“As I Lay Dying” by Warwick Wadlington: Was it legitimate for William Faulkner (post 9) to use obfuscation as a literary technique?

Wadlington’s monograph on Faulkner’s novel is, ultimately, laudatory. He says that some people may not like it, but it is a great book if you read it with the right attitude. Here is a sample of what some people may not like:

“Our discussion has come back to one point repeatedly: As I Lay Dying is a bizarre book. This is a novel in which one of the main characters, Addie, says of her husband Anse that he doesn’t know that he is dead yet. Far more bizarre is that as we encounter this revealing statement, two-thirds through the novel, we are reading the words of a character who herself has died several days (and many pages) earlier, whose corpse has already begun to stink” (1, pp. 72-73).

While the above could conceivably have some profound meaning, or perhaps be intended as humor, the following would seem to indicate that Faulkner engaged in intentional obfuscation:

“…the manuscript of the text shows that Faulkner worked to blur the clean lines of individual identity at the level of pronoun references, often substituting unclear pronouns for the names or clear references of the first draft” (1, p. 76).

I recall that in one of my past posts on Faulkner, I quoted him as saying that he changed the ending of one of his other novels, years after it was published, because he was still in touch with the characters, and was still trying to make his novel more accurately reflect what they told him.

And so I have tried to rationalize what Faulkner did with the pronouns in As I Lay Dying as his attempt to more accurately reflect his characters, who may have told him their stories without always saying which one of them was talking. But Faulkner, unlike the reader, would have been able to know who was talking by the sound of their voices.

1. Warwick Wadlington. As I Lay Dying: Stories out of Stories. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1992.

“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck (post 3): Jim Casy stopped being a preacher, since he knew of, but did not remember, his sexual promiscuity

Jim Casy had been known to the other main characters as a preacher, but he declares that he is no longer a preacher, and is very eager to make that clear.

Nevertheless, Casy has always been respected and well-liked by the Joad family, and he accompanies them as they migrate from Oklahoma—where they have been evicted from their depression-era, dustbowl-ravaged farm—to California, where they hope to find employment. Toward the end of the novel, Casy, who has become a union organizer for the persecuted, migrant farmers, is murdered by union-breaking thugs.

In remembering Casy, especially in regard to his philosophical pronouncements, which had sounded to the Joads like quotes from Scripture, they recall that Casy had attributed his ideas to “the Preacher,” with a capitalized “P,” like it was the name of a person (1, pp. 440-441).

But since Casy had repeatedly insisted that he was no longer a preacher, what could he mean by “the Preacher”?

The key to this puzzle is found in what Casy had originally said to explain why he was no longer a preacher. Most readers misinterpret what he said to mean that he was no longer a preacher only because he had sinned by being sexually promiscuous. That was part of the truth. But what had most disturbed him about his sexual promiscuity was that, although he knew about it, he did not actually remember it. As he explained:

“I’m all worried up,” Casy said. “I didn’ even know it when I was a-preachin’ aroun’, but I was doin’ consid’able tom-catin’ aroun’ ” (1, p. 179).

Thus, he very clearly states that he didn’t know it at the time he was doing it. But how could he not have? Only if an alternate personality were doing it, leaving his regular personality (“the Preacher”?) with a memory gap for doing it. (He evidently learned about it later, indirectly, when other people made reference to it.)

So here is a good illustration of a fundamental feature of multiple personality. The host personality may have a memory gap for what an alternate personality does. But the host personality may find out what happened, indirectly, from what other people say or circumstantial evidence. In short, it is the distinction between knowing about something you did versus actually remembering doing it.

Psychiatrists may be confronted by this distinction when they are called to the emergency room to see patients who have slit their wrists. In some cases, the patients know that they slit their wrist, since they can see the bandage and infer what it means, but the patient (host personality) does not really remember doing it. If this is inquired into, the patient may switch to the alternate personality that did slit the wrist, who can provide details.

Since no character in this novel is labeled as having multiple personality, and the issue is not necessary to the story, this novel would be another example of what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” It is probably in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology.

