V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize speech says his books were written, not by “the self that frequents the world,” but by an “innermost self,” an alternate personality.

Naipaul quotes Proust, who said, “…that a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life…In fact, it is the secretions of one’s innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life…is the product of a quite superficial self, not the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world” (1).

Naipaul had made a similar distinction in a 1994 interview. The interviewer reports: “That is how he talks, as if he were observing from afar the creature who bears his name. He says, ‘one’ instead of ‘I’ he refers to himself as ‘the writer’ and sometimes as ‘the man.’ [Naipaul] says ‘I do it instinctively, distinguishing between them, between writer and man’ ” (2).

In past posts, I have quoted other writers who have said the same thing. This distinction, between the writer’s regular self (host personality) and writing self, is almost a cliché: You can never meet the person who actually wrote the book.

However, I disagree with that mystical conclusion. You and the person’s host personality can meet and talk with the person’s alternate personalities, if you recognize that the condition is multiple personality and know what you are doing.

1. V. S. Naipaul - Nobel Lecture (2001).
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html  http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=899
2. Feroza Jussawalla (Editor). Conversations with V. S. Naipaul. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1997, p. 139.