“The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol: Dostoevsky, author of “The Double,” said he and other contemporary writers “all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ ”

Akaky Akakievich, who works copying documents in early 19th century St. Petersburg, desperately needs a warm winter coat (to commute to his copying job), which he cannot afford. But after he finally saves enough money and gets a new overcoat, he is robbed of it, and beaten, by thugs; humiliated by the authorities; and gets a fever and dies, all in the first twenty-five pages of this comic, then tragic, short story.

The final five pages are a ghost story. Two kinds of “ghosts” are seen in St. Petersburg. One kind looks like Akaky and takes people’s overcoats. The other kind is taller, and like the thugs, has moustaches.

Is this simply a supernatural twist at the end the story, with Akaky’s ghost taking his revenge, and the thugs’ turning out to have been other people’s ghosts?

My interpretation is that the “ghosts” represent alternate personalities of Akaky—and that the ones with mustaches were either other people’s alters or other alters of Akaky that wanted to mess him up—and that this has been a theme of the double, multiple personality, story, all along.

My reason is that the protagonist, Akaky, had been introduced and portrayed, not as a whole person with various interests and relationships, but as being so narrowly and exclusively devoted to copying documents that he was not like a real, whole person, but like Akaky’s document-copying alternate personality, who, since he was in control most of the time, had functioned as Akaky’s regular, host personality.

When Dostoevsky said, “We all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” I think he meant that “The Overcoat” (1842) was a double story (a multiple personality story) and preceded his own “The Double” (1846/1866).

1. Nikolai Gogol. “The Overcoat” [1842], pp. 115-145, in Nikolai Gogol’s Plays and Petersburg Tales. Trans. Christopher English. Oxford University Press, 1995/2008.

New York Times, celebrating 200th birthday of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” nearly a year late, fails to mention Victor Frankenstein’s multiple personality

The book was published in January 1818, not October, but I guess the Times thought of it in connection with Halloween: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/frankenstein-at-200.html

April 7, 2015

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: What is Victor Frankenstein’s Mental Illness? Why Doesn’t the Creature Have a Name? A Multiple Personality Story.

How did Victor Frankenstein construct a man eight feet tall? Did he have eight-foot-tall cadavers to get body parts? And why would a creature who was so superbly constructed—he had a superior brain, since, after a few years of self-education, he was speaking with all the erudition of his creator; not to mention the creature’s superhuman running speed—why would he be constructed with an appearance that was ugly? And since ugliness was the basis of his social rejection (which was what turned him from good to evil), why wasn’t plastic surgery the relatively easy, obvious solution?

The reason that the story doesn’t make sense is that Victor is an unreliable narrator. He is unreliable because, as the reader is repeatedly told, Victor is mentally ill. For example, after his creature first comes alive, Victor has a “nervous fever, which confined me for several months…The form of the monster on whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes, and I raved incessantly concerning him” (1, p. 39). For several months! And Victor has “nervous fevers” and other emotional disturbances recurrently, throughout the novel.

Indeed, the novel is so repetitive and consistent on the theme of Victor’s mental instability that the author, at the end of the novel, is obliged to have the creature appear after Victor dies, just to show that, after all, the story was “real.” Otherwise, the reader would have thought that Victor was just crazy, and might have closed the book feeling cheated.

Of course, once you acknowledge Victor’s mental illness, the question is diagnosis. And since murders were committed that Victor honestly doesn’t remember doing, and the alternate personality who committed them is described, the diagnosis is multiple personality.

An interesting feature of this novel is that the creature has no name. And since naming is such a common, natural thing to do with any creature (a pet, etc.), the creature in this novel has often, erroneously, been given a name, “Frankenstein.” (However, if the creature is an alternate identity of Victor Frankenstein, calling the creature “Frankenstein” is actually an insight, not an error.) But the fact is, in the novel, the creature has no name.

So it is worth noting: in multiple personality, alternate identities who have no name are common.

1. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by J. Paul Hunter. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.

“A Study in the Psychology of Acting” by William Archer: “The real paradox of acting…dual consciousness,” 19th-century synonym for multiple personality

Archer’s Chapter 10, “The Brownies of the Brain,” begins as follows: “The real paradox of acting, it seems to me, resolves itself into the paradox of dual consciousness…

“There are many ‘brownies,’ as Mr. [Robert Louis] Stevenson puts it, in the actor’s brain…I was anxious to obtain authentic illustrations of this double, triple, and quadruple action of the mind…” (1, p. 150), so he circulated a questionnaire among actors and collected illustrative anecdotes.

