“Trilby” by George du Maurier (post 5): Trilby fulfills criteria for multiple personality—two or more personalities + amnesia—but it is unacknowledged

At the end of the novel, Svengali dies of a heart attack. Trilby reverts to being tone deaf, is unable to sing, and has amnesia for her life as a singer. Svengali’s violinist, who helped Svengali train Trilby to sing, explains:

“I will tell you a secret. There were two Trilbys. There was the Trilby you knew, who could not sing one single note in tune…Well, that was Trilby, your Trilby! that was my Trilby too…

“But…with one look of his eye — with a word — Svengali could turn her into the other Trilby, his Trilby…who could produce wonderful sounds…Well, that was the Trilby he taught how to sing…when Svengali’s Trilby was being taught to sing…when Svengali’s Trilby was singing…our Trilby was fast asleep” (1, pp. 350-353).

Since it is revealed that there were at least two Trilby personalities plus amnesia, the character explicitly fulfills the official psychiatric diagnostic criteria for multiple personality. But since neither the narrator nor any character recognizes it as multiple personality, per se—does not call it what it is—this novel is an example of unacknowledged multiple personality.

And since the novel does not explicitly acknowledge multiple personality, per se, most book reviewers, literary critics, and biographers have not discussed it.

Moreover, the basic plot—Svengali hypnotizes a young woman to become a singer—does not require the woman to have multiple personality. Svengali did not need Trilby to have multiple personality. It was George du Maurier who needed it. Multiple personality was the author’s issue.

1. George du Maurier. Trilby. London, Everyman, 1994.

“Trilby” by George du Maurier (post 4): Tone-deaf Trilby, now superstar singer, La Svengali (Mrs. Svengali), seems to speak neither English nor French

“…his real name is Adler; his mother was a Polish singer; and he was a pupil at the Leipsic Conservatorio. But he’s an immense artist, and a great singing-master, to teach a woman like that! and such a woman! belle come un ange — mais bête come un pot [as beautiful as an angel — but as stupid as a pot]. I tried to talk to her — all she can say is ‘ja wohl,’ or ‘doch,’ or ‘nein,’ or ‘soh!’ not a word of English or French or Italian, though she sings them, oh! but divinely! It is ‘il bel canto’ come back to the world after a hundred years. Every voice a mortal woman can have — three octaves — four!…Everything that Paganini could do with his violin, she does with her voice — only better — and what a voice!” (1, p. 195-197).

1. George du Maurier. Trilby. Edited by Leonee Ormond. London, Everyman, 1994.

“Trilby” by George du Maurier (post 3): “Trilby speaking English and French were two different beings” — “transformation” characterizes “Trilbyness”

Most people are a little different when speaking different languages, due to the languages themselves and the circumstances in which each language was acquired. But the narrator chooses to emphasize that “transformation” characterizes “Trilbyness”:

“Trilby speaking English and Trilby speaking French were two different beings. Trilby’s English was more or less that of her father, a highly-educated man…

“Trilby’s French was that of the Quartier Latin—droll, slangy, piquant, quaint, picturesque—…funny without being vulgar…

“…she handled her knife and fork in the dainty English way…

“But enter a Frenchman or two, and a transformation effected itself immediately—a new incarnation of Trilbyness—so droll and amusing that it was difficult to decide which of her two incarnations was the more attractive” (1, p. 75).

Many of the characters in this novel are bilingual, but Trilby is the only character prone to “transformation” (switches in personality).

1. George du Maurier. Trilby [1894]. London, Everyman/J. M. Dent, 1994.

“Trilby” by George du Maurier (post 2): Why is Svengali’s initial hypnosis of Trilby for the purpose of relieving her headaches, not for curing her tone deafness?

Since Trilby had been introduced to the reader as suffering from tone deafness, while Svengali had been introduced to the reader as an extraordinary musician who has given voice lessons to another young woman so she could be a singer, the reader might have expected that Svengali would initially use hypnosis to cure Trilby’s tone deafness (and then teach her to be a singer).

