Time Travel stories are amazingly common (1, 2), because fiction writers, by virtue of multiple personality, may have personally experienced time travel

Most fiction writers have multiple personality trait, in which alternate personalities may see themselves as being a different age than the person’s actual age.

For example, the regular, host personality sees itself as being the person’s actual age, say 30, but one alternate personality may see itself as being 18 and another as being 5. And the 5-year-old may think that it is still the year in which it originated (when the person was five). So when the person switches to their 5-year-old personality, they will have time-traveled back to the year when the person was five (in subjective reality).

And if the writer, as a child, had read, or been told, historical stories, the reality of those stories may have been adopted as the reality by an alternate personality. Or the child may have come up with its own imaginary world, which is common enough to have been given a name: “paracosm” (3). (Search “paracosm.”)

In short, when fiction writers do time travel stories, they may be writing what they know (by virtue of their multiple personality).

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

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Novels_about_time_travel

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracosm

“The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron (post 3): Selling millions of books that teach people how they can hear and work with their alternate personalities

The Artist’s Way has been a self-help phenomenon, selling millions of books (1). It is based on the psychology of fiction writers, who hear and work with their alternate personalities.

Here are a few quotes from the beginning:

“My life has always included strong internal directives. Marching orders, I call them…I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping…I wasn’t doing it. By resigning as the self-conscious author, I wrote freely” (2, pp. xvii-xix).

“What we are talking about is an induced—or invited—spiritual experience…” (2, p. 1).

“…recognize, nurture, and protect your inner artist…” (2, p. 7).

“There are two pivotal tools in creative recovery: the morning pages and the artist date” (2, p. 9).

“We are victims of our own internalized perfectionist, a nasty internal and eternal critic, the Censor, who…keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth” (2, p. 11).

“Your artist is a child and it needs to be fed. Morning pages feed your child artist. So write your morning pages. Three pages of whatever crosses your mind…Morning pages…get us beyond our Censor…” (2, p. 12).

“But what exactly is an artist date? An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist…Your artist is a child…Above all, learn to listen to what your artist child has to say…” (2, pp. 18-19).

1. Penelope Green. “Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages.” New York Times, Feb. 2, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.html

2. Julia Cameron. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York, Tarcher Perigee/Penguin Random House, 2016.

“Floor Sample: a creative memoir” by Julia Cameron (post 2): Relationship to August Strindberg, who also had both creativity and psychotic episodes

For the rest of her memoir, Julia Cameron remains productive in her writing (plays, novels, musicals) and her teaching about creativity, except when she has recurrent, blatant, “psychotic episodes.”

Eventually, she gets on antipsychotic medication, first Navane and later Abilify. She claims that her official psychiatric diagnosis is nothing more specific than “psychotic episodes,” but acknowledges that she would relapse without medication.

Of all the writers I have discussed, the one who comes most to mind is August Strindberg, who also had both creativity and psychotic episodes. Search “Strindberg.”

Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung: Are psychiatrists and psychologists who choose to train in psychoanalysis more likely to have multiple personality trait?

Most psychiatrists (1) and psychologists (2) are not psychoanalysts. Psychoanalysis is a separate course of study (3). I am a psychiatrist, but not a psychoanalyst.

Freud and Jung were psychiatrists who founded schools of psychoanalysis. I have discussed each of them in past posts as having multiple personality trait. (Search “Freud” and “Jung.”)

Critics of psychoanalysis might say that there is a lot of overlap between psychoanalysis and fiction writing. Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysts might say that if they are like Freud or Jung, they are proud of it.

1. Wikipedia. “Psychiatrist.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatrist

2. Wikipedia. “Psychologist.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychologist

3. Wikipedia. “Psychoanalysis.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis

“Floor Sample: a creative memoir” by Julia Cameron: Writer, whose alcoholic blackouts could be prevented by stimulants, becomes conduit for creativity

Julia Cameron is a novelist, playwright, songwriter, and poet, with extensive credits in theater, film, and television. She is best known for her book on creativity (1). Before reading the latter, I have begun her memoir, the first quarter of which is mostly about her overcoming alcoholism, which featured alcoholic blackouts.

