“Faust” (post 2) by Goethe (post 4): Faust sees an alternate personality when he looks in a mirror, reflecting multiple personality trait in the author

Mirrors are a recurring subject in this blog, because it is known that persons with multiple personality may occasionally see one of their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror.

In fiction, this may be explained away by saying it is a “magic mirror.” But it would have made more sense for fiction to have had magical windows.

“FAUST. Who meanwhile has been standing in front of a mirror, going forward to peer into it from up close and then stepping back.

What do I see? What a marvelous vision

Shows itself in this magic glass!

Love, lend me your wings, your swiftest to pass

Through the air to the heaven she must dwell in!

Unless I stay firmly fixed to this spot,

If I dare to move nearer the least bit,

Mist blurs the vision and obscures her quite.

Woman unrivaled, beauty absolute!

Can such things be, a creature made perfectly?

The body so indolently stretched out there

Surely epitomizes all that is heavenly.

Can such a marvel inhabit down here?” (1, lines 2477-2490).

A magical mirror in fiction may reflect multiple personality trait in the writer. In the above example, it is not a problem that the alternate personality would be of a different sex and age than the character or writer, since alternate personalities are often of a different sex and age than the host personality.

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One [1806/1829] & Two [1831], Fully Revised. Translated from the German by Martin Greenberg. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014.

“Faust” (post 1) by Goethe (post 3): Play dedicated to spirits and ghosts, author’s “reality”; God gives Mephistopheles “carte blanche”; Faust’s “two souls” 

“Dedication”

This play, written in verse, begins with an author’s “Dedication” to the spectral spirits he has enjoyed since childhood:

“Come back, have you, you figures shifting, spectral,

Who first appeared to me when I was young?…

“What lively scenes you bring back, days how happy,

Beloved shadows come again to life;…

“And a yearning, unfelt, unroused for so long,

For that solemn spirit world, seizes me,…

“And vanished ghosts are my reality” (1, lines 1-32).

“Prologue in Heaven”

“The Lord,” in a meeting with “Mephistopheles,” gives his “full consent” for Mephistopheles to work with Faust in the “cat’s way with a mouse,” since, God says, “A good man always knows the way that’s right.” To which Mephistopheles replies, “Yet I’ll seduce him from it soon enough.” The Lord replies “…you have carte blanche. I’ve never hated your likes much, I find of all the spirits of denial, You jeerers not my severest trial…So I’m glad to give him a devil—for his own good, To prod and poke and incite him as a devil should” (lines 330-354).

Faust’s “two souls”

Faust, a scholar, says:

“Two souls live in me, alas,

Irreconcilable with one another.

One, lusting for the world with all its might,

Grapples it close, greedy for all its pleasures,

The other rises up, up from the dirt,

Up to the blest fields where dwell our great forbears” (lines 1138-1143).

Comment

The author’s spirits and ghosts—to the extent that they are imaginary, personified beings, experienced as having minds of their own—are alternate personalities, as are Faust’s two souls. Goethe’s relationship between God and Mephistopheles is intriguing enough to mention, but beyond my scope, unless you want to argue that they are alternate personalities, which I don’t.

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One [1806/1829] & Two [1831], Fully Revised. Translated from the German by Martin Greenberg. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014. 

“Villette” (post 6) by Charlotte Brontë (post 18): Narrator-protagonist, Lucy Snowe, on the multiplicity of her creative process and sense of identity

“I, to whom nature had denied the impromptu faculty; who, in public, was by nature a cypher; whose time of mental activity, even when alone…needed the fresh silence of morning, or the recluse peace of evening, to win from the Creative Impulse one evidence of his presence, one proof of his force; I, with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most capricious, the most maddening of masters…—a deity, which sometimes…would not speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be found; but would stand, all cold…all granite…like the stone face of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some long-trembling sob of the wind…the irrational demon would wake unsolicited, would stir strangely alive…perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the desperate listener even a miserable remnant…” (1, p. 356).

“Is there another Lucy Snowe?” (1, p. 486).

1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008. 

Harold Bloom’s Rage to Read, “The Daemon Knows,” and Multiple Personality in Literary Creativity

Since this Sunday’s front page of The New York Times Book Review will feature the following essay on Harold Bloom by Robert Gottlieb…

Robert Gottlieb. “The Rage to Read.” January 31, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/books/review/bright-book-of-life-harold-bloom.html

…I will take this opportunity to reprint my post on a book by Bloom that Gottlieb does not mention:

December 11, 2015

"The Daemon Knows" by Harold Bloom: He refers to daemons as supernatural, alternate personalities, who produce and/or appreciate creative works.

