New York Times Book Review features Proust scholar, André Aciman, who trashes “Mrs. Dalloway” and would like to demote Virginia Woolf from the canon

“I would remove Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf [from the literary canon]…Mrs. Dalloway is an overrated novel that I don’t find particularly gripping or interesting. I’m not even sure it’s well written” (1).

However, as a Proust scholar, Aciman focuses on the wrong novel by Woolf. If he understood that Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is a prototypical multiple personality novel with multiple narrative personalities, he would not have focused primarily on Mrs. Dalloway, which, although it involves multiple personality, does not do so as pervasively as Woolf’s The Waves and Orlando.

Proust and Woolf are both in the literary canon, because they are both outstanding multiple personality novelists.

1. “André Aciman Would Like to Demote Virginia Woolf From the Canon.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/books/review/andre-aciman-by-the-book-interview.html

“Miles City, Montana” by Alice Munro (post 3): Nameless narrator has “parts” and puzzling inconsistency, all clues to multiple personality trait

When the nameless first-person narrator of this short story had been six years old, eight-year-old Steve Gauley, the son of a hired hand, had drowned, and the funeral for the child was held at the narrator’s home.

Twenty years later, the nameless narrator is the mother in a family of four: herself, her husband, Andrew, and their two children, Cynthia, six, and Meg, three and a half. The rest of the story is the family’s car trip to visit relatives, during which they pass through Miles City, Montana.

The climax of the story is when they stop at a motel that has a pool so that the two children can cool off. Meg almost drowns. But she is okay. And they continue on their trip; although, the narrator mentions in passing, referring to the distant future, “I haven’t seen Andrew in years.”

The following passage, irrelevant to the main plot (see above), seems to be about a writer’s creative process:

“I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide — sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy with my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself…I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at — a pig on a sign, a pony in a field, a Volkswagen on a revolving stand — and pouring lemonade into plastic cups, and all the time those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful and lighthearted. It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper” (1, pp. 135-136).

Note her reference to “parts of myself.” Persons with undiagnosed multiple personality commonly think of themselves as having independent “parts.” That she has to “woo” these parts suggests they have minds of their own, the essential feature of an alternate personality.

Another clue to multiple personality is that the narrator describes herself as a person of “violent contradictions” (1, p. 138), especially in they way her attitude toward her husband changes puzzlingly back and forth between positive and negative (1, pp. 138-139).

Search “puzzling inconsistency,” “nameless,” “namelessness,” and “gratuitous multiple personality” (since it is irrelevant to the story’s main plot, and may be there only because it reflects the author’s own psychology) for previous discussions of these issues in the works of other writers.

1. Alice Munro. Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories. New York, Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 1977/2006.

Alice Munro (post 2): Retraction of hypothesis that Nobel Prize short-story writer’s inability to write novels is due to her not having multiple personality

I have just read two of Alice Munro’s favorite short stories, and they both feature unlabeled, unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality.

“Royal Beatings”

The main characters are a family of four: the father (nameless), Flo (stepmother), Rose (adolescent daughter from father’s first marriage), and Brian (half brother).

In many past posts, I have discussed the association between namelessness and multiple personality (search “nameless” and “namelessness”). That association is confirmed in this story by the following passing remark about the father: “The person who spoke those words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same, though they seemed to occupy the same space” (1, p. 4).

Moreover, after her father gives Rose a “royal beating” at the instigation of her mean stepmother, the family can soon sit down together in peace, almost as if nothing had happened. Rose grows up in a multiple personality family.

“The Beggar Maid”

Rose (now a college student) suggests that her boyfriend, Patrick, might have been the unidentified person who had grabbed her leg in the library: “He did not think it would be funny. He was horrified that she would think such a thing. She said she was only joking…‘You know [Rose says], if Hitchcock made a movie out of something like that, you could be a wild insatiable leg-grabber with one half of your personality, and the other half could be a timid scholar’ ” (1, p. 38). When a character makes a multiple personality joke, the issue has been on the author’s mind.

At another time, Rose hears voices: “Some outrageous and cruel things were being shouted inside her. She had to do something to keep them from getting out. She started tickling and teasing him [Patrick]” (1, p. 42). Nonpsychotic people who hear voices probably have multiple personality. Rose is probably hearing the voice of an alternate personality.

