“The Fixer” by Bernard Malamud (post 2): Fellow prisoner describes apparent alcoholic blackout that is probably a multiple personality memory gap

“What are you [Yakov, the fixer, a handyman] accused of?” [asks his fellow prisoner].

“The fixer touched his lips with a dry tongue. “Whatever they’ve accused me of I didn’t do. I give you my word. It’s too complicated to go into without turning it into a wearying tale, something I don’t understand myself.”

“I’m a murderer,” said Fetyukov. “I stabbed a stranger at the inn in my village. He provoked me so I stabbed him twice, once in the chest, and when he was falling, once in the back. That was the end of him. I had had more than a drop or two, but when they told me what I had done I was greatly surprised. I’m a peaceful man, I never make trouble if you don’t provoke me. Who would’ve thought I could murder anybody? If you had told me any such thing I would have laughed at you to your face.”

“The fixer, staring at the murderer, edged sideways along the wall. At the same time he saw two other prisoners sneaking up on him, one from either side. As he cried out, Fetyukov reached behind him whipping a short heavy stick out of his trousers. He struck Yakov a hard blow on the head. The fixer went down on one knee, holding both hands over his pain-wracked, bloody head, then fell over” (1, pp. 149-150).

Comment

Yakov’s fellow prisoners assault him, because they mistakenly think he had been put among them as a snitch. But, incidentally, the story that the murderer tells about himself is typical of a person with multiple personality who switches to a violent alternate personality and then has a memory gap when he switches back to his regular personality. He accepts what he has done, because it is obvious from circumstantial evidence, but he doesn’t actually remember doing it.

It is rare for a person with multiple personality to be a murderer, but it does happen (2). If a murderer had been drinking, the murder could be mistakenly attributed to pathological intoxication, overlooking the person’s multiple personality.

Why does this novel unnecessarily include this multiple personality scenario in a minor character? It may reflect the author’s psychological interest (based on his own multiple personality trait).

1. Bernard Malamud. The Fixer [1966]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004.

2. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, MD., et al. Objective Documentation of Child Abuse and Dissociation in 12 Murderers With Dissociative Identity Disorder. American J Psychiatry, Dec 1, 1997. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.154.12.1703

Aug. 31: I finished the novel and found nothing else of interest here.

“The Fixer” by Bernard Malamud (post 1): National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning novel based on real-life Jewish handyman accused of ritual murder

The handyman, who was acquitted, had written a memoir, and his descendants accused Malamud of plagiarism (1).

I have just started reading The Fixer to see if it has anything related to multiple personality, and this is what I have found so far:

“Where do you go if you had been nowhere? He hid at first in the Jewish quarter, emerging stealthily from time to time to see what there was to see in the world, exploring, trying to find the firmness of the earth. Kiev, ‘the Jerusalem of Russia,’ still awed and disquieted him. He had been there for a few hot summer days after being conscripted into the army, and now, again, he saw it with half the self—the other half worried about his worries” (2, p. 29).

I infer that the author experienced similar divisions in himself: separate thinking parts (alternate personalities).

1. Wikipedia. “The Fixer (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fixer_(novel)

2. Bernard Malamud. The Fixer [1966]. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004.

ALWAYS vs. NEVER Seeing Unlabeled Multiple Personality in Literature: Which is ridiculous?

It would be ridiculous for most literary criticism to always focus on signs of unlabeled multiple personality the way I do in this specialized blog, because it is not a major issue in most works of literature.

But it would be equally ridiculous for anyone’s literary criticism to never raise the issue, because it is a significant feature of some great literature and a reflection of the author's mind in most fiction.

“So Long, See You Tomorrow” by William Maxwell: Nameless narrator experiences himself as “two boys” with memory gap for fantasy

“In the insufficiently heated bedroom on the northwest corner of the house in Park Place I was taken by surprise by the first intimations of a pleasure that I did not at first know how to elicit from or return to the body that gave rise to it, which was my own. It had no images connected with it, and no object but pure physical sensation. It was as if I had found a way of singing that did not come from the throat. I stumbled upon it by accident and it did not cross my mind that anybody might ever have had this experience except me. Therefore I did not connect these piercing exquisite sensations with the act of murder that removed Cletus Smith from Lincoln, or with what other men and women did that was all right for them to do provided they were married. Or even with what older boys talked about in the locker room at school. It was an all but passive, wholly private passion that turned me into two boys, one of whom went to high school and was conscientious about handing in his homework and tried out for the glee club and the debating society and lingered after school talking to his algebra teacher. The other boy was moody and guilt-ridden and desired nothing from other people but their absence” (1, pp. 47-48).

