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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Saturday, February 10, 2018

“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.

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