Soon Rose is sexually aggressive, in both words and behavior, in ways that her host personality finds out-of-character: “She had never said anything like this before, never come near to behaving like this” (1, p. 43). An alternate personality had temporarily taken control of her overt behavior.

The couple gets married, divorced, temporarily reconciled, and estranged in the years that follow. When she sees him at the airport many years later, he is unalterably against a reconciliation, but she could go either way.

In short, I see Rose as having multiple personality trait, which originated in childhood to cope with the inconsistency and beatings from her nameless, multiple personality father.

In conclusion, I can’t attribute Alice Munro’s self-claimed inability to write novels to her not having multiple personality trait, since two of her favorite short stories suggest that it is an issue.

1. Alice Munro. Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories. New York, Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 1977/2006.

“The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles (post 2): Kit Moresby, following death of her husband, has dissociative fugue and winds up in harem

At the end of the novel, Katherine “Kit” Moresby, an American who had been traveling with her husband in northern Africa for most of the novel, has been wandering around in a state of confusion following her husband’s death, but is finally taken in hand by a woman from the American Consulate, who says to herself, “My God, the woman’s nuts!” (1, p. 312).

As usual, neither the novel nor most reviews (for example, 2) say or care what kind of mental disturbance Kit has.

She probably has multiple personality, since she has been wandering around northern Africa in a dissociative fugue since her husband died. And a dissociative fugue is just the largest form of memory gap, which is a cardinal symptom of multiple personality. (Search “dissociative fugue” and “memory gaps.”)

In the prototypical dissociative fugue, a person suffers a psychological trauma, forgets who she is, wanders off to where people don’t know her, and assumes a new identity. That is what Kit has done when she joins a caravan and winds up in a harem.

1. Paul Bowles. The Sheltering Sky. 50th Anniversary Edition. New York, Ecco/HarperCollins, 1949/2000.

2. Dwight Garner. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/books/31bowles.html

Paul Bowles: Quotations from Interviews

“The man who wrote the books didn’t exist. No writer exists. He exists in his books, and that’s all” (1, p. xii).

“When I write a story I think more or less the same way as if I were writing a poem. It’s quite different from writing a novel” (1, p. 49).

“I can see that a lot of my stories were definitely therapeutic. Maybe they should never have been published, but they were. But they certainly had a therapeutic purpose behind them when I wrote them. For me personally. I needed to clarify an issue for myself, and the only way of doing it was to create a fake psychodrama in which I could be everybody” (1, p. 50).

Bowles: “I didn’t plan The Sheltering Sky at all. I knew it was going to take place in the desert, and that it was going to be basically the story of the professor in “A Distant Episode.” It was an autobiographical novel, a novel of memory, that is.

Q: You mean you identify with the professor?

Bowles: No, not directly…One’s first novel often writes itself: everything comes out in it and it’s generally the best novel that one writes. In that sense it was autobiographical:—the one I’d been hatching for ten or fifteen years without knowing it. And it came out that way” (1, pp. 51-52).

“I got the idea for The Sheltering Sky riding on a Fifth Avenue bus one day going uptown from Tenth Street. I decided which point of view I would take. It would be a work in which the narrator was omniscient. I would write it consciously up to a certain point, and after that let it take its own course…simply writing without any thought of what I had already written, or awareness of what I was writing, or intention as to what I was going to write next, or how it was going to finish. And I did that” (1, p. 88).

“I’m not aware of writing about alienation. If my mind worked that way, I couldn’t write. I don’t have any explicit message…” (1, p. 90).

“The day I find out what I’m all about I’ll stop writing—I’ll stop doing everything. Once you know what makes you tick, you don’t tick any more” (1, p. 93).

“I can only find out after I’ve written, since I empty my mind each time before I start. I only know what I intended to do once it’s finished” (1, p. 101).

Q: …living outside your indigenous culture [Tangier instead of New York] became almost a compulsion with you.

Bowles: Not almost; it was a real compulsion. Even as a small child, I was always eager to get away. I remember when I was six years old, I was sent off to spend two weeks with someone…and I begged to stay longer. I didn’t want to go home again…I didn’t want to see my parents again…” (1, pp. 116-117).