Why, then, is Trilby suddenly given a bad headache (it now appears that she is prone to have them) for Svengali to relieve by hypnosis? As I said in the last post, the author seems to have an ulterior motive: to build a case for Trilby’s having multiple personality.

I have just searched “headache” in this blog to see what I have previously said about it in regard to multiple personality, and what follows is a past post that includes discussion of something that Harry Potter has in common with Trilby: recurrent headaches.

November 21, 2015

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (post 2): The last chapter, “The Man with Two Faces,” has overt, but unnamed, multiple personality.

The villain, the evil wizard, Voldemort, makes his first appearance in the Harry Potter series at the climax of this first book, as an alternate personality:

“And to Harry’s horror, [an alien] voice answered, and the voice seemed to come from [Professor] Quirrell himself”…”Where there should have been a back to Quirrell’s head, there was a [second] face”…” ‘See what I have become?’ the face said…’I have form only when I can share another’s body’…” (1, pp. 314-315).

Meanwhile, Harry, who has had recurrent headaches throughout the book, has one again, but now accompanied by voices in his head:

“Harry’s…head felt as though it was about to split in two”…”the pain in Harry’s head was building — he couldn’t see — he could only hear Quirrell’s terrible shrieks and Voldemort’s yells of ‘KILL HIM! KILL HIM!’ and other voices, maybe in Harry’s own head, crying, ‘Harry! Harry!’ “ (1, pp. 316-317).

Just as the alien voice coming from Quirrell is the voice of an alternate personality, so, too, would be the voices in Harry’s head. This looks like a foreshadowing of an eventual revelation that Harry, too, has multiple personality (possibly also overt, but possibly also not named or acknowledged as such).

Beside the voices in Harry’s head, his headache—“his head felt as though it was about to split in two”—may be a symptom of multiple personality, as described in a standard textbook:

“The single most common neurological symptom reported in MPD [multiple personality disorder] is headache…The headaches are usually described as extremely painful…Several patients have described these headaches to me as ‘blinding’…a number of therapists have associated the presence of headaches with conflicts and struggles for control among alter personalities…” (2, pp. 65-66).

Although the Harry Potter books depict multiple personality, they don’t name or acknowledge it, so I assume that Rowling hadn't read up on it. How, then, did she know that alien voices in the head—alternate personalities speaking from behind the scenes—are a common symptom of multiple personality, and that splitting and blinding headaches may happen when alternate personalities struggle with each other for control? Maybe she knew it from personal experience.

1. J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London, Bloomsbury, 1997/2004.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“Trilby” by George du Maurier: Svengali hypnotizes tone-deaf Trilby into being singing superstar, but tone deafness, neurological, can’t be cured by hypnosis

Why did George du Maurier introduce his protagonist, Trilby (1), as a young woman who had blatant tone deafness, which is a defect of the brain whose neurological name is congenital amusia (2)? If Trilby had actually been tone deaf, neither Svengali nor any other hypnotist could have cured her of it, because you can’t cure a neurological condition with hypnosis.

Perhaps the author was lazy, and did not inquire whether tone deafness was neurological, since all he wanted to do was make Trilby as poor a singer as possible, so that her transformation into a singing superstar by Svengali would seem all the more remarkable. But I don’t think the author was lazy. I think he had an ulterior motive: to present Trilby as already having had multiple personality.

From what I’ve read about this novel, Trilby eventually does become a recognizable split personality: one personality who is tone deaf, the other personality a superstar singer, with the two personalities having mutual amnesia. Thus, many people would see this as a novel about the artificial creation of multiple personality through the use of hypnosis. And that would have been what it was about if the author had not made Trilby tone deaf before she met Svengali.

But since you can’t cure true tone deafness with hypnosis, Trilby’s initial tone deafness must not have been neurological, but that of a tone deaf alternate personality who was out and in control at the very beginning of the novel. Thus, what Svengali accomplished with hypnosis was to bring out a previously existing personality who was not tone deaf, and give that preexisting personality an intense course of singing lessons.

