March 24, 2017

“Stop Reading My Fiction as the Story of My Life” by Jami Attenberg in New York Times Book Review

If there is anything more annoying than a reader who asks if a novel is autobiographical, it is a writer who misunderstands the question.

Readers are not really asking if the author had been fat like a character. They are asking how novels are written.

Here is what Attenberg says about her creative process:

“…I write fiction because it is a beautiful place to hide…It is a fictional universe. And how do you even explain the creative process…I have the possibility with fiction to make a character feel more real than with nonfiction…Fiction is a magic trick of sorts…at best it doesn’t just conjure up an imaginary world; it makes the real one disappear, it makes the author disappear…” (1).

1. Jami Attenberg.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/books/review/stop-reading-my-fiction-as-the-story-of-my-life.html

March 9, 2017

“Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic” by Darryl Hattenhauer

“In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Shirley Jackson was ranked among America’s most highly regarded fiction writers…an article in 1955 on the strength of contemporary American fiction listed her with J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty…In 1968, Macmillan’s Literary Heritage series included her with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Welty, and Ellison in its canonical anthology The American Experience: Fiction…When Joyce Carol Oates’s first novel appeared, her publisher advertised her as ‘already compared to William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Shirley Jackson’…(1, pp. 1-2).

“Jackson was…almost, at least at times, a multiple personality…

“Sometimes when Jackson awoke, she found disturbing notes that she had written to herself while sleepwalking” (1, pp. 25-26).

“As Jackson did in her letters…Betsy [one of the alternate personalities in The Bird’s Nest] refers to herself with a lowercase i ” (1, p. 134).

“In her diary as an adolescent, [Jackson] wrote of her writing as something that came not from her but from her pen or her typewriter” (1, p. 22).

1. Darryl Hattenhauer. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003.

March 15, 2017

Shirley Jackson on Writing: Notes she writes to herself while awake, and other notes she writes to herself while she is supposedly asleep.

Notes Written Awake

“When I start writing a book, I go around making notes, and I mean that I literally go around making them; I keep pads of paper and pencils all over the house…I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget—no murder before chapter five’…or ‘Shirley, have old man fall downstairs.’ When I am ready to write the book, I go and collect all my little scraps of paper and try to figure out what I was thinking when I wrote them” (1, p. 392).

Why do these notes address “Shirley”? They could not be mistaken for anyone else’s notes. They were obviously written by the only novelist of the house; written by Shirley for herself. Yet the notes are written as if someone else were addressing Shirley to help her write her book.

Notes Written Supposedly Asleep

People with MPD (multiple personality disorder) “frequently have the experience of waking up in the morning and finding evidence that they were busy during the night, although they do not remember anything. They may find drawings, notes, poems, relocated furniture, discarded clothing, or other evidence that they have been up and busy. If this is a common life experience for a patient, there is an excellent chance that he or she has MPD” (2, p. 81).

One Example

“I was talking casually one evening recently to the husband of a friend of mine, and he mentioned his service in the Marines. I said, ‘Oh, yes, your rifle number was 804041,’ and then we kind of stared at each other dumbfounded, since one does not usually just happen to know the rifle numbers of the husbands of friends. We finally remembered that some months before, during a similar conversation after another bridge game, he had mentioned his Marine service, and remarked that one thing he would never forget was his rifle number, 804041…

“I was having a good deal of trouble at the time, working over a new novel that somehow refused to go together right…One night I gave up; I shoved the typewriter away and…went to bed, somehow forgetting to set the alarm clock.

“When I came rushing downstairs the next morning, half an hour late…I did not go at once into the study…it was not until much later in the morning that I went near my desk, but when I did, I got one of the really big shocks of my life. A sheet of paper had been taken…and put directly into the center of the desk, right where it would be most visible. On this sheet of paper was written, in large figures, and in my own writing with my own pencil, 804041.

“Now, I have walked in my sleep frequently, particularly when I am under pressure with a book, and have done odd things in my sleep, but I have rarely taken to writing notes to myself, and particularly not in code…Clearly, I was remembering this number as a clue to something else…”

Then Shirley remembered that the former Marine had told her about a woman member of an anti-Fascist organization who had been taught to “withdraw her mind from her body” so that she would not break under torture.

“When I remembered all of this and went back to my book again, I found that the trained ability to separate mind from body, a deliberate detachment, was the essential characteristic I had been looking for for my heroine, and was what I had been trying to tell myself by [the number]…(1, pp. 378-380).

Another Example

“Two weeks ago, I had written part of the beginning of the book and was having a great deal of trouble making it go together and could not find a suitable name for my secondary female character. One evening…finally I decided to give up…and I stomped furiously up to bed.

“The next morning, when I went to my desk, I found a sheet of typing paper…set right in the middle. On the paper was written, ‘oh no oh no Shirley not dead Theodora Theodora.’ It was written in my own handwriting, but as though it had been written in the dark.

“I have always walked in my sleep, but I don’t think I have ever been so frightened. I began to think that maybe I had better get to work writing this book awake, because otherwise I was going to find myself writing it in my sleep…Since then, the book has been going along nicely, thank you, and my female character is named Theodora and is turning out quite well.