“I’ve never been a thinking person. A lot seems to happen without my conscious knowledge” (1, p. 119).

“…I learned how to write without being conscious of what I was doing. I learned how to make it grammatically correct and even to have a certain style without the slightest Idea of what I was writing. One part of my mind was doing the writing, and God knows what the other part was doing…I don’t know how those things work, and I don’t want to know” (1, p. 120).

“I don’t feel that I wrote these books. I feel as though they had been written by my arm, by my brain, my organism, but that they’re not necessarily mine…I look on it simply as a natural function. As far as I’m concerned it’s fun, and it just happens” (1, p. 122).

“All through my childhood I was writing, and that means from the age of four on” (1, p. 124).

“What is my writing but a constant exploration of possible modes of consciousness? You could almost qualify the entire body of work as a series of variations on the theme of human perception. (That is, if you didn’t mind sounding like a critic.)” (1, p. 138).

“I mean one writes what one writes, one doesn’t decide what to write, one writes what comes out. Whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, poetically so” (1, p. 153).

“…my mother taught me as child to exist with a completely empty mind, not think of anything. She thought it was good for the mind, relaxing you know” (1, p. 154).

“I often have no idea what I’m going to write when I sit down. I never plan ahead of time, so how could I know the motivation? Writing isn’t about an idea. It comes more from a kind of feeling” (1, p. 199).

1. Gena Dagel Caponi (Editor). Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

2. Wikipedia. “Paul Bowles.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bowles 

3. “Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U27N_icl36g

“The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner (post 4): Main theme may be novelists sometimes use deceptive technique called “the spread,” but they shouldn’t

The Spread

Both the first chapter title (1, p. 5) and the novel’s last two words (1, p. 282) are “the spread”: a debating technique defined in this novel as an intentionally confusing barrage of information. It is a technique used by the protagonist, Adam Gordon, a debating champion.

Since the character who uses “the spread” in this autofictional novel is the author’s alter ego, Lerner may be implying that this is a deceptive technique used by novelists.

At the end, Adam hopes that people will stop using “the spread” and learn “how to speak again” (1, p. 282).

Multiple Personality

There are symptoms of multiple personality in this novel, but they are unacknowledged and unintentional. As I’ve previously discussed regarding the works of literally hundreds of fiction writers, such symptoms are present, because they reflect the writer’s personal psychology.

In addition to the symptoms of multiple personality that I’ve already cited from the first half of this novel, the second half includes the following:

“That part of him inclined to panic about how he would get home was checked by that part of him engaged in calculating if he’d been abandoned by his friends or if they’d first made an earnest search for him” (1, p.149). Note: Persons with undiagnosed multiple personality often think of themselves has having “parts” that think and feel differently from each other.

“…his tongue feels like it belongs to someone else…” (1, p. 180).

“But was Adam in the audience? Yes and no. He was a flickering presence, rapidly changing ages…” (1, p. 199). Note: A person’s alternate personalities often see themselves as being of different ages.

“Only when I heard it clatter on the asphalt was I fully aware I’d knocked the phone out of his hands” (1, p. 270). Note: His host personality is surprised by what his more aggressive personality has done.

Comment

Does anyone disagree with any of the above?

1. Ben Lerner. The Topeka School. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019.

“The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner (post 3): First half has theme of multiple personality, but it is unacknowledged and seems unintentional

The two key components of multiple personality are memory gaps and independent identities. The memory gaps are due to the fact that the various personalities often operate on different tracks of the mind.

Adam’s Memory

The story of Adam’s concussion from falling off his skateboard at age eight is that, upon his awakening from unconsciousness, he was asked where he was, and he promptly replied, correctly, that he was in the hospital. So why could he not also promptly identify his parents or even state his own name? (1, pp. 96-99).

The situation described, in which Adam doesn’t know who he or his parents are, sounds less like brain injury, and more like a dissociation of identity—in which he has switched to an unnamed alternate personality, who does not identify with the parents or the regular personality’s name—indicative of multiple personality.

Mother’s Memory

Earlier in the same chapter, Adam’s mother broaches the subject of her having been sexually abused by her father when she was a child. At the beginning of the paragraph, she speaks of “recovering the memory of what my father had done.” However, at the end of the same paragraph, she refers to “the knowledge I’d both always and never had” (1, p. 78).

