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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Wednesday, March 22, 2023

“Mad Honey” (post 6) by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan: Authors’ Epigraph for this novel (see post 5) quotes Kierkegaard, who is famous for his writing alternate personalities (see below), which inadvertently highlights the issue of multiple personality for this novel


From Wikipedia

“Kierkegaard [1813-1855] has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, David Lodge, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger and John Updike…


“Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonyms that he used to present distinctive viewpoints and to interact with each other in complex dialogue. He explored particularly complex problems from different viewpoints, each under a different pseudonym…


“Kierkegaard's most important pseudonyms, in chronological order, were:

— Victor Eremita, editor of Either/Or

— A, writer of many articles in Either/Or

— Judge William, author of rebuttals to A in Either/Or

— Johannes de silentio, author of Fear and Trembling

— Constantine Constantius, author of the first half of Repetition

— Young Man, author of the second half of Repetition

— Vigilius Haufniensis, author of The Concept of Anxiety

— Nicolaus Notabene, author of Prefaces

— Hilarius Bookbinder, editor of Stages on Life's Way

— Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding

— Unscientific Postscript

— Inter et Inter, author of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress

— H.H.author of Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays

— Anti-Climacusauthor of The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity.”


Kierkegaard Said:

“I suffer as a human being can suffer in indescribable melancholy, which always has to do with my thinking about my own existence…Only when I am producing do I feel well. Then I forget all life’s discomforts, all suffering, then I am absorbed in my thought and happy. If I let my work alone for a couple of days I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, troubled, my head heavy and burdened.” It was due to his melancholy, he tells us, that he “discovered and poetically traveled through a whole fantasy world.” His writing was not an agreeable amusement, but “the product of an irresistible inward impulse, a melancholy man’s only possibility…As Scheherazade saved her life by telling stories, so I save myself or keep myself alive by writing…


“…in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them…My wish, my prayer, is that if it occur to anyone to cite a particular saying from the books, he do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonym…


“Each time I wish to say something, there is another who says it at the very same moment. It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me…” (1, pp. 135-151).


1. Josiah Thompson. Kierkegaard. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. 

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