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.

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Saturday, November 3, 2018

“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” by Muriel Spark: The author does not know what her characters are thinking or why they act the way they do

None of the characters in this 1961 novel (the one for which the author is most famous) has symptoms of multiple personality, but the relation of the narrator to the characters is a kind of multiple personality scenario.

The third-person narrator, perhaps representing the author, does not understand the characters or control their story. It is as if the narrator or author were a host personality, the characters were her alternate personalities, and, like the typical host personality, she had, at best, only a vague idea of what the alternate personalities were thinking and could not control what they do.

The two main characters are girl-school teacher, Miss Jean Brodie, and Sandy, the student who gets her fired. From the beginning of the novel to the end, Brodie remains a bunch of slogans and unexplained behavior. The reader never learns what is going on in her mind and why she acts so peculiarly. Sandy’s behavior and motivation remain just as puzzling and unexplained. Her name is fitting: Sandy Stranger.

Hoping to better understand this author, I plan to read her first novel, The Comforters, and some biography.
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