whole, a way of explaining how Ellison could write for forty years without finishing his novel…

“He is of indeterminate race, here specified as ‘Negro, white, Indian’; he is raised in the church by a black preacher; he runs away and reemerges as a movie man looking to exploit a small Oklahoma town…and he gains political office, serving in the United States Senate, where he is assassinated…

“Rhinehart emerges as an individual particularly trapped by his racial indeterminacy, his protean ability to shift shades as well as shapes…

“The novel’s central action, as Ellison conceives it in this embryonic form, concerns Rhinehart’s attempt to return to his neglected past, to embrace his blackness…” (1, pp. 125-134).

Professor Adam Bradley is the coeditor of Ralph Ellison’s unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting, which Ellison worked on for forty years following publication of Invisible Man. He does not raise the issue of multiple personality.

1. Adam Bradley. Ralph Ellison in Progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the Shooting. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010.

Intelligent Design vs. Mikhail Bakhtin vs. Fyodor Dostoevsky: Are novels written by a single, purposeful mind or by a group of alternate personalities?

Most book reviewers and literary critics seem to assume that novels are created by intelligent design. They think that, ultimately, a single mind, the author’s, is behind whatever narrators and characters are employed; that everything in the novel represents the author’s intention and has an understandable purpose.

One literary scholar who came close to dissenting from this conventional view was Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). In his literary analysis of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin spoke of “polyphony,” meaning that Dostoevsky’s characters have independent voices and minds of their own.

However, Bakhtin did not apply his concept of polyphony to Dostoevsky himself. Thus, in principle, it would be possible to discover Dostoevsky’s single authorial intention behind his polyphonic characters. But if you search Dostoevsky in this blog, you will find ample reason to suspect that Dostoevsky, himself, was “polyphonic” (had multiple personality).

Many of the writers quoted in this blog readily acknowledge that their novels are not created by intelligent design; rather, inspirations occur, character and narrator voices are heard, and so forth. When authors are interviewed, they are reluctant to give definitive interpretations of their work, because they are only the host personality.

Once you realize that a novel’s characters and narrators are alternate personalities, and not just the author’s manufactured puppets, literary interpretation becomes problematic. Whose views and purposes are you interpreting?

And the problem is not simply because characters and narrators may have their own agendas. They at least provide textual evidence to work with. But there may be other alternate personalities involved, working behind the scenes (conventionally thought of as the author’s “unconscious,” but conscious themselves).

Thus, as I proposed in a recent post, the least a book reviewer or literary critic should be prepared to do is to note things in a novel that do not seem to make sense, and not assume that the author could explain them.

Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction, Paris Review, 2003: “Books are born out of ignorance, and go on living only to the degree that they cannot be understood”

“As a young person, I would always ask myself, Where are the words coming from? Who’s saying this? The third-person narrative…there’s an eerie, disembodied quality to that voice. It seems to come from nowhere and I found that disturbing.”

“When you were fourteen years old…the boy next to you was struck by lightning and killed.”

“That incident changed my life, there’s no question about it.”

“Was I some kind of freak or was reality truly as strange and incomprehensible as I thought it was?”

“I felt as if I was writing in a trance.”

    “In Leviathan, your narrator Peter Aaron writes: ‘No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after the are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.’ How close is that to your own belief?

    “I rarely speak directly through my characters. They might resemble me at times, or borrow aspects of my life, but I tend to think of them as autonomous beings with their own opinions and their own ways of expressing themselves. But in this case Aaron’s opinion matches my own.”

Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No.182, The Paris Review, 2004: His novels come to him in a mesmeric, waking dream, in which he feels split.

from Wikipedia

Haruki Murakami is a contemporary Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country.

