Bob Dylan (post 2), winner of Nobel Prize in Literature, is famous for alternating personality: switching name, life story, demeanor, attitude, and voice.

“In 1960, a nineteen-year-old aspiring singer/songwriter born Robert Allen Zimmerman cast aside his given name and adopted…Bob Dylan. It would be the first in an ongoing series of fabrications, fables, and rumors about his life story. Soon the singer had spun so many tales about his background that it was impossible to know who he really was…

“His life story changed as he proceeded onward in his journey, as, remarkably, did his physiognomy and everyday appearance. Like the Greek sea deity Proteus…Bob Dylan…had the most incredible way of changing shape, changing size, changing looks. The whole time…he wore the same thing, his blue jeans and cap. And sometimes he would look big and muscular, and the next day he’d look like a little gnome, and one day he’d be kind of handsome and virile, and the following day he’d look like a thirteen-year-old child…

“You would never know what his voice was going to sound like. One of the other fascinating, if obvious, things about Bob Dylan’s chameleonic personality was the way the timbre of his voice would change…

Said Dylan, “I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time” (1, front flap and Introduction).

Can you tell me something about the songs and ideas involved?

“…I don’t really write about anything. I don’t know where these come from…sometimes I don’t know what I’m writing about until years later it becomes clearer to me.

Do you find that as a composer you’re more like a medium…?

“I think that every composer does that. No one in his right mind would think that it was coming from him, that he had invented it. It’s just coming through him.

What kind of force compels you to write?

“Well, any departure, like from my traditional self, will kick it off” (1, pp. 241-242).

1. Jonathan Cott (Editor). Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. New York, Wenner Books, 2006.

Ernest Hemingway’s Twenty Nicknames and Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”: The Mystery of Why These Blog Posts Have Gotten the Most Visits.

For many months, my blog, “Novelists use Normal Version of Multiple Personality,” had been getting its most visits to the post on Doris Lessing’s short story, “To Room Nineteen,” which remains the second most visited post in the blog’s history. More recently, apart from new posts, the most visited post has been the one on Hemingway’s Twenty Nicknames, which is now, far and away, the most visited post in the blog’s history.

Both of these posts are from 2014. They are good posts, but not my best posts. And I can’t account for their popularity. Maybe it is not that these two posts are so popular, but that all my other posts are of interest to relatively few people.

The blog has modest numbers, but they come from around the world: more than fifty countries. In the last month, the most visits have come from China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Philippines, Ukraine, and the USA.

Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl”: Since its multiple personality passages made no sense to most reviewers when they read them, why didn’t they raise questions?

In my previous post on Gone Girl, the passages I cite that indicate the protagonist has multiple personality do not make sense unless you realize that they indicate multiple personality. And since most reviewers did not realize that, most reviewers did not understand those passages. Yet no reviewer (as far as I know) said that the novel contained passages which made no sense to them. What are the implications?

Do reviewers only skim the books they are reviewing? Perhaps some do, but I assume that reputable reviewers read every word.

Do reviewers assume that a certain percentage of most novels will not make sense—nothing is perfect—and that it would be petty for a review to mention it (as long as it did not prevent a good overall experience)?

Do reviewers assume that if they don’t understand something in an otherwise, obviously, well-written novel, then it must be their own fault, so why bring it up in a review and embarrass themselves?

The reason I raise this issue in regard to Gone Girl is that it is not literary esoterica. It is an extremely popular novel, which would be expected to be completely understandable by nearly everyone. Yet if you haven’t read this blog, even a popular novel like this may not entirely make sense.

All of which raises the question: What is multiple personality doing in this novel? Why is it there? Since it is present in part of the novel, but not in the rest, it does not appear to be an intentional aspect of character development or plot. In short, there seems to be no reason for it to be in this novel. It is gratuitous.

After finding gratuitous multiple personality in many novels, I concluded that it must be a reflection of writers’ psychology.

Gillian Flynn retrospective: In “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects” (Flynn’s first novel) the protagonist has gratuitous or unacknowledged multiple personality.

As you will see in the following two past posts, Gone Girl has “gratuitous multiple personality,” which means that a character has multiple personality, but it is not recognized as such by any character or narrator, and it plays no intentional part in the plot or character development. Sharp Objects has “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which means that the character’s multiple personality is integral to character development, but no character or narrator recognizes that this character has multiple personality, per se.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: The Author Doesn’t Know That Her Character Has Multiple Personality

Amy discovers that her husband, Nick, is unfaithful. To take revenge, she leaves home—thus the title, Gone Girl—and stages her disappearance to look like he has killed her and disposed of the body.

