from April 26, 2015

The Blind Spot of Biographers and The Deafness of Interviewers for What Novelists Say about How They Think and How They Write

In my recent post on Edith Wharton, I quoted from Hermione Lee’s “unquestionably authoritative, impressively exhaustive” (from the New York Times Book Review, printed on the cover) 869 page biography. In this biographical standard of excellence, the little paragraph I quoted is all there is about the dissociative, split nature of Edith Wharton’s mind. Edith Wharton stated that that was how her mind worked, and that was how she wrote, but the biographer did not pursue it.

When I was working on my recent post about Paula Hawkins and her #1 bestseller, The Girl on the Train, I listened to a couple of interviews of the author online. At one point in an interview (which was conducted by three interviewers), Ms. Hawkins mentioned that when she was working on the novel, she knew that the writing was really underway when she started to hear the voice of the main character talking to her. To repeat, she had just stated—and it sounded like a routine experience for her when she was writing—that she had had auditory hallucinations, that she had heard voices. But none of the three interviewers asked her about it. It was as though they were deaf or she had never said it.

These are common, not isolated, instances. Most biographers and interviewers know that many novelists say these things. But biographers and interviewers never pursue it.

And as I have previously said, the only likely way for anyone to hear the voices of, get messages from, and have complex interactions with, imaginary people, on an ongoing basis, is to have multiple personality—which is normal if it doesn’t cause them distress or dysfunction, and is an asset if it is part of a creative process, which it obviously is for novelists.

from April 11, 2015

Margaret Atwood, in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), says that all fiction writers have at least two personalities

“I grew up in a world of doubles…a superhero was nobody unless he had an alter ego…Yes, there were earlier examples of disguises and doubles. Yes Odysseus disguised himself to reenter his halls in Ithaca; yes, in the Christian religion God came to earth as Jesus of Nazareth, a poor carpenter. Yes, Odin and Zeus and St. Peter wander the world as beggars in legend and fairy-tale…But it was the Romantics, par excellence, who fixed this doubleness in the popular consciousness as a thing to be expected, and expected above all of artists…

“As for the artists who are also writers, they are doubles twice over, for the mere act of writing splits the self into two. In this chapter, it is therefore the doubleness of the writer qua writer I will discuss…

“What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward…and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing…

[When she writes things that are out-of-character] “Who was I then? My evil twin or slippery double, perhaps. I am after all a writer, so it would follow as the day the night that I must have a slippery double…

“All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read…

“There has been a widespread suspicion among writers—widespread over at least the past century and a half—that there are two of him sharing the same body, with a hard-to-predict and difficult-to-pinpoint moment during which the one turns into the other. When writers have spoken consciously of their own double natures, they’re likely to say that one half does the living, the other half the writing…”

Atwood elaborates on the above in her twenty-seven page Chapter 2, which is titled: “Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double, Why there are always two" (in every writer).

Yet, like the dictionary of literary terms whose entry on “the Double” was quoted in a recent post, Atwood seems not to know that what she is describing about the “double” nature of writers is that they have a normal version of multiple personality.

from December 3, 2016

Hearing Voices: According to psychiatry, the field that knows most about it, hearing voices is typical of only two conditions — psychosis and multiple personality.

When Charles Dickens mentioned to someone that he heard the voices of his characters, he was accused of being crazy. But more than a half century later, after author interviews had become common, it was found that most authors hear the voices of their characters.

And surveys have found that a substantial minority of the general public hears voices, too.

So public opinion on hearing voices has gone from one extreme to the other. Whereas it used to be thought that hearing voices always meant that you were psychotic, now many people think that hearing voices means nothing in particular.

Whose opinion on this should you trust? Not academics (psychologists or philosophers). The discipline with most expertise on hearing voices is clinical psychiatry (and clinical psychology, etc.). Clinicians have been asking people “Do you hear voices?” for generations, and the results are in DSM-5, the latest edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual.

In short, hearing voices (auditory hallucinations) is typically found in two conditions: 1. schizophrenia (and other psychotic disorders), and 2. multiple personality (“dissociative identity disorder”), a nonpsychotic “dissociative disorder.”

Therefore, when nonpsychotic persons hear voices, the condition that they are most likely to have is multiple personality, in which the host personality hears the voices of alternate personalities.