1979: Gunzo Award (best first novel) for Hear the Wind Sing

1982: Noma Literary Prize (best newcomer) for A Wild Sheep Chase

1985: Tanizaki Prize for Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

1995: Yomiuri Prize (best novel) for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

1999: Kuwabara Takeo Prize for Underground

2006: World Fantasy Award (best novel) for Kafka on the Shore

2006: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

2006: Franz Kafka Prize

2009: Jerusalem Prize

from Paris Review interview

“When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait.”

“When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what is going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out.”

“The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake.”

“When I’m in writing mode for a novel [describes routine] I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

“…for me, my characters are more real than real people. In those six or seven months that I’m writing, those people are inside me.”

“…my protagonist is…a part of myself, but not me…It’s a kind of alternative form of myself.”

“My protagonist is almost always caught between the spiritual world and the real world…The protagonist’s mind is split between these totally different worlds and he cannot choose which to take. I think that’s one of the main motifs in my work. It’s very apparent in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, in which his mind is actually, physically split.”

“Sometimes while I’m writing…the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing…A feeling of a split.”

One more study finds that multiple personality is rooted in traumatic experiences in childhood, not suggestibility or proneness to fantasy.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160525220029.htm

What are the implications of multiple personality’s roots in childhood?

One thing it explains is why most adults with multiple personality have child-aged alternate personalities (in addition to their adult-aged alternate personalities).

In my recent posts on James Patterson’s Along Came a Spider, which features an adult villain suspected of having multiple personality, I noted evidence of the author’s inadequate research on multiple personality: His characters call it a psychosis, when minimal research would have informed Patterson that multiple personality is not a psychosis.

However, Patterson’s portrayal of the villain as having, at times, a childlike, evil-boy persona, and as somehow being related to a twelve-year-old criminal from the past, demonstrated the author’s insight that multiple personality has its roots in childhood. But since Patterson had done poor research on multiple personality, how did he come to have that insight? Personal knowledge?

“Along Came a Spider” (post 3) by James Patterson (post 4): Why is the “cool beans” scenario, extrinsic to plot, unknown to Alex Cross, in this novel?

As mentioned in one of yesterday’s posts, the novel’s Prologue says: Sixty years before the present story, a baby was kidnapped by a twelve-year-old boy, who, proud of his evil deed, said to himself, “Cool beans.”

Sixty years later, in the present story, a kidnapping is committed by a young man, who sometimes thinks of himself as “the bad boy,” and, when proud of an evil deed, may say to himself, “Cool beans.”

In yesterday’s post, I said that the “cool beans” scenario could be accounted for by the reincarnation of the first kidnapper’s evil soul into the evil kidnapper of the present story. However, this novel is not a tale of the supernatural. The hero, Alex Cross, is a down-to-earth detective and psychologist. Reincarnation is an inappropriate interpretation.

The most interesting thing about the “cool beans” scenario is that it is extrinsic to the novel’s plot. Alex Cross never knows of it. It plays no part in any police or psychological investigation. So what is it doing in this novel?

I have faced this situation with many other novels. My conclusion is this: When there is something in a novel that makes no sense in terms of the novel’s own story, when it is unwarranted and gratuitous, then I consider it a reflection of the author’s personal psychology.

The gratuitous thing in this novel is a bad boy whose pet phrase is “cool beans.” My hypothesis is that this describes one of the author’s alternate personalities.

“Along Came a Spider” (post 2) by James Patterson (post 3): Both hero Alex Cross and villain Gary hear rational voices, typical of multiple personality.

Since fiction writers hear rational voices in their head (1), they naturally assume that most other normal people do, too. So such voices are often heard by their characters, as a trivial aspect of normal psychology.

However, most people don’t hear such voices. It is people with multiple personality who do. They are the voices of alternate personalities, speaking to the host personality, from behind the scenes.

Alex Cross

“Everything was very noisy inside my head” (2, p. 16).

“…a voice inside me screamed” (2, p. 120).

“A line was sounding in my head: ‘Oh no, it’s tomorrow again” (2, p. 135).