Comment

The above suggests to me that William Keepers Maxwell Jr. had multiple personality trait since childhood. If you would argue that what he describes is entirely routine and merely cultural for high school boys from his background, please submit your comment.

1. William Maxwell. So Long, See You Tomorrow [1980]. New York, Vintage International, 1996.

I have finished this short novel and found nothing further of interest here. 

Please submit comments or questions if you know more than I do or less, but not if in complete agreement.

“The Snatch” by Bill Pronzini: Hero’s hearing voices and Villain controlled by a “presence” suggest author’s multiple personality trait

In this, the first novel of the author’s Nameless Detective Mystery series (1, 2), the hero hears the voice of his girlfriend in his head; and the villain seems to have been controlled by an alternate personality.

Hero Hears Voices

“I could hear Erika’s voice saying over and over in my mind, When are you going to grow up? Do you think you’ve got the body of a teenager? When are you going to grow up?” (3, p. 38).

Most people would remember what someone said to them, and picture, with their mind’s eye, the person who said it, but they wouldn’t actually hear a voice in their head. The author probably heard the character’s voice in his head, and so he attributed that kind of experience to his hero. Also note, as I’ve previously commented upon, the use of italics for quoting voices.

Villain’s “Ghastly Presence”

The hero is surprised by who turns out to be the villain, because what the villain has done seems so out-of-character:

“What motivates you [the hero asks the villain]?”

“Something, a ghastly presence, came and went on his [the villain’s] face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said with a kind of sick wonder. ‘I don’t know!’ ” (3, p. 152).

When alternate personalities come out for just a moment, they may be manifest as a transient change in facial expression.

Comment

When sane people hear voices, they are usually the voices of alternate personalities.

The author’s use of the phrase “ghastly presence” suggests that he may have been thinking in terms of supernatural possession, rather than in psychological terms of multiple personality. But possession is just an old explanation for alternate personalities.

The author’s use of namelessness (common among alternate personalities) and multiple pseudonyms (2) are also suggestive of multiple personality trait.

1. Wikipedia. “Bill Pronzini.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Pronzini

2. Wikipedia. “Bill Pronzini Bibliography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Pronzini_bibliography

3. Bill Pronzini. The Snatch [1971]. Naples FL, Speaking Volumes, 2011.

“The Hair of Harold Roux” by Thomas Williams: In National Book Award novel that resonates with writers, a fiction writer hears voices and has a memory gap

“The novel is a favorite among writers such as Joseph Heller, Andre Dubus III, and Stephen King, who dedicated his 1993 story collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes to Williams and described The Hair of Harold Roux as a book ‘I keep coming back to. I've read it four or five times,’ King said. ‘It's a couple of days in the life of this guy, Aaron Benham, who's writing a book about a man who is writing a book. It's this little house of mirrors. I love it because it tells the truth as I understand it about what it is to be a writer’ ” (1).

Voices

This is the first sentence of the novel: “Aaron Benham sits at his desk hearing the wrong voices” (2). It appears metaphorical, but readers of this blog will not be fooled.

Memory Gap

His wife and children have traveled to celebrate her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, but he has forgotten it and they left without him. He feels embarrassed and phones his mother-in-law to apologize.

Comment

I can see why this novel resonates with fiction writers: Hearing voices and having memory gaps are features of multiple personality trait.

I don’t plan to read the rest of this novel, because I don’t have patience for its stories in stories. But you might enjoy them.

1. Wikipedia. “The Hair of Harold Roux.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hair_of_Harold_Roux

2. Thomas Williams. The Hair of Harold Roux [1974]. Hanover NH, University Press of New England, 1995.

“Priestdaddy” memoir and “Rape Joke” poem by Patricia Lockwood (post 3): Did her being “crazy” for five years include multiple personality's memory gaps?

