Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

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, June 30, 2022

“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys (2): Identity issues

This is a very short, 103-page novel (1) in which the early pages include people close to the protagonist in her childhood, so it is peculiar that the protagonist’s name, Antoinette, is not mentioned until page thirty-one.

Earlier than that, on page sixteen, the protagonist says, “Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else. Not myself any longer.”

Comment: In this “Jane Eyre” prequel, the protagonist has identity issues before Rochester renames her Bertha and keeps her in the attic. However, while Antoinette/Bertha may have had multiple personality disorder (I’ll see when I read further), the author, like most admired novelists, probably had multiple personality trait (see prior post).

1. Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea [1966]. Edited by Judith L. Raskin. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

Thursday, June 30, 2022

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