“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” (post 3) by Stieg Larsson: Not The Author’s Intended Title

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (original title in Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor, (“Men Who Hate Women” ) is a psychological thriller novel by Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson (1954–2004). It was published posthumously in 2005, translated into English in 2008, and became an international bestseller” (1).

When character Michael Blomkvist says Lisbeth Salander is weird, and possibly on the autistic spectrum, he is reacting to the persona she had adopted to deter men who hate women, and he is also trying to stifle his own feelings of being attracted to her. By the end of the novel, when Lisbeth is convinced that he does not hate her and would not abuse her, she has fallen in love with him, as might any character with basically normal psychology.

The novel’s simplest and clearest statement of her true psychology is this: “Salander worked in a trancelike state” (2, p. 606), which is the psychology of most novelists when they are most involved in writing a novel, and also of the title character of that famous multiple personality novel, Trilby, who was a tone deaf young woman, hypnotized by Svengali to develop the alternate personality of a singing superstar (3). Various great, normal novelists—for example, Stephen King—have explicitly said that they enter a trancelike state when they write.

1.Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_the_Dragon_Tattoo

2. Stieg Larsson. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo [2005]. Trans. Reg Keeland. New York, Vintage Books, 2011.

3. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilby_(novel) 

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” (post 2) by Stieg Larsson: Lisbeth Salander thinks her namesake’s passive obedience is unlike her true self

"Passively she obeyed. Lisbeth Salander is never passive, she thought” (1, p. 360).

Comment: Lisbeth Salander has passively obeyed a suggestion by Mikael Blomkvist, whom she has just met. But she thinks that “Lisbeth Salander” is “never passive,” as though the one now thinking and the one who had obeyed were two different persons. Her thought is rendered in italics, possibly because what this personality says or thinks is heard as a voice in the head of the personality who had passively obeyed.

Search “self-contradictory” in this blog for past posts on this clue to multiple personality.

1. Stieg Larsson. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo [2005]. Trans. Reg Keeland. New York, Vintage Books, 2011.

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” (post 1) by Stieg Larsson: Lisbeth Salander may have signs of Multiple Personality

“She was twenty-four but she sometimes looked fourteen” (1, p. 41).

Comment: Why did she look fourteen only “sometimes”? Perhaps it was only when a fourteen-year-old alternate personality was predominant.

“People always have secrets. It’s just a matter of finding out what they are” (1, p. 138)

Comment: If that was just an ordinary thought, and not the voice in her head of an alternate personality, why doesn’t it simply say "she thought”? Why is it in italics instead, which many novelists use to differentiate a voice in the head from an ordinary thought.

Search “italicized voices” in this blog for relevant past posts.

1. Stieg Larsson. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo [2005]. Trans. Reg Keeland. New York, Vintage Books, 2011.

“Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” (post 4) by Anne Tyler: Multiple personality usually starts in childhood as a way to cope with trauma

Cody, the oldest son of the protagonist, Pearl Tull, says his mother was “a raving, shrieking, unpredictable witch. She slammed us against the wall and called us scum and vipers, said she wished us dead, shook us till our teeth rattled, screamed in our faces. We never knew from one day to the next, was she all right? Was she not? The tiniest thing could set her off. ‘I’m going to throw you through that window,’ she used to tell me. ‘I’ll look out that window and laugh at your brains splashed all over the pavement.’”

But Cody’s younger brother, Ezra, disagrees. He says their mother “wasn’t always angry. Really she was angry very seldom, only a few times, widely spaced, that happened to stick in your mind” (1, pp. 294-295).

Which brother’s memory is more credible? Ezra is the much more likable character, but had been a sleepwalker with memory gaps (see post 2).

1. Anne Tyler. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant [1982]. New York, Vintage Books, 2017.

“Elon Musk” (post 2) by Walter Isaacson: See Added Comment comparing Musk’s “Demon Mode” to Novelist Philip Roth’s “Feral Child”

“Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father…say their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional. He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say…(1, p. 4).

“Elon’s moods would cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as ‘demon mode’…(1, pp. 4-5).

“When he recalled these memories [of his father], he would zone out and seem to disappear behind his steel-colored eyes. [His second wife] said, ‘I think he wasn’t conscious of how that still affected him, because he thought of it as something in his childhood, but he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad’ ” (1, p. 5).

Comment: In multiple personality (a.k.a., dissociative identity), which starts in childhood, the most common kind of alternate personality is childlike. Of course, if Elon Musk had multiple personality, it would be the high-functioning kind, not the diagnosable mental illness.

