Marguerite Duras (post 3): Puzzling novels like this are often seen as “experimental” or “the madness of art,” but puzzling may mean multiple personality.

The Lover, an 84-page novel that often makes no sense (see post 2), was a bestseller, translated into 43 languages, and awarded France’s Prix Goncourt.

Did readers think that its unexplained jumps from one subject and time to another, and between first and third-person narration, were “experimental technique” or “the madness of art”? (Search “experimental” for past posts on that misnomer.) (Also search “madness of art.”)

“Marguerite Duras” is a pseudonym. An author’s pseudonyms may be the names of alternate personalities. It is an obvious possibility, once you think of it. (Search “pseudonyms” for further discussion.)

Although the novel was touted by the author as autobiographical, one of the narrators says near the beginning: “The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist…There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one” (i.e., no one of which that personality was aware). She is being honest, but most readers don’t believe her.

In spite of its puzzling aspects, The Lover was, in fact, a bestseller, translated into 43 languages, and winner of the Prix Goncourt. It joins many other works in world literature that violate common sense, but are otherwise well-written, engaging, and even coherent, in their own way: a puzzling combination, suggestive of multiple personality.

“The Lover” by Marguerite Duras (post 2): It “doesn’t make a lot of sense,” because nameless multiple narrators and protagonists are confusing.

1991 Interview

“During my interview I was disconcerted by her habit of jumping disconnectedly from subject to subject…In New York I spoke to Tom Bishop, chairman of the French department at New York University, a Beckett scholar and a friend of Duras's for 25 years…‘She was always like this,’ he declared. ‘I don't think she was ever any different…I think she's a fabulous writer who should just write and not talk about what she's thinking,’ Bishop said. Like her talk, her work doesn't make ‘a lot of sense,’ but it does ‘something else. It allows me to have an insight into the human psyche that I have found unique. I have learned things about humanity through her that others don't teach me.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/20/magazine/the-life-and-loves-of-marguerite-duras.html?pagewanted=all

The Lover

“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist…There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one” (1, p. 8). [The first-person narrator-protagonist has memory gaps. Search “memory gaps” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.]

“This particular day I must be wearing the famous pair of gold lamé high heels…

“It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it’s the fact that she’s wearing a man’s flat-brimmed hat…The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat…

“Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself…the shoes…contradict the hat…so they’re right for me…” (1, pp. 10-11). [This sequence starts with the first-person narrator, switches to the third-person narrator, then switches back to the first-person narrator, who has the added perspective of some third personality who is observing the first-person narrator.]

“I can become anything anyone wants me to be. And believe it” (1, p. 15). [By itself, this could describe acting ability only. In the context of multiple narrative personalities, this could refer to her ability to form new personalities. It is an interesting question as to whether actors and actresses have a high prevalence of multiple personality.]

“…my mother…I can see she’s watching me, she suspects something. She knows her daughter…there’s been an air of strangeness…The girl speaks even more slowly than usual, she’s absent-minded, she who’s usually so interested in everything, her expression has changed…” (1, p. 42). [This highlights different personalities of the protagonist. There is probably multiple personality of both narration and protagonist.] [Also, search “absent-minded.”]

“The two smaller children, the girl and the younger brother…

“I remember…I forget everything, and I forgot to say this, that we were children who laughed, my younger brother and I…” (1, pp. 45-46).

“I used to watch what he did with me…

“And there’s the headache, too, which often makes her lie limp, motionless, ghastly pale, with a wet bandage over her eyes” (1, p. 72). [Some people with multiple personality get headaches when they switch personalities.]

Finally, why is the protagonist nameless? Why couldn’t the protagonist be named? One possibility is that the protagonist has more then one personality, and not all of them have the same name. [Search “nameless” and “namelessness” for past posts.] 

1. Marguerite Duras. The Lover [1984-5]. Translated by Barbara Bray. Pages 1-84 in Marguerite Duras. The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities. New York, Everyman’s Library, 2018.

“The Ravishing of Lol Stein” by Marguerite Duras (pseudonym): Protagonist has issues of identity, memory, lying, seen in multiple personality.

