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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Thursday, October 31, 2019

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
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