“Milkman” by Anna Burns (post 3): 2018 Booker Prize novel begins with nameless characters and other indications of multiple personality

In the previous two posts based on published interviews, Anna Burns said that her stories and characters, somehow, just came to her. She said that she, the personality being interviewed, was not the most authoritative part of her mind in regard to what her novels meant.

I have just started Milkman, which appears to be about the gender and social politics of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. The nameless first-person narrator is an 18-year-old woman, who reads nineteenth-century novels like Ivanhoe, “because I did not like the twentieth century” (1, p. 5).

“Milkman” is the 41-year-old man who has been harassing her. “Maybe-boyfriend” is the young man she has been dating.

Namelessness, leading to the practical necessity of inventing nicknames (“milkman”) or naming-by-function (“maybe-boyfriend”), suggests that the novel was written by a person with multiple personality. Why do I say that?

As a psychiatrist, when I would see a person with multiple personality, I would often find that an alternate personality didn’t have a name. So, as a practical matter, I had to refer to that alternate personality by their major function or emotion; e.g., “poet” if they wrote poems or “angry one” if that was their characteristic emotion. And that is the kind of naming process used in this novel.

Another indication of multiple personality is the protagonist’s referring to herself as having “parts” that have minds of their own: “Another part of me though, was thinking, is he making this up” (1, p. 9).

And her reaction to her maybe-boyfriend’s sexual touching of her neck suggests multiple personality:

“Any time the fingers were there — between my neck and skull — I’d forget everything — not just things that happened moments before the fingers, but everything — who I was, what I was doing, all my memories, everything about anything, except being there, in that moment, with him” (1, p. 19).

A person whose neck was an erogenous zone, but who didn’t have multiple personality, might become very aroused, be very much in the moment, might even have an orgasm, but would not actually forget who she was and all her memories. What is being described is the person’s host personality losing control, just prior to switching to an alternate personality.

1. Anna Burns. Milkman. Minneapolis Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2018.