from October 26, 2013
Toni Morrison and The Novelist’s Characters

Toni Morrison: Conversations (Edited by Carolyn C. Danard, 2008) was also my source for the post, “Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” Morrison makes various remarks in these interviews that are relevant to this blog, but I prefer to limit myself to passages which lend themselves to quotation—so Morrison can speak for herself—which leaves only the following, from a 1985 interview:

“[Sula] came as many characters do—all of them don’t—rather full-fleshed and complete almost immediately, including her name. I felt this enormous intimacy. I mean I knew exactly who she was, but I had trouble trying to make her…into the kind of person that would upset everybody…And, by the time I finished the book, Sula, I missed her. I know the feeling of missing characters who are in fact, by that time, much more real than real people” (p. 26).

“…the people I would call on to help me to verify some phrase or some word or something would be the people in the book. I mean I would just conjure them up and ask them, you know, about one thing or another. And they are usually very cooperative if they are fully realized and if you know their name. And if you don’t know their names, they don’t talk much” (p. 27).

Thus, for Toni Morrison (and perhaps most other novelists):

1. many characters come rather complete, almost immediately, with a feeling of intimacy,

2. by the time the book ends, characters may be much more real than real people,

3. characters would help Morrison with things that she didn’t know or wasn’t sure about,

4. but if you don’t know their names, characters don’t talk much.

Comments:

1. Novelists don’t consciously construct many of their characters. They spring fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. 

2. I’m not sure what it means for characters to be “much more real than real people,” perhaps only that while the novelist is immersed in writing the novel, her focus on everything else is reduced, but another possibility is that the world of the novel is absolutely more real to the novelist than real life.

3. To the novelist, characters are like autonomous people, with minds of their own.

4. The fourth point is the same as my clinical experience when I would try to talk to my patients’ alternate personalities. Knowing the name of the personality was often the key.

Who went to Stockholm in 1993 and got the Nobel Prize in Literature?: In a 1994 interview, Toni Morrison says it was Chloe Wofford

Q: It must have been fulfilling, in 1970, to see your name on the cover of “The Bluest Eye.”

A: I was upset. They had the wrong name: Toni Morrison. My name is Chloe Wofford. Toni’s a nickname.

Q: Didn’t you know your publisher, Holt, was going to use the name?

A: Well, I sort of knew it was going to happen. I was in a daze. I sent it in that way because the editor knew me as Toni Morrison.

Q: So you achieved fame misnamed?

A: Tell me about it! I write all the time about being misnamed. How you got your name is very special. My mother, my sister, all my family call me Chloe. It was Chloe, by the way, who went to Stockholm last year to get the Nobel Prize.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/11/magazine/chloe-wofford-talks-about-toni-morrison.html

My concept of “multiple personality trait” expands the boundaries of Normal Psychology

I have wondered why, if what I have been documenting here about fiction writers for the last seven years is true, they have not rushed to my defense? They should.

In my view, my concept of multiple personality trait expands the boundaries of normal psychology. But fiction writers may think, or fear others may think, that I’m calling them crazy, since there is a long tradition of linking creativity with mental illness:

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

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-real-link-between-creativity-and-mental-illness/.

https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Fink-et-al.-2013.pdf.

I'm not calling fiction writers crazy. Just the opposite.

Search “Aldous Huxley” and “Brave New World” here regarding the multiple-personality issues underlying author, novel, and new 2020 TV series

from April 27, 2016

The title page of “Autobiography of Mark Twain” omits Samuel Clemens, because Twain was an alternate personality and not just a pseudonym

If the name “Samuel Clemens” had been unknown to the public, then it might have made sense to omit it from the title page of his autobiography. But his real name was well known, and he could very easily have used both names, if the title page had said, “Autobiography of Mark Twain by Samuel Clemens.” So why did he omit his real name from the title page of an autobiography, a nonfiction book?

As seen in recent posts on Charles Hamilton’s autobiography, “The Autobiography of Frank Richards,” the use of an author’s pseudonym instead of his real name in the title of his autobiography implies that the pseudonym was the name of an alternate personality.

I would also relate the title page of Clemens’s autobiography to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter” (1844), in which a letter is hidden in plain sight. The title page of Clemens’s autobiography is like a letter to the public about his multiple personality, hidden in plain sight.

