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.

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Saturday, March 18, 2017

“A Separate Peace” by John Knowles (post 1): What does it mean when Gene sees Phineas in mirror: romantic friendship, literary doubling, or multiple personality?

In 1942, Gene (first-person narrator) and Phineas (Finny) are 16-year-old roommates at an American boys’ boarding school. At age 18, they will face the draft into WWII. The plot revolves around the nature of their relationship, which may be one or more of the following:

1. romantic friendship (either nonsexual or implicitly homosexual)
2. literary doubling (Finny represents a latent side of Gene’s personality)
3. multiple personality (Finny represents Gene’s alternate personality)

Gene and Phineas are of the same height and general appearance. Their clothes fit each other. Gene is a top student. Finny is a star athlete. Finny’s voice is “hypnotic” (1, pp. 14, 25, 54). Why is the word “hypnotic” used repeatedly? It implies that what is going on involves altered states of consciousness (perhaps the altered consciousness of alternate personalities).

Gene sees Phineas in the Mirror
After Phineas is hospitalized for a broken leg, Gene has this experience:

“I spent as much time as I could alone in our room, trying to empty my mind of every thought, to forget where I was, even who I was…I decided to put on his clothes. We wore the same size, and although he always criticized mine he used to wear them frequently, quickly forgetting what belonged to him and what to me…

“But when I looked in the mirror…I was Phineas, Phineas to the life. I even had his humorous expression on my face, his sharp, optimistic awareness…The sense of transformation stayed with me throughout the evening, and even when I undressed and went to bed…it was only on waking up that this illusion was gone, and I was confronted with myself…(1, p. 62).

Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog for previous discussions, and other literary examples, of this known phenomenon of multiple personality: seeing alternate personalities in the mirror.

1. John Knowles. A Separate Peace [1959]. New York, Scribner, 2003.
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