The title character is a married woman with three children whose family moves back to the city where, ten years before, she had been suddenly and publicly jilted by her fiancé.

She has been living a more or less normal life these past ten years, but is said to have been mentally ill ten years ago as a result of that traumatic experience. People sometimes worry that she is not completely well.

The diagnosis and treatment (if any) of her past mental illness are never specified. To a large extent, the novel is the story of Lol’s symptoms.

“Lol…gave the impression of…putting up with a person she knew she was supposed to be but whom she forgot about at the slightest occasion…part of her seemed always to be evading you…” (1, p. 3).

“No matter where she is, it is as though Lol is there for the first time” (1, p. 33). Sometimes she remembers, sometimes she doesn’t, probably depending on which personality is in control.

The back cover of the novel indirectly refers to the fact that Lol repeatedly stations herself outside a hotel where she can see two lovers in a window, calling her “a voyeur.” But the narrator, who is one of the two lovers in the window, and who later is in a relationship with Lol, has this interpretation: “The idea of what she is doing never crosses her mind…she is there without the faintest idea of being there, that, if she were asked, she would simply say that she was resting” (1, p. 53). That is, she probably has or has not, this or that motive, depending on which personality is in control.

Tatiana says that Lol “seemed only to have the vaguest recollection, virtually no memory at all, of their school days together” (1, p. 69). But other times Lol does remember things, probably depending on which personality is in control.

Presumably, Lol had a nervous breakdown as a result of being jilted by her fiancé at a ball ten years ago, but “Tatiana did not believe that Lol Stein’s insanity could be traced back solely to that ball, she traced its origins back further, further in Lol’s life, back to her youth…” (1, p. 71). Multiple personality begins in childhood.

About that supposedly traumatic jilt ten years ago, Lol asks, “Did I suffer? Tell me, Tatiana, I’ve never really known” (1, p. 90). However, on another occasion, Lol implies that being jilted was not traumatic, because, “from the first moment that woman walked into the the room, I ceased to love my fiancé” (1, p. 126). Although Lol’s behavior had evidently been quite disturbed at the time, what she remembers or how it affected her probably differed among her various personalities.

The narrator wonders if there are “twenty women all bearing the name of Lol?” (1, pp. 95-96).

The narrator says, “I have the feeling that I am witnessing with my own eyes some personal and capital manner of lying, an immense yet strictly limited field of lies” like she is living “in a dream so compelling that it has escaped her, and she is unaware she ever had it” (1, pp. 96-97). Search “lying” in this blog. It is a recurrent issue in multiple personality, because each personality has its own memories and view of reality, so that people who do not know about the multiple personality think that the person is simply lying.

Lol makes third-person self-reference: “Lol has always returned home safe and sound…” (1, p. 126). Presumably, an alternate personality not named Lol is talking about Lol.

Although Lol has been in a developing and close relationship with the narrator, he says that recently “She doesn’t recognize me, hasn’t the faintest idea who I am any more” (1, p. 178). Some personalities know him or like him, but others do not.

Comment

Lol is not described as abusing drugs or alcohol, or as having brain disease, so her memory and identity problems are probably attributable to multiple personality (clinical version, with distress and dysfunction). No other psychological condition has these kinds of memory and identity problems.

1. Marguerite Duras. The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Translated from the French by Richard Seaver. New York, Pantheon Books, 1964/66.

“Oedipus the King” by Sophocles: Greek Chorus, self-mutilation, multiple personality, and why, at one point, Oedipus refers to Chorus as “my voice”

The stage directions say that the Chorus represents the citizens of Thebes, Oedipus’s countrymen. And the Chorus often does appear to play that role.

But at one point, after Oedipus blinds himself, I was struck by his reference to the Chorus as “my voice.”

At first, I thought this only meant that since he was blind, and could not see the Chorus, he could only hear its voices. But his dialogue with “my voice” is surprisingly intimate and personal:

OEDIPUS:

“…where’s my voice?—

…Dear friend, still here?