1. John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath [1939]. New York, Viking (Penguin), 2014.

John Steinbeck (post 2): “I confuse pretty easily,” he explains in a personal letter, so he had to “split” himself into two or three “entities” or “units”

In the previous post, I quoted Steinbeck from an interview, after he won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, in which he insisted that he was a “writer,” not an “author.” Subsequently, in a personal letter to his book editor, he elaborated on his sense of identity:

“I confuse pretty easily I guess, although the Stockholm experience is capable of confusing anyone…When it comes right down to it, nothing has changed. The English sentence is just as difficult to write as it ever was. I guess a whole lifetime of direction can’t be changed by one experience.

“But I have had to make a couple of drastic changes in the time past. Once I thought I could successfully divorce everything about myself from my work, I mean as far as the reader was concerned. I discovered that this, while it could be done if one had only written under a pseudonym, was impossible. So I had to split in two and establish two entities—one a public property and a trade mark. Behind that I could go on living a private life just so long as I didn’t allow the two to mix. Now perhaps there must be three—the Nobel person, the trade mark and the private person. I don’t know how many of these splits are possible. As far as I am concerned the only important unit is the private one because out of that work comes and work is to me still not only the most important thing but the only important thing” (1, p. 922).

Why didn’t he just say that he liked his privacy? Because that wouldn’t convey what he meant, which was that he had more than one personality, and he didn’t want the public (which was to be dealt with by his host personalities) to interfere with his writer personality, which he preferred to keep private.

Why did he talk in terms of “entities” and “units” rather than personalities? Either he didn’t think of it as multiple personality, per se, or he thought it prudent to use euphemisms when discussing this matter with his editor.

1. Jackson J. Benson. John Steinbeck, Writer [1984]. New York, Penguin Books, 1990.

“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 8): Ahab says to Pip, “Like cures like,” which means that Ahab, like Pip, has multiple personality

The two people on the whaling ship who appear to be most unlike each other are Captain Ahab and Pip, “a little negro lad, five feet high” (1, chapter 129, p. 705). But they have something in common.

Ahab says, “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt [of Moby-Dick], my malady [my Moby-Dick monomaniac personality] becomes my most desired health…

After Ahab leaves the ship’s cabin, Pip says, “Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing…Who’s seen Pip?” (1, pp. 703-704).

The reader was previously told the nature of Pip’s mental malady in chapter 125, when Pip said, “Pip? Whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Let’s see if ye haven’t fished him up…” (1, p. 689). Ever since he’d been scared in that boating accident, Pip had switched to an unnamed alternate personality.

So when Ahab says to Pip, “like cures like,” it means that he, too, has multiple personality.

The mental malady that Ahab and Pip share is not labeled “multiple personality,” so I don’t know whether Melville thought of it in those terms. But however he thought of it, he returned to that subject in his last novel, The Confidence-Man, which I discussed in my first post on Melville.

Did Melville see himself as having multiple personality? And did he see his “malady” as being “my most desired health” for writing novels?

1. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick or The Whale [1851]. London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016.

“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 7): Are Ahab’s “five phantoms” his alternate personalities, and thus all part of one man?

Suddenly, the crew sees that Captain Ahab is “surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air” (1, chapter 47, p. 305).

The leader of the five phantoms is Fedallah, and after some time has passed, it evolves “that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew, but one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as…people…only see in their dreams, and that but dimly…” (1, chapter 50, pp. 324-325).

Later in the voyage, after Ahab and his five-phantom, personal boat crew kill a whale, he talks with Fedallah (aka Parsee) about his recurrent dream. Ahab insists it means that he will “slay Moby-Dick and survive it,” but Fedallah, cryptically, seems to disagree.

At the end of their conversation, “Both were silent again, as one man” (1, chapter 117, p. 662).

1. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick or The Whale [1851]. London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016.

“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 6): Is main character Ishmael, Ahab, or Moby-Dick? Or is it wrong to choose the foremost alternate personality?