“A phrase drifted through my head. Don’t start anything you can’t finish” (2, p. 178).

Villain with alleged multiple personality

“Gary held his head in both hands. He couldn’t stop the screaming inside his brain. I want to be somebody!” (2, p. 145).

To see the many past posts on this subject, search “voice” and “voices” in this blog.

1. Thaisa Frank, Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

2. James Patterson. Along Came a Spider [1993]. London, HarperCollins, 2004.

“Along Came a Spider” by James Patterson (post 2): The first novel featuring detective/psychologist Alex Cross misclassifies multiple personality.

Alex Cross is both a police detective and a psychologist (Ph.D.). Do the protagonist’s name, “Cross” (as in, a cross between this and that), and his dual occupations, imply that he has a split personality? Just a thought.

One of the main issues in this novel is whether the murderer/kidnapper, Gary Soneji/Murphy, has a real or fake case of multiple personality. Doctor/Detective Alex Cross says:

“A lot of what he’s told us so far suggests a severe dissociative reaction. He appears to have suffered a pretty horrible childhood. There was physical abuse, maybe sexual abuse as well. He may have begun to split off his psyche to avoid pain and fear back then. I’m not saying he’s a multiple, but it’s a possibility. He had the kind of childhood that could produce such a rare psychosis” (1, p. 221). Another doctor continues:

“Dr. Cross and I have talked about the possibility that Soneji/Murphy undergoes ‘fugue states.’ Psychotic episodes that relate to both amnesia and hysteria. He talks about ‘lost days,’ ‘lost weekends,’ even ‘lost weeks.’ In such a fugue state, a patient can wake in a strange place and have no idea how he got there, or what he had been doing for a prolonged period. In some cases, the patients have two separate personalities, often antithetical personalities…” (1, p. 221).

Cross does mention “dissociative,” but he and the other doctor are in error when they refer to multiple personality as a “psychosis” and fugues as “psychotic.” The widely available psychiatric diagnostic manual, the DSM, includes one chapter for Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders, and, separated by literally two hundred pages, an unrelated chapter for Dissociative Disorders, which includes multiple personality and fugues.

At another point, Cross refers to Gary as a “severe schizophrenic” (1, p. 346). At yet another point, Cross expresses belief in Gary’s split personality, saying that the Gary Soneji personality framed the Gary Murphy personality, “and he’s innocent” (1, p. 382). Near the very end, Cross says, “I was certain he was playing games” (1, p. 432), but it is not clear in what sense Cross means this.

Meanwhile, the novel’s Prologue had fantasized that, back in 1932, it had actually been a twelve-year-old boy who had kidnapped the Charles Lindbergh baby, and that the kidnapper had said to himself, expressing self-satisfaction, “Cool beans” (1, p. 4). (Never mind that, outside this novel, the phrase “cool beans” is not known to have been used before the 1960s.) And Gary, who has sometimes referred to himself as the Son of Lindbergh, also sometimes thinks to himself, “Cool beans” (1, p. 394), perhaps implying that he is the reincarnation of the evil soul of the Lindbergh kidnapper.

To summarize, Alex Cross, psychologist, detective, and, often, first-person narrator, does not understand the distinction between multiple personality and schizophrenia, and never does clearly decide whether or not the villain has been faking mental illness. Meanwhile, a third-person narrator seems to suggest that the villain, Gary, is the evil soul of the Lindbergh kidnapper, reincarnated.

What can account for this inconsistent muddle? It is not stupidity or laziness. The writing shows evidence of high intelligence and hard work. My guess is that the novel was written by a committee of more than one personality.

There is a saying that a camel is a horse made by a committee. But a camel is a noble beast in its own way.

