Anna Burns, 2018 Booker Prize (post 2): Author says interview is only of host personality, but alternate personalities would have given "a great interview"

“Burns belongs to the school of novelists for whom characters just ‘come and tell me their stories, in their voices’. She is not very comfortable talking about her writing. Now that the book is finished and the characters have gone, she says: ‘You just get me. I’m sure they’d give you a great interview, but you’ve got me.’

“Like all her characters, the milkman just ‘came to her’, she says, ‘he just drove up in his car’. She never writes to make a point or explore an issue. ‘So I write it and then I see – oh yes, this is sexual abuse, this is sexual scandal, this is a book about rumours, gossip, the power of gossip, the power of history and also the power of fabricated history, when rumours become the history.’ ” (1).

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/17/anna-burns-booker-prize-winner-life-changing-interview

Anna Burns, 2018 Booker Prize: Part of her writing process involves simply waiting for stories and characters to appear and give themselves to her

“It was…labeled an ‘experimental novel’ because its characters are nameless…

“ ‘I don’t understand,’ said Burns, when asked why it had picked up such an awkward label. ‘Is it the whole nameless thing? Is it really difficult? The book just didn’t want names.’ ”

Please search “nameless” and “experimental” for past posts.

“Part of her writing process involves simply waiting for stories and characters to appear…

“Burns already knows what her next book is about. ‘It gave itself to me, like almost all of it, and then it kind of said, ‘Back later.’ ‘That was years ago,’ she said. Its characters still pop into her thoughts now and then, she added. ‘They’re about. They’ve been giving me bits and pieces’ ” (1).

The interviewer does not inquire how all this can be.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/books/anna-burns-interview-booker-prize-milkman-no-bones.html

American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 implies there are 115,500,000 persons with Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) worldwide

DSM-5, the official diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association, estimates that 1.5% of adults have dissociative identity disorder (1, p. 294): 1.5% of 7.7 billion (the world’s population) is 115,500,000 worldwide.

The estimated prevalence of 1.5% limits diagnosis to persons whose “symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning” (1, p. 292).

Obviously, without that limitation, the prevalence of multiple personality would be expected to be much higher, an implication supported by my study of two hundred writers.

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

“The Fourth Man” by Agatha Christie (post 9): Short Story explicitly on Multiple Personality

Dr. Campbell Clark, an eminent “physician and mental specialist” tells his traveling companions that he is on his way to treat “a case of dual personality.” In that context, he tells them about a famous case in France that had featured four personalities. And to explain that multiple personality may be more common than they think, he says:

“You’re the master of the house—we’ll admit that, but aren’t you ever conscious of the presence of others—soft-footed servants, hardly noticed, except for the work they do—work that you’re not conscious of having done? Or…moods that take hold of you and make you, for the time being, a ‘different man’ as the saying goes? You’re the king of the castle, right enough, but be very sure the ‘dirty rascal’ is there too.”

“ ‘My dear Clark,’ drawled the lawyer. ‘You make me positively uncomfortable. Is my mind really a battleground of conflicting personalities? Is that Science’s latest?’ ” (1).

Considering previous Christie posts, her metaphor of the house may reflect her own mind and creative process.

1. Agatha Christie. “The Fourth Man” [1925], pages 55-76 in Agatha Christie, The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories. New York, William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2012.

“The Comforters” by Muriel Spark (post 4): Protagonist, who is writing a book on how novels are written, has this experience and conclusion

“Caroline…I told you of her experience with [hallucinating] the voices and the typewriter. Now she has developed the idea that these voices represent the thoughts of a disembodied novelist, if you follow, who is writing a book on his typewriter” (1, p. 170).

1. Muriel Spark. The Comforters [1957]. New York, New Directions, 2014.

New York Times not curious about fact that novel is narrated by unnamed incorporeal being, a version of which visits author for each of her books

“The book is narrated by an unnamed artist’s ‘muse,’ an incorporeal angel-like being that’s assigned to watch over artists. Different muses have visited Rose for each of her books, she told me recently over dinner at a Sydney restaurant. This one was patient, thankfully, as the novel took her 11 years to write. (Other times, she said, it’s a little old woman with a bamboo stick whacking her on the back, saying: ‘Write harder! Write longer!’) (1).