1. Wikipedia. “Trilby (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilby_(novel)

2. Wikipedia. “Amusia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia

Singers and Their Split Personalities: Title character in “Trilby” by George du Maurier may not have needed Svengali to bring out an alternate, singing personality

http://www.listal.com/list/singers-their-split-personalities

“Lights On, Rats Out (a Memoir)” by Cree LeFavour: Psychiatrists said she did not have alternate personalities, but what were “the 11s” that possessed her?

In part of this memoir, the author describes a psychiatric hospitalization that she had in her twenties due to self-mutilation—repeatedly burning her skin with cigarettes—which was serious.

Since one possible cause of self-mutilation is multiple personality disorder (MPD)—one personality persecuting another—she was given a questionnaire, the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), to screen for MPD. According to her low DES score, she probably did not have MPD (but that assumes she answered the questions truthfully, which she may not have been motivated to do).

An interesting feature throughout this memoir is the author’s preoccupation with both the number eleven and “the 11s,” which refers to two things: 1. her feeling that encountering the number eleven is meaningful or magical, and 2. that some unnamed “they” are the “power” behind eleven. Let me quote the memoir:

“When the 11s appear I read them as a reminder directed at me from an unknowable, vaguely menacing power that must be placated. The power behind the 11s—not the number—dates to memories of myself at five or six years old…” (1, p. 44). [Multiple personality starts in childhood.]

“As long as I’ve tried to talk myself out of them since I first explained them to Dr. Kohl [her psychiatrist], there’s a strong, important part of me that isn’t conceding the argument” (1, p. 47).

“…the 11s don’t like Dr. Kohl, resent him for tricking me into spilling our secret magic” (1, p. 66).

“The 11s are in play. I’m placating them with every burn” (1, p. 75).

“ ‘People trick me into trusting. Once I do there will be a trick.’ This was the 11’s talking [author says]” (1, p. 88). [Alternate personalities may be heard as loud thoughts or voices in the head; they may pull strings from behind the scenes; or they may come out incognito, without acknowledging it is they who are acting or talking.]

“I’ve stopped writing what I call ‘fragments’—unpolished poems spewing rank as bile—because they’re scary thoughts from some other part of me. A disturbing antidote to the 11s called Edlin parades as a named entity come to rescue me…I rationally deny them all, but when I apply pencil to paper I’m possessed, as if the letters and the words they make are dictated by an alien self…” (1, p. 167). [Edlin is a named alternate personality.]

“Then there are the 11s and their favorite toy, the cigarette, goading me to take to burning as the psychic eraser I long for” (1, p. 247).

“I am on some level purifying myself for the 11s” (1, p. 252).

Comment

When the author was in the psychiatric hospital (1991), she was glad that she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder rather than MPD, because she said that MPD was a notorious fad, and perhaps felt that it looked too crazy, so she didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

And like most people, she probably equated MPD with an overt display of alternate personalities, which she didn’t appear to have. But most people with MPD, most of the time, do not display their alternate personalities overtly, unless they have already been diagnosed and are in a group with others who have MPD, or have agreed to make a demonstration video. Otherwise, alternate personalities tend to remain inside, pulling strings, or if they do come out, tend to do so incognito (answering to the person’s regular name).

After reading the above quotations from the memoir about what was going on in her mind, you might think that she must be crazy, but watch a video of a recent talk she gave about this memoir, and you will see that she is perfectly sane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL8fpVUu9V4

MPD is a dissociative disorder, usually secretive and inconspicuous, not a psychosis.

I assume that Cree LeFavour still considers the idea that she had MPD to be ridiculous, and that most people would agree with her (especially in view of the DES, noted above, which is usually valid). But they don’t provide a better explanation for “the 11s,” which is a prominent feature of this memoir, and should be addressed by any attentive review. In short, the 11s appear to be a group of unnamed alternate personalities. What the “11” refers to—the number of them in the group? [or the age of the person when these alternate personalities came into existence; or the age these personalities see themselves as being]—I don’t know.