Thus, the beginning of the paragraph seems to be raising the issue of “recovered memory,” which is based on the Freudian idea of “repression” into “the unconscious.” However, the only way that she could have “always” both known about it and not known about it would be to have had a host personality who never knew about it and an alternate personality who always knew about it.

Adam’s “Multiple Track” Mind

“He was always practicing something like freestyling [debate technique] in his head…There were multiple tracks in his mind and he could conduct a conversation with, say, his grandmother using one track while on another he would be in an imaginary cipher [cryptography]…Yet to say he was ‘practicing’ implies that he could choose to stop; in fact…he did not feel he could turn it off” (1, pp. 127-128).

To have such different tracks of thought going on, simultaneously and independently, you need at least two personalities. And this illustrates the fact that the word “alternate” in “alternate personality” is somewhat misleading, because, in multiple personality, it is typical for more than one personality to be conscious at the same time. They alternate only in regard to which one is out front and in control of overt behavior. In fact, alternate personalities are conscious simultaneously, but on different tracks.

Comment

The front book flap includes the phrase “a culture of toxic masculinity,” and the phrase “toxic masculinity” does appear on page 94, but otherwise, judging from the first half of the book, I can’t see why book reviews mention it as a major theme. Perhaps it will be a major theme in the second half of the novel. But, as discussed above, the first half has more to do with multiple personality, however unacknowledged and unintentional.

1. Ben Lerner. The Topeka School. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019.

“The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner (post 2): Poet’s latest autofictional novel begins with puzzling symptoms of high school debating champion

The novel’s first thirty-five pages are not written as clearly as they might have been, seemingly intentionally. There are a couple of unexplained shifts from third- to first-person narration. And Adam Gordon, a high school debating champion, while debating, purposely uses, but then becomes subject to—is he taken over by a poetic alternate personality?—poetic obfuscation:

“He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him…that he no longer had to organize arguments so much as let them flow through him…he was more in the realm of poetry than of prose, his speech…felt its referential meaning dissolve into pure form…he was seized…by an experience of prosody [poetic meters and versification]” (1, p. 25).

Adam’s parents, both psychotherapists themselves, insist that he resume psychological treatment with someone, because he sometimes gets enraged and argumentative at home. It is unclear if this relates to a past concussion and/or to ongoing migraine headaches.

While Adam is at an appointment with a psychologist, the narration is interrupted by the following passage in italics, which may be either a psychotic voice or the voice of an alternate personality (are Adam’s migraines messages from this voice?):

“I warned you, motherfucker; I said step off. I said affirmative plan will trigger widespread particles of anger resulting in the declaration of martial law of migraine which does permanent damage to democratic institutions leads to collapse of NATO of the sound good rules that would enable thousands to live together in Rolling Hills Nursing Home…” (1, pp. 33-34).

1. Ben Lerner. The Topeka School. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019.

“The Hatred of Poetry” by Ben Lerner: This poet and novelist can both love and hate poetry, because he is comfortable with contradictions

“Many more people agree they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it, and have largely organized my life around it…and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are for me—and maybe for you—inextricable” (1, p. 6).

To show that this is a view shared by other poets, Lerner quotes Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry,” in its entirety:

“I, too, dislike it.

Reading it, however, with a perfect

contempt for it, one discovers in

it, after all, a place for the genuine” (1, p. 3).

Lerner explains: “The hatred of poetry is internal to the art, because it is the task of the poet and poetry reader to use the heat of that hatred to burn the actual off the virtual like fog” (1, p. 38).

Lerner concludes: "All I ask the haters—and I, too, am one—is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love” (1, p. 86).

Comment

Lerner says that poets hate their poems, because poems derive from the inexpressible, and so are never as good as what inspired them. He argues that if you approach poems with a mixture of hate and love, hate may burn away the inadequacy of words, allowing love to hear inaudible melodies.

However, Lerner’s argument defies common sense, because hate and love are contradictory, and the fact that he and other poets do “not experience that as a contradiction” means that they are not bothered by believing two contradictory things at the same time.

What kind of psychology may not be bothered by contradictions? In multiple personality, each personality feels entitled to its own opinion. So one personality may hate poetry, while another personality may love poetry. No problem.