Some readers would say Ishmael is the protagonist, because he begins and ends the story. Others would say Ahab is the main character, because the story is about his conflict with the whale, who is the villain. Still others, who believe society should save the whale, and that Moby-Dick was just defending himself, might say the whale was the hero and Ahab the villain.

I don’t know Melville’s opinion, but he titled the book “Moby-Dick or The Whale,” and devoted many pages to whales, in a sense giving Moby-Dick more of a backstory than Ishmael or Ahab. At least that’s how it seems halfway through the book.

It may not be fair to ask a novelist to choose his hero among his characters, when all of them may have been his alternate personalities.

“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 5): Narrative Structure of Multiple Personalities who have Memory Gaps for each other’s chapters

One of the most commented upon features of this novel is the inconsistency of its narrative point of view. For example, as noted in the previous post, one chapter may be first-person narration by Ishmael, while another chapter may be first-person by Ahab.

So far, Ishmael has been the most common narrator, and starting with the first sentence, “Call me Ishmael,” he often addresses himself to the reader. Indeed, explaining this and that to the reader, often at length, is what he does.

But Ishmael, who routinely acknowledges that this is a book with chapters, appears to be totally unaware that other characters have had their own chapters. He does not comment on what Ahab has said to the reader, because he is unaware of it. How can this be? What could account for it?

These multiple narrators are like multiple personalities, who have memory gaps for the periods of time that another personality had come out and been in control.

This narrative structure probably reflected how Melville’s mind worked.

“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 4): Ishmael and Ahab give their opinions on Ahab’s mental disturbance ever since the whale bit his leg off

Ishmael’s Opinion

Ishmael says Ahab has “monomania” (1, Chapter 41, p. 262). According to Wikipedia, “In 19th-century psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, meaning "madness" or "frenzy") was a form of partial insanity conceived as single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind” (2).

He says that although Ahab could appear completely normal, “even then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form” (1, p. 263).

Ishmael thus implies that Ahab, like Jekyll/Hyde, has two personalities, and whenever you see the one which appears to be completely normal, he has an another personality, a “hidden self,” which is monomaniacal.

Ahab’s Opinion

Ahab’s soliloquy in Chapter 37 is notable for his declaring himself a “demoniac”: “They think me mad — Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!…I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer” (1, p. 243).

If I may assume that Ahab uses the word “demoniac” in the way it is used in The New Testament (e.g., Mark 5:1-20, regarding the Gerasene demoniac named Legion) (search “demoniac”), Ahab is saying that he is not mad, but possessed (by a vengeful spirit). Psychiatry now sees spirit possession as a form of multiple personality.

1. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick [1851]. London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016.

2. Wikipedia. “Monomania.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomania

“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 3): Ishmael praises whaling using internal dialogue, typical of multiple personality

In Chapter 24, “The Advocate,” Ishmael argues for the importance of whaling. He says that whaling has famous chroniclers, honorable family connections, statutory respectability, historical grandeur, and dignity.

The issue in this post is not what he says about whaling, but how he goes about saying it: He states his case in a chapter with an imaginary dialogue (1, pp. 165-171). For example:

“Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.”

“Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial. By old English statutory law, the whale is declared ‘a royal fish’.”

“Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand imposing way.”

“The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon entering the world’s capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession” (1, p. 170).

Ishmael could have made exactly the same points without the imaginary dialogue. But that is how his mind works. He has a “dialogic imagination,” a concept that Mikhail Bakhtin (2) used to explain Dostoevsky (search past posts on “Dostoevsky” and “Dostoevsky duality”), author of The Double.

Anyone can have an internal dialogue occasionally; e.g., if you are thinking about what you should have said to a real person or what you should say to a real person in the future. But Ishmael’s dialogue on whales sounds like a debate with an alternate personality.

1. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick [1851]. London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin

“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville (post 2): Why does Ishmael occasionally address himself in the third-person? What does he mean by “Call me Ishmael”?

