Alice Munro, Nobel Prize short-story writer, in Paris Review interview, said she is incapable of writing novels: Why can’t this great writer write novels?

“…I tried to make it a regular novel…I saw it wasn’t working. It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it…Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story form. Then I could handle it. That’s when I learned that I was never going to write a real novel because I could not think that way…

“…I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives. That was one of the problems—why I couldn’t write novels, I never saw things hanging together any too well” (1).

I just read the title story of Munro’s Runaway (2). The story is so packed with issues that it reads like a summary of, or a proposal for, a whole novel. Most fiction writers, who write both novels and short stories, could have made it into a novel. Why is a great writer like Munro incapable of doing so?

In her Paris Review interview, Munro makes two passing remarks about her writing process that may be relevant here:

“I’m the opposite of a writer with a quick gift, you know, someone who gets it piped in.”

“I don’t think I have this overwhelming thing that comes in and dictates to me.”

She is acknowledging that those kinds of things do happen with other writers, but not with her. What is it that they experience, but that she doesn’t?

Ninety percent of fiction writers experience their characters as having independent agency, minds of their own (search “Marjorie Taylor” for reference to her study). Most fiction writers experience things coming to them that they, themselves, seemingly, hadn’t thought of.

Such a creative process involves multiple personality, since psychological entities, including characters, narrators, and muses, named and unnamed, who have minds of their own, are alternate personalities.

It is possible that Alice Munro is among the ten percent of fiction writers who do not have multiple personality trait. They, too, can win the Nobel Prize. (I have discussed literally dozens of Nobel Prize in Literature winners who have had multiple personality trait.)

[But search "Alice Munro" and see two subsequent posts that retract this hypothesis.]

1. Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson (interviewers). “Alice Munro: The Art of Fiction” [1994]. In The Paris Review Interviews, II. New York, Picador, 2007.

2. Alice Munro. Runaway (Stories). New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Profound or Childlike: Writing may seem innovative and profound when it employs the cognition and imagination of childhood

When a book is odd or confusing, because it problematizes time, identity, and reality, but readers have good reason to think that the writer knew how to write well and was not crazy, many readers think that the work is innovative or profound.

But what if such writing were neither mad nor bad nor innovative nor profound, but a reversion to the cognition and imagination of childhood? That is what I wondered when I read what I quoted in yesterday’s post:

“…the Brontë juvenilia can be seen as a precursor of the postmodern tendency to problematize time and the identity of self…The question of ‘Who am I?’ is finally one of existence, but it is also one of consciousness. What am I doing when I record the ‘airy phantoms’ of my imagination? What am I doing when I divide the self? Which part of me is real? The physical self or the imaginative self (or selves)? How can I reconcile the competing demands of each? Such questions reach back to Charlotte Brontë’s earliest juvenilia, large ontological questions that are not usually associated with children. Certainly the modernist fascination with the fragmentation of the experiencing subject (the narrative ‘I’) is anticipated by the young Brontës in their juvenilia. Perhaps children know these things instinctively and it is adults who forget them in their search for a coherent identity.”

How could adult writers write with the cognition and imagination of childhood? If they had multiple personality trait, they might mingle the perspectives of more than one personality, including child-aged alternate personalities.

“The fractured self in Charlotte Brontë’s early manuscripts” by Professor Christine Alexander: Tracing multiple personality trait to childhood

Multiple personality begins in childhood. It perpetuates aspects of childhood cognition and imagination.

One approach to recognizing multiple personality in the childhood of fiction writers is to read their childhood writing, their juvenilia, when available. I will quote from a study by Professor of English, Christine Alexander.

“In the case of Charlotte Brontë…the narrative ‘I’ is splintered into multiple male voices…” (1, p. 154).

“…Using such tactics, Lord Charles [a character] plays with his Glass Town audience, he plays with us, the readers, and he plays with his own insubstantial identity, both as a narrator and as a player in the saga. There is no closure, no logical plot, no single narrative authority: the Brontë juvenilia can be seen as a precursor of the postmodern tendency to problematize time and the identity of self. There is…no unified writing self. Instead there is a fragmented narrative ‘I’ that manifests itself in a series of layers ranging from an assumed autobiographical ‘I’ through the mask of Chief Genii, to various narrative voices…” (1, p. 160).