December 30, 2016

Actors, Writers, and Multiple Personality: Is acting a form of multiple personality? Is multiple personality as common among actors as it is among writers?

When a good actor plays the role of a character who has multiple personality, it makes people think that it is easy to fake. But most people could not do it convincingly. Why can actors?

Why are some people good at both writing and acting? Shakespeare did both. And when Dickens did his very popular readings, he got into character.

Speaking of Benoit Constant Coquelin (1841-1909), a pre-eminent actor of the French theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century, American drama critic George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) said, “Coquelin is the only actor who ever lived who proved that he had a critical mind in the appraisal of acting” (1, p. 192). Coquelin may not be the only actor, but he did have a credible opinion:

“…the actor must have a double personality. He has his first self, which is the player, and his second self, which is the instrument. The first self conceives the person to be created…and the being that he sees is represented by his second self. This dual personality is the characteristic of the actor.

“Not that the double nature is the exclusive property of actors alone; it undoubtedly exists among others. For example, my friend Alphonse Daudet takes delight in distinguishing this double element in the personality of the storyteller, and even the very expressions I am now using are borrowed from him. He confesses that he also has his first self and his second self—the one a man made like other men…the other a being…” who takes “notes for the future creation of his characters” (1, p. 192).

I do not know enough about acting to answer the questions in the title of this post, but they are good questions.

1. Toby Cole, Helen Krich Chinoy (Editors). Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the Great Actors of All Times As Told in Their Own Words, Revised Edition. New York, Crown Publishers, 1949/1970.

Rudyard Kipling (post 2): Multiple personality suggested by well-known fact that he was self-contradictory, a two-sided man, a man of permanent contradictions

“Kipling was not…a racist or an imperialist or a sadist or an anti-Semite or a repressed homosexual—and there is sound evidence, in his writing and in his life, to counter any such simplistic interpretations. But there is also much evidence, drawn from the same sources, to suggest that Kipling was all of the above. It is far preferable to approach this author…as a man of permanent contradictions…

“Kipling’s most successful and polished achievement in prose, Kim (1901), is also dependent on the idea of a double life…The whole action of the story hangs on dissimulation and duality…the epigraph to Chapter Eight…

     Something I owe to the soil that grew—

     More to the life that fed—

     But most to Allah Who gave me two

     Separate sides to my head.

This is drawn from a Kipling poem titled ‘The Two-Sided Man.’ As if to underline its message, Kipling added,

     I would go without shirts or shoes,

     Friends, tobacco or bread

     Sooner than for an instant lose

     Either side of my head.

“If one were to assemble a balance sheet of Kipling’s own explicit contradictions, it would necessarily include his close relationship with the Bible and the hymnal, and his caustic anti-clericalism; his staunch Anglo nationalism, and his feeling that England itself was petty and parochial; his dislike of nonwhite peoples, and his belief that they were more honest and courageous; his love-hate relationship with the Irish; his contempt, and deep admiration, for the United States; his respect for the working class, and his detestation of the labor movement; his exaltation of the empire, and his conviction that its works were vain and transient” (1).

Search “self-contradiction” for previous posts on this clue to multiple personality.

1. Christopher Hitchens. “A Man of Permanent Contradictions.” The Atlantic, June 2002 issue.

Mark Twain says he has multiple personality

April 28, 2016

In “Mark Twain’s Notebook,” he says he has an alternate personality whom he knows about indirectly from its different handwriting and mysterious trips.

In this seventeenth post on Samuel Clemens (search “Mark Twain”), I quote from his personal notebook.

He says that he has—and assumes that everyone may have—three kinds of personalities: his regular self, his double, and his spiritualized or dream self.

His regular self and his double have no direct awareness of each other; they are not co-conscious. He evidently knows about his double from writing that nobody else could have written (but he doesn’t remember writing it), which has handwriting different from his own. And he has evidently been told that he makes trips—that is, someone looking exactly like him, his “double,” has been seen at various places—which he does not recall. These mysterious trips are dissociative fugues, a symptom of multiple personality, discussed in previous posts (search “fugue”).

In contrast, his regular self and spiritualized or dream self are directly aware of each other; they are co-conscious and have a common memory.

