“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion (part 3): Maria is estranged from husband Carter and visits daughter Kate, but Maria appears to have memory gaps

“She looked at Carter sitting in the living room…

“ ‘You going to stay here?’ she said…

“ ‘All my things are here, aren’t they?…

“ ‘I mean I thought we were kind of separated…

“ ‘If that’s the way you want it.’

“ ‘It wasn’t me. I mean was it me?’

“ ‘Never, Maria. Never you.’

“There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant…

“ ‘I was going out to see Kate,’ she said finally.

“ ‘How many times you been out there lately?…

“ ‘Hardly at all,’ she said, and then: ‘In the past few weeks, maybe a couple of times.’

“ ‘You’ve been there four times since Sunday…They called me,’ Carter said… ‘They called me to point out that unscheduled parental appearances tend to disturb the child’s adjustment…We’ve been through this, Maria. We’ve done this number about fifty times’” (1, pp. 40-42).

Comment

Maria is not sure what has been going on in her marital relationship or how often she has been visiting her daughter. “Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant…”

Carter doesn’t know if his wife is devious, scatterbrained, or mentally ill. All he knows is that she continually acts this way: “We’ve done this number about fifty times.”

Maria appears to have a cardinal symptom of multiple personality: memory gaps.

1. Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays [1970]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005.

“Play It As It Lays” by Joan Didion (post 2): Possible indications of multiple personality in the previously quoted interview and the opening of this novel

from interview in post 1:

“DIDION: Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself…”

People with only one personality can be quite ambivalent and may entertain several points of view. But when people have the subjective experience of hearing themselves or of  “writing to myself” (not for myself) or being aggressive with themselves or being hostile to themselves, they may be describing the interaction of two personalities. (Of course, since the writer is not psychotic, she knows that her reader, objectively, “is me.”)

Psychiatric Opening

Maria Wyeth, the protagonist, is psychiatrically hospitalized for unstated reasons. She mentions that she has migraine headaches (1, p. 5), which doesn’t prove anything. But it is a fact that bad headaches are the most common physical symptom of people with multiple personality. (Some multiples get a bad headache whenever they switch personalities.)

However, what Maria may have that would be more specific to multiple personality are memory gaps. She repeatedly says, “I have trouble with as it was” (1, pp. 7, 9). She also says, “I never in my life had any plans, none of it makes any sense, none of it adds up” (1, p. 7). At this point, I cannot be sure what she means, but memory gaps are a reasonable hypothesis: to be, or not to be, confirmed by the rest of this novel.

1. Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays [1970]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005.

“Sweet Desserts” by Lucy Ellmann: Author’s first novel does not have symptoms of multiple personality, but does have jokes

“Goldberg’s a private in the army. His mother dies, and his superior officers don’t know how to break the news to him. His sergeant volunteers to do it. He calls the whole platoon out, makes them all stand at attention, and then says,

     ‘All those with mothers still living, step forward!’

     They all step forward.

     ‘Not so fast, Goldberg!’ ” (1, p. 117).

1. Lucy Ellmann. Sweet Desserts [1998]. London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

“Invisible Guests” by Mary Watkins: Falsely says good, normal “imaginal dialogue” is not multiple personality (misunderstood as “sequential monologue”)

Note: Search "Mary Watkins" for a good past post from 2016. Other than her multiple personality misunderstanding (which many people have), her book is worthy of attention.

Misunderstood Multiple Personality

“Whereas psychoanalytic and developmental theories advocate a developmental unification of the various imaginal personae over time, a perspective which valued dramatic thought would struggle to maintain a multiplicity. Contrary to fearful expectation, this multiplicity of characters in an individual’s experience would not resemble a pathological state of ‘multiple personality.’ In the latter there is no imaginal dialogue, only sequential monologue. The person identifies with or is taken over by various characters in a sequential fashion. The ego is most often unaware of the other voices. It is paradoxical that the illness multiple personality is problematic precisely because of its singleness of voice at any one moment, not because of its multiplicity” (1, pp. 104-105).