“…From such examples, I would like to suggest that Charlotte Brontë had a very early conception of herself as necessarily a Fiction; a construct of fragmented voices that would vie for supremacy of her public persona in the real world throughout her life” (1, p. 161).

“The question of ‘Who am I?’ is finally one of existence, but it is also one of consciousness. What am I doing when I record the ‘airy phantoms’ of my imagination? What am I doing when I divide the self? Which part of me is real? The physical self or the imaginative self (or selves)? How can I reconcile the competing demands of each? Such questions reach back to Charlotte Brontë’s earliest juvenilia, large ontological questions that are not usually associated with children. Certainly the modernist fascination with the fragmentation of the experiencing subject (the narrative ‘I’) is anticipated by the young Brontës in their juvenilia. Perhaps children know these things instinctively and it is adults who forget them in their search for a coherent identity” (1, p. 169).

The only thing I would add to what the professor says is that Charlotte Brontë evidently had multiple personality trait since childhood.

Search “Bronte” and “Jane Eyre” for past posts.

1. Christine Alexander. “Autobiography and juvenilia: the fractured self in Charlotte Brontë’s early manuscripts.” Pages 154-172 in The Child Writer From Austen to Woolf. Edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (digitally printed version 2009).

John Fowles’ Multiple Personality Poems (post 2): Note namelessness of alternate personality who writes poems after midnight in “The Two Selves” 

Alter Ego

The boy from Uplyme with his smile

Who stands on cliff-tops staring down:

One stares as well. The sea is barren,

And the beach. But still he stares.

Branches of sloe and bullace

Cloud his dar, his idiot eyes.

Always he wears the vacant smile

Of happy mongoloids and kings.

One day he turned and spoke to me.

I’m John, he said. I like it here.

The Two Selves

Making whole is making two halves,

The treadmill and the real;

One for the world to turn to pulp

Beneath its vicious heel.

The other drinks water, has no name,

Sits writing poetry after midnight,

Will be when the world’s [sic] is gone;

And was before the world’s [sic] first came.

Comment: These two poems confirm that the author of The Collector was interested in multiple personality. They also illustrate the association between namelessness and multiple personality; in particular, with those alternate personalities who don’t need names, because they rarely have conversations.

John Fowles. Poems. New York, The Ecco Press, 1973.

“Giving Up the Ghost (A Memoir)” by Hilary Mantel: She is not possessed by the devil, but may have had a male alternate personality

One clue that people may have undiagnosed multiple personality is that they are puzzling even to people who know them well. Another clue, as seen in this memoir, is that they are puzzling even to themselves.

Mantel begins her memoir with puzzlement about whether she sees ghosts (or only has auras related to migraine headaches). “I see a flickering on the staircase…I ‘know’ it is my stepfather’s ghost. I am not perturbed. I am used to ‘seeing’ things that aren’t there…It was in this house that I last saw my stepfather, Jack [when alive], in the early months of 1995…Many times since then I have acknowledged him on the stairs” (1, p. 1).

Comment: As I have previously joked, the English don’t believe in alternate personalities. They believe in ghosts.

Midway through the memoir, Mantel describes an experience that is often quoted in reviews. Since she introduces it as momentous, she cautions readers that it is not what they expect, “some revelation of sexual abuse.” Rather, she feels she has literally had an encounter with the devil:

“I am seven, seven going on eight…I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift in the light…There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift makes my stomach heave. I can sense…the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two…The air stirs around it invisibly…I cannot move…I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body…My first thought is that I have seen the devil…In the days afterward…Wherever I was, home or school, night or day and in bed or abroad, what I’d seen accompanied me…It is part of me…it is a body inside my body…” (1, pp. 93-97).

Later in the memoir, Mantel minimizes this experience, mentioning it only in passing, as “my mauvais quart d’heure” (my bad quarter of an hour) (1, p. 145).

Comment: The above quoted experience lasted much more than a quarter of an hour: “In the days afterward…” it had become a “part of me…it is a body inside my body…” That is, she felt possessed, which is an old way of thinking about multiple personality.