Mark Twain’s Notebook

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence.

“And so, I was wrong in the beginning; that other person is not one’s conscience…

“I am not acquainted with my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me—and whom I will call Watson, for I don’t know his name, although he most certainly has one, and signs it in a hand which has no resemblance to mine when he takes possession of our partnership body and goes off on mysterious trips—but I am acquainted (dimly) with my spiritualized self and I know that it and I are one, because we have a common memory…my dream self…” (1, pp. 349-350).

1. Mark Twain. Mark Twain’s Notebook. Foreword by Albert Bigelow Paine. New York, Harper and Brothers, 1935.

April 29, 2016

Mark Twain’s avowed alternate personality, outside Twain’s awareness, explains how Twain’s books would “write itself”

In yesterday’s post, I quoted from Mark Twain’s notebook, in which he said that he had multiple personality:

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence…I am not acquainted with [have no conscious awareness of] my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me…”

You may wonder what his having an alternate personality—a “wholly independent personage who resides in me,” who does whatever he does, totally out of his regular self’s awareness—has to do with his writing?

The answer is, Everything, according to what he says about how his creative process works, for example:

“As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind…

“…when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work on other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on” (1, p. 196).

Of course, the “unconscious…cerebration” was unconscious only in the sense that his regular self was not conscious of it. But his “partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me” was evidently busy “contriving [the novel’s] situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations,” to fill up the tank from which Mark Twain drew.

1. [Samuel L. Clemens]. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, et al., Editors. A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. Berkeley Los Angeles London, University of California Press, 2013.

Multiple Personality Trait: What’s in a name? (Isn’t a rose a rose? But in “Romeo and Juliet,” a difference in names was a matter of life and death)

Most people have heard of multiple personality. They think it is rare, but admit that it does, if only rarely, occur. The latest edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, DSM-5, estimates its prevalence at 1.5% of the general population (which is quite a few people).

DSM-5’s criteria for making the clinical diagnosis, besides requiring: A. two or more personality states, and B. memory gaps, also requires, C. that it causes the person distress and dysfunction. That third criterion wouldn’t be necessary unless there were people who fulfilled the first two criteria, but were not mental ill.

Unfortunately, there has been no name for having multiple personality, but not being mentally ill. Psychiatry does not have a name for it, because it only has names for mental illnesses.

And because there has been no name for it, psychologists don’t study it and psychology textbooks don’t mention it. And even if psychologists wanted to study it, where would they find it?

Meanwhile, the literary world has long considered fiction writers to be “mad,” in an artistic sort of way; that is, they hear the voices of their characters, and may even say that their characters and imaginary worlds seem, when they are writing, “more real than real” (but they are generally in touch with reality, write bestsellers, and win Nobel prizes).

Indeed, there have long been jokes, and even serious remarks by writers, that writers do have a sort of multiple personality. But “multiple personality” has always meant a mental illness, and they are not mentally ill.

Thus, the term “multiple personality trait” (as opposed to “multiple personality disorder” or “dissociative identity disorder”) is useful.

My Letter in New York Times Book Review; Seven clues protagonist of one of their 10 Best Books of 2019 has unacknowledged multiple personality

To the Editor:

When you named Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School” one of the 10 Best Books of 2019 (Dec. 15), one good thing about the novel was not mentioned: its alarmed consideration of fast-talking, confusing, data-filled techniques like “the spread.” The implication is that many people, including writers, have fallen into the trap of using this style, and that they need to learn “how to speak again.”

Kenneth A. Nakdimen

New York

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/books/review/letters-to-the-editor.html

I had read and discussed two of Ben Lerner’s books for this blog: his nonfiction, “The Hatred of Poetry,” and his novel, “The Topeka School.”

My posts on “The Topeka School” cite at least seven clues that the protagonist has unacknowledged multiple personality:

1. “multiple tracks in his mind”

2.  his mind has “parts”

3.  he feels like a “flickering presence, rapidly changing ages”

4.  his episode of dissociation of identity as a child

5.  anonymous voice in italics: his agitated alternate personality

6.  protagonist feels that “a speech was delivering him”

7. “…his tongue feels like it belongs to someone else…”

Search “Ben Lerner” to read those posts. Search “unacknowledged multiple personality” for prior discussions regarding other writers.

