“The Life and Death of Émile Ajar” by Romain Gary (post 2): “The truth is that I was profoundly affected by the oldest protean temptation of man: that of multiplicity”

The literary world had been fooled into believing that Romain Gary’s second Prix Goncourt had been won by his cousin, writing under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar. The hoax was revealed posthumously by the publication of Gary’s essay “The Life and Death of Émile Ajar,” in which he confirmed that Romain Gary and Émile Ajar were one and the same person. As he explains:

“All my as it were official, labeled lives were doubled, tripled, by other, more secret ones, but the old adventure-seeker that I am has never found total satisfaction in any of them. The truth is that I was profoundly affected by the oldest protean temptation of man: that of multiplicity. A craving for life in all its forms and possibilities, which every flavor tasted merely deepened. My impulses, always simultaneous and contradictory, constantly urged me on in every direction, and the only things that enabled me to survive them with my mental stability intact were, I think, sexuality, and the novel—which is a prodigious means of ever-renewed incarnations. I have always been someone else” (1, p. 186).

However, Gary did not see Romain Gary and Émile Ajar as a pure “dual personality” in the sense of having nothing at all in common. Gary said that textual analysis would find certain phrases and ideas in the novels of both Gary and Ajar:

“Of course, no one has noticed the extent to which Ajar has been influenced by me…it would even be possible to talk of out-and-out plagiarism. But, well, he’s a young author. I’m not going to make a fuss about it. And in general, the influence my work exercises over young writers has not been sufficiently stressed” (1, p. 191).

Comment

Other than that Ajar might have read the works of Gary, my guess as to why their works had things in common would be that novels are not written by one personality, and that the Gary and Ajar personalities might have shared the same muse and other co-writing personalities.

And in general, as I’ve previously noted, the degree of mutual awareness or co-consciousness among alternate personalities varies from no awareness to rather extensive co-consciousness. People with multiple personality, when you know them well enough, usually have a sufficient number of personalities so that all these various degrees of co-consciousness are evident, depending on which two of the person’s personalities you are talking about.

I would disagree with Gary’s overgeneralization, when he implies that everyone is tempted to indulge in multiplicity. On the contrary, most people are so far from being tempted that they find it hard to believe that anyone could actually be multiple. It is usually only people who have used multiple personality to cope with traumatic experiences in childhood who can, or would want to, experience it.

But since imaginative children and childhood trauma are not rare, multiple personality is not rare, especially in certain occupations, such as fiction writing, for which multiple personality, usually the normal version, is a major asset.

1. Romain Gary. “The Life and Death of Émile Ajar” [1979], translated by Barbara Wright, pp. 175-194, in Hocus Bogus: Romain Gary Writing as Émile Ajar [1976], Translated by David Bellos. New Haven, Yale University Press/A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book, 2010.