“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren: How did USA’s first Poet Laureate write poems, and what does it imply for interpreting his novel?

Robert Penn Warren, multiple award-winning poet, novelist, and literary critic, said that he would often get a new poem while exercising, because he found that the repetitive motion was “like hypnosis—it frees your mind. So when I am walking or swimming, I try to let my mind go blank, so I can catch the poems on the wing, before they can get away…The best parts of a poem always come in bursts or in a flash…You can labor on the pruning, and you can work at your technique, but you cannot labor the poem into being” (1, p. 118). That is, he heard the best parts of a new poem—which had evidently been composed by, and were being spoken to him by, an alternate thinker in his head—and quickly wrote it down.

His novel, All the King’s Men (1946), started out as a verse play ten years earlier. For the novel, Warren wondered “who could tell the story?” He chose a nameless, minor character from the verse play to be the first-person narrator and protagonist of the novel. The nameless character was now Jack Burden. And “the first morning I sat down with pencil and paper to write the novel, Burden started talking” (1, p. 87). Warren evidently wrote down what he heard Burden say.

I have just begun reading the novel, and the most famous character, Willie Stark, is introduced as a man of many speaking voices:

“But he was saying…In his old voice, his own voice. Or was that his voice? Which was his true voice, which one of all the voices, you would wonder…and the voice was different now…and it was another voice…” (2, pp. 15-16).

People with multiple personality may have different speaking voices, because each alternate personality may have its own distinctive way of talking.

And Willie Stark also hears voices. He says, “But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back” (2, p. 17). (It may be suggestive of multiple personality that he speaks of himself in the third person.)

Ordinarily, I would interpret the kind of thing Stark says as a metaphorical way of explaining why, that day, he was on his way to visit his childhood home. But when you interpret something, you must consider the source. And the author of this novel—like most poets, novelists, and other normal people with multiple personality trait—actually heard voices. So when one of his characters says he hears voices, I take the character at his word.

1. Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel (Editors). Conversations with Robert Penn Warren. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

2. Robert Penn Warren. All the King’s Men [1946]. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996.

Diaries and Journals: In post earlier today, the novelist may have gotten idea—a diary kept by protagonist and his alternate personality—from his own life

As I discussed in a past post:

August 31, 2015

Novelists keep journals and have “waking-dreams” so that alternate personalities who are usually not co-conscious can communicate

In multiple personality, many alternate personalities are not co-conscious (they are not aware of each other). Or, they may have one-way awareness: “B” is aware of “A,” but “A” is not aware of “B.” Or, they may have indirect knowledge: “C” has seen books bearing “A’s” name. Or, personalities may just want to express themselves.

There are several ways for an alternate personality to send a message. If “B” hates “A’s” necktie, “B” can throw it out, but that is dysfunctional. A better way is for “B” to verbalize his complaint, which “A” will experience as a voice in his head or a loud thought.

Since novelists may be keeping a journal anyway—to collect and work on things of potential use in their writing—“B” can make an entry in the journal for “A” to see. Seeing the entry, “A” might realize that he has an alternate personality, but most novelists probably think of it as a message from their “unconscious” or “shadow,” a new character, or their literary muse.

When voices and journal entries do not suffice, the novelist may have a “waking-dream,” in which they meet the alternate personality and see what the alternate personality wants them to see.

Added Comment

However, some novelists may instinctively avoid reading diaries and journals: that’s one reason that personalities who are not co-conscious remain unaware of each other.

This may also be the reason that some writers never read their old novels. They have various other explanations, but that personality’s real reason may be that it doesn’t want to come upon things for which it can’t account.

“The Prague Cemetery” by Umberto Eco (post 3): You can’t tell book by its cover or reviews, but you can by protagonist and structure, reflecting author

“I have been told that the great storytellers always portray themselves in their characters” (1, p. 275). The protagonist is a forger (fiction writer) with multiple personality.

Main Issue

Anti-semitism is a cover story. The main issue of this novel, multiple personality, is featured and highlighted by the novel’s very format and structure: a diary which is kept by the protagonist and his alternate personality; until, at the end, he finally realizes that they are “one and the same” (1, p. 398) and learns what had caused his split personality:

“The carnal contact with Diana, the revelation of her vile origins and her necessary, almost ritual death had been too much for him, and that same night he had lost his memory, or rather Dalla Piccola and Simonini had both lost their memory, and the two personalities had alternated over the course of that month” (1, p. 399). (And Diana, herself, had had severe, explicit, multiple personality.)

