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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

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Monday, August 30, 2021

“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.

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