Jennifer Egan in NY Times says favorite heroine is Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, who is “flawed but self aware,” but Lily’s lack of self awareness is one main theme.

Jennifer Egan says: “My favorite heroine is Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” She’s a tragic figure: flawed but self aware, living at a time when a woman’s surest ticket to wealth and comfort was physical beauty. In her last act, Lily transcends her mistakes, and I’ve never managed to read it without sobbing.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/books/review/jennifer-egan-by-the-book.html?mcubz=0

But one of the novel’s main themes is that Lily is not self aware, due to her having multiple, dissociated selves, working at cross-purposes, as discussed in a past post:

May 12, 2015

Lily Bart’s multiple dissociated selves in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth prevent her marrying, and end in suicide, because they are at cross-purposes.

“Miss Bart…had a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another” (1, p. 101).

“She might have married more than once—the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence—but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it” (1, p. 123).

“That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic” (1, p. 148). 

The explanation is that she has multiple selves who are at cross-purposes with each other. Little is known about these selves, and it is difficult to know which are the same, but referred to by different names, and which are distinct, but there may be more, perhaps many more, than two of them, variously referred to as “captive,” “free-spirit,” “frightened self,” “insistent voice,” “abhorrent being,” “Furies,” speaking in an “altered voice,” “anguished self,” “a hundred different points of consciousness…this legion of insurgent nerves…sentinels” (see below).

“There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free-spirit quivered for flight…Was it love, she wondered…” (1, p. 52).

“It was as if the eager current of her being had been checked by a sudden obstacle which drove it back upon itself. She looked at him helplessly, like a hurt or frightened child: this real self of hers, which he had the faculty of drawing out of the depths, was so little accustomed to go alone!” (1, p. 75).

“But all the while another self was sharpening her to vigilance, whispering the terrified warning that every word and gesture must be measured” (1, p. 114).

“…the frightened self in her was dragging the other down…Whence the strength came to her she knew not; but an insistent voice warned her that she must leave the house openly…She seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves in her, the one she had always known, and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained…Yes, the Furies might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the dark corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their wings was in her brain…” (1, pp. 116-117).

“Then [Lily Bart] lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered voice… ‘There is some one I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you—we are sure to see each other again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room’ ” (1, p. 240).

“Sleep was what she wanted…The little bottle was at her bedside…but as soon as she had lain down every nerve started once more into separate wakefulness…her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered…She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was possible…a hundred different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could still this legion of insurgent nerves?…She raised herself in bed and swallowed the contents of the glass; then blew out the candle and lay down…Tonight the drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts” (1, pp. 250-251).

1. Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth [1905]. A Norton Critical Edition, Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. New York, WW Norton & Company, 1990.

Dissociative Fugue, common in multiple personality: New York Times reports “9 Years Later, a Teacher Vanishes Again. This Time, in the Virgin Islands” (1).

Dissociative fugue is a temporary psychological symptom in which people have amnesia for who they are, and they travel to where people do not know them. It rarely occurs as a condition in and of itself, but it commonly occurs as a symptom of multiple personality (dissociative identity disorder) (2, p. 293).

The writers Agatha Christie and Sherwood Anderson had dissociative fugues, and so have a number of fictional characters: search “fugue” in this blog to see relevant past posts.

1. Rebecca Flint Marx. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/nyregion/missing-teacher-virgin-islands.html?mcubz=0&_r=0

2. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and "Chapter on Dreams" by Robert Louis Stevenson: Duality is botched, because author had experienced multiplicity.

Although Stevenson’s title speaks of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” as though they were two distinct characters and the theme were duality, his text admits that Jekyll and Hyde were composite characters, Jekyll more obviously than Hyde:

“My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between. Jekyll (who was a composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit” (1, p. 55).

I think that Stevenson got tied up in knots when he wrote this story, because he did not not really believe in the duality of man, but in man’s multiplicity:

“I say two…[but]…I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (1, p. 48).

