BASIC CONCEPTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Share site with friends.

Monday, October 31, 2016

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.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment (whether you agree or disagree) and ask questions (simple or expert). I appreciate your contribution.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)