1. William Archer. Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting. London, Longmans Green and Co., 1888.

But Archer’s anecdotes are not as readable as my two past posts on Stevenson’s multiplicity and brownies:

September 29, 2017

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and "Chapter on Dreams" by Robert Louis Stevenson: Duality is botched, because author had experienced multiplicity.

Although Stevenson’s title speaks of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” as though they were two distinct characters and the theme were duality, his text admits that Jekyll and Hyde were composite characters, Jekyll more obviously than Hyde:

“My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between. Jekyll (who was a composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit” (1, p. 55).

I think that Stevenson got tied up in knots when he wrote this story, because he did not really believe in the duality of man, but in man’s multiplicity:

“I say two…[but]…I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (1, p. 48).

Why did he expect man to be ultimately known for multiplicity? Because that was his personal experience as a fiction writer, as he discussed in his “Chapter on Dreams”:

November 18, 2015

“A Chapter on Dreams” by Robert Louis Stevenson: He gives most of the credit for his published fiction to his alternate personalities, his “unseen collaborators”

“…But presently my dreamer…began to write and sell his tales. Here was he, and here were the little people who did that part of his business…

“…how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for himself. Here is one, exactly as it came to him…

[the story is outlined]

“For now [the reader] sees why I speak of the little people as substantive inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer…that he had no guess whatsoever at the motive of the woman—the hinge of the whole well-invented plot—until the instant of that highly dramatic declaration. It was not his tale; it was the little people’s!…

“But observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told with really guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is…psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot better it…

“Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the dreamer’s, beyond doubt…only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. Who are they, then? and who is the dreamer?

“Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a person than myself…And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them!…That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. For myself—what I call I, my conscious ego…I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all…so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownies, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise…I am an excellent adviser…I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on the whole I have some claim to share, though not as largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise…” (2).

1. Robert Louis Stevenson. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A Norton Critical Edition, Edited by Katherine Linehan. New York, W. W. Norton, 2003.

2. Robert Louis Stevenson. “A Chapter on Dreams,” Scribner’s Magazine, January 1888, pp. 122-128.

Two Types of Fictional Characters—Alternate Personalities vs. Puppets—distinguished by whether the character has a mind of its own

Puppet Characters

The author remembers creating the puppet type of character, either by copying a real person or choosing and assembling the puppet’s characteristics. The author is aware of giving the puppet character its thoughts, feelings, values, and behavior.

Alternate-Personality Characters

In contrast, although the alternate-personality character may have begun as a copy of a real person or as a manufactured puppet, the author has a sense that at some point, the puppet became a personality with a mind of its own.

Or the author may have experienced the alternate-personality character as never having been copied or manufactured, but as having mysteriously arrived, from who knows where, with a mind of its own (which is the theme of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger).

Actors

My current hypothesis is that some actors are very adept at pulling their own strings, or allowing their strings to be pulled by the director, while other actors, who have multiple personality, switch to alternate personalities to play their roles.

How would the latter actors do that? First, they might get a brand new alternate personality that fit the script, just as any adult with multiple personality might get a new alternate personality to cope with a new circumstance. Second, they might search among their already established alternate personalities to find one that matched the character in the script. Third, as Sally Field described in her memoir “In Pieces” (see recent post), various established alternate personalities might work together to provide the various aspects of a character in the script.

Prompted by recent posts on actress Sally Field’s memoir, here is a repeat of two past posts on actors, acting, and multiple personality

June 30, 2018

New York Times article about “The Amy Adams Method” of playing Gillian Flynn protagonist in TV mini-series raises question of multiple personality in actors

In my post earlier today, prompted by an article in The New York Times—

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/arts/television/amy-adams-hollywood-sharp-objects.html—I focused on the multiple personality of protagonists in Gillian Flynn’s novels. But the New York Times article is primarily about an actress, Amy Adams, and acting.

The article mentions that the actress had “an attendant ‘negative self-dialogue’ that never quite went away. ‘I have this internal voice that is just not a cheerleader for myself’ she said.” (She may be describing the voice of, and dialogue with, a critical alternate personality.)

