“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a 1797 poem by Goethe about spirits with independent agency, could have been about fiction writers’ characters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer's_Apprentice

http://socialcognitionlab.uoregon.edu/files/2013/03/Taylor-Hodges-Kohanyi_2003-2b6wdel.pdf

Multiple Personality is usually not Multiple Personality Disorder 

Roald Dahl concludes “Matilda” with an allusion to the famous Multiple Personality novel, "Trilby"

“As soon as it became clear that Miss Trunchbull [Dahl’s villain] had completely disappeared from the scene, the excellent Mr Trilby was appointed Head Teacher in her place” (1, p. 228).

If you are not familiar with the multiple personality novel that introduced the famous villain, Svengali, search “Trilby” in this blog.

1. Roald Dahl. Matilda. New York, Viking, 1988. 

“Matilda” by Roald Dahl: Matilda converses with “the voice”

Matilda, a small, but extremely precocious girl, is having a private, in-person conversation with her elementary school teacher, Miss Honey.

“You are so much wiser than your years, my dear,’ Miss Honey went on, ‘that it quite staggers me. Although you look like a child, you are not really a child at all because your mind and your powers of reasoning seem to be fully grown-up…

“Up to now,’Miss Honey went on, ‘I have found it impossible to talk to anyone about my problems…Any courage I had was knocked out of me when I was young. But now, all of a sudden I have a sort of desperate wish to tell everything to somebody…

“Matilda became very alert. The voice she was hearing was surely crying out for help. It must be. It had to be.

“Then the voice spoke again. “Have some more tea, it said. ‘I think there is still a drop left.’

"Matilda nodded…(1, pp. 195-196) [Miss Honey proceeds to tell her life story…]

Comment: It would have been more natural to say Miss Honey was surely crying out for help…Then Miss Honey spoke again, “Have some more tea, she said.

The redundant use of “the voice” makes me think that someone (the author, in his creative process) was hearing voices, which, in nonpsychotic persons, would very likely be voices of alternate personalities. Assuming that Dahl was not trying to portray Matilda as having multiple personality, then he may have had multiple personality trait.

1. Roald Dahl. Matilda. New York, Viking, 1988. 

Roald Dahl on Fiction Writing

“The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his work room in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction drinks more whiskey than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I’m sure, is why he does it" (1, pp. 171-172).

1. Roald Dahl. Boy (Tales of Childhood) [1984] and Going Solo [1986]. New York, Puffin Books/Penguin, 2010.  

Roald Dahl’s famous short story, “The Way Up to Heaven” (1, 2)

The reader is encouraged to believe that rich, 70-year-old Mr. Foster continually frightens his faithful wife by keeping her waiting, when he knows that she gets panic attacks if she arrives at places late.

But Mr. Foster’s guilt in this regard is explicitly stated to be in doubt: “Assuming (though one cannot be sure) that the husband was guilty…” (2, p. 131). 

And if the author created this character, why wouldn’t he be absolutely sure of his guilt?

The alleged villain dies in a stuck elevator of their large Manhattan building while his allegedly saintly wife—before she left, she probably heard his cries for help—was in Paris, visiting her grandchildren. He was supposedly not found while she was away, because their servants had time-off. But a large, luxury building in Manhattan would have been continuously staffed and monitored. And a rich, 70-year-old man would have been searched for when he did not contact his friends or show up at his club. Thus, the story’s scenario is implausible.

However, even if the readers suspended disbelief and overlooked the story’s implausibilities, why didn’t the author see the story’s problems? Why couldn’t Dahl read the character’s mind and be sure that he was guilty? Because, in a psychologically significant sense, the author didn’t create this story and these characters, which probably came from his storytelling, alternate personalities.

1. Wikipedia. “The Way Up to Heaven.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Up_to_Heaven

2. Roald Dahl. The Best of Roald Dahl. New York, Vintage Books, 1990.

Comment added next day: If she had knowingly left him to die, then she was the true villain, and her husband had known it, in Dahl's opinion.

Eugene O’Neill: Nobel Prize-winner’s Masterpiece is being filmed

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/movies/long-days-journey-into-night-eugene-oneill-jessica-lange-ed-harris.html

Please search “O’Neill” for past posts on the multiple personality, not only in his masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” but even more blatantly in plays prior to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Novelist Matt Haig publicizes his psychiatric issues

“Shortly after the publication of The Midnight Library, at the age of 46, he was diagnosed with A.D.H.D. and autism. In his nonfiction, Haig has been candid about his mental health; his memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, grew out of depression so deep, it almost spurred him to walk off a cliff”(1). One symptom he had was that “my reflection showed another person” (2, p. 46), a symptom that may be associated with multiple personality (3, p. 62).

1. Elizabeth Egan. “Inside the List.” New York Times, 01-15-2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/books/review/matt-haig-the-midnight-library.html

2. Matt Haig. Reasons to Stay Alive. Edinburgh, Canongate, 2015.

3. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“Taste” a short story by Roald Dahl: This story’s very peculiar opening, in which wine is personified, suggests Dahl had multiple personality trait

“Richard Pratt was a famous gourmet. He was president of a small society known as the Epicures…He organized dinners where sumptuous dishes and rare wines were served…and when discussing a wine, he had a curious, rather droll habit of referring to it as though it were a living being. ‘A prudent wine,’ he would say, ‘rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent.’ Or, ‘a good-humored wine, benevolent and cheerful—slightly obscene, perhaps, but nonetheless good-humored” (1, p. 53).