Author’s Mistake

There is one glaring mistake that the author makes about multiple personality. The protagonist is sixty-seven years old when he gets it, but real-life multiple personality begins in childhood. People don’t get it for the first time as adults. Why would the author make this mistake?

Adult fiction writers, like most people who have had multiple personality trait since childhood, usually have no conspicuous symptoms. They become aware of it mostly when writing a novel, when their creative alternate personalities (narrative voice, muse, characters, etc.) come alive to them and make their contributions to the “diary” (novel). If the writer equates multiple personality with conspicuous manifestations, then it appears to him as something you get in temporary episodes as an adult.

Reviewer Blind Spot

One of the main lessons of this novel is the inability of most book reviewers to deal with the issue of multiple personality, even when it is explicit and pervasive, as it is in this novel. Most reviews barely mentioned the protagonist’s multiple personality. Kirkus Reviews, which gave the novel its highest rating, made no mention at all of the protagonist’s multiple personality (2).

1. Umberto Eco. The Prague Cemetery. English Translation by Richard Dixon. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

2. Kirkus Reviews. “The Prague Cemetery.” https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/umberto-eco/prague-cemetary/

“The Prague Cemetery” by Umberto Eco (post 2): The protagonist’s multiple personality has become a metafictional running joke

The protagonist is Mr. Simonini. His alternate personality is Abbé Dalla Piccola. And then there is the Narrator, who intervenes periodically to interpret and summarize what otherwise would have been confusing.

“The Narrator is beginning to find this amoebean dialogue between Simonini and his intrusive abbé rather tiresome, but it would appear that on the 30th of March Simonini completed a partial reconstruction of the final events in Sicily, in which many lines [in the diary] have been blotted out and paragraphs crossed through with an X but still legible—and disturbing to read. On the 31st of March Abbé Dalla Piccola intervenes in the diary, as if to prise open tightly closed doors in Simonini’s memory, revealing to him what he is desperately refusing to remember. And on the 1st of April, after a restless night in which he recalls having attacks of nausea, Simonini makes a further entry, apparently annoyed and seeking to correct what he considers to be the abbé’s exaggerations and moralistic indignation. But the Narrator, being unsure, in short, who in the end is right, has allowed himself to describe these events as he feels they might best be reconstructed, and naturally accepts responsibility for his reconstruction” (1, p. 140).

Had the author planned to use multiple personality in this novel as a metafictional running joke? Or did his protagonist come to him already having multiple personality, which caused practical problems, and he is making the best of it?

1. Umberto Eco. The Prague Cemetery. English Translation by Richard Dixon. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

“The Prague Cemetery” by Umberto Eco: Book reviews note protagonist’s multiple personality, but he didn’t need to have it, so why does he?

I have just started this novel, and in its opening, the protagonist, a sixty-seven-year-old professional forger, is distressed by his recent memory gaps, the mysterious entries in his diary, and his finding a room connected to his apartment that has an alternate wardrobe.

He concludes that he must have had some kind of trauma that has caused him to have a “double personality” (1, p. 26).

In order to discover what his trauma was, and thereby cure his multiple personality, he will write his life story in his diary (which will be the novel).

Thus, the protagonist’s multiple personality is explicit, and almost every review of this book mentions it, but only in passing. Reviewers don’t seem to know why it was necessary or what to make of it.

And neither the publisher nor the author appears to have considered it a selling point, since it is mentioned neither on the book flap nor in an hour-long video that I saw in which the author was interviewed about this novel.

What they think this novel is mainly about, and its chief selling point, is that the fictional protagonist is imagined to have been the one who forged The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2).

What is of interest here is that protagonists do not need to have multiple personality to tell their story. Why, then, did this author give this protagonist multiple personality?