“Ms. Flynn said that…Ms. Adams ‘completely immersed herself physically, bodily, mentally into Camille’ [Flynn’s protagonist in “Sharp Objects”]. [The director added:] ‘I noticed her voice dropped a few notes and her way of walking changed…’ ”

[The article goes on to explain:] “To create a believable performance, many actors jettison their own personality, hoping their character will seize the resulting void like a territorial spirit. During the making of ‘Lincoln,’ Daniel Day-Lewis was so thoroughly consumed by his presidential portrayal that Sally Field, who played Mary Todd Lincoln in the film, later claimed she’s ‘never met him.’

“Some have noted that most method actors…take pride in burying themselves in work…‘Oh, my gosh, the demons they must take on!’ Ms. Flynn said.” (Her mocking metaphor of demon possession is an old theory to explain multiple personality.)

The above, commonly made remarks about actors and acting, make actors seem like a group that might have a high percentage with multiple personality, like fiction writers. So I have often been tempted to write about actors, but compared to writers, actors have very little written either by or about them.

December 30, 2016

Actors, Writers, and Multiple Personality: Is acting a form of multiple personality? Is multiple personality as common among actors as it is among writers?

When a good actor plays the role of a character who has multiple personality, it makes people think that it is easy to fake. But most people could not do it convincingly. Why can actors?

Why are some people good at both writing and acting? Shakespeare did both. And when Dickens did his very popular readings, he got into character.

Speaking of Benoit Constant Coquelin (1841-1909), a pre-eminent actor of the French theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century, American drama critic George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) said, “Coquelin is the only actor who ever lived who proved that he had a critical mind in the appraisal of acting” (1, p. 192). Coquelin may not be the only actor, but he did have a credible opinion:

“…the actor must have a double personality. He has his first self, which is the player, and his second self, which is the instrument. The first self conceives the person to be created…and the being that he sees is represented by his second self. This dual personality is the characteristic of the actor.

“Not that the double nature is the exclusive property of actors alone; it undoubtedly exists among others. For example, my friend Alphonse Daudet takes delight in distinguishing this double element in the personality of the storyteller, and even the very expressions I am now using are borrowed from him. He confesses that he also has his first self and his second self—the one a man made like other men…the other a being…” who takes “notes for the future creation of his characters” (1, p. 192).

I do not know enough about acting to answer the questions in the title of this post, but they are good questions.

1. Toby Cole, Helen Krich Chinoy (Editors). Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the Great Actors of All Times As Told in Their Own Words, Revised Edition. New York, Crown Publishers, 1949/1970.

“The Ghost Story Persists in American Literature. Why?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/books/review/ghost-stories.html

Because ghosts are a literary metaphor for alternate personalities, and fiction writers have them.

“In Pieces” by Sally Field (post 5): Memoir’s title raises issue of multiple personality, and a psychiatrist is consulted, but his evaluation is incomplete

This 400-page memoir, whose title highlights the possibility that Sally Field has multiple personality, devotes less than two pages to her sessions with a psychiatrist (1, pp. 374-375).

After she tells him of, and gives her names for, her “pieces” (see previous posts): “Dan urged me to talk to each of them, to visualize them in my brain like they were separate people…to finally call each one over, to allow them to join the group” (1, p. 375). But skeptics would say that Dan’s advice was premature, since he had not yet established the diagnosis, which requires, at a minimum, a history of memory gaps, about which he is not reported to have inquired. (Search “memory gaps,” “mental status,” and “diagnostic criteria” for relevant past posts.)

If Sally Field did have multiple personality, then an inquiry about memory gaps might have found that what happened during some gaps could not be accounted for by any of the known “pieces,” implying that there were others. And there usually are.

Moreover, a psychiatrist never really knows what is going on with a person who has multiple personality until he speaks with the alternate personalities themselves, and Dan is not reported to have interviewed any of them.

This is not to say that delving into a person’s multiple personality is always appropriate. Often it isn’t. But if there were reasons that it never became appropriate with Sally Field, then those reasons should have been mentioned.

In conclusion, this memoir does not adequately address the issue raised by its title. Otherwise, it is very good.