My previous post on Melville discussed the multiple personality in his novel The Confidence-Man. I have just started Moby-Dick, and am struck by Ishmael’s recurrent habit of addressing himself in the third person. The following example is from Chapter 10, in which Ishmael (first-person narrator) and Queequeg become friends.

“I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth — pagans and all included — can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship? — to do the will of God? — to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me — that is the will of God. Now, Queegueg is my fellow man” (1, p. 96).

Is Ishmael being addressed by an alternate personality? Or does the author have multiple personality, and so thinks of being addressed in the third-person by an alternate personality as just ordinary psychology? Or is it merely a way to remind the reader of the name of the narrator? Or is it typical of most people to speak to themselves in the third person when they are thinking about something (and so these occasional switches to third-person are simply designed to help the reader identify with the narrator)?

“Call me Ishmael”

Reconsider the novel’s famous first line: “Call me Ishmael.” Is that spoken by an alternate personality who has a different name than “Ishmael”?

Does he mean, “My real name is not Ishmael. But what my real name is, is for me to know and you to find out; or, I hope, for you not to find out. So you can just call me ‘Ishmael.’ That’s what I always tell people”?

1. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick, or The Whale [1851]. London, Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016.

William Faulkner (post 7): In 1958 audio recording of interview, Faulkner says, “I think that a writer is a perfect case of split personality”

Today, I noticed that some unidentified visitor to the blog was looking at an old 2014 post on William Faulkner. So I was prompted to do some online browsing on Faulkner, and came upon an audio recording of an interview.

There is no explanation of why the interview was done by a department of psychiatry. It appears that Faulkner was a visitor (not a patient), and that the psychiatrists had invited him to discuss the psychology of being a writer and human nature, since writers and psychiatrists have a mutual interest in understanding people.

This is an excerpt from the audio recording and transcript:

William Faulkner: …I think that—that a writer is a—a perfect case of split personality, that he is one thing while he is a writer, and he is something else while he's a—a—a denizen of—of the world. It may be that—that that's not—that he can't be rid of that split…(1).

1. http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/display/wfaudio28_1

“A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley (post 5): To be or not to be, whether a work of great literature is confused or profound

Previously, I pointed to this novel’s inadvertent lesson that great things can be accomplished only by child-abusing patriarchs. However, the novel can also be interpreted to mean that what seemed to be a great accomplishment really wasn’t, because it was based on miscarriage-inducing poison in the water and broken lives. And, no doubt, it was the latter interpretation that won the literary prizes. But the problem with the nicer interpretation is that the nicer characters try and fail to do a better job.

Many of the most honored works in literature are confused, even silly, but are given the benefit of the doubt. When Hamlet says that people are afraid of having bad dreams after they are dead, why isn’t he laughed off the stage? And when the protagonist of this novel says that she hears voices (see the first post in this series), why don’t most readers insist that this be accounted for and explained?

Most readers don’t expect to understand everything, and if the narrator of this novel forgets about her voices, most readers will be happy to follow her lead. Indeed, if I, myself, hadn’t been reading for this blog, I probably would have ignored the voices and moved on. But here I am trying to understand such things.

The point is, although many novelists don’t seem to realize it, most people do not hear voices. And if they are rational voices, heard by a sane person, they are probably the voices of alternate personalities.

“A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley (post 4): Ginny had no further simultaneous thoughts or voices, making them gratuitous multiple personality

In my first post of this series, I quoted passages from mid-novel in which Ginny, the protagonist, said she was experiencing three different thought processes, in different areas of her mind, simultaneously, and was hearing voices.

Since such things, suggestive of multiple personality, were not mentioned either earlier or later in the novel, they were obviously not integral to either the story or character development. So why were they in this novel?

They are one more example of what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” They are probably in the novel only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology.

“A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley (post 3): To what extent are novelists authoritative in regard to their own novels?

Even though A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was made into a movie, Jane Smiley didn’t much like it “either while writing it, or even when finished, in part because King Lear as a literary point of reference meant that ‘I was writing to it rather than it coming from me’…Smiley also recalled that ‘sustaining the ‘I’ point of view was very tedious. At one point I thought, If I have to write one more sentence that starts with ‘I’ I’ll kill myself!’ ” (1, p. 173-174).