1. Walter Isaacson. Elon Musk. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Added Sept 23: The above about "demon mode" and a child inside reminds me of the following from a memoir by the wife of novelist Philip Roth:

“…he turned toward me with the face of an uncontrollable and malevolent child in a temper tantrum; his lower jaw thrust forward, his mouth contorted, his dark eyes narrowed. This expression of out-and-out hatred went far beyond anything I could possibly have done to provoke it. I remember thinking, with total clarity,‘Who is that?’

“That feral, unflinching, hostile, accusative, but strangely childlike face would appear increasingly in our years together, sometimes without warning, frequently without provocation, always out of proportion to the events that had given rise to it…

“Just as I feared the appearance of this ‘other’ Philip Roth to such a degree that, in order to avoid him, there was almost nothing I wouldn’t have done to make him disappear, I also feared to lose the Philip who was my dearly loved companion” (1, pp. 158-9).

1. Bloom, Claire. Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir. Boston, Little Brown, 1996 

“Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” (post 3) by Anne Tyler: Characters Cody and Pearl are written as though they had multiple personality

“Cody Tull always had a girlfriend, one girl after another, and all the girls were wild about him until they met [and preferred] his brother, Ezra…Meanwhile, [Cody’s] ragged, dirty, unloved younger self, with failing grades, with a ‘U’ [Unsatisfactory] in deportment, clenched his fists and howled, ‘Why? Why always Ezra? Why that sissy pale goody-goody Ezra?” (1, p. 131).

Comment: The above is written, not like a psychological interpretation, but as though Cody’s younger self were a child-aged alternate personality, inside him, clenching his fists, etc.

Pearl Tull, mother of Cody and Ezra, says, “I know when I’m being unreasonable. Sometimes I stand outside my body and just watch it all, totally separate. 'Now, stop, I say to myself…” (1, p. 140).

Comment: In multiple personality, alternate personalities often feel they are totally separate from each other.

But since this novel is not, intentionally, about multiple personality, per se, why is the above in this novel? It is what I call “gratuitous multiple personality” and is probably in this novel only as a reflection of the psychology of the author, who probably had multiple personality trait.

1. Anne Tyler. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant [1982]. New York, Vintage Books, 2017.

“Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” (post 2) by Anne Tyler: One character sleepwalks, possibly a symptom of multiple personality

Ezra is discharged from the army due to his sleepwalking, for which he had no memory (1, p. 80).

Comment: Search “Mark Twain,” “sleepwalking,” and “somnambulism” in this blog for relevant past posts.

Added same day: Ezra subsequently says, "I wasn’t really all the way asleep…I didn’t plan to sleepwalk…and could have wakened the rest of me if I’d tried” (1, pp. 120-121).

However: In multiple personality, there may be observer personalities who'd like to intervene in the behavior of action personalities, but don't actually have the power to do so.

1. Anne Tyler. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant [1982]. New York, Vintage Books, 2017.

“Der Doppelgänger”: Art Imitates Multiple Personality

“In Schubert’s song 'Der Doppelgänger,' a piano resounds with increasingly tormented chords as the narrator recounts a realization: that a pained stranger, wringing his hands in the night, is in fact himself” (1).

1. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/arts/music/doppelganger-armory-jonas-kaufmann-claus-guth.html

“MPD patients…frequently have the experience of waking up in the morning and finding evidence that they were busy during the night, although they do not remember anything. They may find notes, poems…or other evidence that they have been up and busy” (2, p. 81).

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

“Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” (post 1) by Anne Tyler: With whom or what would the protagonist or author converse inside her head?

“Dance? Oh, I don’t think so, she said inside her head. I’m in charge of this whole affair, you see, and all I’d have to do is turn my back one instant for the party to go to pieces, just fall into little pieces…” (1, p. 18).

Comment: If one reads the above fast and superficially, it may seem to merely repeat the protagonist’s oft-repeated complaint that her husband, who travels for business, is almost never home. But with what kind of entities—“inside her head”—other than her creative alternate personalities, would she be conversing?

The author’s creative process, as with most great novelists, probably involves multiple personality trait, which requires constant management and coordination of her alternate personalities (characters, editors, and storytellers).

1. Anne Tyler. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant [1982]. New York, Vintage Books, 2017.

“Disgrace” (post 2) by Nobel novelist J. M. Coetzee: May foreshadow multiple personality by having a character read The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

The protagonist’s daughter reads The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1, p. 73) by Charles Dickens, a novel I discussed in the first post of this blog, because it has two characters—John Jasper and Miss Twinkleton—who have multiple personality.