Am I the only one to see a connection between Samuel Clemens and Edgar Allan Poe? Apparently not, as Alan Gribben makes clear in an essay, which includes the following:

“Several other parallels link the psychological patterns of Poe and Twain even more closely. As Patrick F. Quinn pointed out thirty years ago, “the phenomenon of the Doppelganger is perhaps the most characteristic and persistent of Poe’s obsessive fantasies,” so much so that, “in a real sense, Poe’s heroes are all doubles, one of another. “Unquestionably Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “Ligeia” (1845), and several other tales with double motifs would have appealed to Twain, a tireless chronicler of twins, disguises, exchanged roles, and contrasting personalities. The mistakenly switched Edward Tudor and Tom Canty in The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan and the King (sold as slaves) in A Connecticut Yankee, and Thomas a Beckett Driscoll and Valet de Chambre in Pudd‘nhead Wilson (1894) represent only the best known of Twain’s many explorations of alter ego variations. Twain’s modern biographers, like Poe’s, have discovered a divided, tormented personality — in Twain’s case, partly suggested by his adoption of a nom de plume and his affection for pseudonyms (in 1882, for instance, returning to the Mississippi River to gather literary material, he registered at hotels as “Mr. C. L. Samuels”). Mysterious subterfuges involving names and identities had tremendous allure for the imaginations of both writers” (1).

In short, the title page of “Autobiography of Mark Twain” treats Twain like a person in his own right, which is how alternate personalities see themselves. He used that title page to reveal his multiple personality. But his message was hidden in plain sight. Or, as he was wont to say, nobody believed him when he told the truth.

1. Alan Gribben, “ ‘That Pair of Spiritual Derelicts’: The Poe-Twain Relationship,” Poe Studies, December 1985, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, 18:17-20 http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1980/p1985201.htm

Note: This is my fifteenth post on Samuel Clemens. Search “Mark Twain” to read the previous ones.

“Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School” by Charles Hamilton writing as Frank Richards (post 8): Liars, lying, and double consciousness in multiple personality

Based on his use of twenty-eight pseudonyms, I have previously speculated that Charles Hamilton had multiple personality, but, until now, I had never read any of the stories for which he was most famous, those about Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School.

One of Billy Bunter’s chief characteristics is his “comically transparent untruthfulness” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bunter. He is seen by his schoolmates as being an habitual liar.

His lying is “comically transparent,” because he will often show knowledge of things about which he claims to have had no involvement. For example, he claims never to have gone to the room of his classmate Coker and stolen food that had been sent to Coker by a relative. “I—I wouldn’t ! [Bunter, who is a fat glutton, obviously would steal food.] You can ask Snoop, sir ! He knows—I gave him some of the apples…It—it’s all a mistake, sir,” groaned Bunter. “If—if you won’t let me be run in this time, sir, I’ll never do it again, and I never did it at all, sir. I—I think very likely Coker ate it and forgot about it” (1, p. 131).

The joke is that Bunter, honestly, both knows and doesn’t know what he did, something that is possible only for a person with multiple personality. A good term for both knowing and not knowing would be “double consciousness,” a nineteenth century synonym for multiple personality.

Double Consciousness: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug03/souls/brucepg.html

Note: If this is one of those links that seems to expire, search "double consciousness" in this blog for past posts in which I have quoted from it at length.

1. Frank Richards. Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School. London, Hawk Books, 1991.

Seventh Anniversary of Literary-Psychiatric Blog: "Great Fiction Writers & Multiple Personality Trait"

My seven-year survey of over 240 great fiction writers, including literally dozens of winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has found that most of them have what I call “multiple personality trait.” The trait differs from the disorder, the mental illness, multiple personality disorder (aka dissociative identity disorder), in that the trait does not entail clinically significant distress and dysfunction. Indeed, for fiction writers, multiple personality trait is a core ability, not a disability, since their characters and narrators, whom they often experience as having minds of their own, are equivalent to alternate personalities.

Why is it worth knowing that most successful fiction writers have multiple personality trait? Because it is key to understanding how their fiction writing is done and is often reflected in their works, not as characters with overt, labelled multiple personality disorder, but as gratuitous or unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality, such as memory gaps, alien impulses, puzzling self-contradiction, a voice heard in the character’s head with a mind of its own (whose words are often printed in italics), stories of children who never grow up (like the child-aged alternate personalities in clinical cases of multiple personality disorder), seeing someone else (an alternate personality) in the mirror, or namelessness (alternate personalities in clinical cases of multiple personality disorder are often nameless).

Fiction writers, who seem to be joking when they say in interviews that their characters develop minds of their own, are not joking. They are reporting their subjective experience of multiple personality, but doing so in a joking manner, so that if anyone accuses them of being mentally ill, they can deny it as only a joke.