1. Umberto Eco. The Prague Cemetery. English Translation by Richard Dixon. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

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

“The Inner Room” by Arthur Conan Doyle (post 5): His “multiplex personality” has an inner room with many figures who contend for control

“I have often been asked whether I had myself the qualities which I depicted, or whether I was merely the Watson that I look. Of course I am well aware that it is one thing to grapple with a practical problem and quite another thing when you are allowed to solve it under your own conditions. I have no delusions about that. At the same time a man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really life-like unless he has some possibilities of that character within him—which is a dangerous admission for one who has drawn so many villains as I. In my poem “The Inner Room,” describing our multiplex personality, I say:

There are others who are sitting,

  Grim as doom,

In the dim ill-boding shadow

  Of my room.

Darkling figures, stern or quaint,

Now a savage, now a saint,

Showing fitfully and faint

  Through the gloom.

And those shadows are so dense,

  There may be

Many—very many—more

  Than I see.

They are sitting day and night

Soldier, rogue, and anchorite;

And they wrangle and they fight

  Over me (1).

“Among those figures there may perhaps be an astute detective also, but I find that in real life in order to find him I have to inhibit all the others and get into a mood when there is no one in the room but he. Then I get results and have several times solved problems by Holmes’ methods after the police have been baffled. Yet I must admit that in ordinary life I am by no means observant and that I have to throw myself into an artificial frame of mind before I can weigh evidence and anticipate the sequence of events” (2, pp. 100-101).

1. Wikipedia. “The Inner Room” by Arthur Conan Doyle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Room

2. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Memories and Adventures [1924]. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.

“The Cairo Trilogy” by Naguib Mahfouz (post 3): Book One has Unacknowledged Multiple Personality and Split Inconsistent Narrative

Book One (“Palace Walk”) appears to have been written by two different narrative personalities—one writing the first half and another writing the second half—as indicated by changes in word usage and perspective.

First, as noted previously, several of the characters were continually mentioning the jinn: out of fear, in Qur’an study, or as a metaphor in conversation. And since the jinn are in the Qur’an and part of the culture, and the cast of characters had not changed, I expected the use of this word to remain fairly common. But by the second half of Book One, the jinn are rarely mentioned. And this change in word usage suggests a different narrator.

Second, the father’s behavior alternates between how he is with his family and how he is away from his family throughout Book One. But the reason given for his alternating behavior in the first half (unacknowledged multiple personality) and the second half (family management technique) represent different narrative perspectives.

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality

“His life was composed of a diversity of mutually contradictory elements, wavering between piety and depravity…His conduct issued directly from his special nature…two separate people…(1, pp. 47-48).

“Kamal [one of his sons, accidentally coming upon his father, away from home] was stunned. He stood nailed to the spot, taking in his father’s relaxed, laughing face with indescribable incredulity and astonishment. He could not believe his eyes. He imagined that a new person had taken over his father’s body or that this laughing man, much as he resembled Kamal’s father, was a different individual whom he was seeing for the first time” (1, p. 233).

Another of the father’s sons accidentally comes upon his father away from home: “He plays the tambourine better than a professional…He tells jokes that make his companions die from laughter…Who could this man be?…Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad? That stern, tyrannical, terrifying, God-fearing, reserved man who kills everyone around him with fright?…There must be some confusion between two men with similar names. There could be no relationship between his father and this tambourine-playing lover…Perhaps most amazing of all, he had never before seen his face smile” (1, pp. 266-268).

Family Management Technique

Beginning about three-fifths of the way into the novel, and consistently thereafter, the unannounced new narrator, sometimes at considerable length, interprets the father’s behavior, not as alternating personalities, but as a common sense, family management technique: “He would have to be firm or the family structure would be destroyed” (1, p. 336). This is a distinct change in narrative perspective from that of the first three hundred pages.

Comment

Distracted by the plot, I doubt I would have noticed any discrepancy between the beginning and the end, if I had not seen the same kind of thing previously: multiple personality, unlabelled, but implied, in the first half of a novel, is omitted or ignored in the second half. This is the first time that I also noticed a change in word usage.

Having seen this kind of narrative change a number of times, with different writers, I am confident in the phenomenon, but I am not confident in my term for it, “split inconsistent narrative (SIN),” because it may not be easy to remember, unless you think it’s a sin, which I don’t. It’s just one possible manifestation of multiple personality trait that is seen in some novels.

