“Animal Farm” by George Orwell: Multiple personality issues are more apparent in Orwell’s “Why I Write” and “1984” (See below). In “Animal Farm,” it is only this:

When repeatedly faced with the refrain, “Squealer was soon able to convince them that their memories were at fault” (1, p 98), readers tend to accept totalitarian intimidation as the only issue, but if that were the case, then they would privately remember the truth and only pretend not to remember. So the intimidation is evidently causing them to switch to an alternate personality that, even privately, does not remember.

1. George Orwell. Animal Farm. New York, Signet Classics, 1946/2020.

Note added May 5: Another explanation would be that intimidation induced hypnosis, and then suggestion modified memories; however, some people with multiple personality are among the most highly hypnotizable. Indeed, one old theory for multiple personality is that it involves self-hypnosis as an escape from trauma in childhood.

2017

“Why I Write” by George Orwell: He is “driven on” and must "efface one's own personality” due to alternate personalities he “can neither resist nor understand”

He converses with, or gets out of the way of (“efface one’s own personality”), alternate personalities (“imaginary persons,” “demon”) who take over and which he “can neither resist nor understand”:

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer…

“I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons…

“…for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise…the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind…This habit continued till I was about twenty-five…Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside…

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand…And…one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality…” (1).

Why did Eric Arthur Blair continue to use a pseudonym (George Orwell) after everyone knew who he was?

Judging from what he says about why he writes, the pseudonym would seem to have been an acknowledgement that his regular personality, Eric Blair, was not the personality mainly responsible for his serious writing.

Search “pseudonyms” for past posts on other writers.

1. George Orwell. “Why I Write” (1947), pp. 243-248 in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism, second edition, edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

2017

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell: In Chapter One, Winston Smith’s alternate personality writes “Down With Big Brother” in his diary.

Winston Smith, the protagonist, begins a diary, about which, two things—the origin of what he writes and his handwriting—are specified:

 

1. “The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.” 2. “His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops” (1, p. 7).

The origin of the content of Winston Smith’s diary recalls what George Orwell had written in his essay “Why I Write” (see previous post), which I again quote: “…for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise…the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind…This habit continued till I was about twenty-five…Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside…”

In the novel, why is Winston Smith’s style of handwriting specified? Because seven pages later, his handwriting changes: “His eyes refocused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals— DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” (1, p. 14).

Thus, in both Orwell’s nonfiction essay and his novel, writing is described as not being under the control of the person’s regular personality; rather, it is “against my will, under a kind of compulsion” and “by automatic action.”

Indeed, the novel takes this two steps further. Winston Smith has amnesia, a memory gap, for having written “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.” And he writes it in a different handwriting.

These things—automatic (nonvolitional, involuntary, dissociated) writing, amnesia, and a change in handwriting style—are evidence of the presence of an alternate personality.

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

2017

“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell: Only multiple personality could account for the switches, memory gaps, and contradictory beliefs about war.

It is a running joke in this novel that the nation’s enemy and ally frequently switch places; that the people immediately change which nation they hate; and that the people immediately forget that they have made that switch. This could only happen if each person had two personalities who differed in their view of who was the enemy.

The attitude toward war also illustrates that multiple personality is present, perhaps even more present, in the most powerful members of the Party:

“The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members…is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones; but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously…(1, p. 128).

“Splitting of the intelligence” (see above) is a euphemism for split personality (an informal term for multiple personality).

1. George Orwell. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism. Edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.

2017

“Doublethink” of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell is taken from multiple personality: Alternate personalities have alternate views of reality. 

It is a basic feature of multiple personality that one personality will know something that another personality does not; that two personalities will hold contradictory opinions; and that different personalities will differ in their views of reality. With that in mind, consider these definitions of “doublethink” from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth” (1).

1. Wikipedia. “Doublethink.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink