“Freshwater” by Akwaeke Emezi: New York Times Book Review says protagonist has multiple personalities and novel depicts dissociative identity disorder.

The Times’ review—https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/books/review/freshwater-akwaeke-emezi.html—says the protagonist, Ada, has “multiple personalities” and the novel is a depiction of “dissociative identity disorder” (the formal name for multiple personality), but that the novel explains it in terms of spirit possession, and “causes us to question science and reason.”

The review does not address whether the novel is autobiographical, purely fiction, or represented as autobiographical but really a hoax. Nor does the review mention the author’s claim elsewhere—https://brittlepaper.com/2018/01/friends-family-im-woman-akwaeke-emezi-nonbinary-transgender/—to be transgender and have had surgery.

Of particular interest to my blog in the Times’ review: “The story is narrated by Ada’s multiple personalities, and occasionally by Ada herself.” If that reflects the way this novel was written, it supports my thesis that fiction writers employ alternate personalities in their writing process.

“Independence Day” by Richard Ford (post 2): Frank Bascombe thinks 15-year-old son is having emotional problems due to conflict between “two selves”

Richard Ford’s Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.

In Chapter One, the first-person narrator, Frank Bascombe, who is divorced, is concerned that his son, Paul, who lives with his remarried mother, is having serious problems: shoplifting and assault. Frank plans to spend father-son time with Paul on the Independence Day, 4th of July, holiday.

Frank’s formulation of the psychological basis for his son’s problems includes the following:

“…one little outer character tries to make friends with or exert control over another, submerged, one, but can’t” (1, p. 14).

“My fatherly job…to coax by some middleman’s charm his [son’s] two foreign selves, his present and his childish past, into a better, more robust and outward-tending relationship—like separate, angry nations seeking one government—and to sponsor self-tolerance as a theme for the future” (1, p. 15).

This would be a sound, therapeutic approach to stabilize multiple personality. Is Frank basing his formulation and solution of his son’s problems on his own personal experience? Are these issues a reflection of the author’s?

1. Richard Ford. Independence Day. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

“Frank and me” by Richard Ford, on Frank Bascombe novels: Prize-winning novelist on relationship with characters, and “how real humans are comprised”

Interviewers often ask novelists about their relationship with characters, since it is amusing to hear novelists say they converse with characters, who seem to have minds of their own, and may or may not need to be curbed and controlled. Although some novelists evade such questions, it is rare for a novelist to become irate.

Interviewer: What kind of relationship do you have with your characters?

Richard Ford: Master to slave. Sometimes I hear them at night singing over in their cabins. And sometimes, I’ll wake up at night and write down what I hear…I’m kidding, of course. But they don’t talk to me. They don’t tell me what to do. I make them do whatever I want them to…I’m very disdainful of these aesthetes who talk about, “My characters wouldn’t do that,” or “I just start writing it and then my characters write the book.” Horseshit, is what I say. It’s a ruse to get out of taking responsibility for your mistakes. Authorship means I authorize everything (1, p. 168).

“Writing Frank Bascombe for 30 years was never what I intended…The first Bascombe novel, The Sportswriter (1986), was written…with no onward lines leading to another book. The second, Independence Day (1995), came…when I set out to write a completely unrelated novel…To my surprise, however, all my preliminary notes for this book ‘sounded’ like the narrator from the earlier book. Frank. These notes had his sense of humor, his preoccupations, his flaws…” (2).

Ford goes on to refer to the character “Bascombe as my familiar…He may be my secret friend; but only in ways that children have secret friends…And beyond all this, the sense of what fictional characters are, and how they’re made, turns out to be very instructive about how real humans are comprised. In my view, we’re all but bits and pieces forged together by some furious will, seeking plausibility” (2).