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/books/heather-rose-museum-of-modern-love-marina-abramovic.html

“The Comforters” by Muriel Spark (post 3): Novel introduces three characters who represent different aspects of author’s creative process

The Comforters (1957) is the first novel by Muriel Spark, who is today best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), discussed in a previous post.

I am up to page 50 in this 214-page novel, which appears to be about the author’s writing process, as represented by the following three characters.

Chapter One features Laurence, a young man who has a well-earned reputation “for being remarkably observant” (1, p. 9). He collects all kinds of private and trivial information about everybody.

At first I saw him as inappropriate and obsessive, like someone on the mild end of the autism spectrum. But then I realized he represents the author’s observing personality, who collects all the details of everyday life, so useful in writing novels.

Chapter Two features Mrs. Hogg and Caroline, the writer. The significance of Mrs. Hogg would seem to be her name, which alludes to James Hogg, author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), one the first novels ever written with a multiple personality theme.

Chapter Three begins with Caroline’s hallucination of the sound of a typewriter, and voices who chant the character’s own thoughts (1, p. 43). Frightened by this, Caroline flees her apartment, and finds someone to comfort her.

However, what is here portrayed as frightening to Caroline is what most novelists consider a peak experience: when she feels like a transcriber for a story coming from writing personalities who are behind the scenes.

1. Muriel Spark. The Comforters [1957]. New York, New Directions, 2014.

“Plain Truth” by Jodi Picoult (post 5): Flawed Murder Mystery Illustrates Split Inconsistent Narrative and Gratuitous Multiple Personality

As a murder mystery, this novel makes no sense. The reason given by the murderer for killing the baby is that she had wanted to prevent Katie’s illicit pregnancy from becoming known.

But for that purpose the baby should have been buried where it would not be found, not left where it would obviously be found, and where it would obviously implicate Katie as the one and only suspect, as it obviously did.

Is the reader supposed to pity the murderer for being so tragically wrong-headed? Not judging by Ellie’s uncritical reaction, which seems to accept the murderer’s explanation at face value.

Be all that as it may, the questions remain: Why, in the first half of this novel, is a major issue made of amnesia? Why does Ellie say that Katie’s symptoms make her think of Sybil (multiple personality)? Why does Katie perform on two lie detector tests like she is two different people (like she has two different personalities)?

None of these things was necessary to the murder mystery plot. And all of these things were more or less dropped and forgotten in the second half of the novel.

In short, this is another example of split inconsistent narrative (see previous post) and gratuitous multiple personality (search past posts), the reason for which is probably multiple personality trait in the author.

Split Inconsistent Narrative: The Story Changes Horses in Midstream

“Split Inconsistent Narrative” is a name I am trying out for a phenomenon I have previously discussed in relation to such novels as The Third Man by Graham Greene and You Must Remember This by Joyce Carol Oates.

In such novels, there is a marked discrepancy between the first half and the second half. In the two mentioned, there is a character with multiple personality in the first half, but this is completely forgotten in the second half, and there is no apparent reason.

In contrast, an unreliable narrator may be quite purposeful. The prototypical example is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, in which the narrator turns out to be the murderer.

However, an unreliable narrator whose unreliability has no such obvious purpose may be a sign of the writer’s multiple personality, because when an author switches from one personality to another, he tends to provide inconsistent points of view. An example would be Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.

How does a Split Inconsistent Narrative get written? An author’s editorial personalities may look at the first half and decide it is too good to discard, but they don’t like where it is going.

“Plain Truth” by Jodi Picoult (post 4): Halfway through, Katie seems to have recanted all her claims of amnesia, except for how she got pregnant…

…and it appears that she remembers that, too, and that the only thing she truly does not remember is how the baby died, because someone else killed the baby while Katie was asleep.

Can it be that the first half of this novel presents a character with amnesia and that the second half will say just kidding?

The discrepancy between the two lie detector tests has not been explained.

“Plain Truth” by Jodi Picoult (post 3): In lie detector test, Katie denies ever being pregnant or killing her baby. Why does she pass, then fail, the test?

Katie is administered a lie detector test. She denies ever being pregnant, ever having a baby, and killing her baby. She easily passes the test, which means she honestly believes that none of these things ever happened.

Minutes later, as is routine, the test is redone, and Katie gives the same answers to the same questions, but this time the test strongly indicates that she does not believe those answers (1, p. 154).