So it is astoundingly inconsistent when Amy tells the reader that she is planning to kill herself, and will do so in a way that her body will never be found. Why would she kill herself after successfully taking revenge? And if she is going to kill herself anyway, why not ensure Nick’s conviction for murder by providing her dead body to the police?

If you haven’t read Gone Girl, you might wonder how a story with such amateurish inconsistencies could get published. But if you recall my post on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, you can guess the answer. The novel is otherwise so well written that the reader ignores or makes excuses for the inconsistencies.

Now, when I say that the author doesn’t know that Amy has multiple personality, I must qualify that statement by saying that the author has partial insight, and sometimes seems to be intentionally providing clues to Amy’s multiple personality. For example, Nick recalls that Amy had once taken singing lessons from a Paula, and knew a Jessie from a fashion-design course. “But then I’d ask about Jessie or Paula a month later, and Amy would look at me like I was making up words” (1, p. 46). This implies that Amy’s regular personality had amnesia for what her singing and fashion-design personalities had been doing.

Amy says, “The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities…I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they’re too lazy or stupid to pull off a switch” (1, p. 222).

And Nick is not totally oblivious to Amy’s deep changeability. He says, “She’s like this endless archeological dig: You think you’ve reached the final layer, and then you bring down your pick one more time, and you break through to a whole new mine shaft beneath. With a maze of tunnels and bottomless pits” (1, pp.253-254).

At one point, Amy distinguishes between two personalities, herself and another “I,” who has come into play since she faked her death. She says, speaking about a man named Jeff: “I wonder if ‘I’ might like sleeping with him” (1, p. 282). “I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ’I’ am game. I have become game again since I died…‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that freedom” (1, p. 286). Note: She has become game again, meaning that this other “I” personality, who is game for things that her regular self isn’t, had been present in the past, before she staged her death.

Why, then, do I say that Gillian Flynn has only partial insight to Amy’s multiple personality? After all, she has Amy explicitly say (see above), “I change personalities.” But she then says—like Philip Roth in his Paris Review interview (see past post)—“I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it.”

Well, it may be fair to say that “most people” do this (have multiple personality) if by “people” you are referring to novelists only. As I have previously said, I would guess that 90% of novelists have multiple personality (a normal version of it). But most of the general public don’t (only 30% has the normal version, and 1.5% the mental disorder).

In the last third of the novel, Gillian Flynn does not make a point of Amy’s multiple personality. (Except that Amy abruptly changes her mind and doesn’t kill herself, since, evidently, only one of her personalities was suicidal.) This suggests that the author’s earlier clues and references to multiple personality were just her conception of normal psychology, based on knowing herself, another great novelist. [At the time this post was written, the blog was called, "Great Novelists have Multiple Personality.]

1. Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl. New York, Crown Publishers, 2012.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects: As in Gone Girl and Dark Places, the protagonist has multiple personality, but in this novel it is the title issue

The plot of Sharp Objects is about solving several murders—which turn out to have been committed by the protagonist’s mother and half sister—all of which serves to dramatize the protagonist’s traumatic childhood.

The novel’s main issue is indicated by the title, Sharp Objects, which refers, not to the murders, but to the knives and razor blades used by the protagonist, Camille, to cut and scar her skin since childhood. (As readers of this blog know, multiple personality begins in a traumatic childhood).

Camille has a history of being psychiatrically hospitalized for self-cutting. She has a beautiful face, but scars from self-cutting cover her body from the neck down. She is no longer cutting, but her urge to cut continues throughout the novel.

A few brief quotes from a textbook on multiple personality will help you to understand what I will then quote from the novel.

Self-Cutting in Multiple Personality

“Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients. The percentage of self-mutilators is probably much higher, because this behavior is often not reported to therapists and is rarely spontaneously discovered except by physical examination” (1, p. 64).

“The sites of self-mutilation in MPD are often hidden from casual examination and commonly include upper arms (hidden by long sleeves), back, inner thighs, breasts, and buttocks. Self-mutilation frequently takes the form of delicate self-cutting with razor blades or fragments of glass” (1, p. 89).