“What lies beyond the human for nearly all of these writers is the daemon, who is described and defined throughout this book. The common element in these twelve writers…is their receptivity to daemonic influx. Henry James, the master of his art, nevertheless congratulates his own daemon for the greatest of his novels and tales” (1, p. 4).

“Whitman had no poetic method except his self, though I should say ‘selves,’ as there were three of them: ‘myself, Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs,’ and also ‘the real Me’ or ‘Me myself,’ and the nearly unknowable ‘my Soul’ “ (1, p. 54). “The ‘real Me’ or ‘Me myself’ is an androgyne, whereas the persona Walt is male and the soul is female” (1, p. 57).

But Whitman said that he had more than three personalities:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then…I contradict myself;

I am large…I contain multitudes” (1, p. 68).

“Shakespeare entertained a bevy of daemons: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Cleopatra, Macbeth among them. They did not possess him, though Hamlet and Falstaff edged closest. It is a nice question whether daemonic Ahab possessed Melville. The twelve great writers centering this book were all possessed…” (1, p. 122).

“Where is Melville the man in Moby-Dick? Split at least three ways (Ishmael, Ahab, narrator), he is somewhat parallel to Whitman, who in 1855 also is tripartite…” (1, p. 125).

“Daemonic agency is the hidden tradition of American…narrative (Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner)…In narrative, the protagonists are possessed by daemons, conquistadores somehow ordering a chaos of unruly other selves” (1, p. 135).

“The obscure being I could call Bloom’s daemon has known how it is done, and I have not. His true name (has he one?) I cannot discover, but I am grateful to him for teaching the classes, writing the books, enduring the mishaps and illnesses, and nurturing the fictions of continuity that sustain my eighty-fifth year” (1, p. 156).

Hart Crane…Like John Keats, he had a truer sense of other selves than most of us can attain” (1, p. 158).

“Emerson, a scholar in the broadest sense, formulated what he chose to call ‘the double consciousness’ “ (1, p. 165). Search “double consciousness” in this blog.

“I conclude by expressing a lifelong sense of personal gratitude to Hart Crane, who addicted me to High Poetry. He taught me that my own daemon desired that I read deeply, appreciate, study, and clarify my response to his work. In doing so, my long education began and is ongoing” (1, p. 496).

1. Harold Bloom. The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2015. 

“Villette” (post 5) by Charlotte Brontë (post 17): Polly/Paulina is probably another character with unacknowledged multiple personality

In the last post, the protagonist, Lucy Snowe, was discovered to have multiple personality by virtue of a discrepancy in memory from one time to another (implying that different personalities had different memory banks). Her multiple personality would not have been suspected from obvious overt behavior, which is most commonly the case, and the reason that finding memory gaps is usually the first step in making the diagnosis.

However, when a person does have remarkable changes in behavior, beyond what one would expect from having one drink or being with different people, even those who know the person well may be puzzled. But they usually don’t think of multiple personality, as is seen with the character Polly/Paulina:

She changed “into another tone and manner as soon as she had fairly assayed the beverage, just as if it had acted upon her like some disenchanting draught, undoing the work of a wizard…the child of seven was in the girl of seventeen. Graham looked after her a little baffled, a little puzzled…I saw he hardly knew how to blend together in his ideas the dancing fairy and delicate dame…

“But she had other moods besides the arch and naïve…all the child left her…she rose at once to the little lady: her face seemed to alter, that play of feature, and candour of look, which, when she spoke to her father, made it quite dimpled and round, yielded to an aspect more thoughtful, and lines distincter and less mobile.

“No doubt, Graham noted the change as well as I" (1, pp. 282-287).

In short, Lucy Snowe and Graham, who have known Paulina since she was a young child, are puzzled by these behavioral changes (suggestive of multiple personality), but don’t know what to make of it or what questions might lead to an explanation (e.g., age self-image, fund of knowledge, what year it is, and memories that vary with the behavior).

1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008. 

“Villette” (post 4) by Charlotte Brontë (post 16): Plot twist—Dr. John is Graham from Lucy Snowe’s past—means protagonist has multiple personality

The protagonist-narrator, Lucy Snowe, 24, is working as an English teacher in Belgium. Dr. John is the visiting physician for the school. Lucy gets depressed when she remains at the school while almost everyone else is on holiday. Then, out at night, she faints or blacks out. When she wakes up, she doesn’t know where she is, but the place has furnishings that she clearly recalls from visits to her godmother ten years earlier. She can’t account for it:

“Where was I? Not only in what spot of the world, but in what year of our Lord? For all these objects were of past days, and of a distant country. Ten years ago I bade them good-bye; since my fourteenth year they and I had never met. I gasped audibly, ‘Where am I?’ ” (1, pp. 166-167).