1. Huey Guagliardo (Editor). Conversations with Richard Ford. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

2. Richard Ford. “Frank and me: Richard Ford on his Bascombe novels.” Financial Times, October 24, 2014.

“The Princess Bride” by William Goldman (post 5): In “Buttercup’s Baby” epilogue, Piccoli goes into trance and Fezzik is taken over by alternate personalities.

In 1998, twenty-five years after publication of The Princess Bride, Goldman added an epilogue, “Buttercup’s Baby.” (Buttercup is the title character of The Princess Bride.)

Piccoli, “the acknowledged king of the mind,” is visited by Inigo, who wants Piccoli’s coaching on the mental aspects of swordsmanship. “Piccoli had spent his entire long life training his mind, so that he had the ability to sit for a day in the middle of a mad battle and know nothing of the screams and slaughter going on around him. When he was in his mind, he was as if dead. And every morning at dawn he would go into his mind and stay there ’til noon. No power could disturb him” (1, pp. 368-369).

Like Westley’s going inside himself to withstand torture (see past post), this is another example of a character who uses trance, which is a dissociative state of mind related to multiple personality and the fiction writing process. I suspect that the trances of Westley and Piccoli reflect an aspect of the author’s creative process.

Fezzik, the loyal, but simple-minded, giant—who, if there were a fork in the road, could be relied upon to make the wrong choice—was the last person who would have been expected to come to the rescue when Buttercup was having prolonged labor, and was in danger of losing her baby. There was no doctor, and nobody knew what to do.

But suddenly, “Fezzik…knew…he was…not alone anymore. He began to try to fight it, because something was invading him, invading his brain, and the Lord only knew his brain could use a little help, but Fezzik struggled on because when you were invaded, you never knew who was coming along for the ride, a helper or a damager…

“Fezzik could feel his power going as the invader took control. His last thought was really a prayer: that please, whoever you are, if you harm the child, kill me first…

[And then a voice, speaking from Fezzik’s mouth, said] “ ‘We have the body…We have [Fezzik’s] body,’ Fezzik said again” (1, pp. 406-408).

And then Fezzik, under the control of his invaders, performs a Caesarean section, and successfully delivers Buttercup’s baby.

Goldman, in his afterword, wonders “who did invade Fezzik?” (1, p. 413), suggesting the author did not realize that what he had described is multiple personality.

The climax of The Princess Bride’s epilogue, “Buttercup’s Baby,” involves Fezzik’s multiple personality.

When I read “Fezzik struggled on because when you were invaded, you never knew who was coming along for the ride, a helper or damager,” I interpret “Fezzik” as standing for “William Goldman” or “the fiction writer,” regarding the involvement of multiple personality in the fiction writing process.

1. William Goldman. The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version [1973], Abridged by William Goldman, including “Buttercup’s Baby” [1998]. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 2007.

“The Princess Bride” by William Goldman (post 4): Resurrection of Westley by magic raises question of the concept of death in persons with multiple personality.

Although Westley has now been tortured to death, there is the possibility that Miracle Max may be able to bring him back to life. But since Westley is not a Christlike figure, where is the author coming from with the idea that death may not be permanent?

The answer is childhood. Very young children do not have a concept of the permanence of death. And since multiple personality begins in childhood, it should not be surprising that some alternate personalities do not think of death as permanent.

Indeed, what some alternate personalities mean by the word “death” is that a personality has been locked in, and confined to, the inner world, and is currently prevented from coming out and taking over behavior in the outside world.

This way of thinking is one reason that suicide is a risk in the clinical version of multiple personality. It is not only that one personality, because it thinks of itself as a separate person, supposes it can kill another personality without itself dying, but that it may not think of the murder of the other personality as permanent, but only as a method of getting the other personality out of the way.

“The Princess Bride” by William Goldman (post 3): The hero demonstrates self-hypnosis eye-roll, and probably switches personalities, to cope with torture.