Jane Smiley apparently intended her novel to be a corrective to Shakespeare’s King Lear by telling the story from the daughters’ point of view. She would explain that their hostility toward their father was due to his committing incest with them in their childhood.

As the title of the novel highlights, their father’s farm of a thousand acres was monumentally successful. But when he loses control of the farm to his daughters and their husbands, it goes bankrupt.

Did Smiley intend her novel to teach the lesson that great things are accomplished and maintained only by child-abusing patriarchs? No. Of course not. She had somehow lost control.

A Thousand Acres illustrates that novelists are not as in control of what they write as many readers assume. For various reasons, including multiple personality, they do not control, and do not understand, every word.

1. Neil Nakadate. Understanding Jane Smiley. Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

“A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley (post 2): Difficult concluding paragraph, and Reason this novel is not about “repressed memory”

The final paragraph is narrated by Ginny as follows:

“And when I remember that world, I remember my dead young self, who left me something, too, which is her canning jar of poisoned sausage and the ability it confers, of remembering what you can’t imagine. I can’t say that I forgive my father [for committing incest with her and her sister, Rose], but now I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember—the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all the others” (1, pp. 370-371).

Previously, Ginny had put poison in sausage, which she hoped would kill her sister Rose, who had stolen Jess from her, and may have come to be seen by Ginny as being evil like their father. But it is strange that Ginny attributes the poisoned sausage to “my dead young self.” Who is that?

Her dead young self confers the ability “of remembering what you can’t imagine” (the incest). This could make sense if the the “dead young self” was the alternate personality who took over for Ginny each time that her father had had sexual intercourse with her in childhood.

It was the Dead Young Self personality who had the incest memory, which was why Ginny (her regular personality) had not remembered the incest until Rose told her that she had also been molested by their father. Evidently, Rose’s memory of incest helped to resurrect (bring out) Ginny’s Dead Young Self personality, who had Ginny’s memory of incest. And I suppose that that personality, because her name included “death,” now thought it was her job to do any killing (the poisoned sausage).

Did Jane Smiley understand her last paragraph? I’m not sure I do. But I can’t forget that the passages I quoted in my previous post indicate that Ginny probably did have multiple personality.

“Repressed Memory,” An Obsolete Concept

Because Ginny appears to have had amnesia for her childhood incest until she remembered it as an adult, this novel may be mistakenly reviewed as involving “repressed memory.” But there is no “repressed memory” in the American Psychiatric Association’s 947-page Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5, 2013). Why is that? Two reasons.

First, all Freudian concepts, including repression, were eliminated from the diagnostic manual nearly forty years ago (DSM-III, 1980). Second, the part of the DSM relevant to Ginny’s memory problem is the chapter on Dissociative Disorders. (There are no repression disorders in DSM-5.)

Ginny’s kind of memory problem has NOT been viewed as repressed into the unconscious for nearly forty years. Rather, it is viewed as dissociated into a segregated, alternate consciousness; for example, into an alternate personality, as seen in dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personality disorder).

Even psychiatric experts sometimes forget that persons with multiple personality disorder may be said to have amnesia for their history of child abuse only from the point of view of their regular, host personality: one of their alternate personalities has always remembered it (2).

1. Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres [1991]. New York, Anchor Books, 2003.

2. Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D. “Multiples: No Amnesia for Child Abuse.” American Journal of Psychiatry, June 1999. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.156.6.976a

“A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley: Suddenly, mid-novel, first-person protagonist hears voices, and has three different thoughts simultaneously

Until the middle of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ginny—first-person narrator, and oldest of three daughters of an aging farmer—is rather ordinary. But subsequent to an extra-marital encounter with Jess, Ginny has three different thoughts, simultaneously, and she hears voices, with which she is comfortable.