It turns out that Dr. John is Dr. John Graham Bretton, the son of Lucy’s godmother, Mrs. Bretton, both of whom Lucy had known very well from visits to her godmother ten years ago. Recently, when Dr. John and Lucy have met at the school, he has not recognized her as being Lucy Snowe from his past. In contrast, she now says that she has recognized who he was for months, but has not felt like saying so until now.

However, if for months, Lucy had recognized Dr. John as the Graham she had known very well from visits to her godmother’s house years ago, then why, when she now wakes up and sees all those old familiar furnishings, doesn’t she immediately come to the obvious conclusion, that she must be in Dr. John Graham Bretton’s house?

The explanation (not given in the novel or Wikipedia) is that Lucy had more than one personality. The personality that had, for months, recognized Dr. John as her godmother’s son, was not the same personality who woke up in his house.

And though Dr. John now recognizes Lucy as his old acquaintance, why hadn’t he recognized her the various times they had met at the school? Apparently, her teacher personality was not the personality he had previously known, and different personalities may have such different attitudes, facial expressions, and body language that they can seem like different people.

In short, this “plot twist” and “unreliable narrator” is actually a revelation that the protagonist has multiple personality, even if the author did not think of it in those terms.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008. 

“Villette” (post 3) by Charlotte Brontë (post 15): Protagonist Lucy Snowe has “two lives,” trance states, and switches back to being Lucy Snowe

“I seemed to hold two lives—the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter” (1, p. 77).

Most people feel like they are one person who has both private fantasies and practical thoughts. Persons with multiple personality may feel they have two (or more) ways of thinking and feeling that are so different it’s like different people.

“Oh, my childhood! I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I could feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future—such a future as mine—to be dead. And in catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature” (1, p. 109).

Her references to a problematic childhood, being suicidal, and trance states are not adequately explained, but such things are more common in persons with multiple personality.

“I never had felt so strange and contradictory an inward tumult as I felt for an hour that evening: soreness and laughter, and fire, and grief, shared my heart between them…However, that turmoil subsided: next day I was again Lucy Snowe” (1, p. 119).

She probably feels “strange and contradictory,” because of switching among conflicting alternate personalities, but by the next day, she has switched back to her regular personality, Lucy Snowe.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008. 

“Villette” (post 2) by Charlotte Brontë (post 14): Metaphor, Word Choice, and Multiple Personality; “Faculties” may mean her Alternate Personalities

During Lucy Snowe’s brief first visit to London, she has interesting ways of thinking when she is by herself; interesting, that is, if you assume, as I do, that Brontë’s metaphor and choice of words were meaningful to her.

Common-sense as a Personality

“Into the hands of Common-sense I confided the matter. Common-sense, however, was as chilled and bewildered as all my other faculties, and it was only under the spur of an inexorable necessity that she spasmodically executed her trust. Thus urged, she paid the porter: considering the crisis, I did not blame her too much that she was hugely cheated…” (1, p. 46).

She says, “I said” while alone (to whom?)

“I did well to come,” I said, proceeding to dress with speed and care. “I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets, and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity” (1, p. 48).

But four pages later, she says “I reflected” and “this thought was crossing my mind” (1, p. 52). That is, when she experiences herself as having her own thought, she says so. Which raises the question as to whom she experiences herself as talking, when, by herself, she says “I said.”

Comment

Is “Common-sense” the name Brontë has given to one of her alternate personalities? And when she is alone, but says rather than thinks something, is she speaking to an alternate personality? And is “faculties” her euphemism for alternate personalities? If, as most great fiction writers, Brontë had multiple personality trait, the answers are probably yes.

1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008. 

“Villette” (post 1) by Charlotte Brontë (post 13): Lucy Snowe, first-person narrator-protagonist, gets thought from, converses with, “solemn stranger”

I have already discussed Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre in a dozen past posts, but Villette is said to be her “most autobiographical novel” (1, p. xxxv). I have just started it.

Near the beginning of this 496-page novel, Lucy Snowe, 22, walking alone on a clear, frosty night, and having just seen the Aurora Borealis, converses with a thought or voice that had been inserted into her mind by an unseen “solemn stranger”:

“But this solemn stranger influenced me otherwise than through my fears. Some new power it seemed to bring. I drew energy with the keen, low breeze that blew on its path. A bold thought was sent to my mind; my mind was made strong to receive it.