Moreover, the views of that experience given on pages 93-97 vs. page 145 are so inconsistent with each other that they seem to have been written by different narrator personalities.

And after having seen such narrative inconsistencies in works by various writers, I coined the phrase, “split inconsistent narrative” (you can search it).

[Added Sept. 27: Here is another issue, insufficiently raised in most reviews:]
Mantel says, “I am waiting to change into a boy. When I am four this will occur” (1, p. 41)

At age four, she says, “The onset of boyhood has been postponed, so far. But patience is a virtue with me” (1, p. 51).

“As a knight I am used to arranging siege warfare, the investment of major fortresses…” (1, p. 51).

“It is 1957. Davy Crockett is all the go…We sing he killed a bear when he was only three. Somehow I doubt it. Even I didn’t do that…When exactly do I become a boy?” (1, p. 53).

“Years pass…I realize…that I am never going to be a boy now. I don’t know exactly why. I sense that things have slid too far, from some ideal starting point” (1, p. 55).

“I went to school, taking my knights…I was a small pale girl…but I had a head stuffed full of chivalric epigrams, and the self-confidence that comes from a thorough knowledge of horsemanship and swordplay” (1, pp. 56-57).

“I felt my man’s spirit aroused, my ardor clenching inside my chest like a fist within a mailed glove. Saddle my charger: I’ll canter up their street and decapitate him. My sword arm twitched…I was six…” (1, p. 83).

“I am seven, I have reached the age of reason…I had begun practicing as a parish priest at five years old…Girl could change to boy: though this had not happened to me, and I knew now it never would” (1, p. 86).

Comment: The above goes further than a typical tom boy or ordinary imaginative play, but not as far as transsexualism. Mantel does not describe getting into trouble for being too masculine, so she appears to have switched between male and female personalities, as appropriate.

Her male personality wondered why he could not look male, and thought it was just a matter of time. At age seven, Mantel gave up that hope, personally, but still felt that girls and boys could change into each other, since that had been her subjective experience.

Mantel does not say that she gave up hoping to become a boy because she no longer felt like a boy at times. So she evidently continued to have a male personality (in addition to her female personality), which probably has helped her to write male characters.

1. Hilary Mantel. Giving Up the Ghost (A Memoir) [2003]. New York, Picador/John Macrae/Henry Holt, 2004.

“The Invisible Circus” by Jennifer Egan (post 4): Two characters in author’s first novel have unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality

Phoebe O’Connor, eighteen, is not mentally ill, but she hasn’t been able to get over her older sister Faith’s suicide. Can Faith, who had been traveling in Europe, really have jumped off a cliff? Phoebe goes to Europe to find out.

Luckily, she finds Faith’s old boyfriend, Sebastian (nicknamed Wolf), who knows the truth. Wolf is not mentally ill either. In fact, he is about ten years older than Phoebe and somewhat more mature.

I emphasize that neither Phoebe nor Wolf is mentally ill, because I’m about to quote passages in which Wolf has visual and auditory hallucinations, while Phoebe has memory gaps, mirror hallucinations, and alterations in her personality.

These symptoms—which, in nonpsychotic persons, are suggestive of multiple personality—are mentioned in the novel only in passing. The author evidently saw these symptoms as interesting ordinary psychology. 

Sebastian (“Wolf”)

“Faith [Phoebe’s deceased sister] seemed to come to him, so clear, nothing to do with that body bent on the rocks [at the bottom of the cliff]. She was smiling, saying, Wolf, go on, are you nuts? Get on the train! Don’t you see? she said. We’re free, both of us” (1, p. 312).

“But meeting Phoebe that morning weeks ago on the stairs, Wolf had heard a voice that said, You knew it was coming; well, here it is” (1, p. 314).

Phoebe

“Only when she found herself outside in the hallway, her mother’s white door shut behind her, was she conscious of having left the room” (1, p. 98).

“It was only then that Phoebe realized she’d been crying, her face wet” (1, p. 145).

“As a child she’d played a game of staring in her bedroom mirror and tempting herself not to recognize the girl who looked back, a delicious fear seeping through her stomach as her own image became another girl’s, a stranger whose presence made her shy” (1, p. 153).

“The nervous, solitary girl of these past weeks was someone she wondered at, even pitied. But not herself” (1, p. 182).