Westley, the hero, has been captured by the evil Prince and the sadistic Count, who torture him:

“The Count set fire to Westley’s hands. Nothing permanent or disabling; he just dipped Westley’s hands in oil and brought a candle close enough to set things bubbling…

However, “Westley suffered not at all throughout. His screaming was totally a performance to please them; he had been practicing his defenses for a month now, and was more than ready. The minute the Count brought the candle close, Westley raised his eyes to the ceiling, dropped his eyelids over them, and in a state of deep and steady concentration, he took his brain away” (1, pp. 226-227).

Readers of Edgar Allan Poe will recognize what Westley did with his eyes. In his fictional short story, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), Poes describes an experiment of hypnotizing Mr. Valdemar, who is about to die of tuberculosis, in the hope that hypnosis will prolong Mr. Valdemar’s life. During the induction of hypnosis (mesmerism), Poe notes “the glassy roll of the eyes” of Mr. Valdemar. Later, in bringing Valdemar out of hypnosis, Poe notes the “descent of the iris.”

In 1972, psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel, M.D., introduced “An Eye-Roll Test of Hypnotizability” (2, 3), which claimed to assess hypnotizability by how well people could roll their eyes upward (like Westley).

Where did William Goldman get this realistic detail of hypnosis—the eye-roll—which he used in his description of Westley’s self-hypnosis? From Poe? From psychiatric literature on hypnosis? From observation of, or personal experience with, going into trance? In past posts, I have quoted various fiction writers as saying they go into a trance when they write.

Finally, consider, that at the very same time Westley “took his brain away,” he was putting on a performance of screaming to fool his torturers. How can a person, simultaneously, take his brain away and be present to put on a performance? Evidently, the regular Westley personality went inside (“away”), while an alternate personality, who was impervious to pain, came out, took over, and put on a performance.

1. William Goldman. The Princess Bride [1973]. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 2007

2. The Spiegel Eye Roll Test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vERxtmCz-K8

3. Herbert Spiegel. “An Eye-Roll Test of Hypnotizability” [1972]. http://www.drherbertspiegel.com/_html/pdfs/EyeRollTestForHypnotizability.pdf

Metafiction Fantasy “The Princess Bride” by William Goldman (post 2): Author says all he did was abridge “S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure”

The first thirty-two pages of this fantasy novel are metafiction (1, 2). The first sentence is, “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it” (3, p. 1). Goldman goes on to explain that when he was a child, his father read him this book by S. Morgenstern, and that all Goldman has done is abridge Morgenstern’s book by leaving out the dull parts.

Since the fantasy story itself does not warrant this metafictional distraction, Goldman must have been very impressed by a subjective sense that he did not write it. Yet, as he well knew, no other person did write it. Therefore, “S. Morgenstern” must refer to one or more of Goldman’s alternate personalities, because the only way that a person can both be, and not be, the author of a novel, is multiple personality.

Goldman’s feeling that he did not write his novel is typical of novelists. For example, as noted in past posts, Charles Dickens confided to his friend and biographer, John Forster, “I do not invent it,” and Stephen King has said that his stories are “found objects.”

1. Wikipedia. “Metafiction” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction

2. Wikipedia. “List of metafictional works” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metafictional_works

3. William Goldman. The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version, Abridged by William Goldman [1973, 1998, 2003]. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 2007.

Mario Vargas Llosa (post 3): New York Times review of Nobel Prize winner’s latest novel fails to mention he is known for characters with multiple personality.

The New York Times review of Llosa’s latest novel: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/books/review-neighborhood-sabers-utopias-mario-vargas-llosa.html

Two past posts:

May 2, 2016

Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, is said to write novels based on the premise that people have multiple personality.

“El sueño del celta opens with an epigraph citing a text by the turn-of-the-century Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, Motivos de Proteo:

‘Each one of us is, successively, not one but many. And these successive personalities that emerge one from the other tend to present the strangest, most astonishing contrasts among themselves.’

