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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Wednesday, September 30, 2020

“The English Teacher” by R. K. Narayan (post 1): Protagonist converses with two nonpsychotic inner voices, suggestive of multiple personality trait

The “voice of conscience” is merely a metaphor for some people, but for others it is a nonpsychotic auditory hallucination that they hear in their head. For this novel’s protagonist, an English teacher and poet, it is not just a metaphor, and not the only voice that he hears.


Voice of Conscience Personality

“I decided to rush back to my [room] and write a poem on nature…


“I returned to my room before seven. I felt very well satisfied with my performance. I told myself: ‘I am all right. I am quite sound if I can do this every day. I shall be able to write a hundred lines of poetry, read everything I want to read, in addition to class-work…’ This gave place to a distinct memory of half a dozen similar resolves in the past and the lapses … I checked this defeatism! ‘Don’t you see this is entirely different? I am different today …’


“ ‘How?’ asked a voice. I ignored the question and it added, ‘Why?’


“ ‘Shut up,’ I cried. ‘Don’t ask questions.’ I myself was not clear as to the ‘Why?’, except that my conscience perpetually nagged over arrears of work…(1, pp. 426-427).


Voice of Another “Part of Me” (Alternate Personality)

“I had four hours of teaching to do that day…Four periods of continuous work and I hadn’t prepared even a page of lecture…


“A babble rose in the class…I banged the table with my fist and shouted over the din: ‘Stop this, otherwise I will mark everyone absent’…


“Who was I that they should obey my command? What tie was there between me and them? Did I absorb their personalities as did the old masters and merge them in mine?…


“Some part of me was saying: ‘These poor boys are now all attention, cowed by your superior force. They are ready to listen to you and write down whatever you may say. What have you to give them in return?’ ” (1, pp. 428-429).


1. R. K. Narayan. Swami and Friends [1935], The Bachelor of Arts [1937], The Dark Room [1938], The English Teacher [1945, pp. 421-609], New York, Everyman’s Library/Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, 2006.

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