“And I was surprised to discover how my mind worked over these things, the simultaneity of it. I seemed, on the surface, to be continually talking to myself, giving myself instructions or admonishments, asking myself what I really wanted, making comparisons, busily working my rational faculties over every aspect of Jess and my feelings for him…Beneath this voice, flowing more sweetly, was the story: what he did and what I did…And beneath this was an animal, a dog living in me, shaking itself, jumping, barking, attacking, gobbling at things the way a dog gulps its food” (1, p. 172).

Another day, in town, “I got back in the car…I scrunched down in the seat…There was a remote possibility that I would see Jess…He was often the one to run into town if they needed something…He didn’t appear, but thinking of him sparked the voices, and I gave into them, sliding farther down into the seat” (1, pp. 173-174).

Comment

In a nonpsychotic person, the presence of rational voices and multiple, simultaneous thoughts probably indicate multiple personality. In regard to the “dog living in me,” I have previously discussed animal alternate personalities (search “animal alters”). But I have not seen anyone else relate this novel to multiple personality. So I’ll just keep reading.

1. Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres [1991]. New York, Anchor Books, 2003.

John Steinbeck, in an interview, after receiving the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, said, “I’ve never looked upon myself as an author”

“I’ve never looked upon myself as an author. The word ‘author’ has always horrified me, the quality of phoniness, fakeness about it you know…I’ve considered myself a writer, because that’s what I do. I don’t know what an author does. An author collects things [Nobel Prizes?]; a writer does the work.”

If you took Steinbeck’s distinction between author and writer at face value, he would seem to be rather silly and petty. But if Steinbeck had more than one personality, and something about that interview had provoked Steinbeck’s writing personality to take over from his host personality (the “author”), whom the writing personality had always resented for taking undeserved credit, then it would make more sense.

Have I explained the silly with the far-fetched? I just happened upon the above quotation online, but I plan to read Steinbeck later this year.

“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 10): Does Jean Valjean starve himself to death, erasing sin by refusing to eat loaf of bread he had stolen?

No medical cause of death is given, but Jean Valjean had not been eating.

Just as Javert’s sinner personality may have killed his saint personality, Jean Valjean’s saint personality may have killed his sinner personality.

Please see previous nine posts regarding multiple personality in the narrator, Jean Valjean, Thénardier, Marius, and Cosette.

“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 9): Is Javert’s suicide an internal homicide by an alternate personality?

Police inspector Javert is an unusual personality. Many policemen and detectives in novels are known for bending the rules. In contrast, Javert never bends the rules. He is narrowly specialized in being “irreproachable” (1, p. 1142).

And as discussed in yesterday’s post, alternate personalities, per se, are typically specialized. Thus, in that regard, Javert doesn’t seem like a whole person, but more like an alternate personality.

I have often mentioned the fact that when nonpsychotic people hear rational voices in their head, it may be voices of alternate personalities. And Javert does hear a voice: “…in the depths of his mind he had heard a voice, a strange voice crying to him…” (1, p. 1141).

And when Javert had recently released Jean Valjean from his custody, he had not been aware of any intention to do so: “It was in some sort without his knowledge that his hand had opened and released him” (1, p. 1142). Something within him had had a will of its own. Moreover, “without his knowledge” may even imply a multiple personality memory gap.

In short, Javert “was not sure of being himself” (1, p. 1143). 

Why does he commit suicide? Is it that his regular personality has been freaked out by what his alternate personality has been saying in his head and doing with his prisoner? Or is his alternate personality so fed up with the rule-bound regular personality that it finally couldn’t take any more and killed him? In clinical, multiple personality disorder, so-called “internal homicides” sometimes do happen.

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. New York, Modern Library, 1992.

Alternate Personalities: Multiple Personality was renamed Dissociative Identity to make it clear that alternate personalities are not other people

In the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual (DSM-IV, 1994), multiple personality disorder was renamed dissociative identity disorder. The problem with the old name was that “multiple personality” had made it sound like there were multiple people, which had never been implied. The alternate personalities had never been conceived of as other people, but only as subdivisions of one person, who is dissociated or divided.