1. Cree LeFavour. Lights On, Rats Out: A Memoir. New York, Grove Press, 2017.

Franz Kafka (post 5) said that compulsive self-harm (e.g., suicidal behavior or self-mutilation) implies “a second person” inside (which means multiple personality)

“No one can crave what truly harms him. If in the case of some individuals things have that appearance—and perhaps they always do—the explanation is that someone within the person is demanding something useful to himself but very damaging to a second person, who has been brought along partly to give his opinion on the matter. If the man had taken the part of the second person from the outset, and not just when the time came to make a decision, then the first person would have been suppressed, and with it the craving” (1, p. 80).

“Suicidal behavior is extremely common in MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients…Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD patients” (2, p. 64).

Search “self-mutilation” for relevant past posts.

1. Franz Kafka. Aphorisms [1917-1918]. New York, Schocken Books, 2015.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Harper Lee’s “Watchman” (post 3) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea” (post 4) have protagonists with Nausea, Dissociative Fugue, “First-Half Multiple Personality”

In my recent post on Harper Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman (which was later revised and edited to become her classic, To Kill a Mockingbird), I noted that her protagonist, Jean Louise Finch, responded to her discovering that her idolized father was a racist by having a severe bout of nausea and a two-hour dissociative fugue.

And that reminded me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, whose protagonist has dissociative fugues on a much grander scale.

Another similarity between the two novels is that the multiple personality issues—Jean Louise Finch’s duality and Sartre’s “sudden transformations”—are described in the first half of the novel and later mostly forgotten. Since I have seen this happen in other novels, too, I am coining a term for it: “first-half multiple personality.” 

July 14, 2015

Nobel Prize novelist Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea:  The novel’s opening—saying the protagonist's “sudden transformations” must be explained—is totally forgotten

“Sudden Transformations”

The novel begins with the protagonist’s worry about his “sudden transformations.” For example, due to some kind of change that suddenly came over him, he left France and went to Indo-China, and then, after six years, he suddenly reverted to his regular self and returned to France.

He is trying to understand what is wrong with him, and is worried that he will have another “sudden transformation”:

“I have to admit that I am subject to these sudden transformations…That is what has given my life this halting, incoherent aspect. When I left France, for example, there were a lot of people who said I had gone off on a sudden impulse…

“And then, all of a sudden, I awoke from a sleep which had lasted six years…I couldn’t understand why I was in Indo-China. What was I doing there?…[And so he returned to France]…

“If I am not mistaken, and if all the signs which are piling up are indications of a fresh upheaval in my life, well then, I am frightened…I’m afraid of what is going to be born and take hold of me and carry me off—I wonder where? Shall I have to go away again…Shall I awake in a few months, a few years, exhausted, disappointed…I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late” (1, pp. 14-15).

Author Forgets Sudden Transformations

Amazingly, the rest of the novel makes no mention of sudden transformations. Instead, the protagonist’s problem becomes “nausea,” which eventually leads to his epiphany about existence (1, p. 182), “absurdity” (1, p. 185), and “contingency” (1, p. 188), and his discovery that he might prevent Nausea by becoming a novelist (1, pp. 245-246).

Multiple Personality

The protagonist is described at the beginning of the novel as having the two cardinal symptoms of multiple personality: personality switches and amnesia. And he did not have just the one six-year fugue. He says that he is prone to these sudden transformations, which are what has given his life its “halting, incoherent aspect.”

1. Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea [1938]. London, Penguin Books, 2000.

“Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee (post 2): Jean Louise’s multiple personality indicated by her dissociative fugue after finding father racist.

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise is shocked, disillusioned, angered, and nauseated—she literally vomits—when she discovers that her idolized father, Atticus, is a racist.

However, in view of the obvious racist hierarchy of their community, and how freely Atticus and her other close relatives acknowledge their racist attitudes, I think that the only way Jean Louise could not have been aware of her family’s racism would have been for her to have compartmentalized awareness of it in an alternate personality. But that is just my opinion.

The main textual evidence for her multiple personality (aside from her duality, described in the previous post), is her dissociative fugue:

She thinks to herself, “Two solid hours and I didn’t know where I was.”

