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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Sunday, May 6, 2018

“Jonathan Franzen” (post 6) by Philip Weinstein: Franzen provides key, “I have multiple selves,” but biographer does not use it in his interpretations

Philip Weinstein, Professor of English at Franzen’s alma mater, discusses the author and his work, through and including Purity (2015), the novel I discuss in five previous posts (search “Franzen”).

In Chapter 1, “Becoming Jonathan Franzen,” Weinstein quotes Franzen as saying:

“That we do things that we’re not aware of doing…that we so often unaccountably sabotage ourselves…A human personality is best understood as a collection of selves in conflict…I am a divided person. I have multiple selves” (1, p. 34).

Weinstein fails to apply the above to his interpretation of Andreas Wolf, one of the main characters in Purity. As I have previously discussed, this character had a dissociative fugue (during which he did things, including murder, that he was not aware of doing), had a named alternate personality (Killer), and sabotaged himself in the most extreme way (suicide).

When a novelist provides a key to his work (multiple personality), use it.

1. Philip Weinstein. Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage. New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
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