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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Monday, May 27, 2019

“As I lay Dying” by William Faulkner (post 11): Passages in italics are interruptions in stream of consciousness by alternate personalities

I have just begun this novel and am only up to the chapter narrated by Darl on pages 28-31. This chapter is the first one to have certain passages in italics.

As previously discussed in posts on other authors, italic passages in novels are often used to indicate that the character is hearing a voice in his head of an alternate personality.

But that simple scenario cannot explain everything that is going on here. For example, it could not explain this: “…I am I and you are you and I know it and you don’t know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl” (1, p. 30).

I have looked online to see if Faulkner or anyone else has explained his use of italics. There is no consensus. Explanations range from thoughts coming from a different place or time to mental disturbance. There above-quoted passage looks like crosstalk among unidentified alternate personalities, but most of the italic passages in this chapter are not like that.

In my online search of Faulkner’s use of italics, I found that it is present in a number of his novels, and that when an editor wanted to do away with it, Faulkner was adamant that it was necessary and meaningful, but his explanation was unclear.

My hypothesis is that the first-person narration is being interrupted by thoughts of unidentified alternate personalities, and that Faulkner did not always understand the interruption, but he felt that it was a genuine part of the narrative being provided to him, and must be included.

1. William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying [1930]. New York, WW Norton, 2010.
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