Actual Multiple Personality

While it is true that therapy of multiple personality aims to increase dialogue between the host personality (which is least in the know) and the alternate personalities, there is already dialogue before treatment. The host personality may hear voices of, and get into arguments with, alternate personalities. And alternate personalities are often in dialogue with each other. It is the job of protector personalities to be aware of what is going on with the personality that it is protecting. And since persons with multiple personality rarely have only two personalities, often have a dozen, and sometimes many more, there is a lot of co-consciousness and interaction going on, though most of it is behind-the-scenes. Personalities alternate only in regard to which one is most overt. Multiple personality should be understood as involving multiple simultaneous consciousness.

1. Mary Watkins. Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. Hillsdale New Jersey, The Analytic Press/Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.

“The Pessoa Syndrome” by Katia Mitova: Pessoa’s “Multiple Personality Order” (not Disorder), a theory of literary genius by a professor and poet

You can see the whole text of her 2013 book chapter by searching title and author on Google Scholar. I have cited it previously, but here are excerpts:

“Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the national modernist poet of Portugal, is famous for creating numerous authorial personae, which he called ‘heteronyms.’ These heteronyms wrote poetry, poetic prose, philosophical essays, literary theory and criticism, and even crossword puzzles. While indulging in this creative state of constant switching between one heteronym and another, Pessoa sometimes felt he had reached the bottom of depression. He believed that his ‘tendency toward depersonalisation…’ was caused by ‘a deep-seated form of hysteria, [or] pretended communication with diverse spirits,’ but that his ‘insanity [was] made sane by dilution…like a poison converted into a medicine by mixture.’…Pessoa cultivated a positive attitude toward his own multiplicity, nobodiness, and betweenness, which comprise the creative condition that we term Pessoa Syndrome…

“Writers’ nobodiness, manifested as a contradictory, fluid, or missing self, is not limited to the duration of the writing process. Depending on the vehemence of their engagement in that process, writers may remain in a state of nobodiness for longer periods of time outside the writing process. For incessant writers like Fernando Pessoa, nobodiness may become the primary mode of existence…

“Pessoa first experienced deep loneliness at the age of five when his father and brother died within less than a year of each other. He coped with the trauma by inventing an epistolary friend: ‘I can remember what I believe was my first heteronym, or rather, my first nonexistent acquaintance—a certain Chevalier de Pas— through whom I wrote letters to myself when I was six years old’…

“ ‘This tendency to create around me another world . . . began in me as a young adult, when a witty remark that was completely out of keeping with who I am or think I am would sometimes and for some unknown reason occur to me, and I would immediately, spontaneously say it as if it came from some friend of mine whose name I would invent, along with biographical details, and whose figure—physiognomy, stature, dress and gestures—I would immediately see before me’…

“Pessoa...became an individual with multiple personalities through his heteronymic writing. Therefore, a suitable name for Pessoa’s condition would be Multiple Personality Order…

“Pessoa seems to have been thrilled by this existence on the edge of madness, smoothened by the joys of creativity—and of wine, which eventually led him to cirrhosis and death…

“Pessoa’s specific form of Multiple Personality Order could thus be defined as an interactive arrangement of multiple creative personalities…

“Undoubtedly, there is a price to be paid for containing multitudes—mental breakdown, depression, and suicide mark the lives of numerous artists. But the magnificent achievements resulting from artists’ ability to depersonalise and impersonate—an ability most of us had in childhood and blocked later in order to grow up—should make us reconsider the understanding of mental wellness as a clear-cut self-identity…

“Acknowledging the Pessoa Syndrome in the works of visionary artists such as Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Melville, Kafka, Nabokov, Borges, and Philip Roth may lead to more adequate readings of their multidimensional texts” (1).