1. Naguib Mahfouz. The Cairo Trilogy [1956-7]. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, and Angele Botros Samaan. Introduction by Sabry Hafez. New York, Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

Added January 25, 2019: If this book were analyzed by computer programs for Author Attribution or Stylometry, would they say that more than one person wrote it?

Maggy Van Eijk’s “How Not to Fall Apart: Lessons Learned on the Road from Self-Harm to Self-Care”: Possible relevance of Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects”

Maggy Van Eijk, who is now the BBC’s social media editor, has a history of severe anxiety, and her arms are scarred from self-cutting and burning herself with cigarettes.

Van Eijk’s explanation of self-harm is that “it’s about anger that ‘refuses to leave my body’ if she’s upset or about the feeling that ‘my voice isn’t being heard and it has nowhere to go’ ” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/books/review/erica-feldmann-hausmagick.html

The very brief book review by Judith Newman (above) does not explain what Van Eijk means by “my voice isn’t being heard and it has nowhere to go.” Is this “voice” purely metaphorical or is it a voice in her head that Van Eijk hears? In a nonpsychotic person, a voice that is heard, especially if it is recurrent, may be the voice of an alternate personality.

Friday, July 31, 2015

Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects: As in Gone Girl and Dark Places, the protagonist has multiple personality, but in this novel it is the title issue

The plot of Sharp Objects is about solving several murders—which turn out to have been committed by the protagonist’s mother and half sister—all of which serves to dramatize the protagonist’s traumatic childhood.

The novel’s main issue is indicated by the title, Sharp Objects, which refers, not to the murders, but to the knives and razor blades used by the protagonist, Camille, to cut and scar her skin since childhood. (As readers of this blog know, multiple personality begins in a traumatic childhood).

Camille has a history of being psychiatrically hospitalized for self-cutting. She has a beautiful face, but scars from self-cutting cover her body from the neck down. She is no longer cutting, but her urge to cut continues throughout the novel.

A few brief quotes from a textbook on multiple personality will help you to understand what I will then quote from the novel.

Self-Cutting in Multiple Personality

“Self-mutilation—typically cutting with glass or razor blades, or burning with cigarettes or matches—occurs in at least a third of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients. The percentage of self-mutilators is probably much higher, because this behavior is often not reported to therapists and is rarely spontaneously discovered except by physical examination” (1, p. 64).

“The sites of self-mutilation in MPD are often hidden from casual examination and commonly include upper arms (hidden by long sleeves), back, inner thighs, breasts, and buttocks. Self-mutilation frequently takes the form of delicate self-cutting with razor blades or fragments of glass” (1, p. 89).

“…persecutor personalities are found in the majority of MPD patients. The persecutor personalities usually direct their acts of hostility toward the host [regular] personality…Suicide is an ever-present issue with multiples. The internal persecutors may be threatening to commit suicide themselves, threatening to kill the host (internal homicide), or urging or commanding the host to kill himself or herself…Self-mutilation by persecutors to punish the host or other alters is common” (1, pp. 205-206).

In this blog, suicide in multiple personality was seen in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Internal homicide was my interpretation of Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen.” Self-cutting has not been discussed in the blog previously.

Camille’s Skin Speaks

Camille has carved specific words into her skin. The words are not experienced by her as being her own thoughts. They just seem to come to her or appear on her skin or are “screamed” at her, and she feels the urge to take sharp objects and cut these words into her skin.

The fact that these are specific words, not just feelings, suggests that they are communications from some sort of thinker. The compulsion to carve them into her skin might indicate that the thinker wants his or her thoughts to be taken seriously and remembered.

Actually, there seems to be more than one thinker behind these words, since the “words” are sometimes described as “squabbling at each other”:

“I am a cutter…My skin, you see, screams. It’s covered with words—cook, cupcake, kitty, curls—as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh…my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked…The problem started long before that…The last word I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body…Vanish did it for me. I’d saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in. I stayed at the hospital twelve weeks. It’s a special place for people who cut, almost all of them women, most under twenty-five. I went when I was thirty” (2, pp. 60-63).

Camille is not psychotic. But how can a person who is not psychotic have the subjective experiences and overt behavior described above? The likely explanation is that she gets these messages from, and is pushed to self-cut by, one or more alternate personalities.

