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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Tuesday, February 14, 2023

“Bleak House” (post 1) by Charles Dickens: Why does novel’s second narrator, Esther Summerson, introduce herself by saying she is “not clever”


“I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever…I used to say to my doll…‘Now, Dolly, I am not clever’ ” (1, p. 27).


Comment: Since people with multiple personality may know they have problems with memory gaps, which can be embarrassing, they may make excuses in advance. I don’t know if this will turn out to be the case with Esther Summerson, but I am struck by the odd way she introduces herself.


And I also wonder whether having two narrators in the same novel may reflect multiple personality in the fiction-writing process. How would you explain it?


1. Charles Dickens. Bleak House [1853]. London, Penguin Books, 2003. 


Added 5:50 p.m.:While not confirming the above speculation about Esther Summerson's possible multiple personality, a sentence at the end of chapter 4 does raise identity issues: "Lastly, it was no one, and I was no one" (1, p. 63).

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