1. Ben Lerner. The Hatred of Poetry. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2016.

“The Cost of Living” by Deborah Levy: Indications of multiple personality trait in memoir by two-time Booker Prize finalist

A published review of this memoir begins as follows: “In her first novel, Swallowing Geography, the English novelist and playwright Deborah Levy described a character becoming ‘many selves in order to survive. Through observation, study, and meditation she taught herself to change from one self to another, from one state to another.’ It's an early, tossed-off line, but it predicts Levy's whole body of work. Over and over, this is the story she tells: First a woman learns to change selves, and then she chooses, defiantly, to be the one self she likes best” (1).

From my own reading of this memoir, I would highlight Levy’s sleeping habits as an adult and selective mutism as a child.

“When I was travelling in Brazil…I could not decide which part of the bed I wished to sleep on. Let’s say the pillow on my bed faced south; sometimes I slept there and then I changed the pillow so it faced north and slept there too. In the end I placed a pillow on each end of the bed. Perhaps this was a physical expression of being a divided self…of being two minds…” (2, pp. 6-7).

There was “a year in my childhood when I did not speak at all” (2, p. 94), which happened during her father’s political imprisonment by the apartheid government of South Africa. Selective mutism may sometimes be indicative of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) (3).

1. Lily Meyer. “The Cost of Living.” NPR, July 14, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/14/628215245/in-the-cost-of-living-renouncing-serenity-for-a-life-in-motion

2. Deborah Levy. The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography. New York, Bloomsbury, 2018.

3. Jacobsen T. “Case study: is selective mutism a manifestation of dissociative identity disorder?” J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 1995 Jul;34(7):863-6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7649956

New York Times obituary omits Harold Bloom’s “The Daemon Knows”:  Literary creativity and appreciation depend on alternate personalities

The New York Times obituary for the eminent Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/books/harold-bloom-appraisal.html fails to mention Bloom’s book “The Daemon Knows,” his theory that literary creativity and his own ability to appreciate literature have been due to alternate personalities, which he calls “daemons,” as I discussed in a past post:

December 11, 2015

"The Daemon Knows" by Harold Bloom: He refers to daemons as supernatural, alternate personalities, who produce and/or appreciate creative works.

“What lies beyond the human for nearly all of these writers is the daemon, who is described and defined throughout this book. The common element in these twelve writers…is their receptivity to daemonic influx. Henry James, the master of his art, nevertheless congratulates his own daemon for the greatest of his novels and tales” (1, p. 4).

“Whitman had no poetic method except his self, though I should say ‘selves,’ as there were three of them: ‘myself, Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs,’ and also ‘the real Me’ or ‘Me myself,’ and the nearly unknowable ‘my Soul’ “ (1, p. 54). “The ‘real Me’ or ‘Me myself’ is an androgyne, whereas the persona Walt is male and the soul is female” (1, p. 57).

But Whitman said that he had more than three personalities:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then…I contradict myself;

I am large…I contain multitudes” (1, p. 68).

“Shakespeare entertained a bevy of daemons: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Cleopatra, Macbeth among them. They did not possess him, though Hamlet and Falstaff edged closest. It is a nice question whether daemonic Ahab possessed Melville. The twelve great writers centering this book were all possessed…” (1, p. 122).

“Where is Melville the man in Moby-Dick? Split at least three ways (Ishmael, Ahab, narrator), he is somewhat parallel to Whitman, who in 1855 also is tripartite…” (1, p. 125).

“Daemonic agency is the hidden tradition of American…narrative (Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner)…In narrative, the protagonists are possessed by daemons, conquistadores somehow ordering a chaos of unruly other selves” (1, p. 135).

“The obscure being I could call Bloom’s daemon has known how it is done, and I have not. His true name (has he one?) I cannot discover, but I am grateful to him for teaching the classes, writing the books, enduring the mishaps and illnesses, and nurturing the fictions of continuity that sustain my eighty-fifth year” (1, p. 156).

Hart Crane…Like John Keats, he had a truer sense of other selves than most of us can attain” (1, p. 158).

“Emerson, a scholar in the broadest sense, formulated what he chose to call ‘the double consciousness’ " (1, p. 165). Search “double consciousness” in this blog.