Her blackouts were unusual in two respects. First, she had a blackout the very first time she drank. Second, she could drink, but avoid blacking out, if she took a stimulant drug, either amphetamine or cocaine.

When I looked up alcoholic blackouts, I found that most sources do not mention stimulants, but that those which did said stimulants would make blackouts worse, probably by allowing the person to drink a greater amount of alcohol.

Her Blackouts

“ ‘I was what, in retrospect, I call a Cup o' Soup alcoholic; I had a blackout the first time I went drinking and most people don’t,’ she says” (2).

“At eighteen years of age…Drinking white wine spritzers, I had my first alcoholic blackout. A blackout is a period where although the drinker appears to be acting normally, his or her memory ceases to record. Blackouts are a symptom of alcoholism and may last moments or days…

“One moment I was sipping a chilled drink, waiting for the bus to arrive that would take us to the game; the next thing I knew I ‘came to’ riding in the back of a school bus on the way home after the game and talking with a strange boy…He was assuring me that virginity was a renewable option…

“To me, writing and drinking went together…” (3, pp. 15-17).

She found that “speed [amphetamine] allowed you to drink without blacking out. The combination of wine and speed was a good writing elixir…

“Like many writers, I confused my drinking identity and my writing identity” (3, p. 28).

“I knew very little about cocaine except that it was glamorous and illegal, appealing to my bad-girl side. This was 1976…For me it was immediately attractive because, as a stimulant, it would allow me to drink without blacking out” (3, p. 52).

Conduit for Higher Power

Eventually she hits bottom, admits that she’s an alcoholic, and listens to sober alcoholics, who advise her to stop drinking and accept help from a higher power.

“I could believe in a benevolent creative energy, I decided. That energy would be my higher power” (3, p. 84). God, benevolent creative energy, would be her higher power. But she was a writer. How would she be able to write without drinking?

“Stop trying to be a great writer” they advised me next. “That’s your ego. Get your ego out of your writing…You are just the vehicle, the channel. Let God write through you.

“Imagine my surprise when my writing began to respond to this new…agenda. Now that I was no longer judging and condemning my sentences, my prose seemed to relax a little and to straighten out. If God were indeed writing through me, God had an easier and more accessible prose style than I did…I even liked it myself…

“…dialogue came to me readily. My characters fairly seemed to chatter. I wasn’t so much writing as I was eavesdropping. I wasn’t so much thinking something up as taking something down…I found myself losing my sense of myself as an ‘author’ and gaining a sense of myself as a conduit. I found I wrote best when I felt empty of ego, curious, and receptive rather than full of ideas” (3, pp. 85-87).

Toxic vs. Dissociative (Multiple Personality) Blackouts

Alcoholic blackouts—memory gaps for the period of time that the person was drinking—are usually thought of as the toxic effect of alcohol on the memory circuits of the brain. In older studies of blackouts, it seemed that they only occurred in chronic alcoholics after many years of drinking. But more recent studies have found that alcoholic blackouts are surprisingly common in college students.

Are these early-onset blackouts caused by the toxicity of alcohol? What else could they be caused by? Another possibility is that the alcohol is sedating and putting to sleep the young person’s host personality, allowing a drinking alternate personality to take over (incognito), so that when the person switches back to their host personality, they have a memory gap for the time of the drinking.

Now suppose that the young person took a stimulant while they were drinking. The alcohol would keep the drinking alternate personality in control, but the stimulant might keep the host personality awake, as a co-conscious bystander. (Alternate personalities are often conscious simultaneously.) So when the drinking stopped and the host personality took back control, she would not have a memory gap, and there would have been no “alcoholic blackout.”

This multiple personality scenario is supported by the description of her multiple personality type of writing process after she became sober (see above).

1. Julia Cameron. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York, TarcherPerigee/Penguin Random House, 2016.

2. Julia Cameron interview (2006). https://bookpage.com/interviews/8351-julia-cameron-arts-culture#.XHAKpZNKg4V

3. Julia Cameron. Floor Sample: a creative memoir. New York, Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.

New York Times Book Review: Readers’ Response to Advertisement of This Blog in Their Tuesday, February 19, 2019 Newsletter

The New York Times Book Review, published every Sunday, has two newsletters that are emailed to interested subscribers every Friday and Tuesday. The Friday newsletter provides advanced access to the complete contents of the upcoming Sunday Book Review. The Tuesday newsletter is an abridged retrospective.