Some characters in literary classics have diagnosable multiple personality disorder that is often not recognized by professors of literature when they teach those classics; for example, Dr. Manette in Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” and the title character of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” See past posts. Other famous characters, like Anna Karenina, do things (like commit suicide) that cannot be understood unless you realize that they have multiple personality. See past post. This is true not only of classics, but also of popular, contemporary novels, like Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” (see past post).

Added July 9, 2020: Why is it worth knowing that most successful fiction writers have multiple personality trait? Another reason it is worth knowing is that fiction writers have to come from somewhere. I infer that there must be a substantial minority of the general public that has multiple personality trait, that fiction writers had been members of that minority, but have self-selected themselves to be fiction writers. I have guessed that up to 30% of the general public has multiple personality trait and that 90% of fiction writers have it. The 90% figure is also based on the study by Marjorie Taylor, cited in past posts.https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

“The Stranger” by Nobel prize novelist Albert Camus: Why did Camus believe in the philosophy of “Absurdism”?

Albert Camus believed  in “Absurdism” (see Wikipedia).

His novel, The Stranger, with its autobiographical absurdities, suggests how he came to that philosophy.

The novel comes to a surprisingly abrupt end when the first-person narrator and protagonist, Monsieur Meursault, who has been convicted of murder, is in jail awaiting execution. He does not explain how, if he will be executed, he is here to tell his tale, or, if he will escape execution, why he does not know it. Since he has not kept a diary or journal or told his story to anyone, the ending is an unexplained, autobiographical absurdity.

Back at the beginning of the novel, Meursault had attended his mother’s funeral. He had guessed that she had been in her sixties. There are conceivable circumstances in which a son would not know his mother’s age, but he does not mention any. He treats his memory gap for her age as ordinary, but it is not. It is another example of his absurd, unexplained, autobiographical ignorance.

In the middle of the novel, Mersault tells how he committed murder. But he does not remember why he sought out his victim, shot him, and then shot the corpse four more times. The memory gaps about this murder are yet another example of absurd autobiographical ignorance.

What kind of person has memory gaps that cannot be explained by ordinary forgetfulness?  It is a cardinal symptom of multiple personality. Since the person’s memories are divided among various personalities, none of the personalities has the whole story.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay on this novel says, “The stranger is, finally, myself in relation to myself… “The stranger, who, at certain moments, confronts us in a mirror” (quoted from “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus’s essay on his novel) https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Stranger_Albert_Camus/YXDlsha-vcIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=the+stranger+who,+at+certain+moments,+confronts+us+in+a+mirror&pg=PA6&printsec=frontcover Also see my past post on the symptoms of multiple personality in Sartre’s novel, Nausea. And note that some people with multiple personality do, indeed, see strangers (alternate personalities) in the mirror.

1. “The Stranger” [1942] by Albert Camus. Translated from the French by Matthew Ward. New York, Vintage International/Random House, 1989.

“Of Human Bondage” by W. Somerset Maugham (post 3): Philip, who both loves and despises Mildred, is self-contradictory

The most dramatic relationship in this 700-page semi-autobiographical novel is between Philip, the protagonist, and Mildred, whom he both loves (inexplicably) and despises (for good reasons).

True self-contradiction (not ordinary mixed feelings) is not seen in most people, whose personality is relatively consistent, but is characteristic of multiple personality, since alternate personalities have no difficulty contradicting each other.

In fact, Maugham said that he, himself (like most fiction writers), had multiple personality, as noted in a past post:

April 6, 2018

“The Summing Up” by W. Somerset Maugham: “The point of the writer is that he is not one man but many. It is because he is many that he can create many”

“Other men have been outraged on discovering, as they so often have, the discrepancy between the artist’s life and his work…

“But the point of the writer is that he is not one man but many. It is because he is many that he can create many, and the measure of his greatness is the number of selves that he comprises. When he fashions a character that does not carry conviction it is because there is in himself nothing of that person; he has had to fall back on observation, and so has only described, not begotten. The writer does not feel with; he feels in. It is not sympathy that he has, that too often results in sentimentality; he has what the psychologists call empathy. It is because Shakespeare had this to so great a degree that he was at once the most living and the least sentimental of authors. I think Goethe was the first writer to grow conscious of this multiple personality, and it troubled him all his life” (1, pp. 151-152).

Search "Goethe" for past posts.

Since “Of Human Bondage” is a novel, not an essay, it does not explicitly label Philip as having multiple personality, but the text does include comments that suggest multiple personality:

“But at the moment he had not been master of himself. It seemed that some devil had seized him forcing him to say bitter things against his will (2, p. 85).

“…but at the same time something else in him, like another person standing at his elbow…” (2, p. 89).