Ellie, Katie’s lawyer, has been present during both tests. Immediately afterward:

“Bright-eyed and blissfully unaware, Katie looked up at me. ‘Are we finished?’ ‘Yes,’ I said softly. ‘We certainly are’ ” (1, p. 155).

Ellie’s thoughts about the puzzling discrepancy are not given at this point, and I won’t try to read Ellie’s mind.

But you can probably read my mind.

If you can’t, search “puzzling inconsistencies” and “puzzling inconsistency” in this blog.

1. Jodi Picoult. Plain Truth. New York, Washington Square Press, 2000.

“Plain Truth” by Jodi Picoult (post 2): Lawyer defends young woman who claims amnesia for conception, pregnancy, delivery, and asphyxiation of her baby

In the first 150 pages of this 405-page novel, Katie, 18, an Amish woman, is shown giving birth to a premature infant, who is later found dead, probably from asphyxiation. Katie denies ever having had sexual relations, ever having been pregnant, or having given birth: she claims amnesia for all these things.

The other protagonist is Ellie, 39, a brilliant defense lawyer, who is having a mid-life crisis from getting bad people acquitted and never having gotten married or had children. As a distant relative of Katie, she takes the case.

Ellie has felt that Katie’s claim of amnesia is sincere. And her psychiatric consultant tells her that some cases of neonaticide have been associated with “a dissociative state that lasts through pregnancy…They’ve dissociated from the reality of the event, experiencing memory lapses…” Ellie replies, “Sounds very Sybil to me” (1, p. 132). [Sybil was a famous case of multiple personality.]

However, Ellie and the psychiatrist cannot be sure that Katie is telling the truth. One thing that undermines Katie’s credibility is her having referred to the dead baby as a boy, when nobody is known to have told her.

And other than Ellie’s passing reference to Sybil, multiple personality has not been mentioned or considered. So I am not expecting anything more about it.

As to who might be the father of the baby, the chief suspect is now Adam, who has recently earned a Ph.D. in paranormal science; i.e., ghosts. And since Katie has a history of recurrently seeing the ghost of her sister, she and Adam have ghosts in common and are attracted to each other.

Coincidently, Jodi Picoult, on her website, says her favorite of all her novels is Second Glance (2003), in which the protagonist is a ghost hunter.

Search “ghost” for past posts.

1. Jodi Picoult. Plain Truth. New York, Washington Square Press, 2000.

Prompted by tribute to Pulitzer Prize poet Anne Sexton (post 4) in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review: How did Sexton understand herself?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/books/review/tribute-anne-sexton.html

The following are three past posts. The third one quotes Sexton herself.

April 23, 2017

Anne Sexton’s Memory Gaps: Phi Beta Kappa, Pulitzer Prize poet repeatedly had amnesia for what she had said during psychotherapy sessions.

Anne Sexton saw Dr. Martin Orne, a psychiatrist, two to three times a week from 1956 to 1964:

“From the start, it was clear to Orne that Sexton was unable to remember much from one session to the next. From his point of view, Sexton’s ‘memory trouble’ proved the biggest obstacle to her progress. To address this problem, he eventually suggested (at the end of 1960) that they tape her sessions so that she might listen to what they discussed and reflect upon it in between sessions. Orne believed that transcribing the sessions would help Sexton ‘understand what she was doing’ (Middlebrook, 1991). Faithfully transcribing each tape, Sexton arrived at a session prepared to discuss what had transpired in the previous hour. She commented that she often only ‘heard’ his part of the dialogue when she wrote it down” (1, Introduction, p. xvi).

“Some of the tapes feature the long silences of Sexton’s trances, the dissociated states she entered when angry or upset, presumably in an attempt to manage her feelings. We can hear Orne's soothing voice as he attempted to coax her back to consciousness, and the flare of his anger when she refused to do so, even though the appointment had come to an end and another patient was waiting outside” (1, p xx).

“Her father, whose personality changed completely when he was drunk, once beat Anne with a riding crop because she had stolen her sister’s birthday money…Later, Sexton was to speculate about whether she had been sexually abused by…her father, a question which returned in her therapy sessions dozens of times and which is the subject of many of her poems (as well as her Broadway play, Mercy Street)” (1, p. xiv).