To see whether readers of the Book Review would have any interest in this blog, I scheduled ads for this blog in its newsletters of Tuesday, February 19, 2019 and Friday, March 8, 2019.

The headline of both ads is “Do Fiction Writers have alternate personalities?” The ad is a link to this blog. If a reader clicks on the ad, they come directly to this blog.

In response to the first ad, there were significantly increased visits to the blog. But after three days, visits to the blog were back at their pre-ad rate, which I interpret as indicating no significant interest in this blog by Book Review readers.

One reason for lack of interest could be that most people routinely use smartphones. Between one-half and three-quarters of people responding to the first ad were using smartphones, which do not show the main features of the blog, like its Search Box, which you need to access the blog’s posts on 200 great writers.

Also, a greater number of Book Review subscribers read their Friday newsletter than read their Tuesday newsletter, so it’s possible that the response to my ad in the upcoming Friday, March 8th newsletter will be bigger.

But they just may not be interested.

“Around the World in Eighty Days” by Jules Verne (post 2): The Oxford University Press introduction says a character has a “split personality”

But I just finished the novel and found no such thing, unless you consider the fact that the protagonist, Phileas Fogg, gets married at the end to be so out of character for him that it means he had a split personality.

And it is true that throughout the novel and until the very end, Fogg is described as not having an emotional bone in his body. This is how he is consistently described:

“The phlegmatic gentleman listened to her, apparently with great coldness, without a single intonation or gesture betraying the least emotion…He was unfailingly polite, but with the grace and spontaneity of an automaton…Mr Fogg replied that she had no need to worry, and that everything would sort itself out mathematically! That was the word he used” (1, pp. 81-82).

If the character had had some specific symptom of multiple personality, like memory gaps or fugues, then I could see the above as supportive of multiple personality, because his description as a phlegmatic automaton is like that of an alternate personality in that it is so far from being a well-rounded person.

Since an alternate personality is only one part of a person’s total personality, it is often relatively narrow and specialized in a particular emotion or interest. So, between the Introduction and his description, I was waiting for him to show some specific symptom of multiple personality. But it never happened.

The fact that he suddenly gets married, in and of itself, could mean nothing more than he was previously shy and inhibited, was focused on the trip around the world, and that now that the pressure was off and the pretty girl was so willing, he could relax and enjoy it. He was more well-rounded than he had appeared. But multiple personality? I don’t see it.

1. Jules Verne. Around the World in Eighty Days [1873]. Intro. and Trans. William Butcher (1995). Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

“Personality and the Discontinuity of the Mind” by Aldous Huxley (post 5): Author of “Brave New World” isn’t complacent about his multiple personality

“Personality and the Discontinuity of the Mind” is one of the essays by Huxley in his 1928 book Proper Studies (“The proper study of mankind is man”). He doesn’t use the term “multiple personality,” but, as I’ll explain, that’s what it’s about. The word “discontinuity” is actually used in the official definition of multiple personality by the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5, 2013).

Multiple personality is a discontinuity of the mind. This may be evident in discontinuity of memory; that is, memory gaps for times that other personalities have been in control, with different memories available to different personalities. It may also be evident in discontinuity of behavior—e.g., out-of-character behavior—caused by switching from one personality to another. It is evident in discontinuity of subjective sense of identity: there is more than one “I.”

The way I know that this kind of discontinuity is what Huxley means is that his example of a man with “discontinuity of the mind” is Proust, whose multiple personality I have previously discussed (search “Proust”).

Huxley says: “The most curious feature of Proust’s mentality is his complacent acceptance of the ‘intermittences of the heart’ and all the other psychological discontinuities which he so subtly and exhaustively describes…No author has studied the intermittences of the spirit with so much insight and patience, and none has shown himself so placidly content to live the life of an intermittent being…the idea of using his knowledge in order to make himself better never seems to have occurred to him…The man who would face the world with a complete and consistently effective personality cannot resign himself to his discontinuity” (1, pp. 291-292).

The way I know that Huxley himself experienced “discontinuity of the mind” is that he is discussing it, not as a curiosity, but as an aspect of ordinary psychology, which, of course, would include himself.

