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, July 14, 2022

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (post 5): Author opens last section of novel by highlighting dissociative (multiple personality) issues


“Can one narrate time? (1, p. 531).


“We have often declared that we do not wish to make him [the protagonist, Hans Castorp] any better or worse than he was, and so we do not want to hide the fact that he frequently took countermeasures to try to atone for the reprehensible pleasure he found in mystic disturbances that he quite consciously and intentionally elicited himself” (1. p. 535).


Comment: Multiple personality (also known as “dissociative identity disorder”) encompasses issues of time and lost time (memory gaps), mystic disturbances (dissociative trance states), and plurality (“we”).


Did the author take “reprehensible pleasure” in these things?


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

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