And when her Aunt asks her where she has been, she replies, “I—I don’t know” (pp. 120-121).

Search “fugue” and “dissociative fugue” for previous posts on this common symptom of multiple personality.

I would also interpret the episode at the end of the novel—when her uncle convinces her not to leave town and not to estrange herself from the family—as further evidence of multiple personality, because both his backhand to her mouth (p. 260) and his giving her whiskey appear to have changed her mind not by intimidation or intoxication, but by altering her state of consciousness (pp. 262, 269) and causing a switch to a more pliant personality.

Harper Lee. Go Set a Watchman. New York, Harper, 2015.

“Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee: Henry Clinton, boyfriend of Jean Louise Finch (“Scout”), says she is “a Jekyll-and-Hyde character”

Since Go Set a Watchman (mid-1950s) was written before, and was revised under editorial guidance into what became, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the former may be a less polished, but more authentic, reflection of the author.

In this novel, twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise returns home from New York City to Alabama to visit her aging father, Atticus, and also to renew her romantic relationship with Henry Clinton, who says to Jean Louise:

“You’re a Jekyll-and-Hyde character” (p. 47).

“In the years when he was away at the war and the University, she had turned from an overalled, fractious, gun-slinging creature into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. He began dating her on her annual two-week visits home, and although she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment, he found something so intensely feminine about her that he fell in love” (p. 13).

“ ‘Want to drive?’ said Henry. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. Although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything mechanical more complicated than a safety pin: folding lawn chairs were a source of profound irritation to her; she had never learned to ride a bicycle or use a typewriter” (p. 11).

At age eleven, when she got her first menstrual period, “It had never fully occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had become one of reckless, pummeling activity; fighting, football, climbing…and besting anyone her own age in any contest requiring physical prowess.” And so she felt “a cruel practical joke had been played upon her: she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised, could not comprehend…” (p. 116).

As I continue reading, I will be interested to see if the issue of Jean Louise’s duality is developed or dropped.

Harper Lee. Go Set a Watchman. New York, Harper, 2015.

Note (added March 21): "Jean," the French version of "John," is a gender-ambivalent name for the female protagonist.

Fiction Writer’s Ghosts: voice, alter ego, muse, imaginary companion, character, narrator, pseudonym, the unconscious, alternate personality

Unlike Kafka, Dickens, Conan Doyle, and Yeats (mentioned in recent posts), most contemporary fiction writers don’t believe in ghosts (although some still do, including Nobel Prize winners).

However, like fiction writers of the past, they continue to be aware, at least vaguely or indirectly, that there is thinking going on inside them which seems to be autonomous.

The essential criteria for being an alternate personality (as opposed to being ordinary imagination) are its sense of self and its separate memory bank. Alternate personalities think and remember things that the regular self had not.

What reason is there to believe that the human brain would, or even could, create alternate personalities?

Interviews of both children and their parents have found that sixty percent of children have had imaginary companions or imaginary identities (though, years later, they don’t always remember them).

Alternate personalities are simply a more elaborate version of children’s imaginary playmates and identifications. For the human brain, they are child’s play.

Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats were members of The Ghost Club, founded in London in 1862, by people who took ghosts seriously

In a recent post, I noted that Franz Kafka believed in ghosts, based on his own personal experience, but you might have dismissed that fact, since, judging by the things he wrote, Kafka must have been weird.

So you might be surprised to learn that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of no-nonsense Sherlock Holmes, believed in ghosts, too. And so did Charles Dickens and W. B. Yeats.

Wikipedia. “The Ghost Club.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Club

Some people believe in alternate personalities. Other people believe in ghosts.

Scientists Discover Tipping Point for Spread of New Ideas: Most people won’t believe this blog until at least ten percent of everyone else already believes it.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, July 25, 2011. https://news.rpi.edu/luwakkey/2902

“KAFKA [post 4] The Years of Insight” by Reiner Stach: Third-person self reference and “ghosts,” a term some people use for their alternate personalities

Third-Person Self-Reference

“Having overstepped the mark between self-observation and dissociation [the mental mechanism of multiple personality], he stood beside himself…

“This radicalized form of self-observation—stepping outside himself—now sought expression, and Kafka quickly found a suitable linguistic form. He began to experiment with third-person discourse when describing himself…No sooner was Felice Bauer back from her trip than she received the first samples.