1. Katia Mitova. “The Pessoa Syndrome” in Davies, F., & Gonzalez, L. (eds.) Madness, Women and the Power of Art. Oxford, England: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013, pp. 153-179.

Paris Review Interview of Joan Didion (post 1): Her writing self imposes on her reading self; characters speak to her; narrative seems mysterious, arbitrary

The Paris Review is an American literary journal famous for its interviews of writers on the art of fiction. In the following excerpts from the interview of Joan Didion, she portrays herself as being divided into parts that have minds of their own; in effect, as having multiple personality trait. 

She says that her writing personality imposes her literary vision on her reading personality. She learns about her characters when they tell her surprising things about themselves. She says that her narrative strategy often seems mysterious and arbitrary to her (because she has limited awareness of what her alternate personalities are contributing).

INTERVIEWER: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

DIDION: It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way…

INTERVIEWER: Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?

DIDION: Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself…

DIDION: …I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don’t want to leave them ever.

INTERVIEWER: Do your characters talk to you?

DODION: After a while. In a way…And suddenly Charlotte says, “He runs guns. I wish they had caviar.” Well, when I heard Charlotte say this, I had a very clear fix on who she was. I went back and rewrote some early stuff…

DIDION: …I usually don’t know what’s on my mind. On the whole, I don’t want to think too much about why I write what I write…

INTERVIEWER: A narrative strategy.

DIDION: Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative strategy is very mysterious. It’s a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don’t do it would ever believe…

1. Linda Kuehl (interviewer, 1978). Joan Didion, pp. 407-424, in Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Edited by George Plimpton. Introduction by Margaret Atwood. New York, The Modern Library, 1998.

“Hideous Kinky” by Esther Freud (post 3): Arguing, Speculation, Comment

In the rest of the novel, the five-year-old narrator-protagonist has one more typical symptom of multiple personality: She hears “arguing” in her head (1, p. 165). Arguing entails two or more personalities with minds of their own.

As to explaining the two “impossibilities” noted in post 2 (the child’s never being addressed by name, and her narrating the novel with adult language), I can speculate: 

Speculation

Throughout the novel, the 5-year-old makes up stories to amuse people. The reader is usually not told what the stories are about, but only that the child is a known storyteller. So this “child” may be an alternate personality with no name whom I can refer to only by her function, storyteller. And as an alternate personality who has no name, and has never been knowingly met by the mother and older sister, naturally she could not have been addressed by them by name.

Who, then, is narrating the story using adult language? It would be an adult alternate personality, who is either the child storyteller personality grown up and telling the story of the novel retrospectively, or another adult storyteller personality, using the child storyteller as a medium of expression.

Comment

I do not put much stock in the details of my speculation. In my clinical experience with multiple personality, I would typically start with a person’s memory gap, ask to speak with the one who was in control at that time, and then see the person switch to the relevant alternate personality, who would tell me what had gone on during that time, which was often verifiable.

But what the alternate personality would tell me, almost always surprised me. It was rarely what I had guessed or speculated. So my above speculation may be right about its having something to do with the author’s alternate personalities, but the details are probably incorrect.

1. Esther Freud. Hideous Kinky. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

“Hideous Kinky” by Esther Freud (post 2): Why does five-year-old, nameless, first-person narrator have vocabulary and sentences of eloquent adult?

I don’t understand how Esther Freud could have intended to write a novel with the following two impossibilities: a 5-year-old child whose mother and older sister never address her by name, and the 5-year-old child narrates the novel using the language of an often eloquent adult.

I still have 30% of the novel left to read, and maybe I’ll figure it out.

1. Esther Freud. Hideous Kinky. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

“Hideous Kinky” by Esther Freud (post 1): Nameless narrator-protagonist hears herself  “as if it were someone else’s voice,” which is multiple consciousness

In the first third of this novel, the five-year-old narrator-protagonist has come from England with her mother and older sister to live in Morocco. Her mother and sister have not addressed her by name. And when I listened to the author interviewed (online), she was asked about her protagonist’s namelessness. She said the character was herself (Esther Freud), but not exactly; she knew it was ridiculous for the mother and sister to never address the girl by name; and she had found the naming issue confusing.