“Now, incidentally, you can see why a writer might be reluctant to explain where ideas for books come from” (1, pp. 392-393).

1. Shirley Jackson. Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings. Edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt. Foreword by Ruth Franklin. New York, Random House, 2015.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

March 11, 2017

“The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem: mentions “cryptomnesia,” which is a manifestation of mythopoetic, alternate personalities.

Lethem notes that Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) has the same basic plot as a story by Heinz von Lichberg (1916). “Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia” (1).

“Cryptomnesia” is a term coined by the psychologist Théodore Flournoy, who explained it as a manifestation of multiple personality (2, 3).

In multiple personality, a person can both know and not know something, can both remember and not remember it, because one personality may know and remember what another personality does not.

And it is not just that alternate personalities may know and remember things that the host personality does not. Alternate personalities may use these things for mythopoeic or mythopoetic purposes; that is, to make up elaborate stories.

1. Jonathan Lethem. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine; Feb 2007, pp. 59-71.

2. Wikipedia. “Cryptomnesia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia

3. Théodore Flournoy. From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages [1899/1901]. With a Forward by C. G. Jung and Commentary by Mireille Cifali. Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994.

September 25, 2015

Mythopoetic Function of Alternate Personalities: Illustrated by Famous Medium, Helene Smith, in Théodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars

How does the mind create fiction and myth? And how can we ever find out? Fiction writing is done in private. And even fiction writers, themselves, are not entirely sure how they do it, which suggests that it takes place in “the unconscious.”

What goes on in “the unconscious”? And why study mediums to find out? Because mediums make a public spectacle of what usually takes place in private and out of awareness. Mediums turn off their regular consciousness by going into a trance, allowing their “unconscious” to come out and have its say.

“The mythopoetic function…Its great explorer was Flournoy with his research on Helen Smith and other mediums” (1, p. 318).

From India to the Planet Mars

According to historian Sonu Shamdasani, in his Introduction: “At the end of the nineteenth century, many of the leading psychologists—Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, Bleuler, James, Myers, Janet, Bergson, Stanley Hall, Schrenck-Notzing, Moll, Dessoir, Richet, and Flournoy—frequented mediums…What took place in the seances enthralled the leading minds of the time, and had a crucial bearing on many of the most significant aspects of twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and painting, not to mention psychical research…

“For [Frederic] Myers, whom Flournoy called the founder of subliminal psychology…the secondary personalities revealed in trance states, dreaming, crystal gazing, and automatic writing—potentially possessed a higher intelligence than one’s waking or supraliminal personality and often served to convey messages of guidance…

“Myers ended up embracing the spiritist hypothesis and attempted to unite science and religion in an overarching synthesis…Flournoy, by contrast, attempted to maintain a purely psychological viewpoint…

“For [William] James and Flournoy, the investigation of trance states was a central question if a psychology worthy of the name was to develop. Within this enterprise, the investigation of mediums held pride of place…

“The innovation of From India to the Planet Mars was that it was the first major study of what Myers called pseudo-possession, whose main goal was to disprove the supernatural origin of the phenomena and to give an account of their psychogenesis. In such a manner it established a devastating skeptical paradigm in psychical research…

“Cryptomnesia plays a crucial role in Flournoy’s analysis as the main alternative paradigm to the spiritualistic hypothesis…For Flournoy what was presented as a memory—in the case of Helene, of an anterior existence—in actuality represented a hidden and forgotten memory that had been through a process of subconscious elaboration…Spiritualists were up in arms about the book, for understandable reasons…

The “transition from spiritualism to multiple personality is very clearly developed in From India to the Planet Mars. While Flournoy rejects the extrapsychic existence of the figures in Helene’s trances, and regards them as intrapsychic, he still regards them as personalities…the psychologization of mediumship leads to a multiple personality model. From India to the Planet Mars was the first psychological study of multiple personality to become a best-seller…

“Throughout From India to the Planet Mars, Flournoy never ceases to marvel at the artistic and dramatic powers of Helene’s subconscious creative imagination. On one reading what is left of her romances when shorn of their spiritualistic garb is precisely art…"

The Introduction to From India to the Planet Mars concludes with this quotation from Ellenberger (Psychology Today, March 1973, p. 56), the historian of the unconscious quoted at the beginning of this post:

“Flournoy was a great explorer of the mythopoetic unconscious, particularly in his book From India to the Planet Mars…Today we seldom hear of the mythopoetic unconscious. What psychoanalysts call fantasies represent a minute part of mythopoetic manifestations. We have lost sight of the importance of this terrible power—a power that fathered epidemics of demonism, collective psychoses among witches, revelations of spiritualists, the so-called reincarnations of mediums, automatic writing, the mirages that lured generations of hypnotists, and the profuse literature of the subliminal imagination…unfortunately neither Freud nor Jung became aware of the mythopoetic unconscious” (2, pp. xi-li)

The thing that mediumship makes public is that the mythopoetic “unconscious" is populated by, and is a function of, alternate personalities, who, even when behind-the-scenes, and out of the awareness of the regular self, are usually conscious, and often busy making up stories.

1. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York, Basic Books, 1970.

2. Théodore Flournoy. From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages [1899/1901]. With a Forward by C. G. Jung and Commentary by Mireille Cifali. Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994.