Comment

Editors of The New York Times Book Review are in a difficult position. If their reviews were to mention unacknowledged multiple personality, readers might be fascinated, but authors and publishers might be frightened away.

Elena Ferrante and Jeanette Winterson on Their Multiple Personality and Fiction Writing

November 2, 2016

Elena Ferrante (post 7) says she writes under dictation, reveals self even she may not know, and usually has narrative “I” with alternating, contrasting souls.

“I can’t say precisely…how a story takes shape. When it’s done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least in my case, is insufficient. There is a before, made up of fragments of memory…frantumaglia—bits and pieces of uncertain origin which rattle around in your head, not always comfortably…But how I moved from the frantumaglia…into a story that seemed convincing—that escapes me, I can’t give an honest account…

“I only know one thing for certain—it seems to me that I work well when I can start from a flat, dry tone, that of a strong, lucid, educated woman…Only when the story begins to emerge safely, thanks to that tone, do I begin to wait for the moment when I’ll be able to replace those well-oiled, quiet links with something rustier, raspier, and with a pace that’s disjointed and agitated, even at the growing risk of the story falling apart. The moment I change register for the first time is both exciting and anguished…I enjoy…revealing another, rougher soul underneath, someone raucous, maybe even crude. I work hard to make that change in register come as a surprise and also to make it seem natural when we go back to a more serene style of narration…I always worry that the narrating ‘I’ won’t be able to calm back down…

“It has become natural to think of the author as a particular individual who exists, inevitably, outside the text…Remove that individual from the public eye and…we discover that the text…has taken possession of the person who writes. If we want to find that person, she’s right there, revealing a self that even she may not truly know…

“While I’m writing I think I know a lot about my characters, but then I discover I know much less than my readers. The extraordinary thing about the written word is that by nature it can do without your presence and also, in many respects, without your intentions…Writing…doesn’t need you…

“The state of grace…happens when…you continue to write as if under dictation…For all sixteen hundred pages of the Neapolitan Novels, I never felt the need to restructure events, characters, feelings, turning points, reversals…I am amazed myself…I never resorted to notes, chronologies, plans of any sort…” (1).

1. Sandro and Sandra Ferri (Ferrante’s publishers, who interviewed her in person). “Elena Ferrante, Art of Fiction No. 228.” The Paris Review, Spring 2015 No. 212.

November 6, 2016

“Frantumaglia” by Elena Ferrante (post 8): Title refers to her fragments—alternate personalities—which she has, and uses to write, like Dostoevsky.

“My mother left me a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments” (1, p. 99).

Interviewer: In the Neapolitan novels, can Elena and Lila be interpreted as a single character? As two sides of a single person? Does every writer consist of two halves?

Ferrante: “If we were made of only two halves, individual life would be simple, but the “I” is a crowd, with a large quantity of heterogeneous fragments tossing about inside. And the female “I”, in particular, with its long history of oppression and repression, tends to shatter as it’s tossed around, and to reappear and shatter again, always in an unpredictable way. Stories feed on the fragments, which are concealed under an appearance of unity and constitute a sort of chaos to depart from, an obscurity to illuminate. Stories, characters come from there. Reading Dostoyevsky when I was young, I thought that all the characters, the pure and the abominable, were actually his secret voices, hidden, cunningly wrought fragments. Everything was poured, unfiltered, and with extreme audacity, into his works” (1, p. 322).

1. Elena Ferrante. Frantumaglia. New York, Europa editions, 2016.

June 19, 2017

Jeanette Winterson defends Elena Ferrante’s right to be two distinct personalities, because “Writing is an act of splitting…Writers are multiple personalities”

“And I go on calling Elena Ferrante Elena Ferrante because that is who she wishes to be. She has been very clear about why she has chosen to be two people – one of whom can be known through her books, and one of whom cannot be known at all. Writing is an act of splitting – like mercury. Writers are multiple personalities” (1).

1. Jeanette Winterson. “The malice and sexism behind the ‘unmasking’ of Elena Ferrante.” The Guardian, October 7, 2016.

August 14, 2017

Jeanette Winterson (post 3): Does her memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” describe her as having multiple personality since childhood?