Persons who do not have multiple personality may have different moods and roles in everyday life, but they do not have memory gaps or changes in sense of identity or other identities with minds of their own. Their one and only “I” has continuity throughout their various moods and roles, and in every corner of their mind.

Huxley criticizes Proust, because he feels Proust let his “discontinuity” pervade everyday life; whereas, Huxley probably felt that it should be confined as much as possible to fiction writing.

1. Aldous Huxley. “Personality and the Discontinuity of the Mind,” in Proper Studies. New York, Doubleday Doran, 1928.

Do Fiction Writers have alternate personalities?

Yes, 90% do, based on:

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 discussion, on this site, of works by 200 great writers.

Characters and Personalities: Minds of Their Own

Many writers say that they experience their important characters as having minds of their own. I used to think they were joking.

But after my clinical experience with people who have multiple personality—whose alternate personalities have minds of their own—I finally realized that authors aren’t joking.

Both authors’ characters and alternate personalities are imaginary people who seem to have minds of their own: they are the same psychological phenomenon.

Clinical Disorder vs. Normal Trait

Most fiction writers have a normal form of multiple personality. It does not cause them distress or dysfunction. They are not mentally ill. They do not have multiple personality disorder. They have multiple personality trait.

Only 1.5% of people have multiple personality disorder, but up to 30% of people may have multiple personality trait. Fiction writers come from that normal thirty percent.

What is dissociation?

Multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder) is not a psychosis and has nothing to do with schizophrenia. It is a dissociative disorder. And its normal version, multiple personalty trait, is a dissociative trait. Dissociation means divided consciousness (divided into personalities or characters).

Freudian Blind Spot

Although Freud acknowledged the existence of genuine cases of multiple personality, his theories—based on repression, not dissociation—had a blind spot for multiple personality.

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 labeled as such, because the author did not intend to give the character multiple personality, per se. The symptoms are there, because they reflect the author’s sense of ordinary psychology, based on the author’s own psychology.

Unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality are found in great literature ranging from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

In Anna Karenina, the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality are unlabeled, but integral to the story. In Gone Girl, the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality are unlabeled and gratuitous (except that they reflect the author’s view of ordinary psychology).

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 recognize it as symptoms of the protagonist’s multiple personality.

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.

Where Next

Search the name and subject indices, and choose whatever writers and subjects you wish. Or use the archive in the sidebar to click on past years.

Think of this site as a serial book. Many of the best chapters have come earlier. If you read only recent chapters (posts), you will miss most of what this site has to offer.

Whenever you have a chance, visit again, and read about 200 great writers.

Jules Verne: Major literary author, second most-translated, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare

“Jules Verne (1828-1905) is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children’s books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare” (1).

“Another trait was his changeability…It is not as if we could appeal to the works, since severe contradictions have tripped up all those seeking coherent philosophies in Verne’s works. Socialists have often found Verne to be left-leaning; nationalists, pro-French; Americans, naïve, optimistic, and science oriented; Canadians, confused as to identity; Swiss, stay-at-home; and British, unintellectual and insular. Only the wisest of scholars have concluded on an essential inconclusiveness in the works…mainly because the views expressed are so inconsistent as to cause total confusion” (2, pp. 240-241).

“Most interviewers agreed on his paradoxical combinations…In fact he hated to talk about his own persona—‘the story of my life would not be interesting’—and writing formed his only reality: ‘If I don’t work I feel I’m not living’ ” (2, p. 286).

“The remarkable images of Around the World in Eighty Days…all combine with an explicit and repeated indication that the characters’ rational minds are not in control. Verne thus produces an inventive account of human nature, involving split personality, repressed memories, neurotic behaviour, illicit impulses, sexual obsessions, and many of the concepts that would later be formalized by the psychologists…

“Or as Verne wrote in 1882, ‘There are two beings inside us: me and the other’ ” (3, pp. xxix-xxx).

1. Wikipedia. “Jules Verne.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne

2. William Butcher. Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography. Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006.

3. Jules Verne. Around the World in Eighty Days [1873]. Trans. William Butcher (1995). Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

What is a Mental Disorder? Why aren’t Theists (believe in God), Atheists (disbelieve in God), and Novelists (talk with characters) mentally ill? 

