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, May 21, 2022

My Letter Submitted to New York Times on Batuman’s borrowing the title for her novel Either/Or from a work written by Kierkegaard’s alternate personalities


TO THE EDITOR:

Elif Batuman borrowed the title of her [new] novel Either/Or from Kierkegaard, who said that [his original work] Either/Or had been written by three of his pseudonyms: “Victor Eremita,” “A,” and “Judge William.”


Kierkegaard insisted that “in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader…It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me.”


Did Elif Batuman mean to imply the same kind of thing about her own writing process or did she borrow the title without knowing how Kierkegaard's work had been written?


Comment: The New York Times has now published two separate reviews of Elif Batuman’s recent novel Either/Or. Both reviews mention Kierkegaard, but neither review mentions his multiple personality and famous pseudonyms. (Search "Kierkegaard" here and/or see Wikipedia.)

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