“Dear Felice, you recently asked me several fanciful questions about F’s fiancé. I am now better able to answer them, for I observed him on the way home in the train. It was easy to do, because there was so much crowding that the two of us were sitting literally on one seat. Well, in my opinion, he is totally wrapped up in her…” (p. 29).

Note: Alternate personalities usually prefer to remain incognito, and so answer to the person’s regular name (the name of the host personality). But sometimes they slip and refer to the host personality in the third person. Search “third-person self reference” or “illeism” for past posts.

Ghosts

“Kafka never wanted to interpret his works. The question is whether he could have done so. What, for example, do the unending, impenetrable hierarchies of the officials in The Trial and The Castle mean; what do they stand for?…

“Early on, Kafka had introduced the concept of ghosts…‘To each his own: you get the guests, and I the ghosts,’ he had once written to Felice in jest. Shortly thereafter, however, he reported in detail how he had lured the ghosts to him over the years and that they kept growing in number… ‘nameless in the multitude… If one were writing, they were all benevolent ghosts, but if one were not writing, they were devils.’

“…in The Castle, the fiends (who work mainly at night) are no longer a chaotic mob but emissaries of a system…

“…he frequently used images of this kind in letters, as well, and he made a point of stressing the attacks of the ghosts as though it were a matter of real events playing out right in front of everyone. Kafka was evidently not afraid of the question of whether he ‘really’ believed in ghosts, and he presumably would have conceded that it was a matter of projections of forces within the psych—after all, he himself used the term ‘inner conspiracy’ on occasion. But…They were psychological facts and had a substantial influence on his life, and it was therefore in his best interest to act as though they were real” (pp. 443-446).

Search “ghosts” for past posts.

Reiner Stach. Kafka: The Years of Insight [2008]. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2013.

“Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid (post 3): Neither character nor plot nor migration driven, this novel is psychology of multiple personality driven.

As the last chapter would seem to confirm, this novel is neither character driven nor plot driven nor social issue driven. The two main characters, Saeed and Nadia, who had been a romantic couple, have been separated for many years. How they have been for all these years is barely mentioned. And the issues of social turmoil and refugees are relegated to nostalgia.

What, then, is this novel’s basic interest?

Surprisingly, it is psychology. Take, for example, the novel’s magic doors, which in the real world would be considered a major scientific phenomenon and a revolution in transportation, but in this novel is an illustration of the author’s imagination: He, like most novelists, can travel to different places through doors in his mind.

The following passage addresses place and migration psychologically:

“Every time a couple moves they begin…to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color…but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us. So it was with Saeed and Nadia, who found themselves changed in each other’s eyes in this new place” (p. 186).

Note: Within the passage is embedded the idea that “personalities are not…single.” And although the average person may switch roles and moods under different circumstances, it is the person with multiple personality who switches personalities, or may even create a new personality, according to what is most adaptive under the circumstances.

In contrast, the person without multiple personality can relate to the lyric, “Wherever I go, I find myself there.” Indeed, the very concept of personality is based on the fact that most people stay basically the same. So when novelists or philosophers purport to discover that this is not so, they are extrapolating from the minority of people (possibly including themselves) who have multiple personality.

Mohsin Hamid. Exit West. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.

Gratuitous Reference to Multiple Personality in “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid (post 2): It is unwarranted by character development or plot.

“Nadia sat on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone…and…she thought she saw online a photograph of herself sitting on the steps of a building reading the news on her phone…and she was startled, and wondered how this could be…and she almost felt that if she got up and walked home at this moment there would be two Nadias, that she would split into two Nadias…and two different lives would unfold for these two different selves…” (p. 157).

“Reading the news at that time one was tempted to conclude that the nation was like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some insisting on disintegration…” (p. 158).