The poem is discussed with her parents in the memoir (1, pp. 113-116), but they do not address what the poem says:

“It was a year before you told your parents, because he [the rapist] was like a son to them” and she was “crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there…” (2).

1. Patricia Lockwood. Priestdaddy. Memoir. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.

2. “Rape Joke.” https://www.theawl.com/2013/07/patricia-lockwood-rape-joke/

Aug. 23: I finished the memoir and have nothing to add.

“Rape Joke” poem by Patricia Lockwood (post 2)

https://www.theawl.com/2013/07/patricia-lockwood-rape-joke/

Aug. 21 Note: First line of Lockwood’s poem “Rape Joke” is as follows: “The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.” According to Wikipedia, the poem is nonfiction, autobiographical. So will the rape be discussed in Priestdaddy, a memoir, which includes the time she was nineteen?

And why does the poem say the rape happened to “you” not “I”? Is it for purely literary reasons? Or was the poem written by another personality, her poet personality, who is speaking to and about the personality who did experience the rape?

“Priestdaddy” a memoir by Patricia Lockwood (post 1): Biblical reference, father’s shorts, “Bit” could not go to college, felt her body was not her own

Biblical Reference

Family photo: “There is my father on a five-week ‘biblical archaeological dig,’ wearing white short shorts…There he is standing on the spot where the herd of demon swine were driven squealing into the Sea of Galilee” (1, p. 4).

The biblical reference is to the story in Mark 5, which, from a purely psychological perspective, is about Jesus’s exorcism of a man who contained multitudes, a man who had multiple personality, with about two thousand alternate personalities:

“For [Jesus] had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many’…Now a great herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside…And the unclean spirits came out, and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.”

Shorts, “Bit,” Body

“At nineteen, I ought to have been in college along with the rest of my high school class…I had applied and been accepted…He [her father] was wearing his most formal boxer shorts, the ones you could almost not see through. He patted a spot next to him on the overstuffed leather sofa…

“ ‘We can’t do it, Bit,’ he said…as if it couldn’t be helped. ‘The money just isn’t there’ he explained, which made me think of a smoke-and-mirrors trick: poof, and the pile of money is gone…

“ ‘Okay,’ I said, automatic, from a body that didn’t seem to be mine. I didn’t ask a single question…” (1, pp. 15-16).

Comment

The biblical reference to multiple personality could be pure chance.

Her father’s habit of wearing see-through shorts might not imply anything sexual.

The nickname “Bit” could be a term of endearment, not the name of an alternate personality connected to her feeling that her body wasn’t hers.

1. Patricia Lockwood. Priestdaddy. A memoir. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.

“The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen (post 1): Pulitzer Prize novel begins with nameless first-person narrator’s declaration of multiple personality

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But in the month when this confession begins, my way of seeing the world still seemed more of a virtue than a danger, which is how some dangers first appear” (1, p. 1).

He does not feel he can see both sides due to skepticism, fair-mindedness, or judiciousness, as a person with only one personality would.

He feels as though he has two minds that check, challenge, and contradict each other. And the only things that would cause that kind of subjective experience are alternate personalities.

However, multiple personality, per se, is unintentional and unacknowledged, as in most novels.

1. Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Sympathizer. New York, Grove Press, 2015.

Added later same day: I may come back to this novel in the future, and give it another chance, but today, after the opening, I did not find the narrator engaging.

“On the Art of Fiction” by Alice McDermott (post 3) 

McDermott discusses a number of writers’ works that I have also discussed, but I’ll mention just two: Henry James’s story “The Middle Years” (1, p. 186), famous for his phrase “the madness of art,” and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography (1, p. 217).

Search “madness of art” to read my post on the James character’s plural self-reference. Search “Nabokov autobiography” to read his extensive descriptions of his memory gaps and dissociative fugues.

At the conclusion of McDermott’s book on the art of fiction, she says:

“If you can do anything else, I tell aspiring writers now, if you can do anything other than pursue this literary fiction thing and still sleep at night and wake joyful in the morning and know that the hours of your days have been well spent, then you should do that—that other thing. The beauty of the advice is how quickly it clarifies, for some of us, what we’ve always known: Of course we can’t. We can’t” (1, p. 237).