“…persecutor personalities are found in the majority of MPD patients. The persecutor personalities usually direct their acts of hostility toward the host [regular] personality…Suicide is an ever-present issue with multiples. The internal persecutors may be threatening to commit suicide themselves, threatening to kill the host (internal homicide), or urging or commanding the host to kill himself or herself…Self-mutilation by persecutors to punish the host or other alters is common” (1, pp. 205-206).

In this blog, suicide in multiple personality was seen in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Internal homicide was my interpretation of Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen.” Self-cutting has not been discussed in the blog previously.

Camille’s Skin Speaks

Camille has carved specific words into her skin. The words are not experienced by her as being her own thoughts. They just seem to come to her or appear on her skin or are “screamed” at her, and she feels the urge to take sharp objects and cut these words into her skin.

The fact that these are specific words, not just feelings, suggests that they are communications from some sort of thinker. The compulsion to carve them into her skin might indicate that the thinker wants his or her thoughts to be taken seriously and remembered.

Actually, there seems to be more than one thinker behind these words, since the “words” are sometimes described as “squabbling at each other”:

“I am a cutter…My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words—cook, cupcake, kitty, curls—as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh…my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked…The problem started long before that…The last word I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body…Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in. I stayed at the hospital twelve weeks. It’s a special place for people who cut, almost all of them women, most under twenty-five. I went when I was thirty” (2, pp. 60-63).

Camille is not psychotic. But how can a person who is not psychotic have the subjective experiences and overt behavior described above? The likely explanation is that she gets these messages from, and is pushed to self-cut by, one or more alternate personalities.

However, if she were a real person coming to me for psychiatric evaluation, I would not make the diagnosis of multiple personality unless and until I actually met and interviewed one or more alternate personalities (without using any drugs or hypnosis).

For example, I might look at the words carved into her skin, choose one, and, since Camille says that she didn’t think up that word, I would ask, “Who said [specific word]?” If she had multiple personality, then in reaction to my question I would see a change in demeanor, the alternate personality involved with that specific word would identify herself, and the alter would be able to provide verifiable information previously unknown to my patient.

Does Gillian Flynn understand Camille?

She would if she had mechanically constructed the character, but most novelists don’t get their characters that way. I would guess that she had read of, or knew, someone who was a cutter; that the idea incubated in her mind; and that one day the character came alive for her. So I think it unlikely that Flynn has any deep psychological understanding of the character.

What about my theory that novelists have a normal version of multiple personality and that they use it to write their novels? Well, I do believe that, but that doesn’t mean most novelists know they have multiple personality or that I know what part it played in the writing of any particular novel.

As I have said in previous posts, apart from my analyses of Gone Girl and Dark Places, the only things I know about Gillian Flynn are that her favorite mystery novelist is Agatha Christie (see my posts on Christie), and that, as a child, one of Flynn’s favorite movies was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the main character has multiple personality.

1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, Guilford Press, 1989.
2. Gillian Flynn. Sharp Objects. New York, Broadway Paperbacks, 2006.

Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize in Literature, contradicts himself about his own lyrics, from one interview to the next, like a person with multiple personality.

In this excerpt from an interview published earlier today by someone who has interviewed Bob Dylan a number times over the years, he is described as having always been puzzlingly inconsistent.

At first, when the Nobel Prize was recently announced, Dylan had been inaccessible to the Nobel Prize committee, and one critic speculated that he was standing up for artistic independence. But in today’s interview:

“…when I ask about his Nobel, Dylan is all affability. Yes, he is planning to turn up to the awards ceremony in Stockholm. ‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘If it’s at all possible…It’s hard to believe…amazing, incredible. Whoever dreams about something like that?’…

“If there is one thing I have learned about him over the years, and the several interviews he has granted me, it is that he always does the unexpected…In interviews over the years, the famously unpredictable Dylan has been by turns combative, amiable, taciturn, philosophical, charismatic, caustic and cryptic…fiercely private and frustratingly unknowable…

“He has never, of course, been one to explain his lyrics. ‘I’ll let other people decide what they are,’ he tells me. ‘The academics, they ought to know. I’m not really qualified. I don’t have any opinion.’

“On the associated question of whether those same lyrics can be considered poetry, Dylan has long delighted in publicly changing his mind. He is perfectly capable in one interview of saying that they can, and then the next time he grants a journalist an audience saying that they can’t” (1).

As I’ve said in many past posts, two cardinal clues to the possibility that a person has multiple personality are, 1. puzzling inconsistency, and 2. memory gaps. The above illustrates the first clue. But I don’t know whether he has a history of memory gaps or losing time.