“I conclude by expressing a lifelong sense of personal gratitude to Hart Crane, who addicted me to High Poetry. He taught me that my own daemon desired that I read deeply, appreciate, study, and clarify my response to his work. In doing so, my long education began and is ongoing” (1, p. 496).

1. Harold Bloom. The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky (post 7): Charlie, protagonist, abused as child, has symptoms of multiple personality

Chbosky’s first novel (1) is about a 15-year-old boy, Charlie, who was first psychiatrically hospitalized at age seven, currently sees a psychiatrist, and is socially awkward, but is also endearing, a straight-A student, and considered to be a budding genius by his English teacher.

His multiple personality is revealed at the end of the novel, but is not labeled as such, and is not recognized as such by most reviews.

Early hints of multiple personality include his surprising personality switches from meek to aggressive (in sports as a child and when defending a friend in a fight in high school); his peculiar experience when looking in a mirror (2, p. 74) (search “mirrors” for past discussions of this issue in multiple personality), and his innumerable episodes of crying, which are out of proportion to current situations and are quite puzzling.

As is revealed at the end of the novel, he had been sexually abused, repeatedly, by his aunt Helen when he was seven. I would guess that his puzzling episodes of crying have been the tears of a child-aged alternate personality.

At the end of the novel, Charlie is psychiatrically re-hospitalized:

“I’ve been in the hospital for the past two months…they brought me to the hospital where I stayed when I was seven after my aunt Helen died. They told me I didn’t speak or acknowledge anyone for a week…All I remember is putting the letter in the mailbox. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a doctor’s office” (2, p. 208).

Book reviews that venture a diagnosis usually say PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder), but Charlie has a cardinal symptom of multiple personality—amnesia, a memory gap, a dissociative fugue—from the time he mailed the letter to the time he found himself in the doctor’s office.

And, as previously discussed, additional unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality are found in Chbosky’s new novel, Imaginary Friend.

1. Wikipedia. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perks_of_Being_a_Wallflower

2. Stephen Chbosky. The Perks of Being a Wallflower [1999]. New York, Gallery Books, 2012.

“Imaginary Friend” by Stephen Chbosky (post 6): Novel ends with virgin pregnancy

The novel ends with a cliff-hanger (suggesting a sequel). Mary Katherine is a young woman who is pregnant (verified by multiple pregnancy tests), but claims never to have had sexual intercourse (her sincerity about this, even in her own private thoughts, is described at great length). And the last lines of the novel are as follows:

“Mary Katherine…,” the sweet voice said. “You are having a Son” (1, pp. 705-706).

Yes, the last word of the novel, “Son,” spoken by a mysterious voice in her head, is capitalized (implying an analogy to Jesus).

I think it more likely that Mary Katherine has amnesia, a memory gap, for impregnation, because sexual intercourse was engaged in by an alternate personality (with whom her regular personality is not co-conscious).

In conclusion, in spite of the novel’s pervasive symptoms of multiple personality—voices, namelessness, puzzling inconsistency in characters’ behavior, dissociative fugue and memory gap—there is no indication that the author intended to depict multiple personality, per se. So the symptoms may reflect aspects of the author’s own psychology.

1. Stephen Chbosky. Imaginary Friend. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2019.

“Imaginary Friend” by Stephen Chbosky (post 5): Namelessness of “hissing lady” and “nice man,” and Protector Personalities who become Persecutors

One pervasive manifestation of multiple personality in this novel is that various nonpsychotic characters hear voices. It is not just Christopher and his mother. (The author seems to take it for granted that most people hear voices. But since most people don’t, it probably reflects the author’s own psychology.)

The novel’s other prominent manifestation of multiple personality is the namelessness of two important characters: “the hissing lady” and “the nice man.” Unlike real life, namelessness is common in multiple personality. And when you meet a nameless alternate personality, you usually refer to them by a salient characteristic, so that when you want to speak to them, they know it.

I am about 80% through this 700-page novel titled “Imaginary Friend,” and the nice man, whom Christopher had imagined to be his friend, has turned out to be a villain. Which brings up an old question related to multiple personality: Since it is supposed to be a psychological defense, how can you have an alternate personality who persecutes the person?