“Phoebe listened intently, overcome by a familiar sense that she herself was slipping from the scene as if literally fading, becoming physically less solid” (1, p. 220).

“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice was disembodied, as if she’d ceased to be anyone at all” (1, p. 224).

[In a sexual encounter] “She felt like a spectator, observing her physical self in baffled amazement as if it were a violent, stricken creature she were nursing through a fit…That wasn’t me, she would think” (1, p. 264).

“…she was two people, one despairing, the other greedy…” (1, p. 275).

Comment

The symptoms of multiple personality contribute to the novel’s literary, psychological depth.

Search “Jennifer Egan,” “memory gaps,” “mirrors,” “voices,” and “hallucinations” for previous discussions.

1. Jennifer Egan. The Invisible Circus. New York, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995.

Margaret Atwood, Rachel Cusk, Leslie Jamison: Links to their latest in New York Times. Search “Lady Oracle” and authors’ names here for my past discussions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/books/review/testaments-margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale.html 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/books/review-coventry-rachel-cusk.html 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/books/review/coventry-essays-rachel-cusk.html 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/books/review/leslie-jamison-by-the-book-interview.html

My past posts on these three great writers touch on past works, aspects of author psychology, and the creative process.

“Absolute Power” by David Baldacci: William Goldman’s screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s movie of novel supports interpretation of split personality

The novel includes super-burglar Luther Whitney; Kate Whitney, Luther’s daughter; and Jack Graham, the novel’s hero. Kate is Jack’s former girlfriend. She has long been estranged from her father. But Jack has always admired Luther, because, in his opinion, Luther, although a career criminal, has excellent character.

How can Luther be both a career criminal and a person of excellent character? It is never explained. He just is. It is the hero’s opinion of him and how he is portrayed in the novel.

Multiple personality is one possible explanation for Luther’s dichotomous, criminal/admirable, character. But the novel does not give him any other symptoms of multiple personality (e.g., voices or memory gaps). So to support that interpretation, I will cite the movie version of the novel.

In the movie, the novel’s hero, Jack Graham, is simply omitted! In effect, the hero of  David Baldacci’s novel has been incorporated into (like an alternate personality) the Luther Whitney character of William Goldman’s screenplay. The movie doesn’t explicitly raise the issue of multiple personality, but it is a feature of other works by William Goldman.

Search “William Goldman.”

Various other characters in the novel have self-contradictory personalities, too. But since this plot-driven thriller is more interested in action than psychology, its multiple personality is subtler than in literary novels.

1. David Baldacci. Absolute Power. New York, Warner Books, 1996.

2. Wikipedia. “Absolute Power (film).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Power_(film)

Sleepwalking Scene in “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare: Was Lady Macbeth preoccupied but awake, having dialogues of alternate personalities?

The only way to have known for sure whether Lady Macbeth was actually asleep would have been to do an EEG (electroencephalogram), but that was not available.

She appears to have been having complex dialogues, at first addressing her husband and later addressing herself (see below). And from what I read online, although complex speech, including dialogue, does occasionally happen in cases of sleep talking alone, I don’t know if complex speech happens while sleepwalking, especially since sleepwalking and sleep talking may have different patterns on EEG.

In the following transcript of the sleepwalking scene from Act 5, Scene 1, I have labeled it “Lady Macbeth #1” when she talks as herself, and “Lady Macbeth #2” when she talks to herself (as if she were someone else).

       Doctor

32   Hark! she speaks. I will set down what comes

33   from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more

34   strongly.

       LADY MACBETH #1

35   Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,

36   then, 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my

37   lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we

38   fear who knows it, when none can call our power

39   to account?—Yet who would have thought the old

40   man to have had so much blood in him?

       Doctor

41   Do you mark that?

       LADY MACBETH #1

42   The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?—

43   What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o'

44   that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with

45   this starting.

       Doctor

46   Go to, go to; you have known what you should

47   not.

       Gentlewoman

48   She has spoke what she should not, I am sure

49   of that; heaven knows what she has known.

       LADY MACBETH #1

50   Here's the smell of the blood still. All the

51   perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this

52   little hand. O, O, O!

