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, March 31, 2018

“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.
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