The explanation is the transformation of an alternate personality who was originally a protector personality into a persecutor personality. The way this often happens is that the protector personality becomes disgusted with the weakness or dysfunction of the host personality, and decides that things would be better and simpler if the regular personality were eliminated.

That is what happens at the end of Dostoevsky’s The Double, when the regular personality is committed to the hospital, and in other novels like Anna Karenina and The House of Mirth, when an alternate personality causes the regular personality to commit suicide. (Alternate personalities may be so convinced they are separate people that they don’t realize they will die, too).

“Imaginary Friend” by Stephen Chbosky (post 4): Kate, Christopher’s mother, normally hears a voice, but now hears a voice that is creepy

“Give him the pill, Kate [she hears the voice say].

“Christopher’s mother held her little boy as he convulsed with sobbing. Shaking from sleep deprivation. A lifetime of motherhood flooded through her. Every pillow turned to the cool side. Every grilled cheese sandwich made just the way he liked them.

“Give him the pill Kate! Or you’re a terrible mother!

“And that’s when she realized that it wasn’t her voice. It sounded like her. It was almost perfect. The tone was right. She could be negative to herself. She had an internal monologue that had said some ruthless things over the years.

“But Kate Reese was not a terrible mother. She was great. Being Christopher’s mother was the only thing Kate Reese was ever great at. And some bitch was doing a perfect imitation of her voice to convince her otherwise. Something wanted Christopher to take those pills. Something wanted her son to sleep. Something wanted her son.

“ ‘Who is that?’ Christopher’s mother said out loud. ‘Who’s there?’

“The room was quiet. But she could feel something creeping.

“ ‘Mom, do you believe me now?’ Christopher whispered” (1, pp. 365-366).

1. Stephen Chbosky. Imaginary Friend. New York, Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group, 2019.

Self-hypnosis: One Theory for How Characters and Alternate Personalities are Created

In an article about where Freud went wrong, Dr. Eugene L. Bliss explains that Freud mistakenly abandoned the key findings from the famous case of Anna O: She was creating her symptoms in trauma-prompted “hypnoid states” by self-hypnosis.

And once a person, in childhood, gets into the habit of using self-hypnosis to create alternate personalities, the practice continues, and is relatively easy:

As Dr. Bliss reports, “It was possible in some cases [of multiple personality] to obtain, without prompting, descriptions by personalities of how the patient created an [alternate personality], employing a process identifiable as akin to a hypnotic induction. Some personalities become allies to the therapist and often are perceptive observers. One such personality said of the patient, ‘She creates personalities by blocking everything from her head, mentally relaxes, concentrates very hard, and wishes.” Another description was, ‘She lies down, but can do it sitting up, concentrates very hard, clears her mind, blocks everything out and then wishes for the person, but she isn’t aware of what she is doing’ ” (1).

Most fiction writers have little rituals of one sort or another for getting themselves into, and remaining in, the right frame of mind to be productive. I have quoted some writers as actually using the term “self-hypnosis.”

Search “self-hypnosis” for previous discussions.

1. Eugene L. Bliss, M.D. “A Reexamination of Freud’s Basic Concepts From Studies of Multiple Personality Disorder.” Dissociation, Vol. I. No. 3: September 1988, pp. 36-40. https://www.empty-memories.nl/dis_88/Bliss_freud.pdf

“Imaginary Friend” by Stephen Chbosky (post 3): Christopher now has three personalities, but multiple personality, per se, is unacknowledged

Seven-year-old Christopher—who, after his six-day dissociative fugue in the forrest, was suddenly able to read and do arithmetic—has been so changed that his mother has to reassure herself that “No, he wasn’t possessed or a pod person or a doppelgänger…this was her son” (1, p. 153).

But what she doesn’t know is that he now has alternate personalities.

His split is concretely dramatized as follows: “Christopher stepped outside himself and looked back like a spectator. What he saw was a little boy [his regular self]…” (1, p. 169). And at another time, since he is still not used to his multiplicity, “He turned around and almost screamed. Because sitting there, right next to [his three friends] was his own body. Christopher watched the four boys…He called out to them, but they could not hear him. He waved his hand in front of their eyes, but they didn’t even blink” (1, p. 190).

When Christopher was “on the imaginary side…it was like a one-way mirror that lets you spy on people on the real side” (1, p. 193).