It is also worth noting that "Bob Dylan" is a pseudonym. Search "pseudonyms."

1. Edna Gundersen (interviewer). “World exclusive: Bob Dylan - I’ll be at the Nobel Prize ceremony…if I can.” The Telegraph, 29 October 2016.

DSM-5 (post 2): Order of diagnostic criteria for dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality) contributes to skepticism, but what causes emotional skepticism?

In my previous post, I explained why the order of the diagnostic criteria in DSM-5—multiplicity first and memory gaps second—prevents most clinicians from ever making this diagnosis (because that order is the opposite of how the diagnosis is usually made in clinical practice).

Another result is skepticism. Headlining the multiplicity makes people imagine that patients come to psychiatrists complaining of multiplicity; or, that psychiatrists project the idea of multiplicity onto patients. But those things rarely happen, because most patients with multiple personality don’t know they have it (and, anyway, don’t want that diagnosis), and because that is not how psychiatrists usually come to make the diagnosis (and we are too busy to go on wild-goose chases).

In most cases, the first step in making the diagnosis is a single screening question that makes no reference to multiple personality. It is a slight modification of the routine evaluation of memory. In addition to evaluating 1. immediate and short-term memory, and 2. long-term memory, the psychiatrist asks, “Do you ever have memory gaps or lose time?” Most patients will say, “No,” and that is that.

I remember the first time that I asked a patient that question and got a positive answer: I was shocked! Nothing in my formal psychiatric training had led me to ask that question or expect that answer.

So I think that the order of the diagnostic criteria, and its contribution to a misconception about how multiple personality is usually diagnosed, is one factor in skepticism. But why are some people emotionally and irrationally skeptical? I had been skeptical before making the diagnosis, but it was not something I had gotten emotional about. It was something I had mostly ignored.

Now that I know, from my reading since 2013 for this blog, that there is a normal version of multiple personality, I wonder if some of the emotional skeptics have the normal version, are in denial, and doth protest too much.

Mark Twain retrospective: In two of nineteen posts on Samuel Clemens (search pseudonym, Twain), he tells what he knows of his multiple personality.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

In “Mark Twain’s Notebook,” he says he has an alternate personality whom he knows about indirectly from its different handwriting and mysterious trips.

In this seventeenth post on Samuel Clemens (search “Mark Twain”), I quote from his personal notebook.

He says that he has—and assumes that everyone may have—three kinds of personalities: his regular self, his double, and his spiritualized or dream self.

His regular self and his double have no direct awareness of each other; they are not co-conscious. He evidently knows about his double from writing that nobody else could have written (but he doesn’t remember writing it), which has handwriting different from his own. And he has evidently been told that he makes trips—that is, someone looking exactly like him, his “double,” has been seen at various places—which he does not recall. These mysterious trips are dissociative fugues, a symptom of multiple personality, discussed in previous posts (search “fugue”).

In contrast, his regular self and spiritualized or dream self are directly aware of each other; they are co-conscious and have a common memory.

Mark Twain’s Notebook

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence.

“And so, I was wrong in the beginning; that other person is not one’s conscience…

“I am not acquainted with my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me—and whom I will call Watson, for I don’t know his name, although he most certainly has one, and signs it in a hand which has no resemblance to mine when he takes possession of our partnership body and goes off on mysterious trips—but I am acquainted (dimly) with my spiritualized self and I know that it and I are one, because we have a common memory…my dream self…” (1, pp. 349-350).

1. Mark Twain. Mark Twain’s Notebook. Foreword by Albert Bigelow Paine. New York, Harper and Brothers, 1935.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Mark Twain’s avowed alternate personality, outside Twain’s awareness, explains how Twain’s books would “write itself” with “unconscious cerebration”  

In yesterday’s post, I quoted from Mark Twain’s notebook, in which he said that he had multiple personality:

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence…I am not acquainted with [have no conscious awareness of] my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me…”

You may wonder what his having an alternate personality—a “wholly independent personage who resides in me,” who does whatever he does, totally out of his regular self’s awareness—has to do with his writing?

The answer is, Everything, according to what he says about how his creative process works, for example:

“As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind…

“…when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work on other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on” (1, p. 196).

Of course, the “unconscious…cerebration” was unconscious only in the sense that his regular self was not conscious of it. But his “partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me” was evidently busy “contriving [the novel’s] situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations,” to fill up the tank from which Mark Twain drew.