1. Sally Field. In Pieces: a memoir. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

“In Pieces” by Sally Field (post 4): Good at playing Sybil, woman with multiple personality, because both had “similar psychological survival techniques”

“I received a call…to audition for a role against the wishes of everyone else involved…Sybil…the story of a young woman with severe dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality…

“I had worked my whole life—lived my whole life—to play this role…I knew her. She belonged to me. And though I never consciously saw how connected I was to Sybil, never saw myself as having similar psychological survival techniques, I knew my own childhood difficulties would fuel the work, knew this role was mine even if no one else in the room thought so…

“I knew I had to go into this meeting as the passive, shell persona of Sybil herself: baggy colorless clothes, no makeup, neat but uncoiffed hair. My old ragamuffin look…

After getting and successfully playing the role, she says…

“I had lived inside of Sybil, felt her longing to know who she was, to know the parts that had protected her and the parts that she was afraid to meet. Did I start to know my own selves as I became more capable of calling on them in my acting? When I walked off the stage, away from the work, did I lose the ability to hear them freely, forget they were even there, becoming a version of Sybil’s shell? I don’t know” (1, pp. 290-306).

Comment

It is not only that Sally Field’s multiple personality trait enabled her to credibly play a person with multiple personality disorder, but it appears that she finds acting, per se, to be therapeutic: it facilitates awareness of, and working with, her alternate personalities.

1. Sally Field. In Pieces: a memoir. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

“In Pieces” by Sally Field (post 3): Performing for Lee Strasberg, Field’s madwoman, red rage, ragamuffin, and rock-solid “pieces” work together

Sally Field’s acting career started in television, playing the cute, title characters in Gidget and The Flying Nun. She did not consider these serious roles, but wanted to become good, so she signed up for classes at the Actors Studio.

“I’d signed up to do a scene at the Actor’s Studio…and the moderator would be Lee Strasberg (1). I remember feeling dark and depressed, dressed in my ragamuffin clothes as I sat on the floor of the theater arts section at the public library…I was looking for scenes between two characters when I stumbled upon a long one from Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute…Immediately, I asked Paul, one of the actors I’d worked with in exercise class, to play the rich southern bigot, Fred, to my Lizzie the prostitute…”

Performing the scene: “As my fellow actor began to grope me, rubbing his hands intimately over my body, the madwoman part of me stayed present, and when he began to choke me—truly lost in the task—the red rage of me pushed him away, while I jumped to my feet crying ragamuffin’s tears, and the rock-solid piece of me said the required dialogue. All the pieces, the voices, the parts of me came together. Worked together. Lived for that moment…together.

“Then the scene was over. Lee had not stopped us when our allotted fifteen minutes were up, like he had done with all the other scenes [performed by other actors]. Our Respectful Prostitute had taken forty-five minutes…

“He asked, ‘Why are you here? You work. A lot of people here don’t and you do. You’re doing very well. Why are you here?’

“ ‘Because I want to be good,’ I said.

“ ‘You are good’ he said. ‘Good enough to work all the time…I let this scene continue. I wanted to watch you. You were quite brilliant’ ” (2, pp. 193-196).

Comment

One important difference between the normal version of multiple personality, multiple personality trait, and the mental illness, multiple personality disorder, is that the alternate personalities in the normal version work together (or at least not at cross purposes). Therapy for multiple personality disorder helps alternate personalities get along with each other.

1. Wikipedia. “Lee Strasberg.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Strasberg

2. Sally Field. In Pieces. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

“In Pieces” by Sally Field (post 2): Enraged alternate personality, standing on coffee table to confront much-taller stepfather eye-to-eye, says she’s not going to take it anymore

Preceding Chapter One, Sally Field quotes a poem by Emily Dickinson, which says “There is a pain so utter” that it “covers the Abyss with Trance,” so that “Memory can step Around” it and go “safely—where an open eye” would have subjected the person to destruction “Bone by Bone” (1, p. 5).

That is a poetic version of the prosaic theory of multiple personality: A child, subject to trauma that would be incapacitating were it fully experienced and continually remembered, enters a trance in which an alternate personality is created to take the pain and memory, allowing the regular personality to function, but leaving it with memory gaps (“Memory can step Around”) for the times that the alternate personality had substituted.

In the first five chapters, Field’s stepfather, Jocko, sexually abuses her, causing her to enter a trance state: “What I didn’t want to see or feel, I would send off into a cloud of fog, hidden in a mental whiteout” (1, p. 78). And she has memory gaps: “I’m naked. How did I get naked?” (1, p. 73).

