“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt (post 3): Narrator’s probable multiple personality-type memory gap and Camilla’s French-speaking alternate personality.

I am halfway through the novel, and the murder announced in the Prologue has taken place: five college seminar students have killed the sixth, because the latter knew that four of them had killed a bystander when they had been in a state of ritual, dissociative-type “madness” (which they had intentionally worked themselves into for the express purpose of getting away from their regular selves).

Since the student I previously noted as having childish handwriting (child-aged alternate personality?) was the one they killed, the question of his having multiple personality remains unanswered. However, two of the other students have now had episodes suggestive of multiple personality.

Camilla

Following the ritual madness murder of the bystander, “Camilla couldn’t even talk for three days…She was thinking clearly enough, but the words wouldn’t come out right. As if she had a stroke. When she started to speak again, her high school French came back before her English…" (1, p. 168). The most likely explanation is that she had a French-speaking alternate personality who spoke before her regular English-speaking personality came back.

Richard

The first-person narrator has a memory gap, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality: “Then I remember feeling dizzy, pushing through the crowd [at a party] to get some air. I could see the door propped invitingly with a cinder block, could feel a cold draft on my face. Then—I don’t know, I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew my back was against a wall, in an entirely different place, and a strange girl was talking to me. Gradually I understood that I must have been standing there with her for some time…” (1, p. 268-269).

Before coming to the party, another student had given Richard a Demerol. And then at the party, he had been drinking. But prior to his taking the Demerol and drinking, he had already been “in a sort of trance” (1, p. 266). And, coincidentally, the girl he finds himself talking to at the party is described as “a small girl, barely five feet” (1, p. 269), which happens to be the stature of the author, who in her magazine article about her childhood (post 2) had described herself as involved with what amounted to self-hypnosis (often posited as the mechanism of multiple personality).

But the main point—discussed in previous posts about the confusion between alcohol blackouts and multiple personality memory gaps—is that the latter is often mistaken for the former.

Richard accompanies the small, college girl back to her apartment, where they have sexual relations. Then Richard goes back to his own apartment, where he is visited by one of the male students in his seminar, who is homosexual, and who kisses Richard. Richard starts to respond to the kisses, but they are interrupted. It is implied that his response is another aftereffect of the Demerol, but it may be that Richard has a homosexual alternate personality.

In short, Camilla’s French-speaking personality and Richard’s memory gap are this novel’s first concrete indications of multiple personality; that is, they are first if you don’t count the novel’s pivotal event, the ritual dissociative “madness.”

1. Donna Tartt. The Secret History. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.