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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Monday, December 4, 2017

“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.
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