I am prompted to reiterate this history, because some readers of yesterday’s post may have thought it strange that I referred to Marius and Cosette of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables as having alternate personalities that were specialized in being in love. The fact is, all alternate personalities are specialized in one thing or another.

The least obviously specialized personality is the host personality, which is designed to appear like a regular, whole person and to deal with the public. In novelists, this is often the personality who does interviews, but who is not one of the more specialized personalities who actually wrote the novel. I think it was Margaret Atwood who said that in interviews you hardly ever meet the personality who actually wrote the book.

There are two reasons that I usually use the old name, “multiple personality.” First, it is still much more familiar to most people than “dissociative identity.” Second, “multiple personality” better captures the subjective experience of meeting alternate personalities. They seem like people in their own right, in part because they see themselves that way.

“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 8): Marius and Cosette are lover-specialized alternate personalities, with definitive feature of memory gaps

In the last post, I inferred that when Marius and Cosette did not exchange names until the very end of their hour-long intimate conversation, they were acting like alternate personalities. Since some readers may have doubted that opinion, Victor Hugo provides more definitive evidence.

“Strange to say, in the kind of symphony in which Marius had been living since he had seen Cosette, the past, even the most recent, had become so confused and distant to him that what Cosette told him satisfied him fully. He did not even think to speak to her of the night adventure at the Gorbeau tenement, the Thénardiers, the burning, and the strange attitude and singular flight of her father [Jean Valjean]. Marius had temporarily forgotten all that; he did not even know at night what he had done in the morning, nor where he had breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him…he existed only during the hour in which he saw Cosette” (1, pp. 873-874).

Readers who are new to this site, and do not have even the most basic knowledge of multiple personality, will misinterpret the above passage as merely a romantic exaggeration of how enraptured they were. But what is being described is that the two lovers, per se, were lover-specialized alternate personalities, with amnesia for anything other than their specialized interest. Perhaps the author had had that kind of alternate personality when he had been in love.

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. New York, Modern Library, 1992.

“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 7): Only at very end of hour-long, extremely intimate conversation, do Marius and Cosette exchange names

“Gradually they began to talk. Overflow succeeded to silence, which is fulness. The night was serene and splendid above their heads. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other all their dreams, their frenzies, their ecstasies, their chimeras, their despondencies, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they ceased to see each other. They confided to each other in an intimacy of the ideal, which even now nothing could have increased, all that was most hidden and mysterious of themselves. They related to each other, with a candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth and that remnant of childhood was theirs, suggested to their thought. These two hearts poured themselves out into each other, so that at the end of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl’s soul and the young girl who had the soul of the young man. They inter-penetrated, they enchanted, they dazzled each other.

“When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she laid her head upon his shoulder, and asked him:

“ ‘What is your name?’

“ ‘My name is Marius,’ said he. ‘And yours?’

“ ‘My name is Cosette’ ” (1, p. 814).

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. New York, Modern Library, 1992.

Comment

Within the framework of ordinary psychology, it would be plausible for two persons to see each other across a crowded room at a large social gathering, fall in love at first sight, and get the opportunity to exchange names only at the very end of the night. But it would not be plausible for two persons to wait to exchange names only at the very end of an intimate, self-revealing, hour-long conversation.

So what could explain the passage quoted above?

These two characters are being treated, not as real persons, but as alternate personalities. As I’ve explained in a number of past posts, it is only in multiple personality that namelessness is commonly found, or that personalities who do have names may reserve their names to be the last thing about themselves that they will divulge.

The multiple personality way of thinking about names is apparently ordinary psychology for this author.

Studies at King’s College London support validity of multiple personality: Does this mean that visits to this site from the UK will increase?

Considering the large number of UK writers discussed at this site in the past six years, the number of visitors from the UK has been minimal. I have joked that the UK has a greater belief in ghosts than in alternate personalities.

And as a psychiatrist, I know from articles it used to publish, that the British Journal of Psychiatry had been more than skeptical of the diagnosis.

So I am pleasantly surprised that King’s College London (1) has been studying multiple personality in recent years, with positive results (2, 3).