Why did he expect man to be ultimately known for multiplicity? Because that was his personal experience as a fiction writer, as he discussed in his “Chapter on Dreams”:

November 18, 2015

“A Chapter on Dreams” by Robert Louis Stevenson: He gives most of the credit for his published fiction to his alternate personalities, his “unseen collaborators”

“…But presently my dreamer…began to write and sell his tales. Here was he, and here were the little people who did that part of his business…

“…how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for himself. Here is one, exactly as it came to him…

[the story is outlined]

“For now [the reader] sees why I speak of the little people as substantive inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer…that he had no guess whatsoever at the motive of the woman—the hinge of the whole well-invented plot—until the instant of that highly dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was the little people’s!…

“But observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told with really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is…psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot better it…

“Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer’s, beyond doubt…only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. Who are they, then? and who is the dreamer?

“Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a person than myself…And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them!…That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. For myself—what I call I, my conscious ego…I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all…so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownies, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise…I am an excellent adviser…I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on the whole I have some claim to share, though not as largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise…” (2).

1. Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A Norton Critical Edition, Edited by Katherine Linehan. New York, W. W. Norton, 2003.

2. Robert Louis Stevenson. “A Chapter on Dreams,” Scribner’s Magazine, January 1888, pp. 122-128.

“The Red and the Black” by Stendhal (post 11): Since both protagonist and narrator have multiple personality, the other major characters probably do, too.

In previous posts, I cited Julien’s explicit acknowledgement of having at least two personalities, and the narrator’s occasional slips into nosism (plural self-reference), as unsubtle evidence of their having multiple personality.

In the context of multiple personality in both the protagonist and the narrator, I would interpret Madame de Rênal, Mathilde, and the Marquis as having multiple personality, too.

The two women are described as having rather extreme switches, back and forth, between loving and hating Julien. Some might say they are women, and women are fickle, but that would be sexism, not literary or psychological interpretation. I think that their behavioral changes are radical enough to support the possibility that they, too, have multiple personality.

In another previous post, I discussed the episode in which the Marquis directs Julien to sometimes wear a black suit, but other times wear a blue suit, and the Marquis’s behavior radically changes in response to the way Julien is dressed. The Marquis treats Julien as an underling when he is dressed in black, but as a social equal when Julien is dressed in blue. It appears to me that the Marquis is switching between two personalities.

What is the meaning of the novel’s title? Nobody seems to know. The most common guess is that red stands for the military and that black stands for the clergy, but the plot gives weak support to that interpretation. My guess is that these colors had a private meaning for Stendhal in regard to the organization of his inner world of alternate personalities.

Let me conclude by returning to what originally called this author to my attention: his use of pseudonyms. While it is certainly possible for writers to have reasons other than multiple personality for the use of pseudonyms, I believe that the possibility of multiple personality should be considered whenever pseudonyms are used.

“The Red and the Black” by Stendhal (post 10): At the end, Julien Sorel hears a voice that he explicitly recognizes as the voice of an alternate personality.

The protagonist, Julien Sorel, has been convicted of premeditated, attempted murder. He receives a death sentence, which he refuses to appeal. In jail, awaiting the guillotine, he speculates about what might have been, if things had gone differently. His thoughts are interrupted by a voice, which he explicitly recognizes as the voice of an alternate personality:

“…All my stupidities would have been forgiven, or more likely thought worthy. A man of high repute, enjoying high life in Vienna or London.

“ ‘Not exactly, sir: you’ll be guillotined in three days.’

“Julien laughed heartily at his own mordant wit. ‘Really, we all have two personalities,’ he thought. ‘What devil thought up that nasty joke?’

“ ‘All right! Yes, my friend, guillotined in three days,’ he replied to whoever or whatever had interrupted him” (1, p. 464).

When Julien asks “What devil thought up that nasty joke?” he seems to be implying that he has more than two personalities, and that he is not sure which of his other personalities was the devilish joker.

He says not only “whoever,” but also “whatever,” because not all alternate personalities are perceived as ordinary people; e.g., some may be perceived as devils or angels.

1. Stendhal. The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830. Translated by Burton Raffel. New York, The Modern Library, 2003.