Perhaps there is something about the fiction writer’s mind which inclines them to that kind of creativity.

1. Alice McDermott. What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2021.

“A Bigamist’s Daughter” by Alice McDermott (post 2): Last lines highlight protagonist’s secretiveness and lying, symptoms of multiple personality

In the novel’s last three lines, the protagonist describes herself as she begins a journey and expects to meet new men. She is: “A hall of mirrors and secrets. A mystery. If she likes him, she knows she’ll lie” (1, p. 294).

The novel’s title issue—whether her father was a bigamist—is never answered.

There is one example of hearing the voice of an alternate personality: “I heard myself urging me to ask him…” (1, p. 134).

But the ultimate issues of this novel, which the author highlights with her last lines, are secretiveness and lying. And the main thing for readers to understand is that these are common symptoms of multiple personality.

The secretiveness is based on alternate personalities’ wish to maintain their privacy. The lying has two main causes: 1. different personalities may differ in their memories, interests, and opinions, resulting in views that may contradict each other and what other people know and see, and 2. some personalities like to make things up (which is good for fiction writing).

Since lying in multiple personality is a recurrent subject in this blog, please search “lying” to read many discussions regarding other writers.

As in most novels, the issue of multiple personality is unacknowledged, and its symptoms are present only as a reflection of the author’s psychology.

1. Alice McDermott. A Bigamist’s Daughter [1982]. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012.

“A Bigamist’s Daughter” by Alice McDermott (post 1): Bigamy suggests multiple personality, as seen in earlier novel by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer

When I saw that Alice McDermott was to be featured in today’s New York Times Book Review (1), I decided to read her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter (2). I am halfway through.

It has just occurred to me that I have previously read a novel about a bigamist: Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Enemies, A Love Story was published in 1972. It’s author, Isaac Bashevis Singer, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. A Bigamist’s Daughter was published in 1982.

I don’t know if Singer’s novel was known to McDermott. Singer’s novel was not mentioned by Anne Tyler in her review of A Bigamist’s Daughter (3).

To see that bigamy is a subject that lends itself to multiple personality, search “Isaac Bashevis Singer” to read my past posts.

1. “Alice McDermott Is Reading ‘Frankenstein’ for the First Time” in The New York Times Book Review of Aug. 15, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/books/review/alice-mcdermott-by-the-book-interview.html

2. Alice McDermott. A Bigamist’s Daughter [1982]. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012.

3. Anne Tyler. “A Bigamist’s Daughter” by Alice McDermott. The New York Times, February 21, 1982. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/mcdermott-bigamist.html

Why do fiction writers, in essays and interviews, say their characters speak, and they hear the voices? Are they joking, seeking validation, or bragging?

For many years, I thought they were joking. But after seeing multiple personality in some of my patients, I realized that such things were possible.

My next guess as to why fiction writers were making this public was that they sought validation. Every time they said they heard voices and were not called crazy, they were reassured.

Then it occurred to me that the fiction writers were bragging: They have multiple personality trait and most people don’t.

Of course, it could be all three: They are bragging, seeking validation, and have a sense of humor.

“A Window Opens” by Elisabeth Egan: Mentally well protagonist hears rational voices, probably voices of alternate personalities

Alice is the first-person narrator of her job and family struggles (1, 2). Near the beginning and end of this novel, Alice casually mentions that she hears voices. The author may have assumed, as do many novelists, that everyone hears voices, but most people don’t.

Mentally well novelists may assume that everyone hears voices, because 90% of novelists probably do hear voices. But 70% of the mentally well public probably do not hear voices.

Voices heard by the mentally well are probably the voices of alternate personalities in multiple personality trait (the mentally well version of multiple personality disorder). Those persons in the general public who have that trait are more likely to become fiction writers, because it is an asset in writing fiction (as discussed in past posts).

Alice’s Voices

“The waiter arrived and deposited two mugs on our table as I struggled to heed my inner voice, which tends to be more sensible than my actual one. (Bossy, too.)” (1, p. 50).

“There was another voice in my head…and it belonged to my [deceased] dad…You have a voice. Use it. (1, p. 332). As noted in past posts, the words of voices in novels are often written in italics.