Their being able, with brain imaging (3), to distinguish the brains of people with and without multiple personality disorder does not necessarily apply to the brains of people with milder, nonclinical, multiple personality trait. But if it did apply, I would not be surprised. For the brains of people with genius are probably different from the brains of people without genius, in some slight but crucial way.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_College_London

2. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/news/records/2016/may/multiple-personality-disorder-may-be-rooted-in-traumatic-experiences

3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/aiding-the-diagnosis-of-dissociative-identity-disorder-pattern-recognition-study-of-brain-biomarkers/DCF85A7D69652C06E61524593B266E8C

“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 6): Narrator reminds reader that protagonist, Jean Valjean, has dual personalities, “two knapsacks”

Earlier (see previous posts), the narrator described Jean Valjean as becoming “separated from himself” and as having internal dialogues. Now, the narrator reminds the reader that Jean Valjean has a dual personality:

“Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he might be said to carry two knapsacks; in one he had the thoughts of a saint, in the other the formidable talents of a convict. He helped himself from one or the other as occasion required” (1, p. 398).

Victor Hugo could have simply said that this saintly person still retained the skills he had learned as a convict. But, instead, after emphasizing the “peculiarity” of what he is about to say, he uses the metaphor of “two knapsacks,” by which he means that the saint and the convict are two distinct, but readily accessible, personalities.

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. Trans. Charles E. Wilbour. New York, The Modern Library, 1992.

“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 5): In metafictional interlude, “the author of this book” speaks of himself in third-person and first-person plural

“Many years have already passed since the author of this book, who is compelled, reluctantly, to speak of himself, was in Paris. Since then, Paris has been transformed. A new city has arisen, which to him is in some sense unknown. He need not say that he loves Paris; Paris is the native city of his youth…If after times, when we are there no longer…that we miss…which we see no more…and we love…and call them up…such as they were…

“Permit us, then, to speak of the past in the present. Saying which, we beg the reader to take note of it, and we proceed” (1, p. 389).

When a person speaks of himself in both third-person and first-person plural, it may imply three personalities. Third-person implies two personalities, the one speaking and the other one he refers to. Then first-person plural implies a different perspective, that of a third personality, who refers collectively to himself plus the other two. But the precise number of personalities is not the issue. Any number more than one is multiple personality.

Why didn’t the author simply use first-person in this metafictional interlude? Is he flaunting his multiple personality? Or is it just that these particular personalities always work as a team, and “team” has no “I” in it (an old sports joke).

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. Trans. Charles E. Wilbour. New York, The Modern Library, 1992.

Added later: My idea that the author or narrator has more than one personality may be supported by what seems to be confusion about the narrative perspective in opinions which I just found online. The most common opinion is that the narration is third-person omniscient, which I can understand, because there are long stretches in which the narrator makes no self-reference. But that doesn't account for the times, as I've previously mentioned, that the narrator refers to himself in first-person plural ("we"), and the one occasion so far in which he refers to himself in first-person singular. I also found some commentary which disputed that the narrator was omniscient, in that sometimes he seemed to be, but other times he didn't. 

“Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo (post 4): “Double nature”—a Jekyll/Hyde dual personality—unnecessarily attributed to minor character

“Thénardier was one of those double natures who sometimes appear among us without our knowledge, and disappear without ever being known, because destiny has shown us but one side of them. It is the fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a quiet ordinary situation, Thénardier had all that is necessary to make—we do not say to be—what passes for an honest tradesman, a good citizen. At the same time, under certain circumstances, under the operation of certain occurrences exciting his baser nature, he had in him all that was necessary to be a villain. He was a shopkeeper in which lay hidden a monster” (1, p. 368).

The narrator could simply have said this character pretended to be a decent fellow, but was really a monster at heart, which the reader already knew from his treatment of Cosette, anyway. So why make a general statement about psychology, and invoke the particular concept of “double nature”? It was evidently a kind of psychology in which the author was interested.

1. Victor Hugo. Les Misérables [1862]. Trans. Charles E. Wilbour. New York, The Modern Library, 1992.