“ ‘Leave this wilderness,’ it was said to me, ‘and go out hence.’

“ ‘Where?’ was the query.

“I had not very far to look: gazing from this country parish in the flat, rich middle of England—I mentally saw within reach what I had never yet beheld with my bodily eyes; I saw London” (1, pp. 43-44).

Comment

Some readers might interpret the above as a literary metaphor. Some psychiatrists might see it as thought-insertion, a “first-rank symptom” of schizophrenia. In the case of a great fiction writer like Charlotte Brontë, I am inclined to agree with the finding that first-rank symptoms are often diagnostic clues to multiple personality (2).

If her thought or voice comes from an alternate personality, what is its name? It may have no name. Many alternate personalities don’t. So they are referred to descriptively. Brontë calls this one the “solemn stranger.”

1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008.

2. Kluft, R. P. (1987). First-rank symptoms as a diagnostic clue to multiple personality disorder. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 144(3), 293–298 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-22128-001 

“Welcome to Hard Times” (post 2) by E. L. Doctorow (post 4): Multiple personality of protagonist and reflection of the author’s writing process

At the end of the novel, the evil murderer-rapist, Clay Turner, returns to the town, and is confronted by the narrator-protagonist, who screams at him with the voice of an alternate personality:

“Do you dare come out, Turner!” screaming his name again and again, the voice in my throat someone else’s, some stranger’s voice doing my work while I watched quietly…” (1, p. 205).

However, the novel’s main reflection of multiple personality is the protagonist’s practice, as the self-appointed town historian, of writing down what the other characters say and do. Doctorow’s putting characters on the stage of his mind and writing down what they say and do is a key aspect of his creative process (search “Doctorow” post 2).

1. E. L. Doctorow. Welcome to Hard Times [1960]. New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007.

“Welcome to Hard Times” (post 1) by E. L. Doctorow (post 3): Molly speaks in a different accent, indicating a switch to a different personality

In two previous posts on this award-winning writer, I quoted him from two interviews in which he said that his writing process involved alternate personalities. I accepted his first-hand testimony and did not look in his works for indirect evidence. But I am now halfway through his first novel (1).

In an episode with Molly (who has been living in this small frontier town of the Dakota Territory), she is comforting an ill young boy with a story about when she had been a maid for a wealthy family in New York. The narrator says:

“I will never forget her words. Even after the boy’s eyes were closed she sat holding him around, whispering these remembrances. It was the most she ever said about herself, it was the most I ever learned about her. She was speaking the brogue. I had never heard her use it before, and I wouldn’t again…

“…she saw me looking and ‘Turn away!” she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Don’t you dare look at me, turn away!’ ” (1, p. 97).

Molly’s switch to speaking with a brogue was a manifestation of her switch to another personality, who didn’t want the narrator-protagonist to know about her.

1. E. L. Doctorow. Welcome to Hard Times [1960]. New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007. 

“The Invisible Man” (1897) by H. G. Wells (post 4): Once again, No multiple personality

In post 1, I quote Wells as saying he is sure he does not have “dual personalities” (multiple personality).

In posts 2 and 3, I discuss Wells’ novel, Christina Alberta’s Father, and conclude that the protagonist does not have co-existing or alternate personalities, but rather becomes irreversibly psychotic.

Once again, in Wells’ The Invisible Man, the protagonist becomes irreversibly psychotic.

These are only two novels of a prolific writer, so it is possible that he has other works with symptoms of multiple personality. But my conclusion as of now is that H. G. Wells is one of the minority of great fiction writers who do not have multiple personality trait. 

“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 6): Modest Conclusion

Shuggie’s mental dissociation in the opening paragraph of the novel (see post 1) is never developed. His mother eventually dies from natural causes, after her history of dramatic suicide attempts.

Agnes’s last major suicide attempt may have featured a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, a memory gap:

“When Agnes awoke in the psychiatric hospital she had no memory of getting there” (1, p. 332).

Did she have no memory for getting there, because she was unconscious for the whole trip to the hospital? Or did she awake in the hospital from sleep due the sedative they gave her after arriving at the hospital “to keep her from clawing at herself again” (1, p. 332)? Indeed, did she actually remember cutting herself, or did she only know about it by inference, from the bandages on her wrists? The novel does not say.

The novel recognizes the problems alcoholism, poverty, and patriarchy, but if there is anything else to understand about Shuggie and Agnes, this novel is too modest to inquire.

1. Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain. New York, Grove Press, 2020. 