Having in a previous post quoted Winterson’s 2016 article, in which she said, “Writing is an act of splitting…Writers are multiple personalities,” I bought her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? (2011), and have just read it.

Winterson is adopted as an infant by a disturbed woman and her husband. She leaves home at age 16. She attends Oxford. She becomes a successful novelist. And she eventually meets her birth mother.

Her memoir does not use the term “multiple personality,” but she does describe a time that she goes “mad” (1, p. 161):

“I started waking up at night and finding myself on all fours shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’ [Mommy]…often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language” (1, pp. 162-163). [This is the emergence of a very young, child-aged alternate personality.]

“I had a sense of myself as a haunted house” (1, p. 165) [a good metaphor for multiple personality].

“…my sense of myself as being a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl. A doubleness at the heart of things” (1, p. 168). [Her adoptive mother dressed her as a boy when she was very young, and she probably has both male and female alternate personalities, which is common.]

“I often hear voices…But in the past, voices were respectable — desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wisewoman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing” (1, p. 170). [People with multiple personality may hear the voices of their alternate personalities, just as writers may hear the voices of their characters.]

“There was a person in me — a piece of me — however you want to describe it —so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace [Winterson had attempted suicide]…My violent rages…The furious child living alone in the bottom bog wasn’t the creative Jeanette — she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life…It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food…I am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that I had to start talking — to the creature…a voice outside my head — not in it — said, ‘Get up and start to work’…Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say…It is not a surprise that it was a children’s book. The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up in me had to tell it to her” (1, pp. 171-173).

“Why didn’t I take myself and the creature to therapy? I did, but it didn’t work…she wouldn’t come with me…She was a toddler, except that she was older ages too…She was sometimes a baby. Sometimes she was seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen” (1, p. 175). [There were several different alternate personalities, but none of them wanted to come out during therapy, because they felt it was Jeanette’s therapy, not their’s; and the therapist never suspected, or knew how to diagnose, multiple personality; which is why many people think it is rare.]

Multiple Personality Since Childhood

“…I left the infant school in disgrace for burning down the play kitchen…I beat up the other kids, boys and girls alike…my mother believed I was demon possessed…” (1, p. 55). [True, her mother is predisposed to satanic interpretations, but Winterson, herself, repeatedly mentions, in passing, that she is a “thug” and capable of committing “murder,” which is so out-of-character for how she generally behaves that it implies the existence of a violent alternate personality.]

“He put his tongue in my mouth…Blackout. I woke up in my own bed…On the inside I would build another self — one that they couldn’t see. Just like [she had done] after the burning of the books” [by her mother] (1, pp. 81-82). [In response to a sexual assault, she has a blackout, which means a memory gap for the time that an alternate personality took the abuse for her. And then she expresses some awareness that she has a way of creating alternate personalities, of which her abusers are not aware.]

So in Winterson’s 2016 article, when she said that writers (which includes herself) have “multiple personalities,” was she expressing insight that what she had described in her memoir was multiple personality since childhood? Or does she dismiss the episode near the end of her memoir as a passing, nonspecific “madness,” and feel she was speaking only metaphorically about writers’ having “splitting and multiple personalities”?

Two Kinds of Writing

“It took me a long time to realize that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look” (1, p. 54). [The writing that writes you is writing controlled by alternate personalities.]

1. Jeanette Winterson. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? New York, Grove Press, 2011.

August 16, 2017

Jeanette Winterson (post 5): In award-winning first novel, “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,” first-person narrator, Jeanette, speaks with an alternate personality.

According to the author’s memoir (see previous post), her mother and religious community did literally attempt to exorcise demons which they alleged had caused her lesbian relationships. But the memoir did not include Jeanette’s conversation with her demon. The novel does.

Jeanette thinks of this experience in terms of demon possession or nonspecific madness (and not in terms of multiple personality, the psychiatric perspective):

“Everyone has a demon like cats have fleas…

“ ‘If I let them take away my demons [thinks Jeanette, about her pending exorcism], I’ll have to give up what I’ve found’ [love with a woman].

“ ‘You can’t do that,’ said a voice at my elbow.

“ Leaning on the coffee table was the orange demon.

“ ‘I’ve gone mad,’ I thought.

“ ‘That may well be so,’ agreed the demon evenly. ‘So make the most of it.’