“This quote from Rodó is a kind of theory of human personality that appears in several of Vargas Llosa’s novels, but underlies in a consistent and significant way La casa verde, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, and El sueño del celta” (1, pp. 110-111).

1. Raymond Leslie Williams. Mario Vargas Llosa: a life of writing. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2014.

May 9, 2016

Unacknowledged multiple personality in “The Bad Girl” by Mario Vargas Llosa (post 2): Title character’s true problem never recognized by anyone in novel.

In my previous post, having misread a biography, I said that “Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, is said to write novels based on the premise that people have multiple personality.” However, now that I have read one of these novels, “The Bad Girl,” I find it questionable that the author recognizes his characters have multiple personality, per se.

I jumped to conclusions when the biographer said, “The Bad Girl states that by living life as she has chosen (a bizarre series of events with multiple personalities), she experiences it more ‘intensely’ ” (1, p. 106). The fact is, no narrator or character in the novel ever says that she has multiple personality. Even when she is psychiatrically hospitalized for a month of evaluation and treatment, including hypnosis, the doctors focus on her recent trauma, ignore her history of alternating identities, and don’t realize that she has multiple personality.

Ricardo (the narrator and other main character) knows very well that the Bad Girl changes attitudes and identities, using different names and behaving in different ways, but he sees her as a calculating adventurer, who seeks out rich men, not as a person with multiple personality, per se.

Ricardo does not recognize multiple personality when he sees it. For example, he meets her when she is in her new identity of Comrade Arlette. She does not recognize him. He reminds her that the last time he knew her “your name was Lily” (2, p. 23). Then she does remember him from back then, quite clearly. “Still, a moment later…she absolutely denied knowing what I was talking about. How could I have made up a thing like that? I was thinking about somebody else. She never had been named Lily” (2, p. 24).

This novel reminds me of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (search past posts), not only in that it is about the adventures of a mistress with multiple personality who comes to a tragic end, but in the reader’s belated discovery of the title character’s real name. Roxana’s real name is Susan. The bad girl’s real name is Otilia (2, p. 234). And if Ricardo had understood that the love of his life, the bad girl, had multiple personality, he would have addressed her by that name with the expectation of either seeing a personality switch or of hearing the bad girl speak of Otilia in the third person. But he never addresses her by, or even asks her about, her real name, since this novel does not acknowledge or recognize the issue of multiple personality, per se.

Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa seems inclined to a conception of human nature that verges on multiple personality. For example, near the end of the novel, he makes a point of mentioning a ballet “where each dancer would be many, each man and woman containing countless human beings” (2, p. 261).

1. Raymond Leslie Williams. Mario Vargas Llosa: a life of writing. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2014.

2. Mario Vargas Llosa. The Bad Girl. Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006/2007.

“The Color of Light” by William Goldman: Fiction writer has ego alien experiences and memory gaps, inadvertently suggestive of multiple personality.

“William Goldman is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He came to prominence in the 1950s as a novelist, before turning to writing for film. He has won two Academy Awards for his screenplays, first for the western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and again for All the President’s Men (1976), about journalists who broke the Watergate scandal of President Richard Nixon.” —Wikipedia.

I chose to read his novel, The Color of Light, because the protagonist, Charles Fuller (“Chub”), is a fiction writer.

If there is anything in this novel suggestive of multiple personality, it does not appear to have been the author’s intention.

Ego Alien

Chub sometimes says and does things that surprise or even astonish him, because they are ego alien, meaning they don’t feel like he, himself, has willed or originated them:

“ ‘More than anything,’ Chub heard himself reply” (1, p. 46).

“…he was stunned to see his right hand rise” (1, p. 148).

“ ‘That’s all pure plain one hundred percent unadulterated bullshit,’ Chub heard himself say” (1, p. 209).

“…Chub…fleeing across the Columbia campus, was astonished, in a passing classroom window, to see himself burst into tears” (1, p. 278).