       Doctor

53   What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely

54   charg'd.

       Gentlewoman

55   I would not have such a heart in my bosom

56   for the dignity of the whole body.

       Doctor

57   Well, well, well.

       Gentlewoman

58   Pray God it be, sir.

       Doctor

59   This disease is beyond my practise; yet I

60   have known those which have walked in

61   their sleep who have died holily in their beds.

       LADY MACBETH #2

62   Wash your hands, put on your nightgown;

63   look not so pale.—I tell you yet again, Banquo's

64   buried; he cannot come out on's grave.

       Doctor

65   Even so?

       LADY MACBETH #2

66   To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate:

67   come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's

68   done cannot be undone.—To bed, to bed, to bed!

Two other possible manifestations of multiple personality in Macbeth are, first, in Act 2, Scene 2 when Macbeth hears a voice cry “Sleep no more. Macbeth does murder sleep” and, second, in Act 3, Scene 4, when Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo. When nonpsychotic people hear voices and/or see ghosts, I suspect multiple personality.

Please search “Hamlet” for six past posts. Also "sleepwalking."

Added Sept. 19: On rereading the above, I cannot be sure whether Lady Macbeth #2 was addressing herself or her husband. If the latter, then there may be no second Lady Macbeth personality. She may have been having a fantasized conversation with her husband (or a second personality representing her husband). Lines 62-64 and 66-68 certainly do appear to be two personalities interacting. And although the Doctor refers to her as walking in her sleep, he has not tried to engage her in conversation, so how can he distinguish between sleepwalking and her being awake, but preoccupied in a fantasy, multiple personality, conversation?

“The Collector” by John Fowles: Author’s Existentialist Philosophy and Sympathy for People with Multiple Personality

1963 Author Interview

“I think of The Collector as a parable…to illustrate the opposition of the Few and the Many…I take these terms from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Haracleitus, who’s been a major influence on my life. For him the Few were the good, the intelligent, the independent; the Many were the stupid, the ignorant, and the easily molded…

“I also wanted to attack…the contemporary idea that there is something noble about the inarticulate hero…I don’t admire beats, bums, junkies, psychopaths, and inarticulates. I feel sorry for them…The boy in The Collector stands for the Many; the girl for the Few…

“But to get back to the girl-in-the-cellar situation. How did I come on it? Well, some time during the 1950’s, I went to see the first performance in London of Bartok’s opera, Bluebeard’s Castle…It so happened that about a year later there was an extraordinary case (again in London) of a boy who captured a girl and imprisoned her in an air-raid shelter at the end of his garden…And eventually, it led me to the book”…

“I think the existentialist trend [in literature] will increase…We’ll have more of the key existentialist notion of authenticity in life…To live authentically is not giving in to the anxieties, not running away from the nauseas [search Sartre], but solving them in some way…The girl in The Collector is an existentialist heroine although she doesn’t know it. She’s groping for her own authenticity…What I tried to say in the book was this: we must create a society in which the Many will allow the Few to live authentically, and to teach and help the Many to begin to do so as well. In societies dominated by the Many, the Few are in grave danger of being suffocated” (1, pp. 1-8).

The Collector (1963)

The novel does not have any clear-cut multiple personality, but the protagonist, Frederick Clegg (who kidnaps Miranda Grey and keeps her locked in the cellar), is repeatedly said to be out of touch with another side of himself, which could be interpreted as either existentialist inauthenticity or psychological split personality.

“I went into that coffee-bar, suddenly, I don’t know why, like I was drawn in by something else, against my will almost” (2, p. 13).

“Don’t look like that,” she said. “What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you” (2, p. 72).

“The next thing was I was naked and she was against me and holding me but I was all tense, it was like a different me…” (1, p. 105).

“Sometimes I think he’s being very clever. He’s trying to enlist my sympathy by pretending he’s in the grip of some third thing” (1, p. 129).

“For a second there was that other side of him I sense, the violence, hatred, absolute determination not to let me go” (2, p. 149).

“He said, I can’t say. As if someone else had strictly forbidden him to speak. (I often feel that with him — a horrid little cringing good nature dominated by a mean bad one.)” (2, p. 194).

“There are moments when he is possessed, quite out of his own control” (1, p. 217).

