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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Monday, August 22, 2022

“Memory of Departure” by Abdulrazak Gurnah (post 1): First novel of 2021 winner of Nobel Prize in Literature


The brief first chapter sketches the protagonist’s first fifteen years: Hassan Omar’s African family is poor. His father is physically abusive. His mother is too frightened to intervene. He witnesses his brother die in a fire. Bullies in the neighborhood threaten to sodomize their victims (2, 3).


If Hassan had dissociative tendencies, he would have had enough childhood trauma to develop dissociative identity (multiple personality). But neither dissociation nor multiple personality is described in the first chapter.


1. Wikipedia. “Abdulrazak Gurnah.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrazak_Gurnah

2. Abdulrazak Gurnah. Memory of Departure [1987]. London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

3. Wikipedia. “Memory of Departure.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_of_Departure

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