This novel is not in the habit of invoking psychiatric conditions to describe experiences of its major characters or the collective psychology of the general public. So it is surprising that the novel does so in these two instances, and that, of all psychiatric conditions, it chooses multiple personality.

When a novel has descriptions of, or references to, multiple personality that are not warranted by character development or plot, I call it “gratuitous multiple personality” (search), which I interpret as a reflection of the author’s psychology.

Mohsin Hamid. Exit West. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.

Magic Doors in “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid: Which of the author’s three different explanations for magic doors most reflects his actual writing process?

In this novel, magic doors enable characters to migrate from one part of the world to another, instantaneously. How did the author come to use this fantasy literature device in this otherwise realistic novel?

In three interviews I found online, Hamid gave three different explanations. In one, he said that the novel was inspired by his own experience of being an immigrant, and that the magic doors were a way to minimize discussion of the trip from one country to another, which he felt was ultimately trivial.

In another interview, he said that he had been impressed with the way that modern technology makes international communication instantaneous; that magic doors were a metaphor for this; and that the novel evolved from the magic door metaphor.

In a third interview, when asked about the magic doors, he said that during the fiction writing process, a novelist believes in the reality of his characters, and he believed in their magic doors, too.

The third interview sounds most candid about his actual writing experience, while the first two sound like plausible, ex post facto, rationalizations.

A more general question is why magic doors, or magic portals of one sort or another, are such a common literary device (Alice, Harry Potter, etc). It probably reflects things widely experienced in the fiction writing process.

Mohsin Hamid. Exit West. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.

“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin: Edna’s “old terror,” hearing voices, and the possibility she committed suicide due to multiple personality disorder

“the old terror”

In the novel’s last paragraph, as Edna Pontellier is committing suicide, “…the old terror flamed up for an instant…Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s…”

What was “the old terror”? Why are her father and older sister present, but not her mother or her younger sister, Janet (whose wedding Edna had refused to attend)?

Could it have anything to do with the fact, mentioned back in chapter VII, that her mother died when the girls were quite young?

Was “the old terror” Edna’s feeling of being unloved and abandoned as a motherless child?

I don’t know what “the old terror” was, but I do know that Edna heard voices, as noted in the novel’s last paragraph (see above) and as follows.

Hearing Voices

“She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope” (chapter XVII, p. 50). 

“Edna was sobbing, just as she had wept one midnight at Grand Isle when strange, new voices awoke in her” (chapter XXI, p. 62).

Were these only metaphorical voices? I wouldn’t assume so, unless her suicide was metaphorical.

And since I don’t think that Edna had schizophrenia, I think her voices were more likely the voices of alternate personalities, some of which “jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope” (see above).

Multiple Personality

Since Edna is not described as having overt switching of personalities or obvious memory gaps (the two cardinal features of multiple personality), I cannot make a definite diagnosis in her case. Auditory hallucinations that are not due to a psychosis like schizophrenia are suggestive of multiple personality, but not definitive. All I can add to the above are the following suggestive passages:

“She could only realize that she herself—her present self—was in some way different from her other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect” (chapter XIV, p. 39).

“…she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded” (chapter XV, p. 44).

“One of these days,” she said, “I’m going to pull myself together for a while and think—try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don’t know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can’t convince myself that I am. I must think about it” (chapter XXVII, p. 79).

Suicide

Suicide is a risk in clinical, multiple personality disorder. In past posts, I discussed the suicides of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart as examples. The diagnosis of multiple personality in Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier is much less sure, but worth considering. 

Kate Chopin. The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, Edited by Margo Culley. New York, WW Norton, 1994.

“The Chill” by Ross Macdonald: Six characters have “doubleness,” ranging from detective to murderer, but multiple personality is unacknowledged.

In this Lew Archer novel, many of the characters—ranging from private detective Lew Archer to the triple murderer—are implied to have multiple personality.

But since multiple personality is never mentioned by name or explicitly raised as an issue by the narrator or any character, it is hard to find reviews of this novel that mention it, or to know the extent to which the author recognized that this is what he was writing about.