Standing by me, still with a care for me,

the blind man? Such compassion,

loyal to the last. Oh it’s you,

I know you’re here, dark as it is

I’d know you anywhere, your voice—

it’s yours, clearly yours…

CHORUS:

“Pitiful, you suffer so, you understand so much…

I wish you had never known” (1, lines 1446-1482).

This sounds like a conversation between a regular, host personality and an alternate personality, known to the host as a voice in his head. As usual in multiple personality, the host personality is the least in the know. Indeed, one of the principal functions of alternate personalities is to contain the knowledge and memory of things that are too disturbing for the host personality to deal with.

Self-mutilation occurs in about a third of people with clinical, multiple personality disorder. In rare cases, it can be as severe as gouging out the eyes or self-castration, but more common types are self-cutting with sharp objects or self-burning with cigarettes. Self-mutilation is usually done by “persecutor personalities” who are fed up with the way the host handles things and want to teach the host a lesson. (Of course, the vast majority of people with multiple personality—who have the normal version—do not self-mutilate.)

If Oedipus had multiple personality, he almost certainly had more than two personalities. The self-mutilation was probably the work of neither his regular, host personality nor his “Dear friend” chorus personality. But the latter, if asked, might have known who did do it.

1. Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York, Penguin Books, 1984.

“Antigone” by Sophocles: Sentry hears funny voice of alternate personality, while Antigone, Creon, Haemon, Eurydice have tragic single-mindedness.

There are only two characters in this play who hear voices: Tiresias, the blind prophet, and the Sentry. Tiresias hears “a strange voice in the wingbeats [of birds], unintelligible, barbaric, a mad scream!” (1, p. 111). Sentry is the only character who hears a voice that is so distinct, it is quotable, and which is not only intelligible, but has a sense of humor:

SENTRY:

“My Lord [speaking to King Creon],

I can’t say I’m winded from running, or set out

with any spring in my legs either—no sir,

I was lost in thought, and it made me stop, often,

dead in my tracks, wheeling, turning back,

and all the time a voice inside me muttering,

‘Idiot, why? You’re going straight to your death.’

Then muttering, ‘Stopped again, poor fool?

If somebody gets the news to Creon first,

what’s to save your neck?’ ” (1, p. 70).

Sentry has news that Antigone has violated King Creon’s prohibition against burying her treasonous brother. If he does not tell the King, someone else might do so first and put the blame on him. But if he does tell the King, the King might kill a messenger who brings such bad news.

What is the significance of Sentry’s hearing such voices? They are not the irrational or delusional voices of psychosis, which are usually experienced or interpreted by the person as originating from the outside. But neither are these voices experienced by Sentry as simply his own thoughts. Sentry does not say he was ambivalent and thought this and that, but that a voice told him first this and then that, a voice that he quotes, as though it were another person whose comments he heard. Voices such as this may be the voices of alternate personalities.

None of the other characters mentioned in the title of this post hears voices. And they are not able to break out of their single, tragic, point of view (Creon does at the end, but it is too late). They come to a tragic end, because they are so single-minded.

In short, one of the lessons of Antigone is that single-mindedness can be tragic, while multiple personality, though it may seem like a joke to people unfamiliar with it, may sometimes be healthier.

1. Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York, Penguin Books, 1984.

“The Odyssey” by Homer (post 8): Do not miss the forest for the trees — nine muses and other Greek gods and goddesses are alternate personalities.

I have finished reading Homer’s Odyssey and have found no other “trees”; that is, other particular kinds or examples of implicit multiple personality (see previous posts in this series). But I don’t want to be so focused on particulars that I miss the big picture.

Each of the Greek gods and goddesses is a type of personality. Like the characters in fiction or the personalities in multiple personality, none of the gods and goddesses is as well-rounded and multifaceted as a real person. Some are obviously specialized; for example, each Muse on a particular art or science. Others have their own characteristic interests and abilities.

Like alternate personalities in a person with multiple personality, the gods and goddesses live in their own world, Olympus or some island, which would correspond to the inner or dream world in a person’s mind, where alternate personalities spend most of their time and are usually busy doing their own things. But they monitor what is going on in the outside world, especially in regard to a particular person (the regular, host personality). Sometimes they are heard by the host as voices. Sometimes they influence the host from behind the scenes. Sometimes they interact with the host, like novelists with their characters. Occasionally they come out and take over.

