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.