However, if she were a real person coming to me for psychiatric evaluation, I would not make the diagnosis of multiple personality unless and until I actually met and interviewed one or more alternate personalities (without using any drugs or hypnosis).

For example, I might look at the words carved into her skin, choose one, and, since Camille says that she didn’t think up that word, I would ask, “Who said [specific word]?” If she had multiple personality, then in reaction to my question I would see a change in demeanor, the alternate personality involved with that specific word would identify herself, and the alter would be able to provide verifiable information previously unknown to my patient.

Does Gillian Flynn understand Camille?

She would if she had mechanically constructed the character, but most novelists don’t get their characters that way. I would guess that she had read of, or knew, someone who was a cutter; that the idea incubated in her mind; and that one day the character came alive for her. So I think it unlikely that Flynn has any deep psychological understanding of the character.

What about my theory that novelists have a normal version of multiple personality and that they use it to write their novels? Well, I do believe that, but that doesn’t mean most novelists know they have multiple personality or that I know what part it played in the writing of any particular novel.

As I have said in previous posts, apart from my analyses of Gone Girl and Dark Places, the only things I know about Gillian Flynn are that her favorite mystery novelist is Agatha Christie (see my posts on Christie), and that, as a child, one of Flynn’s favorite movies was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, in which the main character has multiple personality.

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

2. Gillian Flynn. Sharp Objects. New York, Broadway Paperbacks, 2006.

Tessa Hadley’s “Late in The Day” reviewed by Rebecca Makkai: Hadley is compared to Virginia Woolf and “The Waves,” a multiple personality novel

“I’m not the first to compare Tessa Hadley to Virginia Woolf, not even in these pages, and ‘Late in the Day’ calls to mind, in particular, Woolf’s ‘The Waves’…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/books/review/tessa-hadley-late-in-the-day.html

Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” is well-known in literary criticism and in Woolf’s own opinion as a multiple personality scenario (see past posts, below). However, since critics and Woolf may speak only in euphemisms and may not actually use the words “multiple personality,” it is not clear that they understood it in those terms.

Did Rebecca Makkai mean that Hadley’s novel is a multiple personality story? I don’t think so. It seems that she missed multiple personality in “The Waves,” as may many readers.

But since both Makkai and a previous reviewer have compared Hadley to Woolf, there may be some similarity, and it may be multiple personality, but neither reviewer has said so.

March 30, 2016

The Waves by Virginia Woolf: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis are alternate personalities of a person with multiple personality.

“In their attempt to come to terms with the strangeness of the narrative of The Waves, many readers have understood the six voices as aspects of a single character, a point of view apparently endorsed by Woolf herself…Woolf wrote in 1931 to Goldie Dickinson that she ‘did mean in some vague way we are the same person, and not separate people. The six characters were supposed to be one.’ The idea that the monologues ‘often seem like one pervasive voice with six personalities’ (Naremore) or that the six are aspects of a single being has been common in critical discussions of The Waves from early on. The point is made with slight variations by such differently oriented critics as Aileen Pippett, Dorothy Brewster, Guiguet, Richter, Poresky, Transue, Gorsky, Daniel Ferrer and Thomas Caramagno…” (1, p. 358).

Yet most discussions of this novel continue to make the mistake of referring to six “characters.” Woolf, herself, contributes to this semantic confusion when she says, “The six characters were supposed to be one.” Six “characters” cannot be one person.

Characters, by definition, are persons in a work of fiction—persons in their own right—not components of a person. Person-like components of a person are personalities, as in multiple personality.

1. Mark Hussey. Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers and Common Readers to Her Life, Work and Critical Reception. New York, Facts On File, 1995.

March 31, 2016

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: Initial impression of the six alternate personalities, significance of their mutual awareness, and unanswered questions.

About one third into this novel, two things about the six alternate personalities—Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis—are clear. First, they are all aware of each other. Second, they are not portrayed as being real people, since, for example, Bernard describes himself as having no fixed identity, and Rhoda says that she has no face, and that Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces.

Personalities Aware of Each Other

When you first learn that a person has multiple personality, and start to become acquainted with their alternate personalities, you initially meet a limited number of alternate personalities, who are, more or less, aware of each other. But you soon realize there are things that have gone on in this person’s life that cannot be accounted for by these particular personalities. And in exploring these unaccounted for things, you find a deeper layer of personalities, unknown to the first group. Some persons with multiple personality have two or three layers, some have many.