Comments

The only psychological condition with recurrent amnesia (search “memory gaps”) or spontaneous trances or complete personality changes (the latter attributed to Sexton’s father) is dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality).

Furthermore, after Sexton listened to the recordings of her psychotherapy sessions, “She commented that she often only ‘heard’ [the psychiatrist’s] part of the dialogue.” That is, she could not “hear” the voices of her alternate personalities, with whom she was not co-conscious. Indeed, it was her lack of co-consciousness with these alternate personalities that had accounted for her host personality’s memory gaps for the parts of sessions in which the alternate personalities had been in control.

As any clinician who is familiar with multiple personality knows, alternate personalities (who have not had their cover blown by diagnosis) typically try to remain incognito (they answer to the persons’s regular name and pass for the host personality). So the clinician has to recognize clues, such as memory gaps, and find out what accounts for these gaps; i.e., meet the alternate personalities who had been in control for these periods of time. 

Sexton’s memory gaps should have prompted an evaluation for multiple personality. But, to be fair to Dr. Orne, those were Freudian days, and since Freud’s theories were antithetical to understanding multiple personality (as I have previously discussed), most clinicians would have missed the diagnosis.

As to Sexton’s father, if it is true that when he drank he had a complete change in personality, then he may have had multiple personality, too. Multiple personality is sometimes multigenerational. Alcohol itself does not completely change the personality, but if a person has multiple personality, alcohol may prompt a switch to an alternate personality who drinks.

1. Dawn M. Skorczewski. An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton. New York, Routledge, 2012.

Anne Sexton (post 3): Her psychiatrist tells her “Elizabeth” alternate personality to get lost, and her host personality says “Elizabeth” was a lie.

“Early in Sexton’s therapy [1957], the Elizabeth persona began making appearances while Sexton was in a trance by scrawling messages in childlike handwriting…By September, she was typing letters which she left unsigned, though ‘Elizabeth’ appeared in the return address on the envelopes. Somewhat comically, the writer claimed that she had to type her introductory letter in the dark so Anne wouldn’t read it” (1, p. 55).

Note: Although the biographer thought that the above was comical, readers of this blog know better, since they recall the recent post on Shirley Jackson in which she describes her alternate personalities as leaving notes when her host personality was not looking.

Sexton’s psychiatrist, Dr. Orne, considered “Elizabeth” to be a dangerous symptom for a patient he had diagnosed as having hysteria. He feared that “Sexton was perilously close to developing multiple personality disorder” (1, p. 60), so he ignored “Elizabeth” and she no longer appeared. Moreover, Anne denounced “Elizabeth” as having been a lie (1, p. 63).

Dr. Orne had also expressed concern that Sexton was such a suggestible hysteric that if he had left her hospitalized on a ward with patients who had schizophrenia, she might falsely adopt their psychotic symptoms. But since Sexton had not been exposed to any patients with multiple personality (completely different from schizophrenia), from where did he think she was coming up with the idea of an alternate personality? And his belief that a person can develop multiple personality for the first time in adulthood is wrong; it has a childhood onset.

Moreover, Orne seems to equate having multiple personality with the overtness of an alternate personality. He does not know that that is not how multiple personality ordinarily looks (before it is diagnosed). In the typical case, the alternate personalities are incognito (answering to the regular name and pretending to be the host personality).

You typically discover the alternate personalities in the process of accounting for the person’s memory gaps. And Orne had never understood why Sexton had memory gaps for their therapy sessions (see previous post).

In multiple personality, undiagnosed alternate personalities typically become overt only in some sort of crisis. “Elizabeth” became overt, because she felt that Dr. Orne did not understand his patient (1, p. 55). But when Dr. Orne intentionally ignored her, she reverted to her usual life behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Anne, the host personality, was only too glad to call “Elizabeth” a lie, in compliance with Dr. Orne’s opinion about it.

As quoted in the previous post, from an interview years later, Sexton knew that she was “many people.”