Search “namelessness” and “nameless narrator” for past posts on this recurring subject.

At one point in the story, there is a disturbance—a conflict with neighbors—and the narrator-protagonist says: “ ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ I could hear myself screaming as if it were someone else’s voice” (1, p. 62). This implies two personalities, the one hearing and the one screaming, which is dual or multiple consciousness.

Since the symptoms of multiple personality—namelessness and multiple consciousness—are not integral to the author’s intentions for plot and character development, this is another example of gratuitous multiple personality, meaning that the symptoms of multiple personality are probably in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology (multiple personality trait).

1. Esther Freud. Hideous Kinky. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. 

“Pessoa” by Richard Zenith: The Index of this 1100-page biography makes only one mention of “Pessoa’s multiple personalities,” referring to Pessoa’s own words

“I’ve created in myself various personalities. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I” (1, p. 181).

I don’t see anything in the Index to indicate that the biographer inquired as to whether Fernando Pessoa had memory gaps or any other feature of multiple personality.

1. Richard Zenith. Pessoa: A Biography. New York, Liveright Publishing/WW Norton, 2021.

Search “Pessoa” to see seven previous posts related to this writer.

Simone de Beauvoir (post 2): Multiple Consciousness and Puzzling Self-Contradiction suggest a fiction writer with multiple personality trait

In the last half of The Mandarins, there are three examples of multiple consciousness. First, when Paula is home after a psychiatric hospitalization, Anne (the character most representative of the author in this semi-autobiographical novel) describes how her friend Paula’s handwriting has changed and matured (1, p. 627). A sudden maturation in a person’s handwriting suggests a change from a child-aged to an adult alternate personality. Second, after Anne’s lover admits that he no longer loves her, Anne has dissociated, multiple consciousness: “I heard my voice from a long way off” (1, p. 653). Third, contemplating suicide at the end of the novel, Anne says, “Someone was going to poison me. It was I; it was no longer I” (1, p. 734). Readers of old posts know that she wouldn’t have been the first character in a novel who was killed by her alternate personality.

Simone de Beauvoir was bisexual and had her teaching license temporarily revoked for allegedly seducing a female student (2), which, for the famous feminist author of The Second Sex, were remarkable, puzzling, self-contradictions.

Deirdre Bair sums up her impression of Simone de Beauvoir on the last page of her biography: “Much that she did confused her supporters and confounded her critics…She was affectionate, generous, witty and wise, but she was also quirky and opinionated, gruff and sometimes without a sense of humor. She was a beautiful woman unaware of her striking physical presence, but she was also awkward and ill-kempt…a cultural icon. She regretted being known in France as ‘Our Sacred Monster’…She may have been a mass of contradictions…” (3, p. 618).

1. Simone de Beauvoir. The Mandarins [1954]. Translated by Leonard M. Friedman. Introduction by Doris Lessing [1993]. London, Harper Perennial, 2005.

2. Wikipedia. “Simone de Beauvoir.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir

3. Deirdre Bair. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York, Summit Books, 1990.

“The Mandarins” by Simone de Beauvoir (post 1): Four quotes from first half of novel

Wikipedia Synopsis

“The Mandarins is a 1954 roman à clef by Simone de Beauvoir, for which she won the Prix Goncourt, awarded to the best and most imaginative prose work of the year. The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s. The title refers to the scholar-bureaucrats of imperial China. The characters at times see themselves as ineffectual ‘mandarins’ as they attempt to discern what role, if any, intellectuals will have in influencing the political landscape of the world after World War II. As in Beauvoir's other works, themes of feminism, existentialism, and personal morality are explored as the characters navigate not only the intellectual and political landscape but also their shifting relationships with each other…In her autobiography de Beauvoir denies that The Mandarins is a roman à clef” and says that the characters are are not exactly like herself, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus (1).