Both Vivid Memory and Memory Gaps

Chub has both exceptionally good, and puzzlingly poor, memory. He has unusually vivid memory of some childhood experiences, like his parents’ arguing when he was six years old (1, pp. 13-14). Yet as a young adult, he sometimes has memory gaps:

“…but he had no memory later of any of what it might have been about…and later he had no memory of anything that happened there either” (1, p. 12).

“The next thing he knew it was an hour later” (1, p. 145).

“Chub held her, embarrassed almost because they had been intimate for over a year and so much of her was gone from his memory” (1, p. 157).

Comment

Since, as I have discussed previously, ego alien experiences may be due to alternate personalities, and people with multiple personality often have both exceptionally good memory and memory gaps (search “memory gaps”), you might think the author was trying to imply that his protagonist has multiple personality.

But since no narrator or character ever mentions multiple personality, the presence of its symptoms appears to be unintentional (search “gratuitous multiple personality”). Evidently, the protagonist has ego alien experiences, exceptionally good memory, and memory gaps, because the author considered them to be ordinary psychology for fiction writers. And why would the author think that unless they were aspects of his own psychology?

1. William Goldman. The Color of Light. New York, Warner Books, 1984.

Ego alien, Egodystonic, Self-Contradiction: Thoughts, remarks, and behaviors that do not feel like your own, because they are due to alternate personalities.

Most things that most people think, say, and do are egosyntonic: they feel natural, like something you would expect yourself to think, say, or do. For example, if you have always loved chocolate ice cream, but have always detested vanilla ice cream, then purchasing and eating chocolate ice cream would be egosyntonic, but purchasing and eating vanilla ice cream would be egodystonic or ego alien. And if you found that you had purchased and eaten vanilla ice cream, you would think, “I don’t know what came over me. That’s not like me, at all.”

Of course, not everything that is ego alien is due to alternate personalities. For example, the obsessions and compulsions of a person with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) are egodystonic, but most people diagnosed as having OCD do not have multiple personality (although there has been at least one case in which an initial diagnosis of OCD was later changed to multiple personality).

So if a person had a history of multiple “I don’t know where that came from” experiences, I would not be certain that the person had multiple personality, but I would certainly consider the possibility.

For prior discussions in regard to various writers and related ideas, search “self-contradiction” and “possession.”

“V.” by Thomas Pynchon (post 4): Fausto Maijstral, confessing to four personalities, differing in memory, calls it “false assumption that identity is single”

There is one other character who deserves mention in regard to multiple personality. But since this character does not think of it as multiple personality—a particular condition, with a clinical version known to psychiatry—he discusses it as though it were true of everyone.

In “Confessions of Fausto Maijstral” (chapter eleven), the character divides his life into four personalities, Fausto Maijstral I-IV. He says that each personality has its own memory, making memory unreliable, since it will differ depending on which personality you ask:

“Now memory is a traitor: gilding, altering. The word is, in sad fact, meaningless, based on the false assumption that identity is single, soul continuous” (1, p. 287).

However, identity is single for most people. They have different moods and roles, but their memory is continuous. Novelists and others who have the nonclinical version of multiple personality, but do not recognize it as such, may assume that everyone is multiple, but most people are not.

Although a sizable minority of people, some very gifted, do have the normal version of multiple personality—I estimate over 90% of novelists and up to 30% of the general public—most people, at least 70%, do not.

1. Thomas Pynchon. V. [1963]. New York, Bantam Books, 1984.

“V.” by Thomas Pynchon (post 3): Herbert Stencil’s Illeism (third-person self reference) and the novel’s multiple narratives are due to multiple personality.

The Epilogue is about the last days of Herbert Stencil’s father, Sydney Stencil, who is involved with a woman whose name starts with “V.”

But what I found most interesting, even startling, about the epilogue is the sudden appearance of a character named Stencil (the father) who refers to himself in the first person. Previously, throughout the novel, Herbert Stencil had always and unerringly referred to himself in the third person (which you could probably not do, no matter how hard you tried).

