Alternate Personalities of Borges, Oates, Conroy, and Faulkner speak: “Borges and I,” “JCO and I (After Borges),” “Me and Conroy,” “Afternoon of a Cow.”

from August 27, 2015 (original post)

Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges and I” describes his own real-life, normal version of multiple personality, but literary critics think it is philosophy or a joke

Borges (1899-1986), according to Wikipedia, was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator. In 1955, about the same time he became completely blind, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961, he came to international attention when he shared a literary prize with Samuel Beckett. His work embraces the “character of unreality in all literature.” In the words of Nobel Prize novelist J. M. Coetzee, Borges, “more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.”

However, since Borges’s writing includes many avowed literary hoaxes, he had the same problem as Mark Twain, who complained that nobody believed him when he told the truth. His brief essay, “Borges and I,” rather than being read as a straightforward admission of multiple personality, has been misinterpreted as humor or philosophy.

But here is where Borges, in his real life, was coming from: “The boy was a worry to his parents…He was an extremely anxious child…He used to have bad dreams about peeling off his face and finding someone else’s beneath it, or of taking off a mask only to discover that he was wearing another. Similar anxieties invaded his waking life, too: He was frightened of mirrors…at times he imagined he could see someone else's face staring back at him…” (1, p. 38).

If you search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog, you will find posts about the clinically well-known fact that people with multiple personality sometimes see their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror.

“Borges and I” (translated from Spanish) by Jorge Luis Borges

It’s to that other one, to Borges, that things happen. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause, one could say mechanically, to gaze at a vestibule’s arch and its inner door; of Borges I receive news in the mail and I see his name in a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of [Robert Louis] Stevenson; the other shares these preferences, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into an actor’s attributes. It would be an exaggeration to claim that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live so that Borges may write his literature, and this literature justifies me. It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that he has put together some decent passages, yet these passages cannot save me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to live on in the other. Little by little, I continue ceding to him everything, even though I am aware of his perverse tendency to falsify and magnify.

Spinoza understood that all things strive to persevere being; the stone wishes to be eternally a stone and the tiger a tiger. I will endure in Borges, not in myself (if it is that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in those of many others, or in the well-worn strum of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him by moving on from the mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games are now Borges’ and I will have to conceive of other things. Thus my life is a running away and I lose everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.

I do not know which of the two is writing this piece.

1. Edwin Williamson. Borges: A Life. New York, Viking, 2004.

from September 12, 2015 (original post)

“JCO” and I (After Borges): A brief essay by Joyce Carol Oates, published in one of her nonfiction books

“ ‘JCO’ is not a person, nor even a personality, but a process that has resulted in a sequence of texts…I, on the contrary, am fated to be ‘real’—‘physical’—‘corporeal’—to ‘exist in Time.’ I continue to age year by year, if not hour by hour, while ‘JCO,’ the other, remains no fixed age…perhaps…a precocious eighteen years old…

“ ‘JCO’ occasionally mines, and distorts, my personal history…

“It would be misleading to describe our relationship as hostile…we are more helpfully defined as diamagnetic, the one repulsing the other as magnetic poles repulse each other, so that ‘JCO’ eclipses me, or…I eclipse ‘JCO’…

“For once not she, but I, am writing these pages. Or so I believe” (1, pp. 153-155).

The alternate personality who wrote this brief essay says that “JCO” is a process, not a person or personality, but, then again, JCO may be like a precocious eighteen-year-old. What does this mean?

It may mean that “JCO” is not any one person or personality, but refers to a group of personalities, perhaps one of whom stays eighteen-years-old and never ages. (In multiple personality, some personalities age, but others, like Lewis Carroll’s Peter Pan, never age.)

It would not be unusual for a group of personalities to be known by one public name. That situation was illustrated in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. As I pointed out in a past post, “Dorian Gray” was a name that actually referred to a whole group of distinct personalities.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. New York, ECCO/HarperCollins, 2003.

from October 24, 2016 (original 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.

The above three essays were published as nonfiction. William Faulkner made a similar confession in a humorous short story:

from February 28, 2014 (original post)

William Faulkner’s Multiple Personality: Hidden in Plain Sight

In a short story, written by Faulkner and read to his friends as a “joke,” Faulkner’s alter ego says that he, not Faulkner, is the one who does Faulkner’s writing, that he is Faulkner’s ghost writer:

Faulkner, William: “Afternoon of a Cow” (1937/1947). In Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph Blotner. New York, Random House, 1979/1997.

For a discussion of that story and related issues, see:

Grimwood, Michael: Heart in Conflict: Faulkner’s Struggles with Vocation. Athens, The University of Georgia Press, 1987.