“The Red and the Black” by Stendhal (post 9): Does the narrator slip into nosism—plural self-refence—because the narrator has multiple personality?

“Since it is our intention to flatter no one, we will not deny that Madame de Rênal, who possessed superb skin, had her dresses made so that they left her arms, as well as her breasts, quite open to view. She had a fine figure, and this way of showing it off was wonderfully becoming” (1, p. 48).

“It pains us to admit, since we love Mathilde, that she had received letters from several of these young men, and had sometimes replied to them. We hasten to add that, in so doing, she was an exception to the rules of her time. Lack of prudence is not usually ascribable to young women who have been students at the noble Convent of the Sacred Heart of Jesus” (1, p. 296).

Nosism, a person’s plural self-reference, has three usual kinds: 1. the royal "we" or pluralis majestatis, 2. the editorial “we,” and 3. the author's "we" or pluralis modestiae, which refers to the author and the reader (2), none of which explains the narrator’s nosism in the passages quoted above.

1. Stendhal. The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830. Translated by Burton Raffel. New York, The Modern Library, 2003.

2. Wikipedia. “Nosism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism

Added 9:30 pm: The narrator calls himself the "author" (1, p. 341).

“Gratuitous Multiple Personality”: Novel’s unacknowledged signs of multiple personality may not seem intentional, but could they have been the ulterior motive?

Previously, my explanation of gratuitous multiple personality in a novel has been that it inadvertently reflects the author’s own multiple personality.

But what if it was not inadvertent? How do I know it was not the author’s ulterior motive? Perhaps it was inadvertent in some novels, but the ulterior motive of others. Or perhaps it was inadvertent for some of the author’s personalities, but the ulterior motive for others.

All I know is that a good many novels have unacknowledged signs and symptoms of multiple personality.

“The Red and the Black” by Stendhal (post 8): Julien and Marquis, re Julien’s black suit and blue suit, have gratuitous multiple personality scenario.

In Chapter Seven of Part Two, when Julien Sorel is working as secretary and agent for the wealthy, powerful, upper-class Marquis, the latter gives Julien a blue suit as an alternative to the black suit that Julien has been wearing since coming from the seminary.

Sometimes Julien wears the black suit, and sometimes Julien wears the blue suit. When Julien wears the black suit, the Marquis treats him as an underling, but when Julien wears the blue suit, the Marquis treats Julien as though he were a member of the Marquis’s own social class.

The presumable reason for giving Julien the blue suit is that the Marquis wants Julien to be able to represent him in schemes involving people of the upper class; he wants Julien to be taken seriously by such people. So the Marquis gives him a blue suit and spreads rumors among people in the upper class that Julien is really one of them.

The peculiar thing is that the Marquis, even when only the two of them are present, treats Julien almost as though he were two different people, of two different classes, depending on which color suit Julien is wearing. This scenario, in which one person is like two different people, who have different clothing styles, is typical of multiple personality.

But why is there a multiple personality scenario in this novel? There appears to be no conscious intention to depict any character as having multiple personality, nor does multiple personality appear to be an intentional element of the plot. Its presence in this novel is unnecessary and gratuitous, which suggests that the only reason for it is that it reflects the author’s own psychology.

Search “gratuitous” or “gratuitous multiple personality” for previous examples with other writers.

In the next chapter, “Julien had become a dandy, and understood the art of life in Paris.” This in itself is so different from his previous behavior that it would seem to be a new alternate personality. However, what particularly catches my attention is that, previously, he had told the Marquis’s daughter about his fall from a horse, but now “He appeared to have no memory whatever” of her asking or his telling about that, which may be a memory gap that his “dandy” personality has for what was said when his previous personality had been in control.

Search “memory gaps” for previous posts about this cardinal feature of multiple personality.

“The Red and the Black” by Stendhal (post 7): Multiple personality theme continues with “Julien ceaselessly at work designing himself a brand-new character.”

Julien Sorel is now in a seminary, and he needs to adapt to its culture in order to get ahead. As described in the last post, his modus operandi is to change his personality and physiognomy.