“ ‘What do you want?’ [Jeanette asks].

“ ‘I want to help you decide what you want…Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed,’ the thing began, ‘but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it’…

“ ‘But in the Bible you keep getting driven out,’ [says Jeanette].

“ ‘Don’t believe all you read’ [the demon replies]” (1, pp. 108-109).

Jeanette says that everyone has a demon. The demon agrees, adding that many don’t realize it or know how to use it.

Jeanette and her demon are right in regard to novelists, most of whom have multiple personality. And even if novelists don’t know they have it, or don’t think of it in those terms, they know how to make use of it in their writing process.

1. Jeanette Winterson. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. New York, Grove Press, 1985.

from March 4, 2015

All literary theories—except Multiple Identity Literary Theory—assume that novelists create what most people can’t create, but do not think differently

Standard literary theories are approaches to the interpretation of literary text. They are not theories about how literature is done. Their tacit assumption is that the novelist’s mind works, basically, the same way that everyone else’s mind does.

Most literary theorists allow that certain proclivities and experiences might inspire, enhance, and influence literary creativity—e.g., trauma, depression, gender, childhood, culture, socio-economic conditions, imagination—but they do not believe that the way novelists think is essentially different... 

Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the theory of this blog, is the only literary theory that addresses how novelists think (which sometimes helps you to understand what they wrote).

May 30, 2015

Ursula K. Le Guin says: Most Novelists have “an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality” since that is how they experience their characters

“I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes, of having an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality Disorder, of not entirely subscribing to the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self…

“Now, to trust the story, what does that mean? To me, it means being willing not to have full control over the story as you write it…Deliberate, conscious control…is invaluable in the planning stage—before writing—and in the revision stage—after the first draft. During the actual composition it seems to be best if conscious intellectual control is relaxed…Aesthetic decisions are not rational; they’re made on a level that doesn’t coincide with rational consciousness. Thus, in fact, many artists feel they’re in something like a trance state while working, and that in that state they don’t make the decisions…

“Whether they invent the people they write about or borrow them from people they know, fiction writers generally agree that once these people become characters in a story they have a life of their own, sometimes to the extent of escaping from the writer’s control and doing and saying things quite unexpected…They take on their own reality, which is not my reality, and the more they do so, the less I can or wish to control what they do or say…While writing, I may yield to my characters, trust them wholly to do and say what is right for the story…

“…I had a story to write when I found in my mind and body an imaginary person whom I could embody myself in, with whom I could identify strongly, deeply, bodily. It was so much like falling in love that maybe that’s what it was…for it’s an active, intense delight, to be able to live in the character night and day, have the character living in me…

“When I am working on a story that isn’t going to work, I make up people. I could describe them the way how-to-write books say to do…They don’t inhabit me, I don’t inhabit them. I don’t have them. They are bodiless. So I don’t have a story. But as soon as I make this inward connection with a character, I know it body and soul, I have that person, I am that person. To have the person (and with the person, mysteriously, comes the name) is to have the story…These people come only when they’re ready, and they do not answer a call…I have called this waiting ‘listening for a voice’…and then the voice…would come and speak through me. But it’s more than voice. It’s a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston, Shambhala, 2004.

from August 8, 2015

Sue Woolfe, novelist and teacher of creative writing, asks “What are we doing in our minds, those of us who spend years sitting in rooms making up stories?”

Here are some of her questions and answers:

“Sometimes I feel guided, though I don’t know by what…” (1, p. 3).

“…I had long been aware that while I write fiction, I seem to be using my brain in a very different way from when I’m not—and differently from when I read. For example, I seem to ‘watch’ an imaginary scene in my mind’s eye as I write about it…” (1, p, 16).

“…a well-received story…logically develops and explores a moral principle…Most readers and critics would assume the moral principle was the starting point, indeed the aim, of the whole endeavor. However…these thematic principles are often not intended but discovered by writers during or even just on finishing the creation, not before the creation. But how could that be?” (1, p. 17).

How does an author create “complex fictional works of unpremeditated coherence?” (1, p. 26).

“…students often speak with excitement and awe about the power and autonomy of characters they’d previously considered playthings…

“…characters in their settings become insistent—insistent because the characters begin to enter unbidden into my conscious thoughts even when I’m not working. I ‘see’ characters over time far more clearly than I had previously, and far more clearly than if I had daydreamed them” (1, pp. 28-29).