The reader has not been told at what age Herbert started to refer to himself in the third person, but the reader is told that he had experienced a change in personality at age 38: “it was as if a stranger, located above the frontiers of consciousness, were shaking him” (1, p. 43).

Moreover, to sustain his new “animateness,” “he had to hunt V,” because if he didn’t, he would go “back into half-consciousness” (1, p. 44); that is, revert to his previous personality.

So what is the search for “V”? It is the animating preoccupation of an alternate personality, who is called “a stranger,” probably because he did not identify with the regular personality or call himself “Herbert Stencil” (and so would refer to the latter as someone else, by using the third person).

In addition to Herbert Stencil’s illeism (third-person self-reference), the other unusual feature of this novel is that it seems less like one novel, and more like several novellas, which I guess is due to Pynchon’s having several narrative personalities.

1. Thomas Pynchon. V. [1963]. New York, Bantam Books, 1984.

Fiction Writer Interviews: Some are comfortable giving interviews, but others are not, depending on whether they have a reliable host personality.

Since I am currently reading a novel by an author who is famous for not giving interviews, it is a good time to review how giving vs. not giving interviews relates to multiple personality.

Some people with multiple personality have a robust host personality, who is designed to deal with the public. This personality may not have been directly involved in writing the novel under discussion, but it can discuss the novel intelligently, as long as serious questions, such as what the novel really means, are evaded.

A valuable feature of the host personality is consistency. It will answer the same questions the same way—such as questions about the author’s personal life—from one interview to another.

However, other people with multiple personality cannot depend on a host personality to take full charge of all interviews. Other personalities may be inclined to come out during some interviews. Interviewers may not realize they are speaking to alternate personalities (who almost always remain incognito), but alternate personalities may answer questions differently, because each one has its own perspective. 

For example, William Faulkner’s alternate personalities had given different versions of his military record in different interviews, which had embarrassed him. The following past post does not mention Faulkner’s military record, but discusses his general fear that interviewers might ask personal questions.

February 9, 2014

William Faulkner, lacking a good Host Personality, inadvertently implies that he has Multiple Personality

Faulkner’s interview by Jean Stein in Paris Review (New York City, 1956) begins as follows:

INTERVIEWER: Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don’t like being interviewed.

WILLIAM FAULKNER: The reason I don’t like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different.

Most people would take the above to mean that since Faulkner likes his personal privacy, he will not cooperate with questions that invade his personal privacy, and so he will either refuse to answer such questions or he will give unreliable answers out of spite.

On the second and third pages of the interview, asked how a writer becomes a serious novelist, he says the following:

FAULKNER: …An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done…If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Most people would take this to mean that Faulkner is totally dedicated to his writing, as any serious writer would be. But he seems to be in an obnoxious, irritable mood.

I would interpret the above differently. “If the same [personal] question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different” because you may be talking to a different personality.

Regarding “An artist is a creature driven by demons,” we should keep in mind that Faulkner had continued to read the Bible since childhood. And when they say “demons” in the Bible, they don’t mean it as a metaphor for being determined or irritable, they mean being possessed, which psychiatry now understands to be multiple personality.

Why does Faulkner have such problems with interviews, in contrast to other writers like Doris Lessing, Sue Grafton, and Mark Twain? If you look at videos of interviews with Lessing or Grafton, they are pleasant, polished, and consistent. If you read interviews with Twain, he was similar. My answer is that, with those three, the interviewer would be speaking to their host personality (discussed in previous posts), a kind of personality that Faulkner evidently lacked.

[It may be an oversimplification to say that Faulkner totally lacked a host personality. However, his host personality was not sufficiently robust to always prevent other personalities from coming out during interviews.]

“V.” by Thomas Pynchon (post 2): Esther reads “Bridey Murphy” before, and has fugue after, rhinoplasty, by surgeon with history of fugue and memory gap.