“He realized that, from the time he’d first come to the seminary, there had not been a single hour…that might not have had repercussions for or against him…The damage needing repair was huge; the task extremely difficult. But Julien was painstakingly, ceaselessly on guard: he was at work designing himself a brand-new character.

“His eye movements, for example, caused him serious difficulty. There was good reason, in a place like this, to keep one’s eyes lowered…After months of ceaseless effort, Julien still looked like a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and holding his mouth did not indicate implicit faith, a readiness to believe everything and endure everything, even martyrdom…How hard he strove to achieve a face of fervent, blind faith prepared to believe anything and suffer everything” (1, pp. 171-173).

1. Stendhal. The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830. Translated by Burton Raffel. New York, The Modern Library, 2003.

“The Red and the Black” by Stendhal (post 6): Julien shows not only his photographic memory, but an astonishing switch in manner and personality.

When Julien arrives at the door of the mayor’s house for his new job as children’s tutor, the mayor’s wife sees “a young peasant, really still a child; he was extremely pale and had obviously just been weeping…his eyes so gentle that Madame de Rênal…thought, at first, that this could be a young girl in disguise, coming to ask a favor” (1, p. 25).

Julien will astound everyone at the mayor’s house by reciting, from memory, the New Testament, in Latin, starting from any point chosen at random. However, before that, after the Mayor mentions that he expects a tutor for his children to demonstrate “a certain sobriety” (1, p. 30), Julien goes to his new room in the Mayor’s house, and then comes back with a different manner and personality:

“Finally, Julien appeared. It was a different person who returned to them. To say of this man that he was somber would be a misrepresentation: he was sobriety incarnate. He was introduced to the children, to whom he spoke in a manner that astonished even Monsieur de Rênal” (1, p. 31).

Thus, Julien has the same changeability in personality and physiognomy that Stendhal’s best friend had attributed to Stendhal (see post 4).

1. Stendhal. The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830. Translated by Burton Raffel. New York, The Modern Library, 2003.

“The Red and the Black” by Stendhal (post 5): “Julien possessed one of those stunning memories so often linked to stupidity,” hypnosis, multiple personality.

The protagonist, Julien Sorel, is introduced as a nineteen-year-old with “hypocrisy” and “determination…to make his fortune…So the thing is: become a priest” (1, p. 22-23). His type of memory is highlighted:

“Julien possessed one of those stunning memories so often linked to stupidity. To win over Chélan, the old parish priest, on whom he saw very clearly his future depended, he had learned by heart the entire New Testament in Latin; he also knew Monsieur de Maistre’s On the Pope—and had no more belief in the one than in the other” (1, pp. 19-20).

In a recent post, I mentioned the well-known association between high hypnotizability and multiple personality. And in a number of past posts I have mentioned that persons with multiple personality may have the surprising combination of both unusually good memory and unusually bad memory; that is, generally superb memory (like Julien’s), but also the absentmindedness, amnesia, and memory gaps caused when one personality does not recall what happened when another personality was in control.

For example, that combination was true of Mark Twain, who was known for an excellent memory, but also remarkable episodes of absentmindedness. (To see past posts, search “absent-mindedness” and “memory gaps.”)

Is Stendhal’s narrator correct to link “those stunning memories” with, in some sense, “stupidity”? Yes. A classic paper on characteristics of highly hypnotizable persons describes such persons as having unusually good memory—sometimes verging on total recall—but also says that their memories tend to be rote, photographic, and uncritical (2).

In short, Julien is described as having the kind of memory found in highly hypnotizable persons. And persons with multiple personality usually have high hypnotizability. So Julien’s kind of memory raises the possibility of multiple personality.

But does the type of memory ascribed to Julien foreshadow what will happen later, or is it just narrative chit chat? I will keep reading.

1. Stendhal. The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830. Translated by Burton Raffel. New York, The Modern Library, 2003.

2. Herbert Spiegel. “The Grade 5 Syndrome: The Highly Hypnotizable Person.” The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Volume XXII, Number 4, October 1974, pp. 303-319.