“It did not seem himself that was concerned; he felt that he had been seized by some strange force that moved him against his will, contrary to his interests (2, p. 328).

“Though he yearned for Mildred so madly he despised her” (2, p. 343).

“…he got a melancholy satisfaction in choosing a gift which would give her pleasure and at the same time indicate for himself the contempt he had for her (2, p. 353).

“…it seemed to him rather that he was swayed by some power alien to, and yet within, himself” (2, p. 441).

This novel is one more illustration of the fact that self-contradiction may be a clue to multiple personality. Search “self-contradictory” for past posts related to other writers.

In multiple personality, although only one personality may be overt at any given time, other personalities may be simultaneously conscious, and may pull strings from behind the scenes. The overt personality, unaware of the alternate personalities, per se, may experience the resulting behavior, thoughts, or feelings as alien, puzzling, and contradictory.

1. W. Somerset Maugham. The Summing Up [1938]. New York, Penguin Books, 1963.

2. W. Somerset Maugham. Of Human Bondage [1915]. London, Vintage Books/Random House, 2000.

Fiction Writers’ Fallacy: Thinking that everyone’s mind is like the fiction writer’s mind, self-contradictory and containing multitudes

The poet Walt Whitman famously said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Coincidentally, quoting Whitman, Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan recently published a song, “I Contain Multitudes” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgEP8teNXwY

How do I know that some fiction writers think everyone shares their multiple personality trait; i.e., everyone contains multitudes?

Recently, in The New York Times Book Review, both the reviewer (a fiction writer) and the author of the book being reviewed thought that “everyone” contains multitudes.

Vera Brosgol’s review of “Fly on the Wall” by Remy Lai (May 31, 2020) says that 12-year-old protagonist “Henry contains multitudes,” is “trying to find a perfect personality,” and “learns that everyone contains multitudes.”

Search “Walt Whitman” and “Bob Dylan” for my past posts.

Identical Twins, Pamela Spiro Wagner (diagnosed with schizophrenia) and Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D. (mentally-well psychiatrist), co-author autobiography

The book is alternately narrated by each sister (1). See both sisters in a video (2). Pamela, writing as Phoebe Sparrow Wagner, summarizes her psychiatric treatment (3).

Pamela, Carolyn, and most of Pamela’s psychiatrists believe that Pamela has schizophrenia. 

But Pamela had auditory hallucinations at least as early as age eleven (1, p. 30-33) and DSM-5, the psychiatric diagnostic manual, does not even discuss schizophrenia that young, remarking only that onset prior to adolescence is rare. In fact, the prevalence of schizophrenia prior to age thirteen is very rare, only 1 in 40,000, while hearing voices that young is much more common in other diagnoses (4). According to DSM-5, one of those other diagnoses is dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality).

Since multiple personality is a posttraumatic disorder, the question arises as to whether the autobiography describes any early childhood experience that would have traumatized Pamela more than Carolyn. It does. When the twins were eleven, Pamela disobeys their father. He tells Carolyn to go to her room and Carolyn reports the following:

“When I hear a smack and the words, ‘I’ll show you,’ I tear back to our bedroom, slam the door, and hurl myself into the closet…I dive into a clean pile of quilts and yank them over me. The hollow closet door doesn’t keep out a thing…Pammy shouting. Daddy Bellowing. Words crashing. Threatening, swearing, slapping, thudding, kicking, crashing, things toppling, breaking, smashing…More clattering, banging, shouting. Heart jumping, thumping, panicking, pumping. Everything spinning. Stop! Water running. Stop! I don’t want to hear. Water running?…Pammy screaming…Where’s Mommy? Mommy! More stamping. Dragging…I grit my teeth, pull clothes and blankets around me. Gotta keep from screaming. What’s going on? Make it stop! Water sloshing. Choking sounds. Is he going to drown her? I hurl myself out of the closet. He has her head under the faucet, soap in her mouth. I throw myself at him. ‘No, Daddy! She can’t breathe. You can’t do this!’…I slap him, kick his shins, bite him like an animal until finally Pammy can wrestle free and run for cover” (1, p. 22).

I doubt that one such event would lead to multiple personality, but it may not have been Pamela’s only traumatic experience with her father.

Pseudonyms

The twins’ family name is their father’s last name, Spiro. At age 25, Pamela, who says, “My father and I still do not speak,” legally changes her last name to Wagner, her mother’s maiden name, declaring, “I feel like my real life has finally begun” (1, p. 160). She later also comes to use the name “Phoebe Sparrow Wagner” (3). And as I’ve discussed in past posts, pseudonyms may be the names of alternate personalities.

1. Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D. Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2005.

