When Writing Book Reviews: Remember that “authors” do not know what their novels mean; and “madness,” “alter ego,” “double” are no known conditions.

Most book reviewers assume that the one and only “author” knows best what the author’s novel means. But the fact is that each novelist has multiple writing personalities, each with its own perspective, most of whom do not do interviews, according to Stephen King and Margaret Atwood:

June 29, 2015

Stephen King quoted on Writing: His voices, visions, trances; his becoming or observing autonomous characters; his cowriter muse and discovered stories

“…to be a writer…you have to imagine worlds that aren’t there…You’re hearing voices…As children…we’re told to distinguish between reality and those things. Adults will say, ‘You have an invisible friend, that’s nice, you’ll outgrow that.’ Writers don’t outgrow it” (1, p. 4).

“When I write as Richard Bachman [a pseudonym under which King wrote several novels], it opens up that part of my mind. It’s like a hypnotic suggestion that frees me to be somebody who is a little bit different…and it was fun to be somebody else for a while, in this case, Richard Bachman” (1, pp. 138-139).

“After writing more than a dozen novels, one thing hadn’t changed: Steve rarely provided detailed physical descriptions for the characters he created. ‘For me, the characters’ physical being is just not there. If I’m inside a character, I don’t see myself because I’m inside that person,’ he explained” (1, p. 147).

“[King] was by himself…he was thinking about getting high later…Then, out of the blue, came a voice that told him to reconsider. You don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to was the exact phrase he heard. ‘It’s like it wasn’t my voice,’ he said later” (1, pp. 159-160).

“There is a muse—traditionally, the muses were women, but mine’s a guy…He may not be much to look at, that muse guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty…” (2, pp. 144-145).

“You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted…I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible…I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and transcribe them, of course)…When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that…I believe it. And I do…Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world…My job [is to] watch what happens and then write it down…I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way…” (2, pp. 163-165).

“And if you do your job, your characters will come to life and start doing stuff on their own. I know that sounds a little creepy if you haven’t actually experienced it, but it’s terrific fun when it happens. And it will solve a lot of your problems, believe me” (2, p. 195).

“Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I’m aware that I’m writing. I’m aware of my surroundings…But in the middle, the world is gone and I’m able to see better…I can remember finding that state for the first time and being delighted. It’s a little bit like finding a secret door in a room [or like Alice falling down a rabbit hole?] but not knowing exactly how you got in…And after doing that for a while it was a little bit like having a posthypnotic suggestion” (3, pp. 141-142).

All the above is characteristic of multiple personality (in this case, normal multiple personality). People with multiple personality may hear the voices of their autonomous, alternate personalities, or may see them, or may switch to become them. It all has similarities to hypnosis; indeed, one old theory of multiple personality is that it is a kind of self-hypnosis.

1. Lisa Rogak. Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King. New York, Thomas Dunne St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008.

2. Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York, Scribner, 2000/2010.

3. Naomi Epel. Writers Dreaming. New York, Carol Southern Books, 1993.

July 1, 2016

Margaret Atwood on writing: superstitions, ghosts, amnesia, interviews, hearing voices of characters, and that the writer qua writer has a split personality

“There are a lot of things that I would rather not know about writing, because I think that if you get too curious about it and start dissecting the way you work and why you do it, you’d probably stop. Maybe not. Anyway that’s one of my superstitions” (1, p. 10).

“There are various kinds of ghosts…Or you can have the Henry James kind, in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one’s own self which has split off, and that to me is the most interesting kind and that is obviously the tradition I’m working in” (1, p. 18).

“…when I do go back and read things I’ve written a long time ago I’m often surprised…I can’t remember having written them” (1, p. 169).

“Interviews are an art form in themselves…The fact is that most writers can’t remember the answers to some of the questions…so they make up the answers…Also, writers quite frequently conceal things. They either don’t want them known, or they think of them as trade secrets…Let’s just state at the beginning that interviews…They’re fictions” (1, 191).

Interviewer: Professor Elspeth Cameron has written in an essay on your work that your characters are “transformations of imagined persona around an inner self.”

Atwood: What does that mean?

Interviewer: In Lady Oracle, Joan Foster creates various personas and somewhere in the midst of them all is “Joan Foster.” Many of your stories, both long and short, are built around shifting identities, the various personas the characters create. You often organize your books around a split point of view. First and third persons, contradictions within the characters, fractured identities. Is that how you see characters?

Atwood: Well, maybe…A lot of this is trying to keep oneself amused…” (1, p. 213).

“Well, for a creative person, some of the work is doing nothing…You need silence within yourself in order to listen…Unless you can listen, you won’t year anything” (2, p. 182).

Interviewer: What are [characters] like?