Four Quotes

“It’s preposterous, the liberties one takes with the characters in a novel…If you look closely enough, every character in a novel is a monster, and all art consists in preventing the reader from looking too closely” (2, p. 156).

“…a gentle ecstatic voice inside him would whisper that the book he was writing would be good and that nothing in the world was more important” (2, p. 21).

“But a voice settled in Henri’s breast and kept repeating, ‘The daughter did, too.’ And all through the afternoon, it kept repeating that refrain” (2, p. 372).

“It’s true that Dubreuilh is a split personality. But I’m surprised to see you criticizing him for that; I am like him, you know” (2, p. 337).

Comment

In nonpsychotic persons, voices may be from alternate personalities. When the Sartre and Camus characters are explicitly said to have a “split personality” (an informal term for multiple personality), it may be meant either as a joke or as a matter-of-fact observation.

1. Wikipedia. “The Mandarins.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mandarins

2. Simone de Beauvoir. The Mandarins [1954]. Translated by Leonard M. Friedman. Introduction by Doris Lessing [1993]. London, Harper Perennial, 2005. 

Memory in Multiple Personality has Advantages

Most people do not want to remember every trivial detail of what happens in their everyday life. They want to remember what is useful to remember. A good memory is one that forgets trivia and remembers what is important.

However, in multiple personality, there are separate memory banks for each personality. So it would be practical to have a personality that did remember seemingly trivial details. You could even have a personality who remembered things that never happened, fantasies, because other personalities would be grounded in reality. True, some personalities would have memory gaps for times that other personalities were in control, but the latter would recall what happened.

Sympathy for Book Reviewers: They may know an author has multiple personality, but admire the author and don’t want to imply mental illness

That appeared to be the situation of the reviewers I chided in my last two posts for their circumlocutions about Fernando Pessoa and Shirley Jackson.

Their problem was that they didn’t know how to say “multiple personality” without implying mental illness.

The solution is “multiple personality trait,” because it acknowledges multiple personality, per se, but “trait” (as opposed to “disorder”) does not imply illness.

“The Alternating Identities of Shirley Jackson”: Once again, New York Times describes a writer’s multiple personality, but doesn’t explicitly name it

Laura Miller. New York Times, July 11, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/books/review/laurence-jackson-hyman-the-letters-of-shirley-jackson.html

“Pessoa: A Biography” by Richard Zenith: Two New York Times book reviews (1, 2) fail to explicitly note multiple personality of writer who was famous for multiple personality

When I once spoke with a literature professor about my idea that most fiction writers have multiple personality, she was skeptical. She said that the only writer she knew of who had multiple personality was Pessoa.

1. Parul Sehgal. “ ‘Pessoa’ Is the Definitive and Sublime Life of a Genius and His Many Alternate Selves.” New York Times, July 13, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/books/review-pessoa-biography-richard-zenith.html

Added July 15, 2021:

2. Benjamin Moser. “Fernando Pessoa: Office Worker, Occultist, Galaxy of Writers.” New York Times, July 13, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/books/review/fernando-pessoa-biography-richard-zenith.html

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera (post 3): Multiple personality is when a person—a character or an author—has more than one “I”

In post 2, I interpreted Tereza’a grasping her lover while she was partially asleep as being the action of an alternate personality. But since multiple personality originates in childhood, it would be nice to have evidence that Tereza’s alternate personality originated in childhood:

“Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas’s hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training for it since childhood” (1, pp. 54-55).

Another reason to infer multiple personality is that Tereza studies herself in the mirror for a very peculiar reason. She worries that facial features similar to her mother’s may indicate the intrusion of her mother’s “I” and the “confiscation” of her own:

“It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own ‘I’…she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face…Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother’s features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew [plural] charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation” (1, p. 41). Now we can better understand the meaning of Tereza’s secret vice, her long looks and frequent glances in the mirror. It was a battle with her mother” (1, p. 47). From childhood on, Tereza had been ashamed of the way her mother occupied the features of her face and confiscated her ‘I’ ” (1, p. 298).