Polytheism is multiple personality.

In Praise of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience by John Williams in New York Times: Neglects James’s serious interest in multiple personality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/books/william-james-varieties-of-religious-experience.html

Please search “William James” in this blog.

“Two Tricksters” (Book 13) in “The Odyssey” by Homer (post 7): Athena and Odysseus are each physically transformed, as seen in multiple personality.

Odysseus finally comes ashore in Ithaca, but since he has been away for twenty years, and has been disappointed so many times before, he is not sure where he is.

Athena, in the guise of a young man, a shepherd, assures Odysseus that he is in Ithaca. Odysseus, however, pretends to be a foreigner. 

Amused that they have both assumed false identities, Athena transforms herself into the body of a woman, acknowledges that she is Athena, and says to Odysseus, “You clever rascal! So duplicitous, so talented at lying! You love fiction and tricks…” (1, p. 326).

The two tricksters agree that he should spy on his enemies (the suitors of his wife) and assess his friends’ and family’s loyalty and devotion by assuming a disguise and being incognito. For this purpose, Athena physically transforms Odysseus into an ugly old man.

What is the significance of Athena’s and Odysseus’s physical transformations? Many other characters in the history of literature assume successful disguises without actual physical transformations. Is it adequate to say this is just the way that Greek gods did things?

The double or twin, a common literary metaphor for multiple personality, has some basis in reality, because some alternate personalities do see themselves as physically identical, but many alternate personalities differ from each other in body image. Many see themselves as being of different ages, sexes, hair colors, heights, weights, etc.

In short, reversible physical transformations are a very multiple personality kind of thing.

1. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York, WW Norton, 2018.

“The Odyssey” by Homer (post 6): In Book Nine, Odysseus tricks Cyclops with “the ‘no man’ maneuver,” which is often used by people with multiple personality.

The narrator, “Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies” (first line), tells how he escaped being killed by the giant, one-eyed, cannibalistic Cyclops, first by blinding the Cyclops, then by preventing the Cyclops from getting reinforcements from fellow Cyclopses by using what Odysseus calls “the ‘no man’ maneuver” (1, p. 253), which worked as follows:

When the Cyclops had asked Odysseus his name, Odysseus had said his name was “Noman.” So later when the blinded Cyclops was trying to call for reinforcements, yelling that he had been attacked by “Noman,” the other Cyclopses did not come, because they thought there had been an attack by no one.

The “no man” maneuver is described in a textbook on multiple personality:

“Many personality systems [of people with multiple personality] will have one or more “unnamed” personalities. Sometimes these “unnamed” alters [alternate personalities] use the same trick Ulysses pulled on the Cyclops: they go by the name of ‘No one.’ When the therapist inquires as to who in the system is responsible for some behavior, he or she will be told, 'No one.’ So the therapist should be prepared to inquire whether there is a personality known as ‘No one,’ ‘No name,’ or ‘Nobody.’ Most of the ‘unnamed’ personalities will turn out to have names as the therapy progresses. Many alters are unwilling to reveal their names early in the course of therapy, because this knowledge allows the therapist to call them out” (2, p. 117).

1. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York, WW Norton, 2018.
2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Sylvia Plath (post 7): Her letters reveal “a split, almost bifurcated personality…‘my brown-haired personality’ and ‘the frivolous giddy gilded creature’ ”

“One slowly gets a sense of a split, almost bifurcated personality, all rhapsodic enthusiasm on the one side and all dark apprehensions on the other…

“Plath herself appears to be aware of this uneasy duality, which she refers to under the rubrics of ‘my brown-haired personality’ and ‘the frivolous giddy gilded creature who careened around corners at the wheel of a yellow convertible.’ It was probably no accident that she wrote her senior thesis at Smith on the idea of ‘the Double’ in two of Dostoevsky’s novels.” (1).