So the reader of this novel is faced with trying to understand a person when you are only allowed to meet the most superficial layer of who that person is.

Unanswered Questions

Bernard describes himself as being a sort of chameleon, who adapts to people he meets, but does not have much of any existence in private. He says, “Thus my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are…I am made and remade continually…” (1, pp. 133-134). This reminds me of the character in Henry James’s short story, “The Private Life,” who always knew exactly the right thing to say in social gatherings, but literally ceased to exist in private.

So far, then, Bernard seems to be a “host personality” (search it in this blog), but I wonder if there might be more than one personality using the name Bernard, similar to the way that Doris Lessing described herself as having more than one version of her “hostess” personality (search Lessing). It is one of my unanswered questions.

Meanwhile, Rhoda says that she has “no face,” and also mentions that “Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces” (1, p. 122). In contradiction, Neville says, “Let Rhoda speak, whose face I see reflected mistily in the looking-glass opposite…” (1, p. 138). This brings up the subject of mirrors and multiple personality (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog).

I am interested to see how much of this is clarified in the rest of the novel.

1. Virginia Woolf. The Waves. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 1931.

April 1, 2016

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (conclusion): Protagonist has alternate personalities, but literary criticism fails to acknowledge multiple personality.

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard. “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life” (p. 238).

“There are many rooms—many Bernards” (p. 260).

“I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs” (p. 276).

“For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another” (p. 281).

“And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know” (p. 288).

Unnamed Personality

As I speculated in a previous post, the six mutually-aware personalities were unlikely to be the person’s only personalities. Bernard mentions another, unnamed personality, who has affected his life for many years.

“I spoke to that self who has been with me in many tremendous adventures; the faithful man who sits over the fire when everybody has gone to bed, stirring the cinders with a poker; the man who has been so mysteriously and with sudden accretions of being built up, in a beech wood, sitting by a willow tree on a bank, leaning over a parapet at Hampton Court; the man who has collected himself in moments of emergency and banged his spoon on the table, saying, ‘I will not consent’ ” (pp. 283-284).

Do Bernard and Others Die? “…he is dead, the man I called ‘Bernard’…” (p. 291).

Who is this speaking in the final seven pages? Is Bernard, psychologically speaking, dead, or does he mean only that he feels depressed, because he seems to have been abandoned by his named and unnamed alternate personalities, and feels empty and at a loss without them? Have those personalities died? Is this narrator, who says Bernard is dead, the unnamed personality mentioned above, or some new narrator, who has taken over?

At the end of this novel, where have all these personalities gone? Have they died? Have they ceased to exist? Not at all. They have simply gone behind the scenes. How do I know? Because it is in the nature of multiple personality that most alternate personalities, most of the time, reside behind the scenes; or, if not behind the scenes, at least incognito.

Unacknowledged Multiple Personality

Although the six “characters” are revealed to be alternate personalities, the text does not call them “personalities” or speak of them in terms of multiple personality. So the author probably knew that she had various selves—which I think she mentions in her diaries—but she probably did not think of them in terms of multiple personality, per se.

Similarly, many literary critics have recognized that this novel features personalities, not characters, but most critics have not made the connection between personalities and multiple personality.

Virginia Woolf. The Waves. New York, Harvest/Harcourt, 1931.

Do Fiction Writers have alternate personalities? 90% probably do, say past study of 50 fiction writers and this study of works by 200 fiction writers

Two Studies:

1. Marjorie Taylor’s study of 50 fiction writers: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf , and

2. my study of works by 200 great fiction writers, here.

Authors Aren’t Joking

Long before doing this study, in my hope of one day writing a great novel, I used to read author interviews for tips on writing. I found it amusing that many novelists told the same joke: they talked with their characters. And it was only after my clinical experience with multiple personality—in which people may talk with their alternate personalities—that I finally realized: authors aren’t joking.

Hypothesis

Most fiction writers have multiple personality, but since it doesn’t cause them distress and dysfunction, it is not a mental disorder, only a trait.

Multiple personality trait occurs in up to 30% of the general public. It is a normal version of the mental illness, multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder) (1.5% of public).