1. Diane Wood Middlebrook. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Anne Sexton (post 2): “It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people…I become someone else…even in moments when I’m not writing the poem”

“It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it. Many times I assume these guises; I attack it the way a novelist might. Sometimes I become someone else, and when I do, I believe, even in moments when I’m not writing the poem, that I am that person. When I wrote about the farmer’s wife, I lived in my mind in Illinois; when I had the illegitimate child, I nursed it—in my mind—and gave it back and traded life. When I gave my lover back to his wife, in my mind, I grieved and saw how ethereal and unnecessary I had been. When I was Christ, I felt like Christ. My arms hurt, I desperately wanted to pull them in off the Cross. When I was taken down off the Cross and buried alive, I sought solutions; I hoped they were Christian solutions.”

from Anne Sexton interview with Barbara Kevles in 1968, published in The Paris Review, 1971.

 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4073/anne-sexton-the-art-of-poetry-no-15-anne-sexton

Jodi Picoult, bestselling novelist, reveals her cowriters, psychologically speaking: Her creative process, according to what she says on her website

A successful novelist, with 14 million books in print worldwide, translated into 34 languages, she says the following in “Frequently Asked Questions” on her website:

Do you always know the end before you write it?

Let me put it this way - I think I do, and I’m usually wrong. When I start a book, I juggle a what-if question in my head, and push it and push it until I feel like I have a good story. I figure out what I need to know and do my research…I start to write when I come up with an excellent first line. And then I keep going, chapter by chapter, exactly in the order in which you’re reading it. Often, about 2/3 of the way through, the characters will take over and move the book in a different direction. I can fight them, but usually when I do that the book isn’t as good as it could be. It sounds crazy, but the book really starts writing itself after a while. I often feel like I’m just transcribing a film that’s being spooled in my head, and I have nothing to do with creating it. Certain scenes surprise me even after I have written them - I just stare at the computer screen, wondering how that happened…When I was writing Plain Truth, I called my mom up one day. “You’re not going to believe what’s happening to Ellie!” I told her. I think she said I was scaring her and hung up. I know it seems a little unnerving, but I love the moments when my characters get up and walk off on their own two feet.

—from “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)” https://www.jodipicoult.com/faqs.html

Comment

Her characters develop minds of their own, and she feels like she’s transcribing a film that someone, inside her head, has created. It is a little unnerving at times, but she enjoys it.

So why has she, together with her inside collaborators—not to mention the many other novelists, both literary and commercial, who have said similar things—never told the whole story about how novels are written?

Won’t her cowriters cooperate?

James Joyce (post 8) might have titled his novel “Stephen Dedalus: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Why didn’t he?

If James Joyce had simply put “Stephan Dedalus” at the head of his title, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, all of the silly problems noted in my previous post would have been avoided.

Joyce failed to do the obvious thing. Here is a possible explanation.

If Joyce had put “Stephen Dedalus” at the head of his title, it would have implied that “Stephan Dedalus” and “the Artist” referred to the same thing. But Joyce may have felt they did not refer to the same thing. How could that be?

Even when writers are not aware of the full extent of their multiplicity, they may, at least, have a sense of duality. They may feel that one part of them attends to everyday affairs, while another part does the writing. That is what Margaret Atwood said in her nonfiction book on writing, and what Henry James said with his short story “The Private Life” (both of which I have previously discussed; search them).

“Stephen Dedalus” may represent Joyce’s everyday, host personality, while “the Artist” may represent his alternate personality who did the writing.

Postscript Nov. 20, 2018: I tried to read the novel, but halfway through I lost interest.

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce (post 7): Will the novel explain and justify its title?

I have just begun this novel, which Joyce worked on for more than ten years, and I wonder about its title.

Why does it say “the” artist rather than “an” artist? Is there only one kind of art and one kind of artist? Does the title claim that the portrait of Stephen Dedalus is in some important sense the portrait of all artists?

And why “A Portrait” rather than just “Portrait”? The former would seem to imply that different, but valid, portraits of Stephen Dedalus would have been possible. Indeed, the word “portrait” itself would seem to imply that different artists would have painted Dedalus differently.

Is “the” artist male, or only “an” artist?

I think that when most people read Joyce’s title and don’t see any problem, it is because they are translating it into The Story of Stephan Dedalus as a Young Man. But that is not Joyce’s title.

Perhaps the novel itself will explain the way its title is worded.

1. James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916]. Edited by Jeri Johnson. Oxford University Press, 2000/2008.

