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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Wednesday, January 2, 2019


“The Cairo Trilogy” by Nobel Prize novelist Naguib Mahfouz: “She knew far more about the jinn than mankind…She frequently heard their whispers”

This 1313-page family saga, spanning the years from WWI to WWII, begins by introducing the servile matriarch of this extremely patriarchal family.

“She had married before she turned fourteen and had soon found herself the mistress of the big house, following the deaths of her husband’s parents…She had been terrified of the night when she first lived in this house. She knew far more about the world of the jinn than that of mankind…She frequently heard their whispers…When she was left alone, her only defense was reciting the opening prayer of the Qur’an…Over the course of time as she gained more experience living with the spirits, her fears diminished a good deal. She was calm enough to jest with them without being frightened…But her mind was never completely at rest until her husband returned…She had no regrets at all about reconciling herself to a type of security based on surrender” (1, pp. 7-8).

I have just started this novel and don’t know whether the jinn will even be mentioned again. But for this woman, in whose culture the jinn could conceivably possess a person (2), and who “frequently heard their whispers,” has a cultural belief given form to alternate personalities?

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. Wikipedia. “Jinn.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinn
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