“Purity” by Jonathan Franzen (post 7): Novelists’ understanding of their characters is limited, because character creation is partially a mystery to them

In my last post, I said Franzen had provided his biographer a key to understanding that the character, Andreas Wolf, had multiple personality, but that his biographer had failed to use the key. I may have been unfair to the biographer, because Franzen himself probably did not understand the character in terms of multiple personality. 

How could a writer provide his character with the symptoms of multiple personality, but not understand that the character has multiple personality? Aside from whether or not the author knows the symptoms of multiple personality, the answer has to do with how characters are created.

Generally speaking, fiction writers do not mechanically construct their major characters. Characters may either come from the author’s repertory company of alternate personalities, or may be newly minted, starting with aspects of real people, a mood, an image, or a story situation. In any case, most major characters are created by the same psychological process that creates imaginary companions and alternate personalities, which is a process that most fiction writers can employ, because most fiction writers have a normal version of multiple personality.

Is it only the author’s host personality who may not understand that a character has multiple personality? What about the author’s alternate personalities, including muse and narrator personalities? Surely, you might think, alternate personalities must recognize the presence of multiple personality, since alternate personalities, per se, are an integral part of multiple personality. But it is in the nature of alternate personalities to see themselves as other people, not as alternate personalities (which is why, clinically, they often deny the diagnosis).

As a practical matter, when I see that a character in a novel has symptoms of multiple personality, but no narrator or other character acknowledges that fact, I infer that the author did not understand the character in those terms. And that is the case with Andreas Wolf in Purity.

Novelists know many things about their novels better than anyone else, but there are aspects that are a mystery to them.