Marilynne Robinson and J. M. Barrie on Angels in Literary Creativity: That which finally gets written goes beyond what writer’s regular self had intended.

Marilynne Robinson

“Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise” (1).

J. M. Barrie

“My special difficulty is that though you have had literary rectors here before…you have had none, I think, who followed my more humble branch, which may be described as playing hide and seek with angels. My puppets seem more real to me than myself, and I could get on much more swingingly if I made one of them deliver this address. It is M'Connachie who has brought me to this pass. M'Connachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half…M'Connachie is the one who writes the plays…When I look in a mirror now it is his face I see. I speak with his voice…He has clung to me, less from mischief than for companionship…” (2).

1. Marilynne Robinson. “Marilynne Robinson on Finding the Right Word.” New York Times, Sept. 22, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/books/review/marilynne-robinson-on-finding-the-right-word.html?mcubz=0

2. J. M. Barrie. “Courage,” The Rectorial Address at St. Andrew’s University, May 3, 1922. http://www.freeclassicebooks.com/James%20M%20Barrie/Courage.pdf

Nicole Krauss, genuine novelist: Her latest novel is said to involve “divided selves,” and her new personal essay talks about her containing “multitudes”

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/books/review/forest-dark-nicole-krauss.html?mcubz=0

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/sunday/i-knew-i-had-to-fight-for-authority-so-i-wrote-like-a-man.html?mcubz=0

“The Life of Henry Brulard” by Stendhal (post 4): First-person narrator mentions close friend, Louis Crozet, who said Stendhal had many personalities.

It is not until Chapter 30 that there is any further mention of the title name, Brulard, which the narrator says is his name, but which now seems to be a joke. However, as noted in a previous post, it is a joke with its own birthday.

It is also in this chapter that the first-person narrator, whoever he may be, talks of his close friend, Louis Crozet:

“Memories throng as I write. I’ve just noticed that I have left out one of my most intimate friends, Louis Crozet, now Chief Engineer, and a very good Chief Engineer, at Grenoble…

“Louis Crozet was cut out to be one of the most brilliant of men in Paris, and in any salon he would have beaten Koreff [a physician known in the French literary world as an expert on hypnosis (1)]…and myself as well, if one may mention oneself…he was the most intelligent and sagacious of all the Dauphinois I have known…” (2, pp. 220-221).

According to Josephson’s biography of Stendhal, Louis Crozet was “the scholarly engineer and sometime mayor of Grenoble, who had really been Stendhal’s most intimate friend” (3, p. 457).

“Crozet, who (according to Stendhal himself) ‘knew him inside out’ ” said of Stendhal: “He had not one personality but many,” each of which had its own characteristic facial expression, so that he “had at different times quite different physiognomies” (3, p. 458).

1. Wikipedia. “David Ferdinand Koreff.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ferdinand_Koreff

2. Stendhal. The Life of Henry Brulard [1835-36]. Translated by Jean Stewart and B. C. J. G. Knight. New York, Noonday Press, 1958.

3. Matthew Josephson. Stendhal: A Biography. New York, Doubleday, 1946.

“Story of O” by Anne Desclos, Dominique Aury, Pauline Réage (post 3): Svengali in “Trilby” by George du Maurier showed torture unnecessary.

At the beginning of Story of O, before O is handed over for bondage and torture, she is already as suggestible and compliant as a person in a hypnotic trance.

If you wonder how this could be, since she had not been hypnotized, then you don’t understand hypnosis, which is mostly based on the subject’s own ability to go into a trance. It is a cliché, but true, that ultimately “All hypnosis is self-hypnosis.”

This is illustrated in the novel Trilby by George du Maurier, whose character Svengali had no special powers, but was able to recognize and use Trilby’s high hypnotizability.

Hypnosis is something that fiction writing and multiple personality have in common.

In past posts, I have quoted a number of novelists as saying that getting into the right frame of mind to write is like self-hypnosis.

