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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Friday, October 27, 2023

“Lies and Sorcery” (post 3) by Elsa Morante: Opinion from a biography of the author, based on an earlier translation

“In the end, notwithstanding the admiration one might feel for the ambitious enterprise, House of Liars remains a strangely anachronistic and lugubrious novel. The reader is not drawn to any of the characters, nor does he or she care much what happens to any of them. No matter that it was willed, the writing is irritatingly precious, the plot is too convoluted and contrived to be credible. The result is a kind of artificial airlessness…"(2, p. 79).


Comment: My post 2, based on the new translation of this novel (1), highlights the issue relevant to this blog—multiple personality—which appears to have been unrecognized by both Elsa Morante and the biographer. So I will have no further posts on this novel. But this blog is not a book review, and you might love this novel in its new translation.


1. Elsa Morante. Lies and Sorcery (1948 novel). Trans. from Italian by Jenny McPhee. New York, New York Review Books, 2023, 775 pages.

2. Lily Tuck. Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. New York, Harper Perennial, 2009.

3. Wikipedia. “House of Liars” [title of previous translation].

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

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