1. “Review: Who Is Sylvia Plath? Daphne Merkin reviews an unabridged, annotated collection of the budding poet’s candid letters” December 15, 2017, Wall Street Journal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-who-is-sylvia-plath-1513371988

“What the Shadow Knows: Picture Books on Runaway Reflections” by Frank Viva in New York Times: Stories about therapy for multiple personality?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/books/review/smoot-smith-cuevas-shadows-kids.html

It is not that the reviewer of these three children’s books on runaway shadows has no interest in psychological theory. He says, “Shadows are proxies for the unconscious, repressed or unrealized side of the self.”

But these children and their independent-minded shadows may become quite conscious of each other: “…she is saved from a band of marauding nighttime bandits by none other than her decidedly braver shadow. Full of remorse, she exclaims, ‘Oh, shadow, I saw things all wrong…You’re part of me, shadow. Please come back!’ ”

The shadow, who is braver than the girl, and saves her from bandits, is an example of one of the most common types of alternate personality, a protector personality. Search “kinds of alternate personalities.”

Protector personalities are quite conscious of the regular personality they protect. And although the regular personality may initially be unaware of the alternate personality (and so has memory gaps for the times that the protector has been protecting), the regular personality may eventually become aware of the alternate personality through personal insight or therapy.

When the girl says, “You’re part of me, shadow,” it sounds like an insight in therapy for multiple personality.

Literature professor says “Harvey,” based on Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, is a great holiday movie, but she fails to recognize multiple personality.

Jennifer Finney Boylan in New York Times on “Harvey" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/opinion/christmas-holidays-movies.html?_r=0

Search “Mary Chase” for my brief past post on this play.

Search “McConnachie” for posts related to J. M. Barrie’s real-life version of Harvey (in the sense of having a co-conscious, companionable, alternate personality), except that McConnachie is not an animal. For another literary example of an animal alternate personality, search “Kafka.”

People with multiple personality sometimes see and interact with their alternate personalities—like children do with their imaginary companions and fiction writers sometimes do with their characters—either when they look in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors”) or as a free-standing visual hallucination (not psychotic, because they know very well that it is not objectively true and that other people cannot see it).

I think that professors of literature should know about these things, so that they know what they are reading.

They can still enjoy “Harvey,” just as people can still enjoy Peter Pan even if they know about J. M. Barrie’s “McConnachie.”

Indeed, knowing that “Harvey” is a case of multiple personality, and that multiple personality is not a psychosis, might even reinforce their enjoyment of “Harvey.”

And as I emphasize in this blog, if a person’s multiple personality does not cause significant distress or dysfunction, it is not a mental illness, and may even be an asset.

“The Odyssey” by Homer (post 5): Why does Athena usually appear in the guise of people, rather than as herself, or simply force people to do what she wants?

In The Odyssey, Athena frequently appears in the guise of people (e.g., Mentes, Mentor, Telemachus, and a shepherd). In contrast, it is relatively rare that she appears as herself or that she simply makes people do or say what she wants.

Of the three ways she could get what she wants—impersonating, acting as herself, putting thoughts in a person’s head—only impersonating necessarily leaves the person with no memory for what had been said or done.

For example, when Athena speaks in the guise of Mentor, the real Mentor is not present, and so cannot have any memory for what was said. Whereas, if Athena had made Mentor say what she wanted said, or had herself said what she wanted said in everyone’s presence, then Mentor would remember what had been said.

Perhaps it was not uncommon in the ancient world for a person to have been witnessed doing or saying something, but honestly have no memory for it. What could explain it? If you didn’t have the concept of memory gaps due to multiple personality, then you might explain it by saying that it was not really the person, but a goddess impersonating the person.

But would multiple personality have been more common in the ancient world than it is now? If childhood trauma had been more common, then multiple personality might have been more common.

However, it may simply have been that fiction writers in the ancient world, like fiction writers today, were more likely to have had multiple personality than the general public, and that it was reflected in their stories.

Of course, if no narrator or character ever raises the issue of Mentor, for example, having amnesia for advising what he had appeared to advise, then few readers will notice or care.

“The Odyssey” by Homer (post 4): Either Athena impersonates Telemachus to arrange for a ship or Telemachus has a multiple personality memory gap.