And self-hypnosis is one of the oldest theories to explain how people create alternate personalities.

So it is no accident that multiple personality has its onset in childhood, the time of life when the ability to go into a trance is at its maximum.

“The Life of Henry Brulard” (post 2) by Stendhal (post 3): Chapters 2-4 of autobiography do not mention Henry Brulard, and continue to vary year of birth.

Chapter 2 starts with reference to the first-person narrator’s year of birth as 1783, but ends with reference to his “Childhood and early education, from 1786 to 1800” (1, p. 16). This could mean that his education started at age three, but since it distinguishes between childhood and early education, it seems to give the year of birth as 1786, which was previously attributed to Henry Brulard (in a third-person footnote of Chapter 1), who has not been mentioned again.

Chapter 3 tells of the narrator’s mother’s death in 1790 when he was seven, consistent with his birth in 1783.

The narrator makes reference to his becoming a wit in later years, which makes me wonder if that which perplexes me is an intentional joke.

He also raises the possibility of lying: “In any case, even supposing I were lying about my budding understanding [at age seven, about the nature of death] I am certainly not lying about all the rest. If I feel tempted to lie, it will be later on, when it’s a question of very serious faults” (1, pp. 26-27).

The first-person narrator is apparently Stendhal, since he mentions that “I wrote Le Rouge et le Noir” (1, p. 9). However, as noted above, Stendhal’s year of birth seems to be given first as 1783, then as 1786, but then as 1783 again in relation to his mother’s death.

Is the above confusion due to translation, typographical error, wit, lying, or the fact that I have read, or misread, only the first twenty-nine pages? 

1. Stendhal. The Life of Henry Brulard [1835-36]. Translated by Jean Stewart and B. C. J. G. Knight. New York, Noonday Press, 1958.

“The Life of Henry Brulard” by Stendhal: Beyle (b. 1783), writing as Stendhal, writes autobiography of Brulard (b. 1786), an alternate personality.

I have just read Chapter 1 of this autobiography, in which the narrator mentions three names: Marie-Henry Beyle (the author’s legal name), M. de Stendhal (Beyle’s most famous pseudonym), and Henry Brulard (the pseudonym used in the title).

The narrator does not explain the purpose of either of the two pseudonyms. And in fact, Brulard, as I am about to explain, may not be a pseudonym, but an alternate personality, strictly speaking.

Brulard may not be a pseudonym in the ordinary sense, because Beyle and Brulard have different birthdays, as though they were different persons. On page 1, the narrator gives his year of birth as 1783, which corresponds to the year that Marie-Henri Beyle was born, but a footnote on page 4 says that Brulard was born in 1786.

Thus, Henry Brulard is three years younger than Marie-Henri Beyle, which may mean that Brulard is not a pseudonym for Beyle, but the name of an alternate personality who came into existence when Beyle was three years old.

I see that at the beginning of Chapter 2, the first-person narrator reiterates that he was born in 1783. The footnote about Brulard in Chapter 1 had been in the third person. The first-person narrator, who talks of himself as a writer, must be Stendhal. It is not yet clear to me how Brulard fits in to the narrative. And I don’t know what the first-person narrator means at the end of Chapter 1, where he refers to himself as “madmen of my sort” (1, p. 8).

1. Stendhal. The Life of Henry Brulard [1835-36]. Translated by Jean Stewart and B. C. J. G. Knight. New York, Noonday Press, 1958.

Multiple Personality could not be surprisingly common unless childhood trauma and imaginary companions were surprisingly common: Are they?

How plausible is it that 1.5% of the general public has clinical multiple personality (according to the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5), and that upwards of 90% of novelists and up to 30% of the general public have a nonclinical version (suggested by my study of novelists)?

For that to be plausible, two preconditions would have to be surprisingly common: 1. a natural tendency for normal children to create alternate personalities, and 2. childhood trauma (to perpetuate and amplify the children’s natural tendency to create alternate personalities).

The natural tendency for normal children to create alternate personalities is shown by imaginary companions. So how common are imaginary companions? “If we consider all cases of imaginary companions created up to the age of 7, 63 percent of the children in our study had them” (1, p. 32).