The next chapter, titled “In which Esther gets a nose job,” begins with Esther’s reading, on the way to her plastic surgeon, The Search for Bridey Murphy, a 1956 book about a woman who was hypnotized, and whose past life as a woman named Bridey Murphy was allegedly discovered.

It was eventually found that “Bridey Murphy” was the hypnotized woman’s alternate personality, based on stories she had been told in early childhood. So this chapter opens with reference to an example of multiple personality.

Later in the chapter, the backstory about how Dr. Schoenmaker had been inspired to become a plastic surgeon, which involved his witnessing the disfigurement of a soldier’s face in war, notes the following:

“Schoenmaker must have lost himself. The next he could remember he was back at an aid station, trying to convince the doctors there to take his own cartilage [to help rebuild the soldier’s face]” (1, p. 86).

That is, Schoenmaker had had a dissociative fugue, a memory gap, during which an alternate personality had temporarily taken over.

Also note the narrator’s use of the word “lost”—“Schoenmaker must have lost himself”—a word which people with multiple personality commonly use, as in Proust’s title, In Search of Lost Time, or when psychiatrists screen for multiple personality by asking if a person ever “loses time” (has a fugue or memory gap).

And finally, Esther, after her rhinoplasty, is said to have “roamed the East Side in fugue” (1, p. 96). Dissociative fugue is a common symptom of multiple personality.

Search “memory gaps” and “fugue” for past discussions of other works and writers, and how these symptoms relate to multiple personality.

1. Thomas Pynchon. V. [1963]. New York, Bantam Books, 1984.

“V.” by Thomas Pynchon: Protagonist always speaks of himself in third person, and has “repertoire of identities” with different preferences. 

“Herbert Stencil, like small children at a certain stage…always referred to himself in the third person. This helped ‘Stencil’ appear as only one among a repertoire of identities. ‘Forcible dislocation of personality’ was what he called the general technique…for it involved, say, wearing clothes that Stencil wouldn’t be caught dead in, eating foods that would have made Stencil gag, living in unfamiliar digs, frequenting bars or cafés of a non-Stencilian character; all this for weeks on end; and why? To keep Stencil in his place: that is, in the third person” (1, p. 51).

Although called a “technique,” the above would seem to describe a person with multiple personality, whose host personality is Herbert Stencil and whose alternate personalities are the “repertoire of identities.”

Alternate personalities typically refer to each other in the third person, and may differ from each other in clothing styles, food preferences, etc.

But since the “repertoire of identities” is not labelled “multiple personality,” I do not know whether the author recognized it as such.

I am only at the beginning of the novel, and will read on.

1. Thomas Pynchon. V. [1963]. New York, Bantam Books, 1984.

Mirrors: Very successful 50-year-old professional woman says, “The problem is that whenever I look in the mirror, I see my mother”

As I have previously discussed (search “mirror” and “mirrors”), people with multiple personality may sometimes see alternate personalities when they look in the mirror. I thought of this when recently reading a New York Times advice column:

“I’m a 50-year-old professional woman…I’m very successful…and enjoy good health…The problem is that whenever I look in the mirror, I see my mother. She has been verbally abusive to me throughout my life, and it continues. I’ve gone to counseling, and I keep our relationship very superficial to protect myself. But I look just like her. I don’t see my cute self in the mirror. I see an aging woman who looks strikingly like my mother. I would like to get a face-lift to help give me a more youthful look. My husband doesn’t support this decision. He thinks I look beautiful, and he’s fearful I’ll have complications or not look like myself anymore. What should I do?” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/style/should-i-get-a-facelift.html

Whom does this woman feel she sees when she looks in the mirror: Does she feel, as most readers would assume, that she sees herself, but that her appearance strongly reminds her of her abusive mother? Or does she feel she sees someone else, either “my mother” or a “woman who looks strikingly like my mother”?