“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 5): Shuggie’s Parentification (seen in children of alcoholics) and Agnes’s Two Handwritings (in multiple personality)

Parentification

Shuggie and his mother Agnes often have role reversal. When Agnes’s alcoholism incapacitates her, Shuggie takes care of her as though he were the parent and she were the child. Here is another literary example:

“Charles Dickens' ‘Angel in the house’ characters, particularly Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield, are parentified children. Agnes is forced to be the parent of her alcoholic father…” (1).

Alternate Handwriting

In previous posts, it was seen that Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, an alcoholic, probably had multiple-personality memory gaps, not alcoholic blackouts. Another clue to multiple personality is her having two different handwritings:

“The red leather address book by the phone listed all the people that Agnes knew. She had been religious about keeping it updated, and some of the names in the book had been crossed out in what looked like anger. Next to her neat cursive she had scrawled in another hand, one that looked like another woman’s entirely, a short comment…” (2, p. 309).

Her different handwriting probably reflected an angry alternate personality, and not merely anger, because the text emphasizes that it was written in “another hand, one that looked like another woman’s entirely,” as distinguished from the crossing out, which merely “looked like anger.”

1. Wikipedia. “Parentification.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parentification

2. Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain. New York, Grove Press, 2020. 

“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 4): More on Agnes’s alleged alcoholic blackout

Agnes’s self-diagnosed alcohol blackout was questioned in post 3, because of its recovered memory, since memories of full-fledged alcohol blackouts are not recorded in the first place, and so cannot be recovered. It is also questionable for the following reasons:

First, the amount of her drinking had been unclear.

Second, she had expressed reasons for starting the fire, which burnt the curtains and the wallpaper. “I hate this wallpaper. I hate those curtains…” (1, p. 52).

Third, her sense of how old she was seemed to vary, possibly reflecting switching among different-aged alternate personalities. “…for a moment it was like she was not nearly forty, not a married woman with three children. She was Agnes Campbell again, stuck in her bedroom, listening to her parents through the wall” (1, p. 53).

Fourth, as she and her son watched the flames of the fire she had started, she told little Shuggie, “Now be a big boy for your mammy” and “There was a dead calmness in her eyes” (1, p. 55).

Fifth, after her husband had arrived home and put out the fire, she expressed jealousy as to where he had been earlier that evening (1, p. 56).

So it was not a simple situation in which an alcoholic had gotten drunk, accidentally started a fire, and then didn’t (at first) remember what had happened. If her “blackout” was not just faked, it seems more like multiple personality in the way her personality seemed to fluctuate, was motivated, and she was able to recover the memory. 

Now, if she had multiple personality, she would have had a traumatic childhood. Had she? A peculiar event comes as punishment for her drinking and starting the fire. Her father claims he had been too permissive in her childhood, and he proceeds to make up for it by seriously whipping her buttocks with his belt. At first, she protests, “Daddy! I’m thirty-nine!” But then “She didn’t struggle, and no more begging words would come,” as though a personality took over who knew from experience that resistance was futile (1, p. 75).

1. Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain. New York, Grove Press, 2020. 

“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 3): Agnes, Shuggie’s mother, may be having multiple-personality memory gaps, not alcoholic blackouts

I’m nearly halfway through this 430-page novel, and it is, supposedly, well established that Agnes, a chronic alcoholic, has been repeatedly having alcoholic blackouts. But I look back at the description of one of her so-called blackouts:

“Agnes lowered her chin back to her chest and tried to clear her blackout…The memories of the previous night started to ring like large chapel bells in her scull.

“Clang, here is the wean [child] dancing on the bed.

“Clang, here is the flame on the curtains.

“Clang, here is Shug [Shuggie’s father], twisting his wedding band with a face full of disappointment again.

“Agnes…thought about holding the wean down as the flames raced up the curtain. She pushed the memory away and willed herself not to look at it again, yet the more she looked away the more it blossomed like a terrible flower. The guilt sank like dampness into her bones, and she felt rotten with shame” (1, pp. 71-72).

Since she has the memory, and, therefore, did not have a blackout, why is she calling it a “blackout”? She evidently does not understand the concept of an alcoholic blackout: memories are not recorded, and so cannot later be remembered.

Perhaps she has multiple personality, and it was another personality (a personality who likes to drink) who did those things last night, at a time when her regular personality was not in control, and so her regular personality had, in a sense, been “blacked out” at that time.

But since the memories had been recorded by her brain, they existed, and could be retrieved by her regular personality by a sort of self-hypnotic recall: when she “tried to clear her blackout.”

1. Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain. New York, Grove Press, 2020.