1. [Samuel L. Clemens]. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, et al., Editors. A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. Berkeley Los Angeles London, University of California Press, 2013.

J. M. Barrie retrospective: 1. Who Wrote “Peter Pan”? M’Connachie? 2. J. M. Barrie’s “The House of Fear” 3.“Peter Pan,” a multiple personality story.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Who Wrote Peter Pan? J. M. Barrie? Or M’Connachie? His “Writing Half”

James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) gave the Rectorial Address at St. Andrew’s University on May 3, 1922. His title and theme was Courage (1). However, the speech is most remembered for Barrie’s mention of “M’Connachie,” whom he called his “writing half.”

According to “Barrie’s Other Self,” an article in the New York Times of May 21, 1922, Barrie “revealed that McConnachie, whom he called his other self, really wrote the plays and not the Sir James Barrie known to all.”

Let me help you decide whether to take Barrie seriously or to dismiss M’Connachie as a joke (the latter being conventional wisdom).

Someone who knew him said, “Barrie, as I read him, is part mother, part hero-worshipping maiden, part grandfather, and part pixie with no man in him at all” (2, p. 301).

His secretary described him as “an extraordinary plural personality” (2, p. 307).

The biographer comments that “He was as unpredictable to himself as he was to others; he allowed moods to overwhelm and encase him until the strange M’Connachie who had him temporarily in thrall suffered James Barrie to be released again” (2, p. 368).

A story Barrie wrote called The Body in the Black Box had “the still fashionable Gothic theme of the doppelgänger. Here, Barrie is speaking about himself, about his own shadowy identity” (3, p. 60).

“Divided soul that he was…” (3, p. 114).

“The many selves that constituted J. M. Barrie…” (3, p. 195).

“…his complex personality—his many personalities…his warring selves…” (3, p. 247).

In the above context, I quote from Barrie’s speech, Courage (1):

He said that his work as a writer “may be described as playing hide and seek with angels. My puppets seem more real to me than myself, and I could get on much more swingingly if I made one of them deliver this address. It is M’Connachie who has brought me to this pass. M’Connachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half. We are complement and supplement. I am the half that is dour and practical and canny, he is the fanciful half…

“…I sometimes talk this over with M’Connachie, with whom, as you may guess, circumstances compel me to pass a good deal of my time…

“…M’Connachie is the one who writes the plays…

“…My so-called labors were just M’Connachie running away with me again…

“…Another piece of advice; almost my last. For reasons you may guess I must give this in a low voice. Beware of M’Connachie. When I look in a mirror now it is his face I see. I speak with his voice…He has clung to me, less from mischief than for companionship; I half like him and his penny whistle…he whispered to me just now that you elected him, not me, as your Rector…” (1).

It took courage for Barrie to talk about this publicly. I don’t think it should be dismissed as a joke.

1. J. M. Barrie. Courage: The Rectorial Address Delivered at St. Andrews University May 3, 1922. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930, 49 pages.

2. Janet Dunbar. J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970.

3. Lisa Chaney. Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2005.

Friday, June 6, 2014

J. M. Barrie’s The House of Fear Hints How To Unmask His Incognito Alternate Personalities

Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887-1960), an English writer, was the personal secretary and close friend of Sir James Barrie (1860-1937) for his last twenty years. His will gave her the copyright to all his works except Peter Pan, whose copyright he had given to support a hospital. Asquith described Barrie’s personality as follows:

“…an extraordinarily plural personality” (1, p. 18).

“No pen could convey how widely Barrie varies” (1, p. 22).

“As always, he was fluctuating, unpredictable” (1, p. 141).

“At…times…apparently neither consciously depressed nor annoyed, he would just fade out—perhaps tell one funny, very funny, story, and then subside into silence—Trappist silence—for the rest of the dinner” (1, p. 150).

“Barrie is unpredictable” (1, p. 163).

Of course, readers of this blog know that a person’s puzzling inconsistence may be a clue to the presence of multiple personality.

Barrie’s hint about his multiple personality, and the way Asquith could unmask it, were in one of his plays that he read to her:

“Another evening, I remember Barrie reading to me one of the very few recently ‘slung-off’ one-act plays he thought worth keeping. This was The Fight for Mr Lapraik [renamed The House of Fear], a terrifying drama about the struggle between the forces of Good and Evil for the possession of one more or less average man. At first, Barrie read dispassionately; then, suddenly kindling, dramatically, and in an utterly different voice for each character. The effect was unforgettably eerie…I can’t describe the disquieting tricks he played with face and voice, nor how both visibly and audibly he split himself into the two Mr Lapraiks…this singularly uncomfortable play had been suggested to him by a dream of his own…This nightmare sense of some sinister, furtive being lurking about his flat, determined to oust and supplant him, remained with him after he awoke…” (1, p. 26-27).