1.Roald Dahl. The Best of Roald Dahl. New York, Vintage Books, 1990.

For a story synopsis, go to Wikipedia and search “Taste (short story).”

Comment: Since fiction writers often say they speak with their characters, this short story’s very peculiar opening, in which wine is personified, might be what Roald Dahl was told by his character, Pratt, near the beginning of the writing process. This would suggest that Dahl, like most great fiction writers, had multiple personality trait.

Multiple Personality means having Alternate Identities

“A year before George Santos first ran for Congress, he appeared at an L. G. B. T. Q. event using one of his alternate identities.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/nyregion/santos-trans-therapy-devolder.html

Patrick Modiano: Nobel Prize winner jokes about multiple personality in New York Times Book Review Interview

“You’re organizing a literary dinner party.  Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I don’t know if one could organize a literary “party” inviting 20 writers as one would organize a meeting of club members. I’m afraid these writers, unless they are already friends, wouldn’t have much to say to one another. James Joyce and Marcel Proust met once when they were invited to a party in Paris. This was reportedly their only exchange:

“It’s raining.”

“Do you have an umbrella?”

“No.”

“Me neither” (1).

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/books/review/patrick-modiano-books.html

Comment: The joke is based on the fact that a fiction writer’s regular, “host personality” is probably not the personality who wrote his books.

Multiple Personality in Modern Art and Literature

Features of multiple personality became increasingly evident in the work of three major novelists and artists: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves; Picasso’s Cubism; and Jennifer Egan, who started with The Invisible Circus, and later won a major award for A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Picasso’s Cubist figures often appeared to be a conglomeration of multiple people or personalities.

Jennifer Egan’s first novel, The Invisible Circus, had a standard novelistic format, but, as noted in a past post, its characters had unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality. Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad started with a standard format and characterization, but broke away with multiple casts of characters and jumps in time. The latter is like what a person experiences after memory gaps (a cardinal symptom of multiple personality). 

Added 01/11/2023: An example of Jennifer Egan's relating to her characters as if they were alternate personalities is her saying, in a 2011 video interview with Google about A Visit From the Goon Squad, "I flirt with ideas and then I give them to characters [to do something with]."

You may appreciate a novel more if you understand the author's creativity.

Diagnostic Fads: Multiple personality exists, but sometimes it is not fashionable.

And the diagnostic manual is not as helpful as it could have been: Search "diagnostic criteria" and "mental status."

Do novelists think they are crazy? Yes and No.

They probably do, but if they produce works that people want, and if their writing process can be satisfying, they may consider it, in the words of Henry James, “the madness of art.”

The reason I don’t think they are crazy is that more people, but fewer people than they think, think the way they do. More people than they think have multiple personality, but not everybody.

Samuel Fosso: One Photographer, Many Personalities

“Within himself, he finds multitudes” (1).

Comment: I don't know if Fosso has multiple personality trait, but that is the slant Lubow gives to his New York Times article.

1. Arthur Lubow. "Samuel Fosso, African Photographer." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/arts/design/samuel-fosso-african-photographer-princeton.html

Why being a Con Man (1), lying, or believing in “alternative facts” might suggest multiple personality

In multiple personality, the regular, so-called “host personality” usually has a common sense, conventional view of reality, but each alternate personality, like characters in a novel, may have its own characteristic views of itself and reality, which can be quite imaginative. Thus, if a person switches among alternate personalities, according to which one is of most practical use in a particular situation, then one possible result is a confidence man or “con man.” The lies can be quite convincing at the time, because each alternate personality believes what it is saying, while the host personality is not paying attention or thinks, well, that is his view, not mine.

When I read Tom Suozzi’s column (1) this morning, the words “con man” reminded me of past posts in which I discussed novels by Herman Melville (2) and Thomas Mann (3).

Also, a belief in “alternative facts” (4) might suggest alternate personalities.

1. Tom Suozzi. “A Con Man is Succeeding Me in Congress.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/opinion/george-santos-congress.html

2. Herman Melville. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade

3. Thomas Mann. Confessions of Felix Kroll, Confidence Man.

4. Wikipedia. “Alternative Facts.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

Search “confidence man,” “con man,” and “lying.”

Review 2014-2018 Isabel Allende wins 2018 National Book Awards’ Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Quotations on Writing and Lying

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/books/national-book-award-sigrid-nunez.html

https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/isabel-allende-gives-rousing-speech-at-national-book-awards.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Allende

October 24, 2014

Isabel Allende: Quotations on Creative Writing

“First of all, I have the feeling that I don’t invent [my characters]. I don’t create them; they are there. They are somewhere in the shadows, and when I start writing—it’s a very long process; sometimes it takes years to write a book—little by little they come out of the shadow into the light. But when they come into the light, they are already people. They have their own personalities, their clothes, their voices, their textures, their smells. I don’t invent them; somehow they are there. They always were there” (1, p. 258).