Definition of a Mental Disorder

“A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above” (1, p. 20).

If whatever is going on with a person’s mind does not cause them clinically significant dysfunction and distress, then it is not a mental disorder, they do not get a diagnosis, and they are not mentally ill.

Comments
If what is different about a person’s mind helps them to do worthwhile things that others can’t, then that difference is an asset.

And if someone can write a great novel and you can’t, there is a good chance that their mind and your mind work differently in certain respects.

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley (post 4): “John” and “Savage” are both capitalized, because they are names of two different personalities

One major character is referred to in five different ways: John, John the Savage, Mr. Savage, the Savage, and Savage. At first, I thought this was just a reference to John’s uncivilized upbringing. But if that were true, “Savage” would not always be capitalized. It would be “John, the savage” or “the savage,” not always “John the Savage” or “the Savage.”

Why is “Savage” always capitalized? Because the character has two different names: John and Savage. And the latter is not just a nickname used by other characters, since the narration often refers to him as “Savage” even when it would have been natural to refer to him by the name he was raised with, John.

The character has evidently had two personalities since childhood. One personality thought of himself as John, the white-skinned son of a couple vacationing on a Native American reservation. The other personality wanted to fit in with the Native Americans among whom he was raised when his pregnant mother got lost, was thought dead, and was left behind on the reservation.

The narrator, other than by capitalization, does not make this duality obvious. The character is not called “John” only when he is quoting Shakespeare and called “Savage” only when he whips himself (a ritual that he had wanted to participate in on the reservation).

But in real-life, undiagnosed, multiple personality, the alternate personalities usually don’t announce themselves, but act either incognito or by pulling strings from behind-the-scenes. Indeed, both personalities may be simultaneously conscious behind-the-scenes while they are fronted by a host personality (search “host personality”).

In short, there are two manifestations of multiple personality in this novel: 1. the cloning metaphor, and 2. the character with two names, John/Savage.

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley (post 3): Is this novel meant to be a joke? And is its cloning an obvious metaphor for multiple personality?

Is Brave New World an obvious joke, beginning with the fact that children are produced in a “hatchery”? And what could be more absurdly funny than a society without mothers, in which the word “mother” is a horrible profanity?

But since Huxley’s mother died of cancer when he was a child, this novel may be his revenge against mothers and motherhood, because his mother abandoned him.

And what this novel describes as its “caste” system, with the lowest class colored black, is not a funny new world, but the old classism and racism.

Moreover, since cloning is an obvious metaphor for multiple personality, is any further analysis required? I will read on, anyway.

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley (post 2): Makes no sense as either totalitarian or anti-war, but raises issues central to multiple personality

Halfway through the novel, I am impressed by the very peculiar use of ectogenesis (in vitro fertilization and artificial wombs), cloning, and indoctrination. They are not used the way totalitarian regimes would have used them. And if this society was formed in reaction to a catastrophic war, why would they want to create a passive, sitting-duck population?

The major totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century would have used these technologies to produce exceptional people (scientists, athletes, etc.), who would be seen as demonstrating the glory, and increasing the power, of the leader. They were happy to have intimidated and patriotic parents raise their children to be loyal to the regime. But the society of Brave New World is designed to eliminate exceptional achievers and parents. Why?

Totalitarian regimes like its people to have anxiety. It is a principal weapon of control. Brave New World does everything it can to eliminate anxiety, including the easy availability of its happiness drug, Soma.

But the society of Brave New World seems to have been designed not simply to create happiness and nonviolence, but to eliminate trauma and individuality. Why might parents be considered horrible? They might, through abuse or failure to protect, cause childhood trauma (a cause of multiple personality). What is a society with no individuals? It is one huge person with multiple personality.

The scene where they put young children on an electric grid to shock and terrorize them, plus the absence of parental love, describes a society that would increase the prevalence of multiple personality disorder.

In short, the design of the society in this novel seems to make no sense, except that it seems to raise issues—trauma and identity—central to multiple personality.

Perhaps the second half of the novel will make everything clear.

