Self-Contradiction: Clue to multiple personality in Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, and Daphne du Maurier.

The following six posts highlight self-contradiction as a clue to the presence of multiple personality.

Note: Since each of these authors has been the subject of multiple posts—not just the one below—search each author’s name to see their other posts for further evidence of their multiple personality.

Table of Contents

1. Lewis Carroll: The Mysterious, Self-Contradictory Inconsistency of Multiple Personality, including Carroll’s Child-Aged Alternate Personalities.

2. Evidence of Huck Finn’s multiple personality in his self-contradictory—not ambivalent or hypocritical—attitudes about freeing Jim.

3. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: He is invisible, because his true emotions and humanity, in the form of alternate personalities, are hidden.

4. Salman Rushdie’s “Joseph Anton: A Memoir”: Third-person narrative of his years in hiding from a death-threat for “The Satanic Verses.”

5. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”: This novel’s blatant self-contradictions reflect multiple narrative personalities that should have been reconciled in rewrite.

6. Daphne du Maurier: The National Book Award Winner’s Male and Female Alternate Personalities.

April 6, 2014

Lewis Carroll: The Mysterious, Self-Contradictory Inconsistency of Multiple Personality, including Carroll’s Child-Aged Alternate Personalities

One of the hallmarks of multiple personality is that—when a person has it, but you don’t know it—you can’t get a coherent picture of them, because, unknown to you, their various personalities differ from each other in such things as attitudes, values, age, or even gender.

A good biography of such a person is Jenny Woolf’s The Mystery of Lewis Carroll (New York, St. Martins Press, 2010). Woolf’s main conclusion is that she likes Carroll—as she has, since, as a child, she read about Alice’s adventures—but that he is a mystery, because he is “self-contradictory.”

One of the perennial controversies about Carroll is the nature of his relationship with the young girls to whom he liked to tell entertaining stories and of whom he liked to take pictures. The issue is traditionally framed as the peculiar, if not perverted, interest of an adult man in little girls.

But if Carroll had multiple personality, the personality who was interested in little girls may not have been either adult or male. Since, needless to say, I have not had the opportunity to interview Carroll when he was in that frame of mind, I can only go by circumstantial evidence. I quote from The Mystery of Lewis Carroll:

“His niece, Irene Dodgson Jacques, looking back to her childhood, remembered [Carroll] sitting beside her on the carpet happily playing with a marvelous bear that opened and closed its mouth as it spoke.”

“[Carroll] in his toy-strewn college rooms was perfectly recognizable as the youth who had loved creating puppet stories for his little brothers and sisters…”

“There have been many condescending remarks made about this characteristic of his, as though a love of childish things somehow prevented him from being a proper adult. Virginia Woolf thought that childhood had lodged within Carroll ‘whole and entire’…”

Not all the young children Carroll played with were girls. For example, there was “Bert Coote, whom he met when Coote was 10. ‘My sister and I were regular young imps,’ Coote recalled later, ‘and nothing delighted us more than to give imitations…but we never gave imitations of Lewis Carroll…he was one of us, and never a grown up pretending to be a child...’”

So, psychologically speaking, the situation may not have been an adult man interested in little girls. And the inconsistency between his adult and child-aged personalities would have made him seem self-contradictory. Other of his inconsistencies included his attitudes toward sex and religion. Sometimes he was the ultimate prude, but other times he wasn’t. Sometimes he was the unquestioning believer, but other times he was wasn’t. Different personalities differed.

Many people have their moral ambivalence or even hypocrisy, but Carroll was known for his unusually marked degree of sincere, but contradictory attitudes. Which is how people come across when they have multiple personality, but when you haven’t knowingly interviewed the various personalities, and you don’t know that this is what is going on.

May 6, 2015

Evidence of Huck Finn’s multiple personality in his self-contradictory—not ambivalent or hypocritical—attitudes about freeing Jim

Many readers have been disappointed with Huck, when, in the last part of the novel, he says he truly believes that he would go to hell for freeing Jim, and when he plays games with Tom while Jim remains literally in chains and fearful for his life. It appears that Huck is a racist at heart, either by ambivalence or hypocrisy.

But there is a third possibility.