Comment

Christopher is now divided into three personalities: Imaginary Christopher and The Nice Man, who are alternate personalities, and Regular Christopher, the host personality.

As is typical, the alternate personalities are aware of the host personality, but not the reverse, which is why the host personality has memory gaps and fugues for periods of time that the alternate personalities have been in control.

Also, as is common, the host personality gets headaches when the alternate personalities demand to take their turn.

Of course, the idea that the alternate personalities are “imaginary” and live in a purely imaginary world is the host personality’s objective perspective. Alternate personalities see themselves as real.

In the novel so far, multiple personality, per se, does not seem to have been intended by the author. Its symptoms are not labeled as such. But the mother’s comments suggest that the author may have had his suspicions.

1. Stephen Chbosky. Imaginary Friend. New York, Grand Central, 2019.

“Imaginary Friend” by Stephen Chbosky (post 2): Voices Christopher hears from forrest are integral to story, but voices his mother hears are gratuitous

Seven-year-old Christopher, who had always been a very poor reader due to severe dyslexia, and who had also been very poor at arithmetic, suddenly becomes excellent at both reading and arithmetic.

(In real life, that kind of sudden and extreme change in ability could only happen with a sudden switch from a dysfunctional alternate personality to a highly functional alternate personality.)

Meanwhile, his mother, Kate, wins the lottery, which suddenly takes them from poverty to prosperity. “She felt like it couldn’t have worked out any better if someone had planned it” (1, p. 101). Actually, someone or some thing had planned it: the mysterious forces in the forrest.

Christopher is again drawn to the forrest, this time by an ineffable voice that he experiences telepathically, and with which he enters into dialogue. He thanks the nonvoice voice for getting him and his mother a house (which she has just bought with the lottery money). 

Once he is in the forrest, he hears the voice as a voice, per se. “Are you really real? “yes.” “You’re not a fig newton [figment] of my imagination?” “no.” “So I’m not crazy?” “no.” Why can I hear you now?” “because we’re alone in the woods. that’s why i got you the house [which is adjacent to the woods]. do you like it?” (1, p. 104).

“Christopher sat there for hours. Oblivious to the cold. Talking about everything. With his new best friend. The nice man” (1, p. 105), whose voice seems to emanate from a plastic bag on the branch of a tree.

Meanwhile, unrelated to the forrest, his mother, Kate, has heard a more ordinary kind of voice while she was negotiating with the real estate agent for the new house. This voice, rendered in italics (a common convention for when characters hear voices), gives her ordinary advice: “Slow down, Kate, Ask the questions [that you wanted to ask the real estate agent]” (1, p. 95).

When authors treat hearing voices as ordinary, it may reflect the author’s own psychology.

1. Stephen Chbosky. Imaginary Friend. New York, Grand Central, 2019.

“Imaginary Friend” by Stephen Chbosky: just published, second novel of successful author, director, and screenwriter

So far, I have read the prologue and first sixty-five pages of this 700-page novel, which appears to be a heart-warming horror story about a seven-year-old boy, Christopher, and the frightening, supernatural, “hissing woman,” who lives in the forrest adjacent to the small Pennsylvania town where he and his mother have taken refuge after fleeing from her abusive boyfriend.

Fortunately, the forest also has “the nice man,” who might be the little boy, David, described the prologue, who had entered the forrest fifty years ago (also fleeing abuse).

Christopher has psychological symptoms that are common in multiple personality (aka dissociative identity), which include hearing voices and having visions (in a basically nonpsychotic person); a dissociative fugue (Christopher has a memory gap for the six days he has just been lost in the forest, except he recalls having been saved by “the nice man”); and he sometimes has momentary difficulty distinguishing between dreaming and being awake (the opening line of Chapter One is “Am I dreaming”).

The third-person narration is in easy-to-understand language, sometimes, but not always, from young Christopher’s perspective. Is the author’s narrative voice a child-aged alternate personality, or is the book merely written to be understood by the largest possible number of readers?

The front flap describes this as an “epic work of literary horror.” It says you should “Read it with the lights on.” So I’m not sure whether the author meant to raise psychological issues. 

1. Stephen Chbosky. Imaginary Friend. New York, Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2019.