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.

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Tuesday, December 6, 2016

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.

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