In Book 2, it is alleged that Athena, in the guise of Mentor (an old friend of Odysseus), urges Telemachus to take a ship in search of news of Odysseus, his father, who has been missing for twenty years (the ten years of the Trojan War and ten years thereafter). Then, in the guise of Telemachus, himself, Athena goes around and actually arranges for the ship.

Why does Telemachus accept Mentor’s claim to have arranged for the ship? Evidently because Telemachus has no memory of doing it himself. But Mentor is an old man and would not have been able to do it. So the most likely explanation is that Telemachus, himself, arranged for the ship, but has a memory gap for doing it, implying that Telemachus has multiple personality. (Search “memory gaps” to see many past posts that discuss this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.)

Did Homer and his original audience accept the story of Athena’s intervention at face value or did they have some concept of multiple personality? I don’t know.

“The Odyssey” by Homer (post 3): Opening lines contain an invocation of the Muse, which is not just a literary convention or a metaphor for inspiration.

In the new translation by Emily Wilson, these are the opening lines:

“Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost

when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,

and where he went, and who he met, the pain

he suffered in the storms at sea, and how

he worked to save his life and bring his men

back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,

they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god

kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,

tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning” (1).

The usual controversy about the opening lines revolves around translation of the Greek word “polytropos” (literally, many turns)—Odysseus is a man of many turns—which Wilson has translated as “complicated.”

There is usually no controversy about Homer’s invocation of the Muse (the goddess, a child of Zeus), which is assumed to be nothing more than an epic poem convention and a metaphor for the author’s inspiration.

But people who have read this whole blog know better. Fiction writers may actually hear the voice of an alternate personality who knows the story that the writer is going to tell before the writer’s regular self knows it.

For example, the bestselling novelist Sue Grafton calls it her “Shadow,” a Jungian term for the unconscious, but Grafton (regular personality) says she converses with Shadow and that Shadow knows Grafton’s stories before Grafton does.

Are all muses female? No. Another contemporary writer discussed in this blog, Stephen King, says that the alternate personality he converses with and refers to as his “muse” is male.

Are Grafton and King speaking metaphorically or joking? I used to think so. But read the posts on all 150 fiction writers I discuss in this blog, and you will realize that when fiction writers say such things in nonfiction articles and books, they mean it.

Fiction writers take their writing process very seriously.

1. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York, WW Norton, 2018.

Introduction to Emily Wilson’s new translation of Homer’s “Odyssey” (post 2) says Odysseus “contains multitudes” and “creates multiple identities for himself”

“Odysseus himself seems to contain multitudes: he is a migrant, a pirate, a carpenter, a king, an athlete, a beggar, a husband, a lover…a fighter, a liar, a leader, and a thief…a man who cries…self-interested sacker of cities…seems to be constantly changing—in appearance, behavior…He is able to be, at different times, young or old, strong or weak, a beggar or a home owner, a victim or an aggressor…He switches roles not only through the magical power of Athena, which transforms his appearance, but also through the magical power of his own words, through which he creates multiple different identities for himself” (1).

The two classics professors, Thomas Van Nortwick (post 1) and Emily Wilson, seem to be arguing that Odysseus has multiple personality, but I reserve judgment until I read the poem myself.

1. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York, W. W. Norton, 2018.

“The Unknown Odysseus” by Thomas Van Nortwick: Hero has multiple personae and autobiographies, namelessness, and is self-contradictory, lying trickster.

I have never read Homer’s Odyssey, but think I should, and so have just read The Unknown Odysseus to prepare myself.

Classics Professor Van Nortwick urges “an opennesss to the implications of Odysseus’ alternate personae for our understanding of the account of human experience the poem creates.

“To put it another way, the unmaking of Odysseus in his various nonheroic personae is also the making of a wider world. Most studies of the Odyssey have assumed that the heroic Odysseus is always the real Odysseus, that the world this hero, with Athena’s help, creates in Ithaka is the only reality the poem recognizes. To read the Odyssey in this way is to put on Athena’s blinders, to identify the poem with the fairy tale. To do so robs the story of its depth and complexity, its portrayal of human experience in all its untidy profundity” (1, p. x).