Multiple personality trait is normal, but it is truly dissociative (divided consciousness), not just role-playing. Multiple personality disorder is classified among the dissociative disorders, which are not psychoses and have nothing to do with schizophrenia.

Freud’s Blind Spot

The concept of dissociation originated with French psychologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947). Freud (1856-1939) acknowledged the existence of multiple personality, but since his rival concept of repression could not explain multiple personality, Freud had a blind spot for it in his clinical work.

Reader’s Blind Spot

Most readers assume that multiple personality in a novel, play, or poem would be obvious. So if it’s not mentioned, and the plot doesn’t appear to have anything to do with multiple personality, readers don’t think of it.

Findings

Most symptoms of multiple personality in literature are not labelled as such, are not obvious to most readers, are not acknowledged by narrators or characters, and are probably there, not because the author intended to give a character multiple personality, but as a reflection of the author’s view of ordinary psychology, due to the author’s own multiple personality.

This is true of literature ranging from classics like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to contemporary bestsellers like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

Indeed, I found this so common that I had to coin terms for two kinds of it. Anna Karenina is an example of unacknowledged multiple personality, in which the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality are integral to plot and character. Gone Girl is an example of gratuitous multiple personality, in which the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality are unnecessary (except that they reflect the author’s view of ordinary psychology).

Who Cares?

Anna Karenina, as I explain in past posts, is thrown under the train by an alternate personality, which would be interesting for a reader to know. And you just won’t understand some of what goes on in Gone Girl unless you are aware of the protagonist’s multiple personality.

Writers

Fiction writers who sense that they have two or more selves, parts, voices, I’s, etc.; who may even have written about it or mentioned it in interviews; and who may have thought that what they have is like multiple personality, but that it couldn’t be multiple personality, because they are not mentally ill, may find this site interesting, because it explains that most people with multiple personality have the trait, not the disorder, and are not mentally ill.

Where to Begin

You need Search. If you are using a smartphone and don’t see a Search Box at the top of your screen, please switch to a larger category of device.

I recommend that you begin by searching the following, in this order: 1. Dickens, 2. Oates, 3. Anna Karenina, and 4. Gone Girl. 

Subsequently, search the name and subject indices, and choose whatever writers and subjects you wish. Many past posts from over the last five and half years are surprising and enjoyable.

[Added 5:43 p.m.: I wrote this post in coordination with an advertisement for this blog that was supposed to appear today. The ad had the headline: "Do Fiction Writers have alternate personalities?" However, the ad did not run, and the people at the publication who can find out why have left for a three-day holiday weekend.]

How common is Multiple Personality Trait in the general public: Is my figure of 30% a wild overestimation or a reasonable guess?

Multiple Personality Trait is what I call multiple personality minus the distress and dysfunction required to make a clinical diagnosis. While there is reason to believe that about 90% of fiction writers have the trait—e.g., Marjorie Taylor’s study of fifty fiction writers found that about 90% had “the illusion of independent agency,” characters that seemed to have minds of their own—there is no study of nonclinical multiple personality in the general public. So is my guess of 30% reasonable?

Rita Carter’s Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality, Identity, and the Self (New York, Little Brown, 2008) argues that having more than one personality is simply the way most people are, that it is human nature. But since she may have multiple personality trait, she seems to feel that if you don’t seem to have it, you probably just won’t admit it.

My guess of 30% is based on four things. First, fiction writers have to come from somewhere. I don’t think that writing fiction gives you multiple personality trait, but that, from people in the general population who have the trait, some people self-select themselves to write fiction. Second, a surprising number of people believe in angels and ghosts, which in some cases might be alternate personalities. Third, multiple personality usually originates to cope with traumatic childhood experiences, which unfortunately are not rare. Fourth, childhood imaginary companions—a phenomenon similar to, and sometimes evolving into, alternate personalities—are, according to the most thorough studies, at least briefly present in the majority of children.

In short, 30% is a reasonable guess.

