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.

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Tuesday, August 23, 2022

“Memory of Departure” by Abdulrazak Gurnah (post 2): “She was distant and preoccupied, as if dissociating herself.” Is “dissociating” redundant?


“She said little, content to follow the conversation with her eyes. The attention she paid to my clowning was amused, but she was distant and preoccupied, as if dissociating herself” (1, p. 110).


Is “dissociating” redundant?  Or does Gurnah mean something by it, other than or beyond, “distant and preoccupied”?


My attention was arrested by “dissociating herself,” because “dissociation” means an altered state of consciousness in the sense of splitting consciousness, as in split personality, dissociative identity, or multiple personality. 


Is any of that what Gurnah had in mind, expressly or intuitively? Or was he just being redundant? I’ll resume reading and tell you if I find out.


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


Added Aug. 24: This sociologically intense, but psychologically superficial, story, ends inconclusively.

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