Barrie’s play, plus an article about it, are available online:

The House of Fear by J. M. Barrie

http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol27/iss1/3

"J. M. Barrie’s Jekyll and Hyde Drama: Lifting the Curtain on The House of Fear" by R.D.S. Jack

http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol27/iss1/4

In the play, Mrs. Lapraik has to distinguish between her real husband and his look-alike double. She succeeds in doing so by asking the man about things that her real husband would know, but that an impostor would not.

Therefore, when Cynthia Asquith would observe puzzling, unpredictable, distinct changes in Barrie’s behavior, she could have done something similar to what Mrs. Lapraik did. That is, when Barrie was behaving one way, she could have asked him about something that had been said or done while he had been behaving another way. If these different behaviors indicated different personalities, then he might have amnesia for what she asked him about. [But she evidently missed the hint and never questioned him in this way.]

One other episode Asquith mentions that is suggestive of multiple personality was when Barrie had “writer’s cramp,” and he had to change writing from right hand to left. Barrie told her:

“I’m going to take to writing with my left hand. It shouldn’t be as difficult for me as for others for I have really been ambidextrous all my life. In fact, I was naturally left-handed, but was compelled to use my right hand at school…It isn’t so difficult as you might fancy to write with the left hand, but it’s the dickens to think down the left side. It doesn’t even know the names of my works…” (1, p. 45).

In multiple personality, one personality may be right-handed and another personality may be left-handed.

1. Cynthia Asquith. Portrait of Barrie. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1955.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: a Multiple Personality Story

Peter Pan is not an immature man or a man who wishes for eternal youth. He is a prepubescent boy who never ages. He has hardly any memory of the past and hardly any sense of the future. No such boy has ever existed. And most men would not want to be one.

Such boys are found only in multiple personality. Indeed, as noted in yesterday’s post, they are one of the most common types of alternate personality.

“Child and infant personalities are found in virtually every MPD [multiple personality disorder] patient’s system of alter[nate] personalities. Usually there will be a number of child personalities, and they often exceed the number of adult personalities. The child and infant personalities are usually frozen in time; they are locked into a given age…” (1).

The other thing that I wish to highlight is found in “J. M. Barrie’s Introduction to the Play Peter Pan,” which begins:

“Some disquieting confessions must be made in printing at last the play of Peter Pan; among them is this, that I have no recollection of having written it…I remember writing the story of Peter and Wendy many years after the production of the play, but I might have cribbed that from some typed copy. I can haul back to mind the writing of almost every other assay of mine, however forgotten by the pretty public; but this play of Peter, no…How odd, too, that these trifles should adhere to the mind that cannot remember the long job of writing Peter” (2).

J. M. Barrie’s amnesia for writing Peter Pan reminds me of Sir Walter Scott’s amnesia for writing one of his novels, which I discussed at the end of my Dickens essay (June 2013 post).

The point is this, that if a writer had multiple personality, it would have been possible for one personality to have written something and have remembered doing so, but for another personality to have no memory of it.

It may be that the one who remembered writing Peter Pan was M’Connachie (see May 14th post).

1. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
2. J. M. Barrie. The Annotated Peter Pan: The Centennial Edition, Edited by Maria Tatar. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

“Their Inner Beasts: Lord of the Flies Six Decades Later” by Lois Lowry in New York Times barely mentions William Golding and fails to mention “Peter Pan”

Lois Lowry. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/books/review/their-inner-beasts-lord-of-the-flies-six-decades-later.html

Here are my two past posts on 1. the relation between “Lord of the Flies” and “Peter Pan,” and 2. the author of “Lord of the Flies,” William Golding:

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: Stories of lost boys, without adult supervision, on islands where time stands still

The ending of Lord of the Flies, “Ralph wept for…the darkness of man’s heart” (1, p. 285), is misleading. For it is silly to conclude anything about “man’s heart” based on a story of young boys. Their brains are not fully developed.