If Huck were ambivalent about freeing Jim, he would honestly like to free Jim, but he would not want to become estranged from all his friends and family who believe in slavery, and he would not want to get lynched. People are ambivalent when they are pulled in different directions by conflicting interests.

If Huck were a hypocrite, he would say he wants to free Jim, but he would know that he really didn’t want to, in his heart.

But Huck is neither ambivalent nor hypocritical. He wants to free Jim and he doesn’t want to free Jim. He wants both, honestly, in his heart. How can such self-contradiction be possible?

True self-contradiction is possible only in multiple personality, when one personality honestly thinks one way and another personality honestly thinks another way, and the two ways are incompatible and contradictory.

August 11, 2016

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: 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.

February 16, 2015

Salman Rushdie’s “Joseph Anton: A Memoir”: Third-person narrative of his years in hiding from a death-threat for “The Satanic Verses”

Rushdie’s pseudonym in hiding was “Joseph Anton”: “Joseph” taken from Joseph Conrad, author of the “The Secret Sharer” (see past post).

I don’t know whether Rushdie’s use, in a memoir, of a third-person narrator reflects the author’s multiple personality or is a purely technical choice. It never felt natural to me.

Nor am I sure who vandalized his college room—probably a racist and not an alternate personality:

“…a few nights before his [Rushdie’s own] graduation, some anonymous wit…chose to redecorate his…college room, in his absence, by hurling a bucketful of gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of his record player and clothes. With that ancient tradition of fairness and justice upon which the colleges of Cambridge prided themselves, King’s instantly held him solely responsible for the mess…” (1, pp. 45-46).

“He was a migrant…The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogeneous…multiple rather than singular…” (1, pp. 53-54).

He calls the following alternate perspective his “unconscious,” but it sounds like a second self who has artistic differences: “His conscious mind was, as usual, at odds with his unconscious which kept throwing angels and miracles at his rationality and insisting that he find ways to incorporate them into his way of seeing” (1, p. 73).

Near the end of his memoir, he says: “In the pages of a novel it was clear that the human self was heterogeneous not homogeneous, not one thing but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory…” (1, p. 627).

He goes on to illustrate his comment with things that could represent ordinary roles in life, and not alternate personalities. But a person who has various ordinary roles in life—like most people—usually experiences himself as multifaceted, and the roles as complementary.

However, if a person feels himself to be “not one thing, but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory,” it sounds less like ordinary roles and more like multiple personality. 

1. Salman Rushdie. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York, Random House, 2012/2013.

August 6, 2015

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”: This novel’s blatant self-contradictions reflect multiple narrative personalities that should have been reconciled in rewrite

Now that I’ve read Lolita, I’m no longer interested in whether Clare Quilty is a “double” of Humbert Humbert (HH). No, the main feature of this novel—especially in regard to multiple personality—is self-contradiction.

At the beginning of Lolita, HH spells out his fixation on “nymphets,” who are pubescent girls aged nine to fourteen. But at the end, HH wants to live forever-after with Lolita even though she is no longer a nymphet: She is years too old, not to mention married and pregnant by someone else.

The way that Nabokov glosses over this contradiction is that he calls HH “a maniac,” which is not a valid diagnosis, and is just a poor excuse to account for anything, no matter how inconsistent. (The reason that there is such a thing as psychiatric diagnosis is that symptoms tend to be consistent.)

Either the author had more than one narrative personality, whose differences were not reconciled in rewrite, or the author failed to “prune” (as Stephen King would say) what the characters told him and failed to “control” his characters (as Toni Morrison would say) (as quoted in past posts).

It is like the person who wrote the end of this novel was not the same person who wrote the beginning, and hadn’t even read the beginning.

September 15, 2014

Daphne du Maurier: The National Book Award Winner’s Male and Female Alternate Personalities

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), Lady Browning, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was a novelist, wife, and mother. Her novel, Rebecca, won the National Book Award for 1938. Alfred Hitchcock’s first American movie, “Rebecca,” based on the book, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. Indeed, a number of her stories and novels were made into movies. In short, she was a very successful, well-functioning person.