William Goldman dies at 87: Here is one past post, about trance and multiple personality, which reflects his experience of the creative process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/obituaries/william-goldman-dead.html

February 24, 2018

“The Princess Bride” by William Goldman (post 5): In “Buttercup’s Baby” epilogue, Piccoli goes into trance and Fezzik is taken over by alternate personalities.

In 1998, twenty-five years after publication of The Princess Bride, Goldman added an epilogue, “Buttercup’s Baby.” (Buttercup is the title character of The Princess Bride.)

Piccoli, “the acknowledged king of the mind,” is visited by Inigo, who wants Piccoli’s coaching on the mental aspects of swordsmanship. “Piccoli had spent his entire long life training his mind, so that he had the ability to sit for a day in the middle of a mad battle and know nothing of the screams and slaughter going on around him. When he was in his mind, he was as if dead. And every morning at dawn he would go into his mind and stay there ’til noon. No power could disturb him” (1, pp. 368-369).

Like Westley’s going inside himself to withstand torture (see past post), this is another example of a character who uses trance, which is a dissociative state of mind related to multiple personality and the fiction writing process. I suspect that the trances of Westley and Piccoli reflect an aspect of the author’s creative process.

Fezzik, the loyal, but simple-minded, giant—who, if there were a fork in the road, could be relied upon to make the wrong choice—was the last person who would have been expected to come to the rescue when Buttercup was having prolonged labor, and was in danger of losing her baby. There was no doctor, and nobody knew what to do.

But suddenly, “Fezzik…knew…he was…not alone anymore. He began to try to fight it, because something was invading him, invading his brain, and the Lord only knew his brain could use a little help, but Fezzik struggled on because when you were invaded, you never knew who was coming along for the ride, a helper or a damager…

“Fezzik could feel his power going as the invader took control. His last thought was really a prayer: that please, whoever you are, if you harm the child, kill me first…

[And then a voice, speaking from Fezzik’s mouth, said] “ ‘We have the body…We have [Fezzik’s] body,’ Fezzik said again” (1, pp. 406-408).

And then Fezzik, under the control of his invaders, performs a Caesarean section, and successfully delivers Buttercup’s baby.

Goldman, in his afterword, wonders “who did invade Fezzik?” (1, p. 413), suggesting the author did not realize that what he had described is multiple personality.

The climax of The Princess Bride’s epilogue, “Buttercup’s Baby,” involves Fezzik’s multiple personality.

When I read “Fezzik struggled on because when you were invaded, you never knew who was coming along for the ride, a helper or damager,” I interpret “Fezzik” as standing for “William Goldman” or “the fiction writer,” regarding the involvement of multiple personality in the fiction writing process.

1. William Goldman. The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version [1973], Abridged by William Goldman, including “Buttercup’s Baby” [1998]. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 2007.

“Marnie” by Winston Graham (post 6): Marnie’s multiple personality never acknowledged. Novel narrated in first person because author was Marnie

Marnie begins to think it futile to keep on “living a solitary life and codding up a make-believe world with a different name and personality every nine months and rustling bank notes stuffed surreptitiously in your handbag” (Marnie, last page).

She thinks she might want to go back to her husband, because he may still love her, and he was the only person she felt who had really tried to hear her.

However, her husband’s brother, who said he was driving her to her home, has instead taken her to meet the owner of one of the businesses she had robbed. She thinks that this may be a facing up to her past, and therefore to the good. But since her husband’s brother hates his brother, he may be delivering her to the enemy. This is how the novel ends, and the reader will never know what happened.

As to Marnie’s multiple personality, neither she nor any other character ever calls it that. Her theory about her behavior is that she may have inherited insanity from her mother.

Marnie does not realize that she has memory gaps (indicative of multiple personality), because she has, to borrow a phrase from the psychiatric literature, “amnesia for her amnesia” (see the example of her memory gaps in post 5).

The author may have gotten the idea for this novel from a news article (1). But he wrote it in the first person, because, ultimately, he, himself, was a “Marnie”: In real life, he had changed his own name and identity from Winston Grime to Winston Graham (2).

The significance of this and many other novels I have discussed is that they involve a character with multiple personality, but multiple personality, per se, is never acknowledged. The author has evidently not set out to use multiple personality, per se, as a literary gimmick. In fact, he seems not to have seen Marnie as having multiple personality, per se, for he has a psychiatrist as a character, but the psychiatrist does not offer any such opinion.

