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, November 11, 2019


Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 2): As readers, do people with multiple personality trait go with the flow, and not complain about unclear writing?

So far, in my preliminary reading about Singer, he appears to be another writer with multiple personality trait. And I have previously thought that such a person, as a reader, might tend to go with the flow, and not make an issue of unclear writing. So I was surprised to read the following:

“I am not happy with bad writing…I still demand that a writer should write clearly, should have a story to tell, should write it well…and that the story should be more or less convincing in its own terms. In other words, I’m not fooled by all these coverups” (1, pp. 130-131).

“The modern writer is so eager to be profound, to be symbolic, to show off his greatness, that the reader cannot enjoy him anymore. Never before in the history of literature have the readers been so fooled, so hypnotized against their will, to call mediocrity greatness…The masters [e.g. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky] were all great storytellers, and they wrote in a very clear way, they tried their best to be clear. Language is made to communicate, it has to make itself understood, not become a mystery which has to be explained by other language…I don’t hide behind puzzles, riddles, symbols which mean nothing” (1, pp. 150-151).

Are there any group differences between people with and without multiple personality in how they are as readers? Or are individual differences much greater than group differences?

1. Grace Farrell (Editor). Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations. Jackson and London, University Press of Mississippi, 1992.

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