“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.