That may seem like a high figure, but the researchers interviewed both children and parents—sometimes the children didn't remember that they had imaginary companions, but the parents did, and other times the parents hadn’t known about their children’s imaginary companions—and the researchers were aware of all the forms that imaginary companions can take.

How common is childhood trauma?

“Depending on how various traumatic experiences are defined, 8–12% of American youth have experienced at least one sexual assault; 9–19% have experienced physical abuse by a caregiver or physical assault; 38–70% have witnessed serious community violence; 1 in 10 has witnessed serious violence between caregivers; 1 in 5 has lost a family member or friend to homicide; 9% have experienced Internet-assisted victimization; and 20–25% have been exposed to a natural or man-made disaster” (2).

In short, since the two preconditions for multiple personality are relatively common, it is plausible that multiple personality is relatively common.

But if multiple personality is so common, why haven’t you seen it? Because, unless you’ve been reading this blog in its entirety, you probably don’t know what it looks like.

1. Marjorie Taylor. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.

2. Benjamin E. Saunders and Zachary W. Adams. “Epidemiology of Traumatic Experiences in Childhood.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3983688/

“Story of O” by Anne Desclos, Dominique Aury, Pauline Réage (post 2): Pseudonyms and hearing voices in everyday life might indicate multiple personality.

The first thing that I find interesting about this author is her three names: her having not just her real name and a pseudonym for her novel, but also a pseudonym in her everyday life. Indeed, she speaks of leading “parallel lives,” which is a good description of having multiple personality.

Is her use of pseudonyms in everyday life just a meaningless quirk of a pornographer? Not at all. Another novelist who has used pseudonyms in everyday life is Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, as mentioned in my post of November 25, 2015:

Nobel Novelist Toni Morrison’s Puzzling Pseudonyms: Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, wrongly reported as Chloe Anthony Wofford, plus four reasons for Toni

Author’s pseudonyms have been a recurrent subject in this blog, because a pseudonym may be the name of an alternate personality. And since Toni Morrison may have claimed two different birth names, and “Toni” is a pseudonym, her use of names is worth considering.

Toni Morrison’s birth name was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, so why do so many articles about her say that it was Chloe Anthony Wofford? She must have fostered this mistake or let it pass on many occasions. Are Chloe Ardelia and Chloe Anthony two different personalities?

And how did Chloe become Toni? There seem to be four explanations. First, people mispronounced Chloe as Toni. Second, at age 12, she chose the baptismal name of St. Anthony of Padua (the patron saint of finding lost things and people), and she got Toni from this name. Third, her middle name is Anthony (but this isn’t true). Fourth, one of her early manuscripts had the name Toni, and by the time she told the publisher to use Chloe, it was too late, so she became known as Toni. And I suppose these four explanations could be combined, with a little ingenuity.

Are Chloe, Toni, Ardelia, and Anthony different personalities? I don’t know. But as past posts indicate, multiple personality is common in her novels.

The usual reasons given for why novelists use pen names are often rationalizations. The use of pseudonyms even in their everyday lives suggests that it may be a manifestation of multiple personality.

The second thing I find interesting about the author of Story of O is that her so-called “fantasies,” from which she got her novel, were not fantasies in the usual sense. For when people ordinarily speak of having a fantasy or of imagining something, they usually have a sense of its being something that they are doing. They are fantasizing or imagining something.

In contrast, this author “didn’t even have the feeling I was creating a character,” because “O” seemed to her like some kind of separate, independent being, perhaps a ghost, but at least some kind of being “without the normal marks of identity” (nameless, like alternate personalities often are), whose voice she heard murmuring in the night.

In short, “O” was less like an ordinary fantasy and more like alternate personalities, which, although objectively imaginary, seem like persons in their own right, because they have a sense of personhood, their own opinions and memories, and their own voice.

In general, the author reports having a sense that “I move from one me to the other” and that her life is one of puzzling contradictions—puzzling not only to other people, but even to herself—which is a clue she may have had undiagnosed multiple personality.