Dani Shapiro, memoirist and novelist, quoted on her reading habits, Inner Censor, and dissociative fugues

I just read Dani Shapiro’s “By the Book” interview for The New York Times Book Review, which is a regular feature about the reading habits of well-known people. She says:

“I love writers who take risks, break rules, don’t succumb to the censoring voice whispering it can’t be done…[She reads to] enter the consciousness, the inner life, of another human being…I’m drawn to fractured narratives and linked stories, like…Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”…These days I read several books simultaneously…” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/books/review/dani-shapiro-by-the-book.html

When she speaks of a “censoring voice whispering,” is this just a metaphor or is she referring to what she experiences as a person-like being inside her? Here is an excerpt from her memoir, “Still Writing” (2013):

“Under the guise of being helpful, or honest, my censor is like a guided missile aiming at every nook and cranny where I am at my weakest and most vulnerable. She will stoop and connive. All she wants to do is stop me from entering that sacred place from which the work springs. She is at her most insidious when I am at the beginning, because she knows that once I have begun, she will lose her power over me…The I.C. [Inner Censor], once you’re on a nickname basis, should be treated like an annoying, potentially undermining colleague” http://jenny-blake-me.squarespace.com/blog/still-writing

She says that another recurrent problem is dissociative fugues:

“It’s always just me versus me…When I find myself, as if waking from a fugue state, on Facebook or Twitter before I’ve begun my writing day, I know that I’m losing the battle” http://www.centerforfiction.org/forwriters/writers-on-writing/dani-shapiro-on-procrastination

“If, at one moment, you are sitting quietly at your desk, and then—fugue state alert!—you are suddenly on your knees planting tulips, or perusing your favorite online shopping Web site, and you don’t know how you got there…” http://jenny-blake-me.squarespace.com/blog/still-writing

Search “dissociative fugue” for past discussions.

“The Cairo Trilogy” by Naguib Mahfouz (post 2): Jinn in Qur’an. Talk of “two separate people” in one person and “exorcisms.” Are metaphors only metaphorical?

In the first hundred pages, the jinn are spoken of continually. Since they are in the Qur’an, they enter into the thoughts of most everyone and must be taken seriously. But sometimes, without reference to jinn, characters hear voices or feel they have a split personality. Here are examples:

“Her [one of the daughters] love and fear were both intense. She lingered in her drowsy conflict for some time. Then the voices of fear and censure subsided, and during this truce she enjoyed an intoxicating dream” (1, p. 28). Voices, as often previously discussed, may be voices of alternate personalities. But is this just metaphorical? See below.

“His [the father’s] life was composed of a diversity of mutually contradictory elements, wavering between piety and depravity…Was he two separate people combined into one personality?” (1, pp. 47-48). That father, who was described at the beginning of the novel as very brutal with his sons and extremely domineering with his wife, is later described as beloved by his friends, because he is so nice.

“That day the shaykh had recited to them the Qur’an sura containing: ‘Say it is revealed unto me that a group of jinn listened’ (72:1)…The shaykh had undertaken to tell him [one of the sons] about the jinn and their different groups, including the Muslim jinn, and in particular the jinn who will gain entry to paradise in the end as an example for their brothers, the human beings” (1, pp. 51-52). Evidently, the jinn have a significant role as a nonhuman race of people in the Qur’an.

“The jinni controlling him [one of the sons] was wild about women in general” (1, p. 77). The jinni controlled him. How? Possession (multiple personality)?

A flirtatious conversation between the father and a woman, an entertainer:

“She freed her hand from his and…replied, ‘My incense is a boon and a blessing…It’s capable of ridding the body of a thousand and one jinn.’ He sat down again and said,…‘But not my body. My body has a jinni of a different sort’…The woman…shouted, ‘But I perform at weddings, not exorcisms’ ” (1, p. 100).

Comment

The reference to “exorcisms” implies possession, which is multiple personality. But are the above quotations only metaphorical? That would be the usual interpretation. However, I often agree with the old idea that many a true (or truly believed) word is said only seemingly in jest (2, 3). And this might be especially so when Muslims are speaking about something from the Qur’an, the word of God.

Many a true word is spoken in metaphor, especially by fiction writers, who may use metaphorical kinds of expressions for things that they have actually experienced, subjectively. In a past post, I coined the phrase, “subjectively experienced metaphors” (search).

1. Naguib Mahfouz. The Cairo Trilogy [1956-7]. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, and Angele Botros Samaan. Introduction by Sabry Hafez. New York, Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

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

3. https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/32/messages/1050.html