“After all, what is consciousness? I assume that we all have an interior commentary that chatters on and on, like a voice-over narration in a film” (1, p. 40).

[I don’t have a commentator, but Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow did. He was quoted in my post of November 15, 2014 as saying: “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.”]

“As a child I’d lived much of the time in my imagination, so I’d always thought of it as my confidante” (1, p. 49).

“Plato thought that a poet is able to create only what the muse dictates…” (1, p. 49).

“Much of the work of fiction writing depends on first finding and then learning to maintain a voice. For readers…It is the personality they sense inside the writing…Writers—all those I have spoken to, at least—consider it essential to ‘find’ a voice…; in fact, the voice is considered so privotal that commonly if a group of writers at a bar are recounting their problems, and one of them says that he or she cannot fine the voice for the current work, everyone murmurs in sympathy…

“…there is , for me at least, an almost visceral sensation that the voice will lead me through the story, that the voice already knows the story though I don’t…

As a novelist friend said, “There was an element of magic about writing the book. There were times when I felt in direct relation to that voice, that the book was—as they say—‘writing itself’ through me…[The character’s] voice felt very natural to me, although it’s not a voice I ever use in my own life. In taking on that persona—that voice, actually—I discovered an astonishing freedom. Perhaps that’s the compulsion of writing: the freedom to be, not somebody else, but another of your selves” (1, pp. 60-61).

“A character seems for a very long time into fictional work to be not a character but a boon companion to the author, a fellow muser, a consciousness about any number of subjects. Even if the character’s outlook is counter to the writer’s usual views, even if he or she is morally repugnant, there is a conviction of a shared understanding of the world—the character seems like a person the writer could possibly have become” (1, pp. 69-70).

“…the state of trance I induce when I write, a trance so profound that I lose track of my physical whereabouts, my sense of time, my sense of myself and even my own name, so that I am, for instance, barely able to remember what a telephone is, let alone coherently answer an interrupting phone call. In my experience, very little material written in the trance state, or written while emerging from it, is discarded—even though in the early stages of the writing process, when I go into the trance, I have no idea the subject matter or concerns of the eventual novel” (1, p. 93).

“This is a very personal search. It does not pretend to be anything other than the investigation of a novelist baffled by her own creative processes and seeking to understand them, the better to have faith in their worth and to articulate them to others” (1, Preface).

1. Sue Woolfe. The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: A writer looks at creativity and neuroscience. Crawley, University of Western Australia Press, 2007.

“Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens (post 4): Sales of this novel continue to amaze

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/books/where-the-crawdads-sing-delia-owens.html

People love this book, but do they understand it?

from June 9, 2019

“Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens (post 3): Explaining some puzzling things, including why the poetry manuscripts were hidden

Kya, the Marsh Girl

One of the most puzzling things about Kya had been why she stayed, and continued to live, in the shack in the marsh, even after her four siblings and her mother had set repeated examples of how to deal with an untenable situation: leave.

Evidently, in order to deal with each of these abandonments, culminating in the abandonment by her mother, Kya had developed an alternate personality whose specialty was to cope with that situation. Thus, her regular, host personality, Kya, was not her original, “real person” personality, but was herself an alternate personality, whose specialty was to live in the marsh and cope with abandonment.

In fact, the regular, host personality of most people with multiple personality is not their original personality. Indeed, the original personality may be a relatively minor part of the person (the person is all the personalities taken as a whole).

Engaging and Entangling

How did this “marsh girl,” this “marsh trash,” who was living this bizarre, impoverished lifestyle, and who really did not have the grooming and clothing to appear normal and conventionally attractive, nevertheless attract Tate (who taught her to read, and who eventually, in effect, married her) and Chase, the local football hero, who routinely attracted and dated all the normal girls?

Indeed, why did Chase continue to wear the shell necklace, a gift from Kya, even after he married someone else? He continued to wear it in full view of his wife, mother, and the rest of the community. Even though he saw Kya as far beneath him, socially, he was infatuated, possibly in love, in spite of everything.