1. James Patterson. Along Came a Spider [1993]. London, HarperCollins, 2004.

Added Feb. 16, 2019: Since I saw that this post has been read recently, I reread it. And I should have elaborated on the idea that the author seems to be giving a possession-by-a-reincarnated-spirit theory of the villain's mental condition. That is, forget schizophrenia or multiple personality: the problem was possession by an evil, reincarnated spirit. Or, that's the real cause of those conditions. I don't know whether the author believes in spirit possession, or just thinks that such an idea would appeal to many readers, as it may have.

Professors of Literature who understand importance of Multiple Personality in Literary Criticism: Jeremy Hawthorn, Katia Mitova, Heike Schwarz.

We may not agree on everything, but I honor and commend their psychiatric literacy, and hope that other scholars follow their example.

Jeremy Hawthorn. Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character: From Oliver Goldsmith to Sylvia Plath. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

Katia Mitova. “Artistic Creativity as a ‘Multiple Personality Order’: The Case of Fernando Pessoa.” https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9781848882034/BP000016.xml

Heike Schwarz. Beware of the Other Side(s): Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder in American Fiction. Transcript-Verlag, 2013.

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (post 4): The title means man is invisible, especially to the extent that his alternate personalities remain hidden.

Neither Ellison’s interviews nor his introduction to this novel nor the novel itself gives a clear and consistent explanation of what he meant by “invisible man.” He is of two (or more) minds about it.

At some points, he says it means that men (especially blacks) are not seen by others (especially whites) for who they really are. But at one point, he says that some of the white characters are not seen for who they are, either. And so, since it is impossible to know what is in the heart of any other person, “Invisible Man” means that man is invisible.

However, at other points, cited in previous posts, Ellison says that his nameless, first-person narrator/protagonist is really only a disembodied voice that he heard. So that is the reason he is invisible.

And as I pointed out, a disembodied person-like entity is an alternate personality, which, not having its own separate body, and being, most of the time, on the inside, behind the scenes, is, usually, invisible. According to this view, a man is invisible to the extent that his alternate personalities remain hidden.

Is there any evidence that Ellison ever thought in terms of multiple personality, per se? Toward the end of this novel, the protagonist is repeatedly compared to Rinehart, a character who is described as having “multiple personalities” (1, p. 377). Indeed, the only apparent purpose for the existence of the Rinehart character is to make the issue of multiple personality explicit.

Ellison is intrigued, but doesn't pursue the issue, because he finds “the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities…too vast and confusing to contemplate” (1. p. 377).

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

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (post 3): 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.

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (post 2): Is narrator incarnated but invisible, or a disembodied voice? Views of Prologue, Epilogue, Author's Introduction.

Prologue

“I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids…I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (1, p. 3).

Epilogue

“ ‘Ah,’ I can hear you say, ‘so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!’ But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do?” (1, p. 439).

Author’s Introduction

“For while I had structured my short stories out of familiar experiences and possessed concrete images of my characters and their backgrounds, now I was confronted by nothing more substantial than a taunting, disembodied voice…an ironic, down-home voice…the voice seemed well aware that a piece of science fiction was the last thing I aspired to write. In fact it seemed to tease me with allusions to that pseudoscientific sociological concept which held that most Afro-American difficulties sprang from our ‘high visibility’…But then as I listened to its taunting laughter and speculated as to what kind of individual would speak in such accents, I decided that it would be one who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic…And after coaxing him into revealing a bit more about himself, I concluded that he was without question a ‘character,’ and that in the dual meaning of the term…this has always been a most willful, most self-generating novel…” (1, pp. xiv-xxi).

Comment

As is true of many novelists, Ellison, intellectually, knew that he had imagined and thought up his narrator and main character. But that is not the way he experienced his creative process: His protagonist just seems to have arrived. He is confronted by it. He hears its voice. It has its own opinions and attitude. It seems to be self-generating, with a mind of its own. All of which describes the psychological experience of getting and having an alternate personality.

Although most characters and alternate personalities are embodied, it is not uncommon to have an alternate personality who is conceived of as a disembodied spirit of one sort or another.

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