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley: Inspired by the trendy scientific ideas of “ectogenesis” and “cloning”

I am now starting to reread Brave New World to see if it has anything relevant to multiple personality. But before I was interested in multiple personality, I had read this novel in the course of researching ectogenesis, which is making babies in artificial wombs (1), an idea popularized by the biologist, J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) (2).

“Haldane was parodied as ‘the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife’ by his friend Aldous Huxley in the novel Antic Hay (1923). His essay Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924), about ectogenesis and in vitro fertilization was an influence on Huxley's Brave New World (1932)...Haldane was the first to have thought of the genetic basis for the cloning of humans, and eventually super-talented individuals. For this he coined the term ‘clone’ ” (2).

Since they were friends, Huxley evidently knew about Haldane’s ideas before publication of the latter’s essay mentioned above. In Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), a character says, “…the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift…the means of dissociating love from propagation…In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear…”

And since Huxley had taught French and was familiar with French literature, it is possible that he first got the idea of ectogenesis from “D’Alembert’s Dream” (1769?) by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), in which there is this passage: “You would have a warm room lined with little vials, and on each of these vials there would be a label: warriors, magistrates, philosophers, poets — this vial for courtiers, that one for whores, that one for kings.”

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

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane

“Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe (post 2): An un-novelistic novel with almost nothing indicative of multiple personality

The novel’s description of its particular ethnic group in Nigerian history is interesting, but not flattering. For example, it is mentioned in passing that they kept “slaves” (1, p. 40).

And for a highly praised novel, it has surprisingly little character development or plot:

Character development: Okonkwo, the protagonist, is happy when he can be manly, but unhappy when he is prevented from acting manly.

Plot: Okonkwo accidentally kills someone from his community, and is banished for seven years. After his return, he impulsively kills a colonial messenger, after which he commits suicide.

One thing in this novel that I thought might be relevant here is that Okonkwo’s (and the author’s) people killed all infant twins. And twins in literature are often a metaphor for multiple personality. But nothing psychological is made of this religiously dictated practice. And whereas the author’s Nigerian people killed twin babies, another Nigerian people honored twins (2). So the infanticide of twins, like the keeping of slaves, is just a cultural practice.

The only thing in this novel that is probably relevant to multiple personality is that the community’s oracle seemed to become like another person when she became oracular. So she may have had multiple personality, but I don’t see that as a reflection on the author (unless he had a tendency to become oracular).

In short, I found this novel to be not very novelistic in its meager character development and plot. And aside from the oracle, I found nothing indicative of multiple personality.

1. Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart [1958]. New York, Everyman/Knopf, 1992.

2. James Adewumi. https://artifactsjournal.missouri.edu/2014/03/twins-in-west-african-culture-and-society-of-the-iron-age/

Chi and Chinua Achebe: Author of “Things Fall Apart” says belief in duality is part of his Igbo Nigerian culture

“…the word chi in Igbo…is often translated as god, guardian angel, personal spirit, soul, spirit double, etc…In a general way we may visualize a person’s chi as his other identity in spiritland—his spirit being complementing his terrestrial human being; for nothing can stand alone, there must always be another thing standing beside it…

“When we talk about chi, we’re talking about the individual spirit, and so you find the word in all kinds of combinations. Chinwe, which is my wife’s name, means ‘Chi owns me’; mine is Chinua, which is a shortened form of an expression that means ‘May a chi fight for me’…

“One of the most typical Igbo tales is about a proud wrestler who has thrown every challenger in the world, and so he decides to go and wrestle in the land of the spirits…the spirits come out to wrestle with him—one after the other—and he beats them all…The spirits have a consultation and tell him, ‘Well, there is somebody, but we think you shouldn’t fight him.’ He responds, ‘No, if there is anybody at all here now, I must wrestle with him.’ And this person is his chi—his personal spirit—and when he comes out he’s very unimpressive…‘Who is this?’ the wrestler asks. They tell him that this is the man who will challenge him, and he laughs. But his chi moves toward him and with one finger picks him up and smashes him on the ground. And that’s the end of our great wrestler” (1, p. 84).

“The duality. Things come in twos. ‘Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it’—this is another very powerful Igbo statement. It’s absolutely true, and it’s when someone refuses to see the ‘other’ that you have problems” (1, p. 87).

