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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Monday, May 1, 2023

“The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso)” by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)


“Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them—there is no third,” said T. S. Eliot, quoted on the back cover of this 895-page, one-volume translation (1).


I had prepared to read Dante with Reading Dante (2), but have only gotten as far as the preface to Dante’s “Canto I, The Dark Wood of Error” (1, p. 16), which says that Dante will be aided in his quest by Virgil, symbol of human reason, and Beatrice, symbol of divine love.


If I had kept reading, would I have seen Virgil and Beatrice as Dante’s alternate personalities? I don’t know. Would my interpretations have made sense to T. S. Eliot (search him in this blog) and most Dante readers? Probably not. 


So I will keep my 895-page edition of this major classic, and may come back to it, but will not read it at this time.


1. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, The Paradiso. Translated by John Ciardi. New York, The New American Library, 1954/2003.

2. Prue Shaw. Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. New York, Liveright, 2015. 

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