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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Friday, July 8, 2022

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (post 2): Self-justifying, Plural Narrator


“The story of Hans Castorp that we intend to tell here…is a story that took place long ago…in the old days…before the Great War [WWI]…But is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale…?


“We shall tell it at length [700 pages], in precise and thorough detail—for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling?


“And with that, we begin” (1, Foreword).


Comment: I am only up to page 233, and do not yet know whether the Foreword was promising or cautionary. Neither do I know whether the narrator’s plurality (“we”) was a self-diagnosis of multiple personality trait, rhetorical, or both.


I do know that Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.


1. Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain [1924]. Translation from the German by John E. Woods. New York, Vintage International, 1996. 

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