To understand “Lord of the Flies,” it helps to compare it to a similar story, “Peter Pan.” Both stories are about lost boys on an island, who have no adult supervision. One has a “beast,” the other has a crocodile. One has a tribe of bloodthirsty hunters, the other has bloodthirsty pirates. Both islands are magical places where time stands still.

In “Peter Pan,” it is directly stated that Peter and the lost boys, as long as they live on the island, will never grow up. In “Lord of the Flies,” the same thing is implied, since there is almost no reference to the boys’ growing up, or being likely to grow up, while on this island. For example, the question is never raised as to whether the face-painting, bloodthirsty hunters would be likely to still be interested in that in six months. To conclude anything about “man’s heart” from this story, you would have to assume that all or most of these boys, psychologically and morally speaking, will never grow up.

Now, jokes aside, most boys do grow up. The only “children” who never grow up are the child-aged alternate personalities of adults who have multiple personality. Child-aged alters are very common in adults with multiple personality, and they are child-aged because they arose when the person was a child and are frozen in time.

So when I read stories about children on magical islands where time stands still, I suspect that the characters are based on the author’s child-aged alters.

1. William Golding. Lord of the Flies. Introduction by Stephen King. New York, Perigee, 1954/2011.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

William Golding (Lord of the Flies; Nobel Prize) agrees with Margaret Atwood that a novelist’s regular self and writing self are distinct, alternate personalities

“Some of those who knew him best, among them the critic Stephen Medcalf, felt that the man they met and talked to was simply not the same man who wrote the novels. Medcalf went so far as to imagine that the novels were written by a ‘daimon’ or supernatural agent. Golding himself was half-prepared to countenance the idea. ‘That is right,’ he agreed, ‘Sometimes I have felt it myself and been astonished at what it accomplishes’. But he also felt the daimon idea was ‘too simple’, even if there was ‘something in it’. When writing in his journal he gave his ‘real’, everyday self curious comic nicknames (‘Pewter’ and ‘Bolonius’) to distinguish the ordinary Golding from Golding the novelist, who remained, it seems, outside his knowledge and control” (1, p.176).

Golding’s “everyday self” was really more than one identity—at least two—as indicated by the two names.  How many identities did the work of “the novelist”? He didn’t know. It was outside his knowledge and control.

Of course, the nature and number of identities, and what they know or don’t know about each other, is unique to each novelist. The only general conclusion is that normal novelists have multiple personality.

1. John Carey. William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies. New York, Free Press, 2009.

Self-Assessment for Aspiring Novelists: Read how one hundred great novelists think, to see if your mind works that way and if writing is for you.

Reading all eight hundred posts in this blog (written since 2013) will not make you a great novelist. But it might help you decide whether you have the potential to be a great novelist.

Before I did the reading for this blog, I had assumed that writers’ minds were basically like everyone else’s. Perhaps, as I had heard, they had more depression, bipolar disorder, and drinking. Perhaps they were highly imaginative. Perhaps they were a little eccentric. But wasn’t the main thing that they loved to write and had devoted themselves to it? Couldn’t anyone with the same love and devotion be a great writer, too?

What I found is that writers—according to what they have said about themselves, and how this is reflected in their writing—do not think like everyone else.

But neither are they freaks of nature. My guess is that about 30% of the general public thinks the same way that writers do, and that people from that 30% self-select themselves to become writers, resulting in 90% of writers’ thinking that way (a normal version of multiple personality).

Why 90%? Why not 100%. Two reasons. First there is the study of fifty writers by Marjorie Taylor et al, cited in this blog. Second, I just assume there must be some novelists who don’t think that way.

Where do I get the 30% figure? That is more of a guess. First, since novelists have to come from somewhere, there must be a pool of people in the general public who think the same way. Second, surveys find that a surprising number of people believe in angels, etc. Third, imaginary companions (similar to multiple personality) are common in childhood (although not everyone who had them remembers it). Fourth, the antecedent of multiple personality, childhood trauma (of various kinds and degrees) is relatively common.

I have addressed this post primarily to aspiring novelists rather than to great novelists, because there are more of the former than the latter. However, this blog may also be of interest to writers who have already proven themselves. They might like to know whether, and to what extent, other writers think the way they do.

How to write a novel: Read novels, practice writing (classes, workshops optional); listen to Muse; find Voice for novel; consider all your alternate personalities.

Since ancient times, writers have spoken of having a muse and listening to voices.

A Muse is a voice that remains with you and may offer guidance on any novel you write.

The Voice of a novel are the voices you hear that belong to that novel’s main characters and/or narrators.

What are these muses and voices? They are alternate personalities, which simply means that they are rational, autonomous, psychological entities, who have minds of their own.

Why think of muses and voices as alternate personalities? What is the advantage?

First, there is a body of knowledge related to alternate personalities (i.e., multiple personality).

Second, if you don’t realize that you have multiple personalities, and don’t consider the needs of your other personalities—and not just the needs of the Muse, the voices of that novel, and of the writing personality who is working with them—your other personalities might cause problems.

What if you don’t have a muse or hear voices? If you really do have them, but haven’t paid attention, you can listen for them. But if you just don’t have them—most people don’t—there are things to do other than write novels.

There are literally hundreds of posts in this blog about various aspects of writing: comments quoted from great writers and discussions of their novels. But you can't become a great writer just by knowing these things. Not everyone is suited to be a novelist. 

Is it an open secret at Iowa Writers’ Workshop and other graduate-level creative writing programs that novelists have normal version of multiple personality?

Four of the many illustrious writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop have been cited here in past posts: T. C. Boyle (alumnus and faculty), Frank Conroy (1987-2005 director and faculty), Philip Roth (faculty), and Kurt Vonnegut (faculty).

My guess is that multiple personality is, indeed, an open secret at writing programs: everyone, vaguely, knows about it, but they don’t speak about it, except, occasionally, in euphemism or jest.

Another way of putting this is to say they both know it and don’t know it.

Take, for example, Conroy’s “Me and Conroy” (see post earlier today). It was apparently written by an alternate personality. Does this mean Conroy knew he had multiple personality? Not necessarily. Conroy may have felt that the essay was written by a writing self (a euphemism), while the latter apparently thought of himself as another person, not as Conroy’s alternate personality. Was the whole thing a joke? No, it was published in a collection of nonfiction essays, and was seen by his friend, Tom Grimes, as consistent with what he knew about Conroy (see past post).

“Me and Conroy”: Frank Conroy (post 6) either pretends he has multiple personality (why would he?) or publishes essay by alternate personality.

In a previous post, Tom Grimes, a friend and student of Conroy at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in describing Conroy as having several personalities, mentioned the following essay, “Me and Conroy,” which, since it is very brief, is quoted in its entirety:

“He needs me more than I need him, but you’d never know it from the way he treats me. Contempt is perhaps too strong a word. It’s something icier, more distant, more perfectly disinterested. He uses me as if I could easily be replaced, which is certainly not true. Not easily, anyway. Who else would put up with him the way I have? (For instance, this is the fourth version of this manuscript, and it’s only a tiny bit better than the first. A lot of time for a very small gain, in other words, and no complaints will be heard.) Who else would ask nothing of him—I mean nothing, not once, ever—simply for the experience of his company? What makes it worse is I think he knows all this and finds it banal. Yes! He does! I felt it just now as my hand wrote the word.

       Should I mention the matter of the cigarettes? I think I should. After smoking a pack a day for forty years, I stopped five months ago. Quitting was difficult, to say the least, but the support of my family and friends helped. I’m on the verge of a big change here, which is to say seeing myself as a nonsmoker, accepting myself as a nonsmoker. Everybody respects this except him. My abstinence irritates him for some reason, and when I try to write he tempts me with images of the red and gold Dunhill package, which he knows I used to smoke on special occasions. ‘Is this not a special occasion?’ he seems to be saying, ‘with the clipboard across your knees and your pen in your hand? Is this not as special as it’s ever going to get?’ Arrogant bastard.

       You see, there’s nothing fancy about it. The situation resembles the story line of a thousand execrable country-western songs more than it does any delicate Borgesian aperçu. I’ve laid my life on the line, and if that isn’t love I don’t know what love is. For my entire adult life he has simply popped up whenever it pleased him, used me, put me through a million changes and split without warning, leaving me exhausted and enervated. He takes me, and my love, totally for granted, and if I had any brains I’d tell him to fuck off. But of course it’s far too late for that. He is my fate, for better or worse.

       I just wish he’d talk to me directly sometimes. You know, stop whatever he’s doing and look me in the eye and tell me something that would help me get rid of this idea of myself as some feckless brokenhearted jukebox cowboy crying in my beer. I mean, would the sky fall? Would the stars freeze in their courses? God damn it, he owes me. Don’t you think?” (1).

1. Frank Conroy. “Me and Conroy” (1995), pp. 121-122, in Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.