“Story of O” by Anne Desclos, living as Dominique Aury, writing as Pauline Réage: Nameless, uncreated character; author’s pseudonyms and contradictions.

If you have never read this famous work of literary pornography (1) and are unfamiliar with the controversy surrounding it, I recommend the “The Story of the Story of O,” an article by Carmela Ciuraru (2).

The author, herself, says the novel “was a way of expressing a certain number of childhood and adolescent fantasies that persisted into my later life, that not only refused to go away but came back time and again” (3, p. 73). “In fact, the first sixty pages of O are literally copies of these fantasies. I won’t say dictated by them…but transcribed from them” (3, pp. 88-89).

“I didn’t even have the feeling I was creating a character. What O admits to in this book, what she ‘confesses,’ is the confession of a ghost…without the normal marks of identity, little more than a low voice, like a shadow that murmurs in the night” (3, p. 146).

“For a long time I’ve lived two parallel lives: work and family on the one hand, and love or loves on the other, and I have meticulously kept those two lives quite separate, so separate in fact that the invisible wall between them seems to me normal and natural” (3, p. 147).

“I’m the first to admit that I’m a walking contradiction. It took me a long time to realize that, and even longer to come to terms with it. My use of a pseudonym in my writing is much more than a mere artifice; it reveals and denounces that basic contradiction…” (3, p. 148).

“…this part of me known as Pauline Réage…is not me entirely and in some obscure way is…I move from one me to the other…Story of O is a fairy tale for another world, a world where some part of me lived for a long time…The book of an unknown woman, and that that woman is I continues to amaze me…and all my contradictions are, as you see, still with me” (3, pp. 149-150).

Search “nameless,” “pseudonyms,” and “contradictions” for previous posts on these recurring topics.

1. Pauline Réage. Story of O [1954/1965]. New York, Ballantine Books, 1973.

2. Carmela Ciuraru. “The Story of the Story of O.” Guernica, June 15, 2011.  https://www.guernicamag.com/ciuraru_6_15_11/
3. Régine Deforges. Confessions of O: Conversations with Pauline Réage [1975]. New York, Viking Press, 1979.

“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman (post 7): Profs. Folsom and Merrill, University of Iowa, and the difficulty in translating Whitman’s contradictions.

“Untranslatable”

In 2014, Profs. Folsom and Merrill started an international online course focusing on Song of Myself. They made it available in fifteen languages, even though it is “a particularly challenging poem to translate” (1, p. 5). So in the poem’s concluding Section 52, when Whitman says he is “untranslatable” (1, p. 183), the professors interpret him to mean that he is difficult to translate from one language to another.

However, I interpret Whitman’s “untranslatable” as meaning he is hard to understand as a person, as Whitman explains nine lines later, when he says, “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean” (Section 52) (1, p. 183). Indeed, Whitman had previously used “translate” in the latter sense in Section 47: “And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air. If you would understand me go to the heights or water-shore” (1, p. 166).

“You” as Alternate Personality

See my previous post, in which I interpreted “you” in the poem’s opening lines as being an alternate personality.

Another example of “you” as an alternate personality is found in the opening lines of Section 5 (1, p. 20), where “you” is “the other I am”:

“I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,

And you must not be abased to the other.”

Contradictions of Multiple Personality

In Section 16, which begins “I am old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,” Whitman goes on to make a long list of different and contrasting attributes, and of diverse people from many places and walks of life. What did he mean by this? That he is ecumenical? On the contrary. As he explains: “I resist anything better than my own diversity” (1, p. 55), which prepares the reader to understand Whitman’s most famous lines:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” [1, p. 180, Section 51].

Whitman thus reiterates his own internal diversity—translated into psychological terms, his multiple personality—which is famous for the way such a person may contradict himself, because his alternate personalities are diverse, and tend to disagree with each other.

In conclusion, Song of Myself, a long, complicated poem, can support various interpretations, mine included.

1. Walt Whitman. Song of Myself [1881]. Introduction and commentary by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2016.