2. Video “Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI

3. Phoebe Sparrow Wagner. July 13, 2019. “Why I Take Drugs [medications] and Don’t Plan To Stop.” https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/07/take-drugs-dont-plan-stop/

4. Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3289250/

“Inner Voices: My Journey With Psychosis And Schizophrenia” an autobiography by May-May Meijer: Unexplained Memory Gaps

Both the author’s book (1) and her essay, “What I Have Learned From My Psychosis” (2), describe it as a typical case of recurrent, flagrant psychosis, which is successfully treated with antipsychotic medication, except that the medication does have its side effects and her interpersonal relationships and level of function are never quite as good as before.

However, in addition to psychosis, she also has memory gaps, a symptom typical of multiple personality, not schizophrenia: During her hospitalizations for psychosis, when her sister comes to visit, she speaks to her sister in English only—this is the Netherlands, and their primary language is Dutch—and has no memory for having done so (1, pp. 108, 162). And “My father told me that I also often didn’t remember his visits or my sister’s” (1, p. 221).

There is no indication that she discussed these memory gaps with her psychiatrists. As I have been saying in previous posts, patients usually don't volunteer this information, and psychiatrists usually don't know enough to ask.

1. May-May Meijer. Inner Voices: My Journey With Psychosis And Schizophrenia. Translated from Dutch to English by Karen Loughrey, Kumar Jamdagni, and May-May Meijer. Netherlands, Amsterdam Publishers, 2019.

2. May-May Meijer. “What I Have Learned From My Psychosis.” April 14, 2019. https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/04/learned-from-psychosis/

Most Psychiatrists Do Not Have An Informed Opinion About Multiple Personality: Another Reason

I have a number of past posts on why most psychiatrists miss the diagnosis of multiple personality: They are clueless, because the mental status examination that they are taught to use fails to inquire about memory gaps (search “mental status”).

But there is an important additional reason that most psychiatrists ignore, and may be prejudiced against, multiple personality: The primary treatment of multiple personality is a certain kind of psychotherapy (1), not medication.

And as you can see from the following recent article in Psychiatric News (newspaper of The American Psychiatric Association), most psychiatrists nowadays do not know or do psychotherapy: “Should Psychotherapy Be a Psychiatric Subspecialty?” https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.3b6

Added April 11, 2020: It is not just most psychiatrists who don't have an informed opinion about multiple personality. It is also academic and social psychologists, who do not usually do psychotherapy. It is also clinical psychologists and other psychotherapists who do psychotherapy, but have never learned how to diagnose and treat multiple personality, because it is a subspecialty that is not included in most professional training.

Multiple personality disorder (renamed dissociative identity disorder) is in the official diagnostic manual, DSM-5 (and was in DSM-III and DSM-IV previously), because professionals who do know its diagnosis and treatment have published peer-reviewed studies to prove its validity.

1. Frank W. Putnam, M.D. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

Irony in Margaret Atwood’s promotion of book tours

Because of the pandemic, Atwood, a Canadian novelist, has suggested that Canada replace in-person book tours with virtual book tours.

The irony, as noted in past posts, is Atwood has written that writers have two distinct selves, the one who handles public life and the one who writes the books. And, she has said, since it is the former who handles public events like book tours, people attending such events never actually get to see the one who wrote the book.

You should be so skeptical that you will need to read about all 240 writers discussed here

Why read all past posts on the 240 writers (and related subjects) I have discussed over the last seven years?

Why not limit yourself, let’s say, to reading Marjorie Taylor’s study of 50 anonymous writers

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

plus my posts on the 10-50 writers with whom you are most familiar, and associated subjects, selected from my name and subject indices?

Because, if you have an ordinary amount of skepticism, you will need to read about literally hundreds of diverse writers before you are convinced that 90% of fiction writers actually do have real multiple personality (the creative trait, not the clinical disorder), and you begin to realize that if this is true of 90% of fiction writers, it may also be true of up to 30% of the general public (which would be a new view of normal psychology).

I know that if I hadn't explored 240 diverse fiction writers, I would never have believed those conclusions.

Added March 22, 2021: What I mean is that, if, like most readers of this blog, I hadn't had clinical experience diagnosing and treating multiple personality, then I might need to read about hundreds of writers before believing it. The great obstacle for most readers of this blog is that they have never seen the indisputable condition themselves. The reason I added the subtitle to the blog about memory gaps is that that is the most likely key for a person to discover multiple personality. I know that I was shocked the first time I asked a puzzling person if they had memory gaps and they said yes. Then of course I had to ask questions about that, which led to meeting an alternate personality, which is what convinces you that this is something objective, and not just an interpretation.