So how did unacknowledged multiple personality get into this and many other novels? It reflects the personal psychology of most fiction writers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marnie

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Graham

“Marnie” by Winston Graham (post 5): Marnie’s session with psychiatrist—confusing to both him and her—is right from textbook on multiple personality

Marnie’s mother is alive. There are several scenes in which Marnie visits her mother. Indeed, providing her mother with financial support, and looking like a success to her mother, are why Marnie has secretly been a thief.

However, Marnie has told her husband that both of her parents are deceased. And she has told the same thing to the psychiatrist her husband sent her (after she attempted suicide on their honeymoon).

During one of Marnie’s sessions with the psychiatrist, he says:

“Let’s see, have you one parent alive or both?”

“What d’you mean? You know they’ve been dead seventeen years, both of them.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You’re thinking of your next patient, not me.”

“No,” he said, “I was thinking of you” (1, p. 441).

Evidently, one of Marnie’s alternate personalities had referred to one of her parents as being alive, which puzzled the psychiatrist, since she had previously told him that both her parents were deceased. He thought he must have previously misunderstood her—maybe both her parents were living—so he asked her, “Let’s see, have you one parent alive or both?”

However, Marnie, now back in the personality who had told him that both her parents were deceased, has a memory gap for having told him otherwise, and thinks that he must be confusing her with one of his other patients.

This kind of confusion in getting a patient’s personal history is right out of the textbook on multiple personality (2, p. 72).

1. Winston Graham. The Forgotten Story [1945]. Marnie [1961]. Greek Fire [1957]. London, Chapmans, 1992.

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

“Marnie” by Winston Graham (post 4): Young, attractive, serial embezzler, using a series of false identities, both knows and doesn’t know what she is doing

Margaret “Marnie” Elmer, the first-person narrator, is a 23-year-old serial embezzler, who commits her crimes under a series of false identities. She gets employed as a cashier or bookkeeper, each time using a different name, then robs the safe and disappears.

She had started stealing in childhood. “Twice I’d been caught stealing when I was ten…The second time I got into trouble when I was ten my mother had beaten me with a stick, and I still have one mark on my thigh where she dug a bit deep” (1, p. 275) (Marnie, pages 249-527, is the second of three Graham Winston novels in this edition).

Marnie’s father had been killed in 1943, when she was nearly six. Marnie went to school only until age 14, but had been considered very bright.

At her current job, one of her bosses says, “Has anybody told you before what a pretty girl you are?” Marnie replies, “I don’t remember” (1, p. 278).

She has been known at this job as Mary Taylor, a widow (she has never been married). For the first time since age ten, she has been caught stealing, for which she berates herself:

“She really had been a bit of a fool, Mary Taylor, getting so involved. Mollie Jeffrey had had much more sense…When that man Ronnie Oliver had rung up Marion Holland just after she’d helped herself to a large sum of money from the office…I’d said never again. Don’t be a fool, getting entangled. So Mollie Jeffrey had taken that advice to heart. But Mary Taylor had forgotten it…This was the worst and most incautious ever” (1, p. 322).

“It isn’t always so easy to know the truth about yourself…I often have two thoughts—one belongs to the person I’m trying to be now, the other belongs to the kid from Devonport. And she’s still a back-street urchin. I mean, you don’t suddenly grow out of knowing what it’s like to be hungry and knocked around and treated like dirt. You don’t honestly. I mean, you may think you have, but then when you find yourself holding a thousand pounds in pound notes, well, you suddenly discover you want to bolt down the next dark alley…” (1, p, 335).

1. Winston Graham. The Forgotten Story [1945]. Marnie [1961]. Greek Fire [1957]. London, Chapmans, 1992.

Isabel Allende wins 2018 National Book Awards’ Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Quotations on Writing and Lying

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/books/national-book-award-sigrid-nunez.html

https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/isabel-allende-gives-rousing-speech-at-national-book-awards.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Allende

But what is her creative process? Quoting Isabel Allende herself, it is a multiple personality story:

October 24, 2014

Isabel Allende: Quotations on Creative Writing

“First of all, I have the feeling that I don’t invent [my characters]. I don’t create them; they are there. They are somewhere in the shadows, and when I start writing—it’s a very long process; sometimes it takes years to write a book—little by little they come out of the shadow into the light. But when they come into the light, they are already people. They have their own personalities, their clothes, their voices, their textures, their smells. I don’t invent them; somehow they are there. They always were there” (1, p. 258).