Finally, at age fifteen, an alternate personality, who wouldn’t take the abuse anymore, comes out: “And then one night some piece of me…finally ripped out of my self-imposed fog and took center stage. Rage…I stepped onto the coffee table [Jocko was much taller] and there we were…eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose…

“ ‘I hate you! YOU’RE the liar! Not ME! And you know NOTHING!’ From my mouth came a voice, but it didn’t belong to me, and from a faraway place I watched as this little person who looked like me stood up until she seemed to tower over this man…

“ ‘You don’t know who I am!’ This guttural voice, filled with loathing, vomited forth as she peered into his eyes…He was frightened of her…Somehow, some part of me that wasn’t afraid, that didn’t care if I was loved, or if I lived or died, had beaten him. He knew it too” (1, p. 89-91).

1. Sally Field. In Pieces. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

“My Altered Self: How God’s Gift of Multiple Personality Disorder Redeemed my Nightmare Childhood” by Sue Liston

Sue Liston is a college graduate and a leader in Bible Study Fellowship. She has been happily married for more than fifty years, and has two lovely daughters and four grandchildren. But in the past, she had not been happy inside. 

After a number of ineffective exorcisms by several people, she asked the latest exorcist…

“Do you think you can help me?”

“Look…I’ve given your behavior a great deal of thought. What I saw and heard was clearly not you. But I think we’re dealing here with a split personality, not demons.

“How can you be so sure it wasn’t a demon?

“Well, another personality speaking through your mouth and controlling body movements could be a demon. But what you displayed spoke rationally, upholding and defending your position in life. Demons aren’t there to help us cope…They don’t dialogue or communicate…” (1, pp. 230-231).

Sue had wanted to be a Christian, but one of her alternate personalities (alters) had rejected Jesus. Treatment for multiple personality not only soothed the inner turmoil from her nightmare childhood, but helped her accept Jesus.

1. Sue Liston. My Altered Self: How God’s Gift of Multiple Personality Disorder Redeemed my Nightmare Childhood. El Cajon CA, SANL619 Publishing, 2017.

Blog Statistics for Last Thirty Days

Google’s blog software and blog services provide me with some statistics, such as from which ten nations have come the most visits. (“Unknown Region,” which has appeared only in recent months, is probably a Google malfunction.)

Pageviews

1379 India

 462 United States

 146 Pakistan

  96 Indonesia

  93 Unknown Region

  74 Philippines

  35 South Korea

  23 Hong Kong

  22 Russia

  19 Germany

None of these visitors has submitted any comments. Why? I don’t know. Comments on any post, old or new, are welcome.

New York Times Book Review: Sally Field’s memoir, “In Pieces,” reveals that due to childhood trauma she has “distinct and sometimes conflicting identities”

The New York Times review of In Pieces, the bestselling memoir by multiple Emmy- and Oscar-winning actress, Sally Field, says this:

“The events [sexual abuse] of Field’s childhood seemed to fragment her personality into distinct and sometimes conflicting identities—the ‘pieces’ of the book’s title—and shaped how she navigated both her romantic relationships and her career, as she rose from teenage star…to her Emmy-winning role as a woman with multiple personality disorder in ‘Sybil’…” (1).

The title and content of this memoir would seem to imply that one reason Sally Field is such a good actress, and was so good in Sybil, is that she, herself, has a creative, high-functioning version of multiple personality. However, The New York Times Book Review does not recognize the relationship between multiple personality and creativity.

1. Sean Smith. “Behind the Act.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/books/review/sally-field-in-pieces.html

Three reviews say identity and memory are core concerns in “The Witch Elm” by Tana French (post 5): These are core concerns of multiple personality

“The narrative is fueled by some of the same themes French has explored in the past. It’s reminiscent of The Likeness (2008) in the way it challenges the idea of identity as a fixed and certain construct. And the unreliability of memory was a central issue of her first novel, In the Woods (2007)” (1).

“In the current novel, Toby can’t even be sure of his own past and keeps returning to the holes in his memory…” (2).

“At its core is the impaired Toby’s struggle to make sense of his own memory and identity…Nothing in this book can be trusted, not even Toby’s claims that his brain is untrustworthy” (3).

Characters with 1. a changeable sense of identity, and 2. memory gaps, should make reviewers think of multiple personality. I don’t know whether this particular novel has enough information about the character to make a formal diagnosis, but reviewers of psychological novels should know that identity and memory are the core issues of multiple personality.

1. Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tana-french/the-witch-elm/

2. Stephen King. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/books/review/tana-french-witch-elm.html

3. Janet Maslin. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/books/review-witch-elm-tana-french.html

Novelist Tana French (post 4), who says “We’re all unreliable narrators,” misunderstands the concept and what it may imply about the narrator

Definition

Unreliable narrators are unreliable in that they do not tell what most readers would consider the truth. Causes of unreliability include lying, joking, and multiple personality.

Tana French

“I love unreliable narrators, and I would absolutely love to think I have even a tiny part in there being more of them around…We’re all unreliable narrators: we all unavoidably see only a certain amount of what’s going on, and then we filter it through our own interests and desires and fears and biases. So when a really well-written narrator is showing us only the skewed version of the truth that he or she is able to see, that’s when we’re most deeply immersed in him or her, and that’s when we reach the deepest understanding of that truth that other people are real too” (1).

Multiple Personality

In multiple personality, each alternate personality (alter) has it own reality in regard to self-image, memories, interests, talents, purpose, and world view. Each alter’s memories may have gaps, and its special interests will lead it to attend to certain things only, so each alter’s overall view of reality will be distorted accordingly. And which view of reality is being presented at any given time depends on which personality is in control. Thus, if a narrator is unreliable, one possible explanation is that it is an alternate personality.

Why does Tana French think that “we’re all unreliable narrators”? Perhaps she thinks that everyone has multiple personality.

1. Interview, October 9, 2018. “Tana French: We’re All Unreliable Narrators.” https://crimereads.com/tana-french-were-all-unreliable-narrators/

“The Piano Tuner” by Daniel Mason (post 3): At the end of the novel, the protagonist has a conversation with an alternate personality

Edgar, the piano tuner, is arrested by the British, because Dr. Carroll, the British hero for whom Edgar had tuned the piano, is now thought to have been a spy and a traitor. After interrogation, Edgar is locked up and left alone. Then:

“The door [of the jail] opened and a figure entered, floating, a shadow as dark as the lightless night…‘May I come in,’ the shadow asked…For a long moment there was silence, before the voice floated once again out of the darkness…‘We need you to help us find him,’ said the shadow…” (1, pp. 299-300).

As the dialogue between Edgar and the shadowy, floating, voice continues, Edgar notices that the latter knows certain specific facts that only Edgar, himself, could know. Edgar then says, “You aren’t here…You aren’t here, I hear nothing…” To which the shadow replies, “You wish to ask if I am real, or but a ghost…We have been ghosts since this all began” (1, p. 303-304).

“Shadow,” “voice,” and “ghost” are metaphors for an alternate personality. Only an alternate personality could seem like someone else, but know things that nobody else could know.

“We have been ghosts since this all began” is a metafictional comment, meaning that all the characters in a novel are ghosts or alternate personalities.

However, since no character or narrator interprets shadows, voices, and ghosts as alternate personalities, per se, it would appear that the author either did not understand or did not want to acknowledge the relation of what he wrote to multiple personality.

1. Daniel Mason. The Piano Tuner. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

“The Piano Tuner” by Daniel Mason (post 2): Piano tuner, when tuning, dissociates into alternate personality, leaving memory gap of multiple personality

Two-thirds through the novel, when Edgar, the piano tuner, is in Burma, he recalls what his wife, back in England, had once asked him:

“Edgar…I am asking how you work, I am being serious, Do you see anything while you work?…It just seems that you disappear, into a different place…Edgar laughed…But in truth, he did understand what she was trying to ask. He worked with his eyes open, but when he finished, when he thought back on the day, he could never remember a single visible image…” (1, p. 214).

That is, his regular personality had a memory gap for the period of time that his piano-tuning, alternate personality had taken over. Search “memory gaps” for past discussions of this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Daniel Mason. The Piano Tuner. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Mystery Novelist Tana French (post 3): Is “First Lady of Irish Crime,” who was born in USA, a citizen of Ireland, USA, and Italy or only USA and Italy?

The review of Tana French’s seventh novel in today’s New York Times reminded me that I’d discussed her first novel, In the Woods, in two past posts. After rereading my posts, I googled reviews to see what others had said about that novel. Several of the reviews mentioned that she had dual citizenship in the USA and Italy; another review said she had dual citizenship in the USA and Ireland. Why the confusion?