If the latter: Does she ever hear the voice of this other person? Has she ever been told (because she, herself, does not recall it) that she sometimes acts like her mother? Or has she ever acted like her mother against her will, as though, somehow, her strings were being pulled? Or has she ever found that something has been done (perhaps something like her mother would do) that nobody else could have done, but she doesn’t recall doing it? In general, have any such puzzling things happened, and has she ever had memory gaps? (Search “memory gaps,” a cardinal symptom of multiple personality.)

In short, I don’t know whether any of that would apply to this particular woman. But when people feel so strongly about what they see in the mirror that they are considering surgery, psychological screening may be warranted, especially if other people do not agree with the person’s perceptions. And multiple personality is one thing to screen for when people feel that they see someone else in the mirror.

“Big Machine” by Victor LaValle: Male protagonist had childhood trauma, searches for the Voice, had memory gap, and is pregnant with angel inside him.

Seemingly Gratuitous Pregnancy

Toward the end of this award-winning novel, the reader learns that the protagonist, Ricky Rice—a biologically normal, African-American man in his forties—has been telling this story to the literal angel inside him, with whom he is now literally pregnant.

This male pregnancy is not only unbelievable, but unnecessary, since the pregnancy could have been given to Ricky’s partner, a woman, and since there have been other angels in this story whose existence had not required a human pregnancy.

And since this pregnancy, qua pregnancy, does not make sense, how can it be understood? As an alternate personality: When a person has another distinct personality inside him, it is called multiple personality.

Seemingly Gratuitous Memory Gap

I had wondered what the reason was for the following comment by Ricky Rice earlier in the novel:

“I must’ve been left alone for a little while, but I couldn’t remember the passage of time. [Mr.] Lake went away, and then, next in my memory, the other Unlikely Scholars crowded round. But my hands were clean [after having read newspapers], so I’d gone down the hall to the coffee room and washed them, but when?” (1, p. 74).

He has had a memory gap, which is a marker for a period of time that another personality had taken over. It is a cardinal symptom of multiple personality (search “memory gaps” for previous discussions). But it is just mentioned in passing, as though the author had considered having a memory gap ordinary psychology, which it would be only for persons with multiple personality.

The Voice

Most of the novel revolves around the search to rediscover the Voice, a previously heard voice of God, or at least a god of some sort.

Since novelists sometimes ask each other if they have found the right “voice” for their new novel—the right narrator, character, and/or muse personalities—the novel’s theme of finding the “voice” might be considered an inside literary joke.

But in general, the thing to keep in mind is this: when people who are not psychotic hear voices, they are often the voices of alternate personalities (search “voice” and “voices”).

Serious Childhood Trauma

However, the novel is not just a joke, because of all the oppression and suffering of the characters, from their childhoods onward. The person who originally heard the Voice had been a slave; whereas Ricky, himself, had been raised in a religious cult, and had seen his sister murdered.

Since multiple personality is one way to cope with childhood trauma, these traumatized characters may be interpreted as illustrating that result. 

1. Victor LaValle. Big Machine. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2009.

Autofiction: New York Times Book Review of fictionalized memoir says it uses novelistic technique, but novelists use multiple personality, not technique.

Autofiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofiction

“Autofiction has long picked away at the boundary between fiction and nonfiction…The term covers a multitude of approaches; here Malmquist sets his novel in opposition to the very meaning of ‘memoir,’ which implies a recollection of something past. In Every Moment We Are Still Alive is narrated in a vivid present tense that collapses the distance between the time of narration and the harrowing events of the story” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/books/review/in-every-moment-we-are-still-alive-tom-malmquist.html

Is Malmquist’s present-tense narration a technique? Did his one and only personality decide to imagine and remember how past events in his life were experienced at the time, and present them from that point of view?

Or, as I would guess, does he have an alternate personality, who originated to help deal with those traumatic events, does not age, continues to live in that past, and has provided the present-tense narration?