“Odysseus withholds his identity until he chooses to reveal it…In this sense, the entire poem is about who Odysseus is at any given point” (1, p. 24).

“Ought we trust Odysseus as a narrator? His record in the area of truth telling is not impressive elsewhere when he delivers false autobiographies to Athena, Eumaeus, and Penelope” (1, p. 26).

“Disguises and lying, manipulation of loved ones, none of this worries us if we have given ourselves over to the story” (1, p. 31). Search “lying” in this blog.

“Now comes the famous and troubling exchange between Odysseus and his father in which the son, rather than greeting his father immediately, tortures him further with another false tale…Withholding his name has been an important strategy for the hero in the midst of strangers, but here it seems gratuitous…this torture is not necessary by any sane measure” (1, pp. 32-33).

“The central question of the narrative arises once again: who is the real Odysseus?” (1, p. 36).

“Odysseus is the master of namelessness” (1, p. 45). Search “namelessness” in this blog.

“…his contradictory character” (1, p. 50). Search “puzzling contradiction” in this blog.

“…Odysseus’ other selves…” (1, p. 77).

“…the personae Odysseus creates…” (1, p. 80).

“That Odysseus often behaves like a trickster is not news. The more important question is whether the archetype’s appearance in the story adds anything to the articulation of the poem’s reflections on human identity” (1, p. 90).

The Trickster literary archetype (2, 3) (also search “trickster” in this blog) would include “confidence man” (search) and shapeshifting (search; 4), which I would consider clues and metaphors for multiple personality.

“The Odyssey begins with the question: where is Odysseus? As the story unfolds, a second, more difficult quandary surfaces: who is Odysseus? (1, p. 98).

1. Thomas Van Nortwick. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 2009.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_tricksters

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapeshifting

In New York “Times Critics’ Top Books of 2017,” Dwight Garner chooses one by Rachel Cusk, Janet Maslin one by Lee Child, authors discussed here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/books/critics-favorite-books-2017.html

Search “Rachel Cusk” and “Lee Child” to see past posts on these writers.

“Donald Trump, Accidental Buddhist” by Ben Dolnick in New York Times cites Trump’s third-person self-reference, but forgets it in Charles Dickens.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/sunday/trump-narcisit-third-person-buddhism.html

In multiple personality, it is common for one personality to speak of another personality in the third person.

Search “illeism,” “third-person self-reference,” “plural self-reference,” “Trump,” and “Dickens” for past posts.

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens assumed that his readers would infer multiple personality from third-person self-reference, as I discussed in the very first post in this blog on Charles Dickens.

In Dickens’s plan for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the multiple personality of John Jasper, the murderer, was to have been revealed when Jasper, in his confession, referred to himself in the third person.

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 15): Author blames novel’s premise-violating climax on “the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself)”

“Gollum on the edge of the abyss was fighting like a mad thing with an unseen foe. — It is not explained how Gollum was able to find his foe while Frodo was invisible. Readers have suggested, among other solutions, that he did so by means of a keen sense of hearing or smell, or by sensing the presence of the Ring, having become attuned to it through long years of possession; or that Frodo cast a shadow, as Bilbo did while wearing the Ring in The Hobbit, Chapter 5; or that Gollum found Frodo by sheer chance. Chance, however, would seem to be ruled out by Tolkien’s comment to Amy Ronald on 27 July 1956, that at the point when Frodo’s will failed and he claimed the Ring, ‘the Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself)’, i.e. God (Letters, p. 253)” (1, pp. 619-620).

By “the Other Power,” did Tolkien mean God? That is what people usually mean when they capitalize “Other Power.” However, it seems unfair to Tolkien to think he was so presumptuous and sacrilegious as to claim God as his cowriter and blame God for his novel’s glaring mistake.

Then, if it was not God (and, presumably, not the Devil, either), who, other than an alternate personality, could Tolkien have meant by “the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself”?

Why would an alternate personality, writing the story, make such a glaring mistake? Perhaps, since Tolkien was taking credit for the novel, it was the only way for the alternate personality to call attention to itself.

1. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005.

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 14): Like Sméagol-Gollum (widely recognized for multiple personality), Sam Gamgee debates himself.