1. J. M. Coetzee. Disgrace. New York, Penguin Books, 1999.

Added Sept 19: The novel's last two lines may reflect the author's lack of any profound conclusion about his protagonist: "Are you giving him up? Yes, I am giving him up" (1, p. 215).

“To Know Yourself, Consider your Doppelgänger”

Naomi Klein’s essay with the above title in today’s New York Times neglects to relate that trendy term to something in which she has no interest, Multiple Personality.

Search "doppelganger”—German for a person’s mysterious "double”—in this blog to see its relationship to dissociative identity (multiple personality).

“Disgrace” (post 1) by Nobel & Booker novelist J. M. Coetzee: Opens with flurry of markers for multiple personality

“…he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion. When he comes back [from a memory gap]…The girl [a college student] is lying beneath him…” (1, p.17).

“A child! No more than a child! What am I doing? Yet his heart lurches with desire” (1, p. 18).

“An unseemly business…(unbidden the word letching comes to him)…” (1, p. 22).

Comment: Search “italics” and “memory gaps” in this blog for discussion of these markers for multiple personality.

1. J. M. Coetzee. Disgrace. New York, Penguin Books, 1999. 

ITALICS: An italicized “voice” or “thought” is often used by novelists to inform readers of a specific contribution to a character’s mind by an unexplained alternate personality, perhaps the author's 

“Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton: Interesting Author

Comment: This short novel has flat characters and nothing related to multiple personality. I mistakenly decided to read it, because I recalled interesting past posts on this novelist: Search “Wharton” in this blog.

Edith Wharton. Ethan Frome [1911]. New York, Signet Classics, 2009.

“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson: Jekyll-and-Hyde Inheritance

“Both Elon and Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father…say their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional. He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say…(1, p. 4).

“Elon’s moods would cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as ‘demon mode’…(1, pp. 4-5).

“When he recalled these memories [of his father], he would zone out and seem to disappear behind his steel-colored eyes. [His second wife] said, ‘I think he wasn’t conscious of how that still affected him, because he thought of it as something in his childhood, but he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad’ ” (1, p. 5).

Comment: In multiple personality (a.k.a., dissociative identity), which starts in childhood, the most common kind of alternate personality is childlike. Of course, if Elon Musk had multiple personality, it would be the high-functioning kind, not the diagnosable mental illness.

1. Walter Isaacson. Elon Musk. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Added Sept 23: The above about "demon mode" and a child inside reminds me of the following from a memoir by the wife of novelist Philip Roth:

“…he turned toward me with the face of an uncontrollable and malevolent child in a temper tantrum; his lower jaw thrust forward, his mouth contorted, his dark eyes narrowed. This expression of out-and-out hatred went far beyond anything I could possibly have done to provoke it. I remember thinking, with total clarity,‘Who is that?’

“That feral, unflinching, hostile, accusative, but strangely childlike face would appear increasingly in our years together, sometimes without warning, frequently without provocation, always out of proportion to the events that had given rise to it…

“Just as I feared the appearance of this ‘other’ Philip Roth to such a degree that, in order to avoid him, there was almost nothing I wouldn’t have done to make him disappear, I also feared to lose the Philip who was my dearly loved companion” (1, pp. 158-9).

1. Bloom, Claire. Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir. Boston, Little Brown, 1996

“FOXFIRE: Girl Gang” (post 3) by Joyce Carol Oates: Intuitive Diagnosis of Multiple Personality in the Girl Gang’s Leader by Another Character

The girl gang’s leader is known by two names, Margaret Sadovsky and “Legs” Sadovsky. It is never explicitly stated that Legs/Margaret has multiple personality.

However, the diagnosis of multiple personality is inadvertently, implicitly made when another character is startled, almost beyond comprehension, by a sudden alteration in Leg’s/Margaret’s demeanor and attitude:

“So abrupt and so complete was the change in her [Margaret Sadovsky], Marianne Kellogg [the other character] could barely comprehend it, let alone respond” (1, p. 270).

Comment: As far as I know, Joyce Carol Oates has never explicitly acknowledged multiple personality in any character of her many novels. Search “Oates” in this blog for past posts on this issue.

 

1. Joyce Carol Oates. FOXFIRE: Confessions of a Girl Gang. Plume/Penguin, 1994. 

“FOXFIRE: Girl Gang” (post 2) by Joyce Carol Oates: Two of the girls have split-personality thoughts and italicized voices of alternate personalities in their head

“This strange girl presenting one side of herself to adults, one side of herself to her FOXFIRE sisters, but another side, or maybe it’s the innermost core, she kept to herself.

