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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Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Annie Dillard (post 2) in her novel “The Maytrees”: What is meant by a “split-faced smile”? Does it imply the author’s multiple personality trait?


“Two years later [after their marriage] they were dancing in the kitchen to ‘Lady Be Good.’ Maytree [the husband] turned down the radio and ran his notion by Lou [the wife]. It is an unnameable boon love hauls down, that people rightly prize as the best of life, and for which it fusses over weddings…Her eyes’ crystal, her split-faced smile, agreed. He rolled the volume knob. Oh sweet and lovely (1, p. 45).


Comment: In the above context, they are both happy. But I’m not familiar with the phrase “split-faced smile,” and googling it did not clarify.


Out of the above happy context, a “split-faced smile” might mean that the person’s upper and lower face contradicted each other, such as when a person, ordered to smile, brings the corners of their mouth upward, but does not get wrinkles at the corners of their eyes.


Since the word “split” might imply a split personality, the above may be an example of how an author’s multiple personality trait inadvertently intruded into what would otherwise have been an unambivalent scene? 


1. Annie Dillard. The Maytrees. New York, Harper Perennial, 2008. 

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