While the above quotes are all about him, the following type of mirror experience, typical of multiple personality, is hers:

“Staring at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I don’t seem real to myself, it suddenly seems that it isn’t my reflection only a foot or two away…I watch my face and I watch it move as if it is someone else’s” (2, p. 242).

1995 Interview

Dianne L. Vipond: The doppelgänger motif is ubiquitous in your fiction. Twins, sisters, parallel characters, and often the dynamics of male-female relationships all seem to point to “the double.” Your poem “The Two Selves” also deals with the idea of a dual persona. Could you comment on your use of the double?

John Fowles: I honestly don’t know, but I suppose it’s a sort of longing for an impossible freedom. I have some sympathy for those suffering from that psychiatric illness, I think they call it multiple personality disorder. I often wish I were someone else…” (1, p. 209).

1. Dianne L. Vipond (Editor). Conversations with John Fowles. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

2. John Fowles. The Collector [1963]. New York, Back Bay/Little Brown/Hachette, 2010.

Jane Eyre (post 11): Did Jane have one episode of telepathy, or, as Saul Bellow, hear voices routinely? Bellow and Brontë probably had multiple personality

Professor John Sutherland notes that when Jane Eyre was far away from Rochester, she heard his voice say “Jane! Jane! Jane!” They would seem to have been communicating by telepathy. Sutherland speculates that telepathy might be possible if both people are in a mesmeric (trance, hypnotic) state simultaneously: “It is, as Jane protests, no ‘miracle’, but an accident produced by their fortuitously mesmerizing themselves at the same critical moment” (1, p. 65).

1. John Sutherland. The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

The two paragraphs below from Jane Eyre are easy to gloss over as simply two opposing thoughts, the first optimistic, the second pessimistic. And the first paragraph does end by suggesting that the next paragraph is a “thought” that “struck” out the previous thought. But this may be only a recognition that what was coming next was something that was also from inside her head.

Note that the two paragraphs are clearly from different points of view. In the first paragraph she says “My” and “I”; whereas, the second says “your” and “you,” and is “urged” by “the monitor,” which would seem to have a mind of its own (the essence of an alternate personality).

I follow the quote from Jane Eyre with a quote from an interview with the Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow, who says that he has his own monitor voice, which he calls the “commentator within.” Thus, hearing such voices—which, to the extent that they have minds of their own, are alternate personalties—are to be expected of novelists and their characters.

October 26, 2015

Jane Eyre (post 8): Jane gets suggestions from “the monitor”—Saul Bellow from the “commentator within”—only experienced by people with multiple personality

Near the end of Jane Eyre, Jane distinguishes between her own ideas and the suggestions she gets from “the monitor”:

     “ ‘My journey is closed,’ I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a box I had into the ostler’s charge, to be kept till I called for it; paid my fair; satisfied the coachman, and was going: the brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters, ‘The Rochester Arms.’ My heart leapt up: I was already on my master’s very lands. It fell again: the thought struck it:—

     ‘Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you know: and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which you hasten, who besides him is there? His lunatic wife: and you have nothing to do with him: you dare not speak to him or seek his presence. You have lost your labour—you had better go no further,’ urged the monitor. ‘Ask information of the people at the inn; they can give you all you seek: they can solve your doubts at once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home.’

     The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to act on it…” (1, p. 360).

In Saul Bellow’s 1966 Paris Review interview, he says:

“I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me. I have to prepare the ground for him. From this source come words, phrases, syllables; sometimes only sounds, which I try to interpret, sometimes whole paragraphs, fully punctuated. When E. M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter…

“When I say the commentator is primitive, I don't mean that he's crude; God knows he's often fastidious. But he won't talk until the situation's right. And if you prepare the ground for him with too many difficulties underfoot, he won't say anything. I must be terribly given to fraud and deceit because I sometimes have great difficulty preparing a suitable ground. This is why I've had so much trouble with my last two novels. I appealed directly to my prompter. The prompter, however, has to find the occasion perfect—that is to say, truthful, and necessary. If there is any superfluity or inner falsehood in the preparations, he is aware of it…”

No, all people don’t have this. These personified, rational voices are the voices of alternate personalities. Only people with multiple personality may hear the voice of, and get suggestions from, a “monitor” or a “commentator within.”

1. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001.

October 14, 2015

Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë: Brontë describes her creative process; Gaskell describes Brontë’s switch to talkative alternate personality

Alternate Personalities Dictate

“…imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?” (1, p. 255).

“When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them, which becomes their master—which will have its own way—putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-moulding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully-elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. Is it not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it?” (1, pp. 260-261).

Brontë Switches Personalities

At school in Brussels:

“…Emily hardly ever uttered more than a monosyllable. Charlotte was sometimes excited sufficiently to speak eloquently and well—on certain subjects; but before her tongue was thus loosened, she had a habit of gradually wheeling round on her chair, so as almost to conceal her face from the person to whom she was speaking” (1, p. 162).

When Switching Personalities:

“…Women will frequently turn their faces away, momentarily shield their faces with their hands, or let their hair fall over their faces during the moment of switching” (2, p. 121).

1. Elizabeth Gaskell. The Life of Charlotte Bronte [1857], Edited by Elisabeth Jay. Penguin Books, 1997.

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

John Sutherland’s “The Literary Detective” inadvertently makes apt connection between “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “A Tale of Two Cities”

John Sutherland, Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, “taught The Yellow Wall-Paper for ten years” (1, p. 440). He cites “a puzzling feature” (1, p. 441) of the story: “Where there was previously a relationship of two (woman and reader), there are now three persons involved (woman, reader, and an unidentified narrator who has stepped in to take charge)” (1, p. 442).

Also, in Sutherland’s discussion of “the enigma at the heart of The Yellow Wall-Paper…is the woman mentally ill or has she been driven mad by solitary confinement” (1, p. 443), he twice mentions, as another literary example of someone on the edge of madness, Dr. Manette in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1, pp. 443, 445).

The “puzzling feature” of “an unidentified narrator who has stepped in to take charge” might have been solved by Professor Sutherland if he had realized that Dr. Manette has multiple personality. The third person, the unidentified narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, is an alternate personality, who takes over at the end of the story, similar to the way the alternate personality takes over at the end of Dostoevsky’s The Double.

And mentioning a third person reminds me of Graham Greene’s The Third Man (his novella, not the film), which has a character with clear, if gratuitous, multiple personality.

Search “A Tale of Two Cities,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Dostoevsky’s The Double” and “The Third Man.”

1. John Sutherland. The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Partial Apology for Declaring Books Unreadable When They Have Excessive Manifestations of Multiple Personality

On rare occasions in the past six years, I have declined to continue reading books that I found unclear and unreadable. But how could I have been right to put these books down, since I wouldn’t have picked them up in the first place if they had not been either classics or by proven writers?

I may find books unreadable due to the following:

1. unexplained switching among multiple narrators

2. unexplained switching back and forth in time

3. unexplained switching among casts of characters

4. unexplained switching from one story to another

5. puzzling format

Since I read things here in order to find manifestations of multiple personality, it is ironic that I find works unreadable when they have excessive manifestations of multiple personality, such as the five kinds listed above.

Of course, what is “excessive” for me may be delightful to others, who include many readers, reviewers, and literary prize judges.

“Ducks, Newburyport” By Lucy Ellmann: Reviews barely mention or totally ignore that first-person narrator of 1020-page Booker-nominated novel is nameless

All I’ve read are six reviews. One review mentioned in passing that the narrator was nameless. The other five ignored it.

I doubt that the protagonist’s namelessness could be accounted for merely because she is the only one talking or thinking. For a person to discuss her interests and relationships for a thousand pages, without her name ever being mentioned, I think would be implausible.

The feature most-noted by reviewers is that, although the novel is 1020 pages long, it consists almost entirely of only one sentence. Why doesn’t the narrator speak in sentences? What is the main reason that people speak in sentences? Like names, sentences facilitate communication with other people.

If the narrator were not a person, and did not normally have conversations with people, she would not need a name or sentences.

So my guess is that the narrator was an alternate personality who was very talkative (as a voice in the author’s head), but did not have conversations, per se, and did not have a name (many alternate personalities don’t).

Search “namelessness” and “nameless” for my discussion of works I’ve actually read.