     Nobody knows me. Nobody can hurt me” (1, p. 137).

“…there’s a voice in my head thats calm almost like my own voice but grownup & saying O.K. But you’re alive. So I think My God yes—I’m alive” (1, p. 152).

Comment: Their hidden sides or parts and the voices in their head are symptoms of multiple personality. But since the author does not indicate that these symptoms are unusual features, confined to certain unusual characters, they are probably reflective of the author’s multiple personality trait and her concept of ordinary psychology. For further discussion in past posts, search “Oates” in this blog.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. FOXFIRE: Confessions of a Girl Gang. Plume/Penguin, 1994.

“FOXFIRE: Confessions of a Girl Gang” (post 1) by Joyce Carol Oates: Alternate personalities look identical, because they share the same body

“Because different as we were—how different Maddy Wirtz felt herself from Goldie Siegfried, from Rita O’Hagan, from Lana Maguire!—how special, how superior she’d needed to be!—we were like family members proud of their distinctions while always always confused with one another by outside, neutral observers" (1, p. 9).

Comment: Above is the typical perspective of alternate personalities, who see themselves as unique, and quite different from each other, but look the same to other people, because they share the same body. I don’t know if this novel will have anything else suggestive of multiple personality.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. FOXFIRE: Confessions of a Girl Gang. Plume/Penguin, 1994. 

“The Hunger Games” (post 3 ) by Suzanne Collins: Novelist takes hearing inner voices that answer questions for granted

“…a small voice in the back of my head whispers an answer” (1, p. 169)

Multiple personality patients often hear inner voices that answer questions (2, p. 94).

1. Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games. New York, Scholastic, 2008.

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

“The Hunger Games" (post 2) by Suzanne Collins: In her head, protagonist hears the third-person voice of an alternate personality, warning her

"A warning bell goes off in my head. Don’t be so stupid. Peeta is planning how to kill you, I remind myself. He is luring you in to make you easy prey. The more likable he is, the more deadly he is” (1, p. 72).

Comment: Once again, an author uses italics to quote the voice of an alternate personality in a character’s head. The protagonist recognizes the voice of the alternate personality as a product of her own mind, because multiple personality is NOT a psychosis.

1. Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games. New York, Scholastic, 2008.

“The Hunger Games" (post 1) by Suzanne Collins: Gratuitous Mirror Symptom of Multiple Personality

“I can hardly recognize myself in the cracked mirror that leans against the wall” (1, p. 15).

Comment: It is a textbook symptom of persons with Multiple Personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder) that they sometimes may not recognize themselves when they look in a mirror, depending on which of their personalities is looking in the mirror.

The character may have said this merely to emphasize how nice she looked, all dressed up, but the author might not have phrased it this way, unless the author, like most novelists, had multiple personality trait.

1. Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games. New York, Scholastic, 2008.

“Everything / Nothing / Someone” a memoir by Alice Carrière: Highlights Mirror Symptom of Multiple Personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder)

“When I was listening to audiobooks, I thought in the third person. Walking down the street to school I would think, ‘She is walking down the street. It is raining.The rain falls on her jacket.’ I turned myself into words and my life into a story. Years later, when I didn’t recognize my own face in the mirror, when my body did not feel like my own, I would again recite myself to myself, narrating myself into existence…” (1, p. 10).

1. Alice Carrière. “Everything / Nothing / Someone”  a memoir. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2023.

2. NYTimes Book Review. “In a Memoir of Privilege and Pain,” Alice Carrière recalls her eventual slip into dissociative disorder.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/books/review/everything-nothing-someone-alice-carriere.html

Comment: Beyond multiple personality’s classic mirror symptom—search “mirror” and “mirrors" in this blog—the memoir did not have enough about multiple personality to be of further interest here.

Jules Verne and H. G. Wells: Both wrote Invisible-Man novels, but only Wells explicitly denied having his own “double personalities” (Multiple Personality)

—The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells (1897)

—The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (1897, but released posthumously)

And if you count Verne’s character Captain “Nemo” (Latin for “nobody”), Verne was first to think in terms of a hidden personality, as most alternate personalities in multiple personality usually are, when “inside” and not “out."

Search “H. G. Wells” in this blog for his explicit denial of "double personalities.” 

Question: Did Wells explicitly deny having multiple personality, because novelists were thought to have it unless stated otherwise?