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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Thursday, August 26, 2021

“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.

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