In Things Fall Apart, “Okonkwo is cut off from reality, and becomes a victim of illusion, of a false perception of himself. Hence his self-governing chi cannot hold him together, he falls apart…” (1, p. 89).

1. Bernth Lindfors (Editor). Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren (post 5): Title is line from “Humpty Dumpty,” which may be a metaphor for multiple personality

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again” (1).

Robert Penn Warren may have noticed that he was a man of parts, not only that he had various talents, but that he had various senses of identity. Usually this was not a problem; indeed, it was integral to his creative process.

However, occasionally, it was confusing or embarrassing, and at such times he wished he could just “get it together,” permanently.

But his getting it together never was permanent, and after each confusing or embarrassing episode he may have thought, “Well, another of my Humpty Dumpty moments.”

1. Wikipedia. “Humpty Dumpty.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty

“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren (post 4): The philosophies of Jack Burden and Willie Stark may have multiple personality as their premise

Jack Burden’s personality is puzzlingly inconsistent. At times he is Stark’s ruthless agent, such as when he investigates and precipitates the suicide of a man he knew since childhood, and who turns out to have been his own biological father. At other times he is very empathic and sensitive to people’s feelings.

In the following passage, Burden seems to be spouting sophistry about reality, but he concludes by revealing what he is really talking about, his difficulty knowing his own true identity:

“…as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principle” (1, p. 578).

In other words, his own sense of identity at any given time cannot be taken as his real identity, because his previous sense of identity and his future sense of identity may be different. For example, sometimes he is ruthless, but that is not necessarily his real identity, because other times he is very empathic and sensitive. His personality varies to a remarkable extent.

Willie Stark famously says that he never has to use fake evidence to blackmail somebody, because everyone has done something bad in their past, and you just have to dig it up. But another way of stating that basic idea is that everyone has a secret, alternate personality. (Everyone doesn’t, but fiction writers, judging by themselves, might think so.)

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

“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren (post 3): Narrator says there are two types of people, a minority with one self and a majority with many

Jack Burden, the first-person narrator—while talking with Anne Stanton, a woman he has known for more than twenty years—has the following thought:

“…a person like her—a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us…” (1, pp. 310-311).

The narrator is expressing the fiction writer’s perspective. Since most fiction writers have multiple personality trait, they think it is ordinary psychology and that most people are probably that way.

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

“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren (post 2): Stark hears voices, has “parts” or “selves,” and switches from goody-goody to red-neck hick to Boss

I’m a quarter of the way into this novel, and there have been a few passages that refer to Willie Stark’s hearing voices, or having different parts or selves:

“She kept watching his face, which seemed to be pulling back from her and me and the room, as though he weren’t really hearing her voice but were listening to another voice…” (1, p. 92).

“But perhaps the essential part of him was knowing it all the time, only word hadn’t quite got around to the other and accidental parts of him” (1, p. 94).

“Tiny Duffy became, in a crazy kind of way, the other self of Willie Stark, and all the contempt and insult which Willie Stark was to heap on Tiny Duffy was nothing but what one self of Willie Stark did to the other self because of a blind, inward necessity” (1, p. 147).

However, if you step back from those trees to look at the forest, Willie Stark has had three alternate personalities:

First, there was goody-goody Willie Stark. He was studying very earnestly to better himself and become a lawyer, and he championed good public causes, such as the building of a school, not by a construction company connected to public officials, but by the lowest bidder, even if it did employ black workers (this was the pre-civil rights South).

Second, there was the populist, red-neck hick, demagogue. After his goody-goody self had accepted a draft to run for governor as a third-party candidate, he discovered it was a set-up by one candidate to get elected by having Stark split the vote for the other candidate. After being told the truth, Stark got drunker than he had ever been, and the next day started addressing the crowds as one red-neck hick to other red-neck hicks.

Third, there was Stark as governor. The first-person narrator, Jack Burden, who had previously been a newspaper columnist covering Stark, is now one of Stark’s personal assistants. Burden now addresses Stark as “Boss,” and Stark addresses Burden as “Boy.” This hierarchical etiquette may have been common for a governor and an assistant of the South in those days, but since Burden had known Stark since he was a goody-goody nobody, it seems odd to me.

I know that “power corrupts,” but this is beginning to look like unacknowledged multiple personality.

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