Comment

Since the symptom of multiple personality in this novel—hearing voices—was not intended by the author to raise the issue of multiple personality, and is neither integral to the plot nor necessary to character development, it is one more example of “gratuitous multiple personality,” and is probably in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.

1. Elisabeth Egan. A Window Opens. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2015.

2. Alexandra Alter. “Elisabeth Egan's ‘A Window Opens’ Has Echoes of Her Amazon Odyssey.” The New York Times, Aug. 19, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/books/elisabeth-egans-a-window-opens-has-echoes-of-her-amazon-odyssey.html

“Intimacies” by Katie Kitamura: Front flap suggests multiple personality

The nameless protagonist, a first-person narrator, is a simultaneous translator for the international court at The Hague in the Netherlands. The front flap calls her “a woman of many languages and identities” (1), which inadvertently suggests a subtext of multiple personality.

Her namelessness, in and of itself, suggests multiple personality, because there is only one psychological circumstance in life where namelessness is not uncommon: alternate personalities in multiple personality.

The protagonist’s archenemy and antithesis is her lover’s, Adriaan’s, estranged wife, Gaby, who is criticized for having a single personality: “Gaby has always been herself, Adriaan said irritably” (1, p. 41).

In contrast, the protagonist saw “the prospect offered by a new relationship [as] the opportunity to be someone other than yourself” (1, p. 47).

She thinks of herself as having “parts,” a common euphemism for alternate personality: “A part of me was relieved” (1, pp. 76-77).

But sometimes “The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable” (1, p. 101).

Of course, men, too, may be mutable: “He appeared different in some way that I could not immediately identify, as if another version of himself were poking through the familiar exterior” (1, p. 220).

Comment

Since the author did not intend to raise the issue of multiple personality, its inadvertent presence in the subtext may reflect the author’s psychology.

1. Katie Kitamura. Intimacies. New York, Riverhead Books, 2021.

“Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (post 5): Ending possibly explained by multiple personality

Marian Says She’s Still Dead

“But for me, Once Killed, this ghost of Marian loves no more, No more..except the child!..no more at all. I told your cousin, sir, that I was dead; And now, she thinks I’ll get up from my grave…” (1, p. 297).

She feels that her dissociated (ghostly) Marian personality had been a degraded hero-worshipper, but her mothering Marian personality is upstanding and self-respecting.

Romney’s Blindness

Since there is no clear medical explanation, he may have had what used to be called “hysterical blindness.”

“Visual disturbances, ranging from ‘hysterical diplopia’ [double vision] to complete blindness, are reported in about a fifth of MPD patients” (2, p. 66).

Aurora’s Hidden Love for Romney

“Now I know I loved you always, Romney” (1, p. 305).

Aurora may have had warring male (writing) and female (loving) personalities: “It seems as if I had a man in me, Despising such a woman” (1, p. 221). But now these personalities have made peace.

1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh [1856/1859]. Edited by Margaret Reynolds. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton, 1996.

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

“Aurora Leigh” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (post 4): “Marian’s dead,” says Marian (or is it Marian’s alternate personality who is speaking?)

In the Sixth Book, Marian Erle, the lower class, poorly educated woman whom Aurora’s cousin, Rodney, had been about to marry, had suddenly disappeared on the wedding day. She is eventually found by chance by Aurora in Paris. Lady Waldemar, who had wanted to marry Rodney, had tricked Marian, had sent her away, and Marian had wound up drugged and raped in a Paris brothel. She is now caring for her baby.

Marian says: “Marian’s dead…I’m dead, I say…I’m nothing more but just a mother. Only for the child…just for him!…” (1, p. 204).

Marian starts by referring to herself in the third person (“Marian’s dead”), which may mean that the Marian who is “dead” is not the one speaking. The one speaking may be an alternate personality who specializes in child care.

But she quickly changes to first person, which may be the alternate personality’s way of hiding: Alternate personalities prefer to remain incognito and don’t want people to think that the person is crazy.

I will see if this is clarified in the rest of the novel.

1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh [1856/1859]. Edited by Margaret Reynolds. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton, 1996.

Added Aug. 9: In multiple personality, a personality is referred to as "dead" when it is inside and unable to come out. But it is still there and could be resurrected, so to speak, as when Dr. Manette, a character with multiple personality in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, was "recalled to life."