Wikipedia says she was born in the USA, lived in various countries during her childhood, has lived in Ireland since she was 17 (now 45), and that Ireland is the setting of all her novels. It says her nationality is Irish and that “She has retained dual citizenship of the U.S. and Italy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tana_French

Does this mean that she is a citizen of three countries (Ireland, USA, Italy) or that she is a citizen of two (USA and Italy), but identifies herself, and is thought of, as Irish? In any case, here are my two past posts:

November 5, 2016

“In the Woods” by Tana French has two mysteries: Primary mystery is never solved, and protagonist’s multiple personality amnesia is never resolved.

“In the Woods is a 2007 mystery novel by Tana French…The novel won…the 2008 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author, the 2008 Barry Award for Best First Novel, the 2008 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel, and the 2008 Anthony Award for Best First Novel.

Primary Mystery

“Twenty-two years prior to the novel's events, twelve-year-old Adam [Ryan] and his two best friends failed to come home after playing in the familiar woods bordering their Irish housing estate. A search is organized and the Guard finds Adam shivering, clawing the bark of a nearby tree, with blood on his shoes and slash marks on his back. He is unable to tell them what happened or where his friends are. They are never found and his amnesia holds to the present day. He now goes by his middle name, Rob [Ryan], to avoid media attention and is a detective with the Garda Síochána's Murder Squad.

Secondary Mystery

“The plot of the novel circles around the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, Katy Devlin, whose case Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to investigate. The body is found in the same woods where Rob's friends disappeared, at an archaeological dig site, and the coincidence is enough to make Rob nervous, though he insists to his partner that he is fine…” (1).

Primary Mystery Never Solved,

12-year Amnesia Never Resolved

Not only is the mystery of what happened to Adam/Rob Ryan’s two childhood friends never solved, but Ryan’s amnesia for the first twelve years of his life is never resolved. He recovers bits of memory of what happened in the woods when he was twelve, but even most of that is fading away, since those memories “no longer seemed to belong to me” (2, p. 419).

An example of his amnesia was his visit to a church, which somehow evoked a vague sense of familiarity, but “It took me awhile to realize that this was, in fact, for good reason: I had attended Mass here every Sunday for twelve years…” (2, p. 139). That is, he knew it was the church of the community in which he knew he had lived for his first twelve years, but he didn’t actually remember it.

This is like the amnesia described by Frank Conroy in his memoir Stop Time, in which he knows that a certain apartment building is where he had lived as a child until age eight, but he can’t remember having lived there (see past post).

Multiple Personality Type of Amnesia

Only a person with multiple personality could have amnesia for the first twelve years of his life. It suggests that his current personality is not his original personality, but is an alternate personality that took over after he came out of the woods.

Are there any other examples of his having a type of amnesia seen in multiple personality? Yes, at one point he (as an adult) “went for long walks…wondering through the city for hours in something like a trance [until he finally found himself somewhere] with no idea how I got there” (2, p. 174). This is a dissociative fugue, often seen in multiple personality (search “fugue” in this blog).

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality

Although the protagonist of this novel has types of amnesia seen in multiple personality, multiple personality, per se, is never mentioned by any character or narrator. So why is unrecognized, apparently unintentional, multiple personality in this novel? It is an hypothesis of this blog’s Multiple Identity Literary Theory that unacknowledged multiple personality in a novel may reflect the author’s own psychology. (Search “gratuitous multiple personality” in this blog.)

1. "In the Woods.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Woods

2. Tana French. In the Woods. New York, Penguin Books, 2007.

November 6, 2016

Tana French (post 2), Frank Conroy (post 7): In multiple personality, the person’s regular, host personality is usually NOT their original personality.

Since Tana French’s character had amnesia for the first twelve years of his life, and since Frank Conroy had amnesia for the first eight years of his life, I made the obvious inference that their regular personality was not their original personality. The memories of those earlier years were in the memory banks of various earlier personalities, including the original personality.

In a past post, I mentioned that the regular personality may not be the original personality (search “glossary original”), but here is more about it:

“Many multiples have a personality who is identified by the other personalities of the system as the ‘original’ personality from whom all others are derived. Kluft has defined the original personality as ‘the identity which developed just after birth and split off the first new personality in order to help the body survive a severe stress.’ Typically the original is not active and is often described as having been ‘put to sleep’ or otherwise incapacitated at some much earlier point because he or she was not able to cope with the trauma. The original usually does not surface until late in the course of therapy, after much of the trauma has been metabolized by therapeutic abreaction. The host personality is not the original personality in most patients” (1, p. 114).

The original personality is not special. It is often a relatively minor personality. It is NOT the real person. The real person is all the person’s personalities taken as a whole.

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