Atwood: …they talk all the time… (2, p. 222).

Interviewer: Do you see the scenes in your books as you are writing them, or do you hear them?

Atwood: I see them. I hear them, but I’m not hallucinating” (2, p. 248).

“I don’t ‘get an idea’ for a novel…I usually find that I have collected a number of compelling images or that a voice starts operating, somebody starts talking, and I want to know more about him, find out about him…” (1, p. 164).

“I grew up in a world of doubles…a superhero was nobody unless he had an alter ego…Yeats and his theory of personae had nothing on us…As for the artists who are also writers, they are doubles twice times over, for the mere act of writing splits the self in two. In this chapter, it is therefore the doubleness of the writer qua writer I will discuss…What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’?…By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward…and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes over and uses it to commit the actual writing…All writers are double…you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read…(3, pp. 31-37).

1. Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor). Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 1990.

2. Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor). Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 2006.

3. Margaret Atwood. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York, Anchor/Random House, 2002.

“Madness”

This term is so nonspecific that it is almost meaningless. It could refer to schizophrenia, psychotic depression, mania, intoxication or brain disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, an acute disturbance in multiple personality, or impulsiveness, anger, violence, poor judgment, or even creativity. In literary criticism, “madness” has often mistakenly been used to imply psychosis in cases of undiagnosed multiple personality (which is not a psychosis).

January 28, 2016

Literary “Madness”: Henry James, The Madwoman in the Attic, and others use this word, suggestive of schizophrenic psychosis, when they are actually referring to multiple personality

When Henry James’s character speaks of the “madness of art” and when Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar speak of the “madwoman in the attic,” to what condition are they often unintentionally referring?

Henry James’s “madness of art”

As noted in a previous post, the character who uses that phrase refers to himself with the plural pronouns “we” and “our,” inadvertently implying multiple personality. (Also search past posts on James’s “Ambassadors” and “Private Life” for other examples of his unacknowledged descriptions of multiple personality.)

Quoting from James’s short story, “The Middle Years”:

"You're a great success!" said Doctor Hugh, putting into his young voice the ring of a marriage-bell.

Dencombe lay taking this in; then he gathered strength to speak once more. "A second chance—THAT’S the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"If you've doubted, if you've despaired, you've always 'done' it," his visitor subtly argued.

"We've done something or other," Dencombe conceded.

Thus, if you consider the “we” and “our” in the famous part of the passage only, you might think that the novelist is referring to writers in general, but what comes after—“We’ve done something or other”—shows that he is referring to himself only, and that he experiences himself as plural.

The Madwoman in the Attic

If you look in this book’s index under “Madwomen,” it says “See Doubles,” which, of course, is the literary metaphor for multiple personality. As I noted in a past post on The Madwoman in the Attic:

Gilbert & Gubar’s index does not include multiple personality, per se, but it does include Doubles, Duplicity, Fragmentation of personality, Mirrors, and pseudonyms, all of which have prominent roles in this blog. As they say in Part I. Toward a Feminist Poetics:

     “We shall see, then, that the mad double is as crucial to the aggressively sane novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot as she is in the more obviously rebellious stories told by Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Both gothic and anti-gothic writers represent themselves as split like Emily Dickinson between the elected nun and damned witch, or like Mary Shelley between the noble, censorious scientist and his enraged, childish monster. In fact, so important is this female schizophrenia [multiple personality] of authorship that, as we hope to show, it links these nineteenth-century writers with such twentieth-century descendants as Virginia Woolf (who projects both ladylike Mrs. Dalloway and crazed Septimus Warren Smith), Doris Lessing (who divides herself between sane Martha Hesse and mad Lynda Coldridge), and Sylvia Plath (who sees herself as both a plaster saint and a dangerous ‘old yellow’ monster).”

“Alter Ego” or “Double”

Whenever you are tempted to say that a character has an “alter ego” or “double,” look up multiple personality, also known as dissociative identity, and see if that may be what is probably involved. Often the text of the novel does not use the terms “multiple personality” (aka “split personality”) or “dissociative identity,” because the author was embarrassed by the issue, or was not entirely sure what was going on, or thought that the multiple personality should be obvious without spelling it out.

In short, whenever you are tempted to use the terms “alter ego” or “double,” consider whether “alternate personality” would be the known condition implied by the text (intentionally or inadvertently).

Conclusion

Book reviewers might wish to know what novelists, themselves, acknowledge, that novelists cannot have a single, authoritative opinion about their work, because they think and write with multiple personalities, each of whom has its own views.

Also, since readers of book reviews would like them to be as clear as possible, never say a character has a “descent into madness” or an “alter ego” or a “double,” which are literary terms that refer to no known conditions.