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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, April 16, 2022

“Asymmetry” by Lisa Halliday: People keep visiting my 2018 post (below), with its quotation from this novel about a character’s memory gaps, a cardinal symptom of multiple personality


2018

“Asymmetry” by Lisa Halliday: Parts 1 and 2 differ, not only in people and culture, but in punctuation and memory; one character has memory gaps


Part I of this novel begins: “…what is the point of a book…that does not have any quotation marks?” (1, first paragraph), meaning not just that dialogue is interesting, but that punctuation clarifies.


One hundred and twenty-five pages later, Part 2 of this novel, with a new cast of characters, has plenty of dialogue. But there are no quotation marks. It intentionally obfuscates.


And whereas people in Part 1 seem to know what they’re doing, at least one character in Part 2 does not. In spite of keeping a journal, and with no drugs or alcohol involved, he says that time and events go missing (which I notice, because memory gaps may be a symptom of multiple personality):


“It’s as if I blacked out for entire weeks at a time…What don’t I remember? Lots. Contemplating the blackouts in their aggregate makes my breath come short…writing things down does not work” (1, pp. 137-138).


In an interview, the author has said that, in some ways, Part 2 is autobiographical (2). Are memory gaps an example?


Only halfway, I will keep reading.


1. Lisa Halliday. Asymmetry. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2018.

2. https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/lisa-halliday-discusses-her-novel-asymmetry.html

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