“The Art of Memoir” by Mary Karr (post 4): Are “split self,” writer’s “voice,” and “two selves” ordinary psychology, metaphors, or multiple personality trait?

Split Self

“The split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book’s thrust or through line…” (1, p. 92).

Most people have inner conflicts, but do not have a “split self,” a euphemism for split personality.

Voice

“It’s a cliché to talk about finding a voice…It didn’t happen in an instant. But over a period of a few days I went through a profound psychological shift. The images in my head suddenly had words representing them on the page. And accompanying the words was a state of consciousness”…

“Whatever the source of the voice…its arrival changed the whole game. I honestly don’t know if a shift in mind predated the voice or vice versa. But suddenly I felt the wagon I’d been pulling like a trudging ox was a vehicle with an engine, moving down the road. Pages started piling up" (1, pp. 145-146).

This “voice”—many writers hear voices—is described as having a quasi-autonomous “consciousness” that she “finds” when it “arrives.” It is an engine for her writing, perhaps the “generative self” mentioned below.

Two Selves

“Actually, every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self” (1, p. 213).

For writing and revising, writers who don’t have multiple personality trait might speak of adopting two different attitudes, but not of having two different selves.

Comment

Since, as previously noted, Karr has been teaching Conroy and Nabokov for decades, but has not interpreted their memoirs and other works as demonstrating multiple personality, I suppose she (and most literary colleagues) would interpret her statements as ordinary psychology or purely metaphorical. What do you think?

1. Mary Karr. The Art of Memoir. New York, HarperCollins, 2015.