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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Wednesday, September 27, 2017

“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).

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