Most readers of this novel do not recognize the following dialogue as being between Sam and an alternate personality, because the latter does not have its own name. But regular readers of this blog know that in real-life multiple personality, alternate personalities are often nameless (search “nameless” and “namelessness” in this blog) or at least decline to volunteer their names.

When persons who do not have multiple personality debate themselves, the same “I” takes both sides, so “I” is never surprised or taken aback by what is said. The debate is not a true dialogue in which two independent thinkers argue.

But the following is a true dialogue in which Sam and his alternate personality argue:

     “He could not sleep and he held a debate with himself. ‘Well, come now. We’ve done better than you hoped,’ he said sturdily. ‘Began well anyway. I reckon we crossed half the distance before we stopped. One more day will do it.’ And then he paused.

     ‘Don’t be a fool, Sam Gamgee,’ came an answer in his own voice… ‘And you can’t go on much longer…’

     ‘I can go on a good way though, and I will.’

     ‘Where to?’

     ‘To the Mountain, of course.’

     ‘But what then, Sam Gamgee, what then? When you get there, what are you going to do?

     To his dismay Sam realized that he had not got an answer to this. He had no clear idea at all…

     ‘There you are!’ came the answer. ‘It’s all quite useless…You are the fool, going on hoping and toiling…You might just as well lie down now and give it up. You’ll never get to the top anyway.’

     ‘I’ll get there, if I leave everything but my bones behind,’ said Sam. ‘And I’ll carry Mr. Frodo up myself, if it breaks my back and heart. So stop arguing!’ ” (1, p. 939).

Comment

The above is what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality”: the author probably did not intend to portray multiple personality, per se, but does so inadvertently, because, in the author’s own personal experience, it is just ordinary psychology. The author does not realize that everyone does not think this way.

Like the author, most people with multiple personality think that other people probably have similar subjective experiences (internal dialogues, memory gaps, etc.), but that other people don’t mention it, because it is too mundane or personal. Novelists might discover that their spouse does not have similar subjective experiences, but that other fiction writers do.

Sam’s unintentionally portrayed multiple personality is one more example of how an author’s multiple personality inadvertently pervades his novel.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings [1954-55]. 50th Anniversary One-Volume Edition. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

“The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien (post 13): Tolkien said that this novel originated in childhood, which is when multiple personality originates.

Approaching the last hundred pages, I am starting to think about what it all means. And the first thing that occurs to me is that this novel, according to Tolkien, originated in his childhood.

As mentioned in a previous post, Tolkien said the book is based on the imaginary languages, and their associated characters and stories, that he started to imagine when he was a child.

Thus, it is fair to interpret the small hobbits as a metaphor for children in a world of good and evil.

And since it is a hobbit who carries the magic ring through most of the novel, and the magic ring, when you are in danger, can make you invisible, but also makes you feel like a change has come over you, then the question is: What could make a child disappear and feel transformed whenever the child has to escape evil?

That is how multiple personality originates. An imaginative child who is recurrently traumatized learns to switch to an alternate personality whenever trauma is threatened or happens.

Since the evil people don’t know that the personality switch has taken place (alternate personalities are normally secretive and do not acknowledge their presence), the alternate personality is invisible to them and the regular personality is not there to be seen. And the alternate personality feels different (and can either tolerate the evil or feel it is not happening to them).

Of course, the invisibility and transformation are reversible when the hobbit takes off the ring or the child switches back to the regular personality.

It is noteworthy that the character who had had the magic ring for the longest time, Sméagol-Gollum, is the character with the most obvious multiple personality. The magic of the magic ring is the magic of multiple personality.

Of course, Gollum is a cautionary tale about multiple personality. The magic ring (multiple personality) is good to escape danger, but is dangerous if you get addicted to it. Normal multiple personality can become multiple personality disorder if the person cannot put limitations on its use.

I will see what happens with the ring at the end of the novel. So far, it is mainly evil people who want to get it, and the good people who want to destroy it. If that does not change, then the whole novel might be a cautionary tale against multiple personality. But that would be hypocritical for a novelist.