One of her best-known characters, Eva Luna, “is the woman I want to be. We are so different, in every way but one: we both tell stories. But she is my dreamself” (1, p. 273). She “was always there. I know that the character was within me. She doesn’t resemble me; it’s not my biography. I’m not her. But somehow she was inside me…By writing, [the character] got out of me and existed by itself…So that’s my relationship with my characters—very strange and very powerful. [Sometimes they come out right away, fully formed, and she can’t change them even if she wants to]…sometimes they [start out] ambiguous, but by the end they are so real that my children play with the idea that they are living in the house. And we talk about them as if they were part of the family” (1, p. 259).

Once a novel is started, she hates to interrupt the writing process. For example: “Now, while I’m here in Toronto, the voices keep on talking and I’m not there to take them down. I feel like a traitor when I’m not writing” (1, p. 275).

“I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don’t talk to anybody; I don’t answer the telephone. I’m just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I’m creating a world that is fiction but that doesn’t belong to me. I’m not God there; I’m just an instrument” (1, p. 290).

When she starts one of her novels, does she invent the first sentence?

“When I’ve lighted the candles and turned on the computer, I write the first sentence, which I let bubble up from my intuitions, not from reason. That first sentence opens the door to the story that’s already there—only it’s hidden in another dimension. It’s my task to enter that dimension and to make the story appear. When I wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits, which is “Barrabas came to us from the sea,” I didn’t yet know who Barrabas was or why he had come…It’s something magical that I can’t explain very well, because I don’t control it myself” (1, p. 295).

1. John Rodden (ed.). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Translations by Virginia Invernizzi and John Rodden. Foreword by Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

October 27, 2014

Novelist Isabel Allende said in interviews that she was a liar: The Paradox of the Honest Liar, a Clue to Multiple Personality

Allende: I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time.

Interviewer: Lying?

Allende: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying.

Interviewer: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth?

Allende: For me, I can no longer say…For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I received it I think it was more or less like this (holds hands a foot apart), but then I started telling the story and now it is this big (arms open wide). Very soon it will be a monument. [1, pp. 115-116]

She has a good sense of humor, but don’t let that obscure her serious, lifelong concern with lying.

The obvious problem with Allende’s explanation is that she (the host personality, who is doing this interview) actually does recall the original, true size of the bronze statue. The only way her explanation could make sense would be if the exaggerations in her stories were honestly believed by a separate, story narrator, personality, and it was the latter personality whom her mother and others would accuse of lying.

“So many times I don’t remember people’s names, or the places I have been…I don’t remember the names of the men I have married. At times I even forget the names of my own children…They had always told me that I was a liar…” ( 1, p. 218).

This is seen with a person who has multiple personality, in which life experiences are divided among the separate memory banks of different personalities.

“I have a terrible memory. I’m always inventing my own life, so I find that in different interviews I tell different stories about the same subject…The truth is I’m a born liar” (1, pp. 288-289).

This reminds me of when William Faulkner (see past post) warned interviewers not to ask him personal questions, because he might give different answers when future interviewers ask him the same question.

“…I have a special voice for storytelling, a voice that, although mine, also seems to belong to someone else…” (2, p.  227). When writing, she is “transformed into a multifaceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors, living countless lives, speaking with many voices. The characters became so real that they invaded the house…” (2, p. 263).

“We learn early on to wear masks we change so frequently that we are no longer able to identify our own faces in the mirror” (3, p. xiv-xv). [My novel Eva Luna] “is dotted with autobiographical observations about the practice of writing” (3, p. 63). [People with multiple personality may have a problem with mirrors. Search “mirrors” in this blog.]

In conclusion, whenever you have a person who has a reputation for being a liar, or even admits to having repeatedly lied, but this doesn’t make sense to you, because the person seems to be a basically honest and moral person—in short, the paradox of an honest liar—the solution to this mystery may be multiple personality, in which different personalities have different memory banks and different views of reality; which has been seen previously in this blog’s discussion of other great novelists.

1. John Rodden (ed). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

2. Isabel Allende. Eva Luna. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

3. Celia Correas Zapata. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Houston, Arte Publico Press, 2002

Surprisingly Common: Multiple Personality is More Prevalent than Schizophrenia, says American Psychiatric Association

Prevalence of Multiple Personality: 1.5% (1, p. 294)

Prevalence of Schizophrenia:  0.3%-0.7% (1, p. 102)

1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

Neglect: Some Psychiatrists and Columnists Neglect Multiple Personality

As a psychiatrist, I have been very strict and careful in diagnosing multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder), but it is in the diagnostic manual, because it does exist, and those psychiatrists who never make the diagnosis may be negligent.

Columnists (1, 2) are not in a position to make psychiatric diagnoses, but are paid to speculate about persons in the news. So when persons in the news have variable personas, but columnists fail to speculate about multiple personality, they may be negligent.

1. David Brooks. “The Sad Tales of George Santos.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/george-santos-lies.html

2. Carlos Lozada. “How the House of Trump Was Built.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/trump-haberman-baker-glasser-draper.html