Throughout the novel, it is taken for granted that maternal Mrs. Bradshaw and college dean Roy Bradshaw are mother and son. But it is revealed at the end that they are wife and husband, and that she is the one who has committed the three murders. As to their both having multiple personality, the closest the text comes to acknowledging it is when it concludes: “…she had a doubleness in her matching Roy’s…” (p. 277).

The multiple personality of several other characters is implied by passing comments. Lew Archer says he is “telling myself in various tones of voice that I had done the right thing” (p. 48). Helen Haggerty’s “handsome body seemed to contain two alternating persons” (p. 47) and her home looked like “two different women had taken turns furnishing it” (p. 68). Lew Archer describes Dolly Kincaid as changing “physically before my eyes…I’d hardly have recognized her as the girl I talked to on the library steps that day” (p. 58). And Lew Archer says of Alice Jenks, “I had the sense of doubleness again…” (p. 101).

Search “gratuitous multiple personality” and “unacknowledged multiple personality” for past posts related to other writers.

Ross Macdonald. The Chill [1963]. New York, Vintage Books, 1996.

Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) or Dissociative Identity Trait (DIT) as opposed to Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

I would like to coin the above names for a psychological trait to distinguish it from the mental disorder.

MPT or DIT are another way of saying a normal version of multiple personality.

“Description of a Struggle” by Franz Kafka (post 3): Opening of early Kafka story has two characters with identity confusion, a metaphor for multiple personality.

Kafka’s earliest (commonly collected) short story begins “At about midnight,” as a social gathering is coming to an end. The nameless first-person narrator sits alone with schnapps and pastry.

A new acquaintance of the narrator, who wants to share the joy of his amorous encounter earlier that evening, tries to confide in the narrator, who considers it an imposition.

And then, suddenly, the narrator stands up and declares: “All right then, if you insist, I’ll go with you…to climb up the Laurenziberg now, in winter and in the middle of the night…it’s freezing, and as it has been snowing the roads out there are like skating rinks. Well, as you like.”

And then during their walk outside, as relations between the two men become strained, the narrator thinks, “It certainly wasn’t I who had insisted on this walk.” But since it very clearly had been him, why would he now, even in his own private thoughts, disavow it?

Comment

The opening of this story reminds me of Conrad’s “Secret Sharer” in that the protagonist is suddenly confronted by a stranger with whom he has identity confusion. Kafka’s narrator cannot distinguish between himself and his new acquaintance in regard to who wanted to go out walking in the middle of a winter night.

Two characters with identity confusion is a literary metaphor for multiple personality. That the issue is not clearly developed in the rest of this story, reminds me of several works previously discussed in this blog that have multiple personality at the beginning of a story, but forgotten later. One example is Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

In short, this early story by Kafka shows his tendency toward the issue of multiple personality. The story was followed by his “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” which further develops the issue of multiple personality, and which I discussed as a prequel to “The Metamorphosis.”

1. Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer. Foreword by John Updike. New York, Schocken Books, 1971.

“Freshwater” by Akwaeke Emezi (post 4): As this novel illustrates, the real author of novels may not be the regular, named, book signing, host personality.

In this novel, the title of each chapter indicates which personality is narrating it. Why are the fewest chapters narrated by Ada, the regular personality?

Because she is only the host personality, and as such, she may be the personality who is least aware of what the whole person thinks and does.

Ada is aware of herself, but is only intermittently and partially aware of who her alternate personalities are, and what they think and do. In contrast, some alternate personalities may be completely aware of themselves and Ada, too. They have more and longer chapters than Ada, because they know more than she does.

There are no scenes depicting Ada as a novelist, because she is not the actual author.

Who is the author of this novel? In the conventional sense, Akwaeke Emezi is, obviously. But since the novel is autobiographical, and she has multiple personality, the question becomes which of her personalities is the actual author.

To know who is (or are) the real author(s) of a novel, you would have to know all the personalities who participated, and the responsibility each had, in the writing process. This information would be possible to obtain by a series of expert interviews.