At the same time, beginning in childhood, she had at least two personalities, one male and one female. She referred to the male personality by different names at different times in her life: “alter ego Eric Avon,” “boy-in-the-box,” narrator, or “personality No. 2.”

“There were no psychological depths to Eric Avon. He just shone at everything…There was a cricket match, and prize-giving, with Eric Avon receiving four prizes, but for what subjects my diary does not state…But it was a sad moment for the captain of cricket. I realized that Eric must now be nearly eighteen, and that this would be his final day at school…I often wonder how he got on at Cambridge, and what became of him. How did he fare in later life?…Yet why did I pick on Eric Avon as an alter ego and not an imaginary Peggy Avon…?…Whatever the reason, he remained in my unconscious, to emerge in later years—though in quite a different guise—as the narrator of the five novels I was to write, at long intervals, in the first person singular, masculine gender, I’ll Never Be Young Again, My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, The Flight of the Falcon, The House on the Strand. None of these characters resembled the popular schoolboy hero, Eric Avon; instead, their personalities can be said to be undeveloped, inadequate, sharing a characteristic that had never been Eric’s, who had dominated…For each of my five narrators depended, for reassurance, on a male friend older than himself…The female narrators—and these have been three in number—depended upon no one but themselves…The only timid one of the trio was the nameless heroine in Rebecca, and she found strength of purpose when she discovered that her husband Maxim truly loved her, and had never cared for this first wife Rebecca” (1, pp. 55-58).

“Her alter ego, ‘Eric Avon’, in whom she believed implicitly, went to Rugby and was bold and fearless and did all the things she would have done if she had been a boy…It was all rather charming and nobody was disturbed, nobody realized quite how much Daphne genuinely hated being a girl. What her family also did not realize, and this was much more serious, was that Daphne actually convinced herself she was a boy” (2, p. 14).

“The boy could sometimes be shut up in the box inside her, it seemed, without causing any strain” (2, p. 39).

“What puzzled [Clara, Daphne’s friend] were the two sides to [Daphne]: on the one hand the genuine love, after all, of the simple life, but on the other the contradiction, to Clara, of a rucksack full of ‘cosmetics, vanishing creams…lotions…and also scents’. Daphne’s clothes fascinated her too: ‘a white jockey cap, socks, mountaineer’s boots with yellow laces, linen blouse and a zip linen skirt on top of white cotton shorts, then in villages she zipped it back up—‘she was feminine…[then] on the yonder side up rolled the skirt and she strode forward like a boy’” (2, pp. 263-264).

“[Daphne] wrote…she had always been able to feel within herself two quite separate personalities—‘When I get madly boyish No. 2 is in charge, and then, after a bit, the situation is reversed.’ The point was that…one had to make friends with No. 2 and say ‘now don’t get carried away…No. 2 can come to the surface and be helpful’. She explained that when she was writing she felt all No. 2—‘he certainly has a lot to do with my writing’—but when she was not, No. 2 caused trouble…But sometimes her No.2 came into its own and she felt ‘a power thing’…Daphne was trying hard to explain the tremendous contradictions she knew existed in her own personality…the problem of aligning her No. 1 and No. 2 has something to do with her writing self being different from her real-life self…’The people I write about in books are more real to me than the people I meet’…in order to function at all she had to suppress her No. 2” (2, pp. 276-279).

“She could tolerate only a few months without writing before being plagued by her discontented No. 2 which had no other outlet” (2, p. 287).

1. Daphne du Maurier. Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer. Garden City NY, Doubleday & Company, 1977.

2. Margaret Forster. Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. New York, Doubleday, 1993.

Comment

A person without multiple personality might say he loves chocolate on one day, and the next day say he does not want any, but he will have a reason for not wanting it, such as being on a diet. However, only a person with multiple personality will say he loves chocolate, but then later say that he has never liked chocolate. True self-contradiction is a clue to the presence of multiple personality.

Another way of saying self-contradiction is “puzzling inconsistency.” Ordinary inconsistency or ambivalence can be explained in ordinary ways if you know enough about the person. But if you know a person very well and their inconsistent behavior still does not make sense, it may be due to alternate personalities, as in the case of Daphne du Maurier, who was unusual in publicly acknowledging it.