Although Kya was living a seclusive, schizoid lifestyle—to casual observation, she might have even been suspected of having schizophrenia—she was evidently sufficiently emotionally engaging to attract, and remain attractive, to these two men, and also to Jumpin’ and Mabel.

Although some persons with multiple personality may, at times, superficially look psychotic (e.g., they may hear voices and act peculiarly), they may also be, unlike people with true psychosis, quite emotionally engaging, even emotionally entangling, as both Tate and Chase found Kya.

Hidden Manuscripts

The incriminating shell necklace was eventually discovered in a secret compartment under the floor of Kya’s shack.

But why were the Amanda Hamilton poetry manuscripts hidden there, too?

Because these things were being hidden from Kya, by the alternate personalities who wrote the poems and committed the murder.

1. Delia Owens. Where the Crawdads Sing. New York, Putnam Penguin, 2018.

Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” and Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”: In both novels, characters have alternate personalities referred to as “familiars”

Many readers of Marilynne Robinson’s celebrated novel, “Housekeeping,” think that there are two characters, “Rosette Browne” and “Rosette Browne’s mother,” who tell Lucille that they disapprove of her Aunt Sylvie’s behavior.

But if you look at the novel’s list of characters in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housekeeping_(novel), you see that Rosette and her mother are not listed, because they are not portrayed as real people, as explained below.

from June 17, 2018

“Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson (post 2): “Lucille had a familiar” as did Bertha Mason in “Jane Eyre,” meaning they had alternate personalities

Halfway through this novel, the three main characters are Aunt Sylvie and her two adolescent nieces, Ruth, the first-person narrator, and her younger sister Lucille. Sylvie is increasingly portrayed as being mentally ill; Ruth is relatively tolerant of Sylvie’s odd behavior; but Lucille insists on conventional behavior.

Many readers misunderstand the following:

“Lucille had a familiar, Rosette Browne, whom she feared and admired, and through whose eyes she continually imagined she saw” (1, p. 103). And it is described in the next four pages how “Rosette Browne” and “Rosette Brown’s mother” disapprove of Sylvie’s odd behavior.

1. Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980.

Many readers, not knowing what “a familiar” is, think that Lucille is referring to a real mother and daughter. So let me reprint a past post that discussed “a familiar” in Jane Eyre:

October 24, 2015

Jane Eyre (post 7): Bertha Mason misbehaves because she is “prompted by her familiar”—the alternate personality of her multiple personality disorder.

Rochester says that his wife, Bertha Mason, “is prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night [himself], to stab them, to bite their flesh [her brother]…” (1, p. 257).

Who or what is Bertha’s “familiar”? What is a “familiar”?

According to Wikipedia, familiar spirits, sometimes referred to simply as “familiars,” are supernatural entities. “When they served witches, they were often thought to be malevolent, while when working for cunning-folk they were often thought of as benevolent…The former were often categorized as demons, while the latter were more commonly thought of and described as fairies.”

Some familiars take animal form, such as a witch’s black cat. Other familiars take human form, common in Western Europe. According to one definition, “A familiar spirit (alter ego, doppelgänger, personal demon, personal totem, spirit companion) is the double, the alter-ego, of an individual.”

Accounts of familiars were often striking for their “ordinariness” and “naturalism.” Familiar spirits “were often given down-to-earth, and frequently affectionate, nicknames. One example of this was Tom Reid, who was the familiar of the cunning-woman and accused witch Bessie Dunlop.”

Now, if I were to translate “familiar” to modern, psychiatric terminology, I would say that it refers to alternate personality, as in multiple personality. And since Bertha Mason’s multiple personality causes her distress and dysfunction, it would be multiple personality disorder.

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

Comment

Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which “a familiar” (alternate personality) is given to “the mad woman in the attic,” Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping gives “a familiar” (alternate personality; actually two alternate personalities) to the best-adjusted character, Lucille.

Thus, Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason illustrates an extreme case of clinical, multiple personality disorder, while Housekeeping illustrates the normal version, multiple personality trait, which is the subject of this blog.

And since Marilynne Robinson does not appear to have intentionally given Lucille multiple personality, per se, and has not used multiple personality in the plot, then Lucille’s multiple personality is gratuitous (search “gratuitous multiple personality”), and is probably just a reflection of the author’s view of ordinary psychology.