The author, himself, says that his characters are an extension, the “unrealized possibilities,” of his own “I”:

“As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

“But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?

“…The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ‘I’ ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about” (1, p. 221).

Comment

People who don’t have multiple personality are multifaceted, and have various situation-appropriate roles in their everyday life. But they don’t think about their “I” or whether it has been intruded upon or whether it has been extrapolated. They take having one basic sense of self for granted.

1. Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera (post 2): Does a guardian alternate personality take over when Tereza’s host personality sleeps?

“…they both looked forward to sleeping together. I might even say that the goal of their lovemaking was not so much pleasure as the sleep that followed it…Whenever she [Tereza] stayed [by herself] overnight in her rented room…, she was unable to fall asleep; in his [Tomas’s] arms [at his home] she would fall asleep no matter how wrought up she might have been…

“While they slept, she held him…, keeping a firm grip on [his] wrist, finger, or ankle…she guarded him carefully even in her sleep…

“Once, when he had just lulled her to sleep but she had gone no farther than dream’s antechamber and was therefore still responsive to him, he said to her, ‘Good-bye, I’m going now,’ ‘Where?’ she asked in her sleep. ‘Away,’ he answered sternly. ‘Then I’m going with you,’ she said, sitting up in bed. ‘No, you can’t. I’m going away for good,’ he said, going out into the hall. She stood up and followed him out, squinting…Her face was blank, expressionless, but she moved energetically…She [was] convinced in her sleep that he meant to leave her for good and she had to stop him. He walked down the stairs to the first landing and waited for her there. She went down after him, took him by the hand, and led him back to bed” (1, pp. 14-15).

1. Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.

Before reading “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera (post 1): Author’s perspective from his nonfiction “The Art of the Novel”

“All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self” (1, p. 23).

“In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza is staring at herself in the mirror…And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza still be Tereza? Where does the self begin and end?” (1, p. 28).

“The original title considered for The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The Planet of Inexperience.” Inexperience as a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what we’re headed for: the old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience” (1, p. 132).

“The final version of [Anna Karenina] is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work” (1, p. 158).

1. Milan Kundera. The Art of the Novel [1986]. Translated from the French by Linda Asher. New York, Harper Perennial, 2003.

2. Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey (post 6): The novel’s most important psychological and literary issue is the narrator’s multiple personality

In post 1, I quoted the author, Ken Kesey: “Without the character of that Indian, the book is a melodrama. You know, it’s a straight battle between McMurphy and Big Nurse. With that Indian’s consciousness to filter that through, that makes it exceptional.” Thus, a discussion of Bromden’s, the narrator’s, consciousness is not a detour into minutiae, but the novel’s most important psychological and literary issue.

In previous posts, I noted Bromden’s alternate personality with the small self-image, which had been unknown to all the doctors and nurses who had treated him for many years (multiple personality is usually hidden and secretive). It is accidentally discovered in conversation by McMurphy, who then uses common sense to facilitate the growth of Bromden’s small personality or, and perhaps more likely, a switch to a preexisting big personality.

At the end, Bromden’s big personality kills McMurphy (mercifully?) after the latter is lobotomized, and then escapes from the psychiatric hospital. All the reader can be sure of regarding the rest of Bromden’s life is that he has written this memoir (which is a confession to murder).

The reader has no way of knowing whether Bromden’s big personality is a good guy or a bad guy. Perhaps the small personality had replaced the big personality, because the latter had tended to do bad things.

Moreover, as I have mentioned in many past posts, persons with multiple personality almost always have more than two personalities, so the issue of what Bromden was “really” like would be more complicated.

1. Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1962]. New York, Penguin Books, 2007.