One of her best-known characters, Eva Luna, “is the woman I want to be. We are so different, in every way but one: we both tell stories. But she is my dreamself” (1, p. 273). She “was always there. I know that the character was within me. She doesn’t resemble me; it’s not my biography. I’m not her. But somehow she was inside me…By writing, [the character] got out of me and existed by itself…So that’s my relationship with my characters—very strange and very powerful. [Sometimes they come out right away, fully formed, and she can’t change them even if she wants to]…sometimes they [start out] ambiguous, but by the end they are so real that my children play with the idea that they are living in the house. And we talk about them as if they were part of the family” (1, p. 259).

Once a novel is started, she hates to interrupt the writing process. For example: “Now, while I’m here in Toronto, the voices keep on talking and I’m not there to take them down. I feel like a traitor when I’m not writing” (1, p. 275).

“I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don’t talk to anybody; I don’t answer the telephone. I’m just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I’m creating a world that is fiction but that doesn’t belong to me. I’m not God there; I’m just an instrument” (1, p. 290).

When she starts one of her novels, does she invent the first sentence?

“When I’ve lighted the candles and turned on the computer, I write the first sentence, which I let bubble up from my intuitions, not from reason. That first sentence opens the door to the story that’s already there—only it’s hidden in another dimension. It’s my task to enter that dimension and to make the story appear. When I wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits, which is “Barrabas came to us from the sea,” I didn’t yet know who Barrabas was or why he had come…It’s something magical that I can’t explain very well, because I don’t control it myself” (1, p. 295).

1. John Rodden (ed.). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Translations by Virginia Invernizzi and John Rodden. Foreword by Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

October 27, 2014

Novelist Isabel Allende said in interviews that she was a liar: The Paradox of the Honest Liar, a Clue to Multiple Personality

Allende: I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time.

Interviewer: Lying?

Allende: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying.

Interviewer: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth?

Allende: For me, I can no longer say…For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I received it I think it was more or less like this (holds hands a foot apart), but then I started telling the story and now it is this big (arms open wide). Very soon it will be a monument. [1, pp. 115-116]

She has a good sense of humor, but don’t let that obscure her serious, lifelong concern with lying.

The obvious problem with Allende’s explanation is that she (the host personality, who is doing this interview) actually does recall the original, true size of the bronze statue. The only way her explanation could make sense would be if the exaggerations in her stories were honestly believed by a separate, story narrator, personality, and it was the latter personality whom her mother and others would accuse of lying.

“So many times I don’t remember people’s names, or the places I have been…I don’t remember the names of the men I have married. At times I even forget the names of my own children…They had always told me that I was a liar…” ( 1, p. 218).

This is seen with a person who has multiple personality, in which life experiences are divided among the separate memory banks of different personalities.

“I have a terrible memory. I’m always inventing my own life, so I find that in different interviews I tell different stories about the same subject…The truth is I’m a born liar” (1, pp. 288-289).

This reminds me of when William Faulkner (see past post) warned interviewers not to ask him personal questions, because he might give different answers when future interviewers ask him the same question.

“…I have a special voice for storytelling, a voice that, although mine, also seems to belong to someone else…” (2, p.  227). When writing, she is “transformed into a multifaceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors, living countless lives, speaking with many voices. The characters became so real that they invaded the house…” (2, p. 263).

“We learn early on to wear masks we change so frequently that we are no longer able to identify our own faces in the mirror” (3, p. xiv-xv). [My novel Eva Luna] “is dotted with autobiographical observations about the practice of writing” (3, p. 63). [People with multiple personality may have a problem with mirrors. Search “mirrors” in this blog.]

In conclusion, whenever you have a person who has a reputation for being a liar, or even admits to having repeatedly lied, but this doesn’t make sense to you, because the person seems to be a basically honest and moral person—in short, the paradox of an honest liar—the solution to this mystery may be multiple personality, in which different personalities have different memory banks and different views of reality; which has been seen previously in this blog’s discussion of other great novelists.

1. John Rodden (ed). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

2. Isabel Allende. Eva Luna. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

3. Celia Correas Zapata. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Houston, Arte Publico Press, 2002