Sixth Anniversary of multiplewriters.blogspot.com (post 1,630): On Reading, Fiction Writing, & Multiple Personality Trait

During the past six years, this site has been visited more than a hundred thousand times, by people from around the world. That is a surprisingly large number, considering that the subject is a cross between literary criticism and psychiatry (and relatively few people are interested in both).

However, since the subject, ultimately, is normal psychology—multiple personality trait, which, by definition, doesn’t cause distress or dysfunction, is normal—this site may eventually be visited by millions of people. Not necessarily in my lifetime. I’m not holding my breath.

For sixth anniversary entertainment, selected from the previous 1,629 posts for no special reason, here is a group of five past posts on the most prolific author in history:

January 30, 2016

Frank Richards, one of 25 pseudonyms of Charles Hamilton, puts Joyce Carol Oates to shame: He was much more prolific, the most prolific author in history.

“Charles Harold St. John Hamilton (8 August 1876 – 24 December 1961) was an English writer, specializing in writing long-running series of stories for weekly magazines about recurrent casts of characters, his most frequent and famous genre being boys' public school stories, though he also dealt with other genres. He used a variety of pen-names [twenty-five, according to tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review], generally using a different name for each set of characters he wrote about, the most famous being Frank Richards for the Greyfriars School stories (featuring Billy Bunter)…It has been estimated by researchers Lofts and Adley that Hamilton wrote around 100 million words or the equivalent of 1,200 average length novels, making him the most prolific author in history” (Wikipedia).

Hamilton’s autobiography is titled “The Autobiography of Frank Richards,” as though Frank Richards were a person in his own right.

Pseudonyms have been a recurrent topic in this blog, because alternate personalities often have their own names.

Postscript: My title would have been more correct to say that Charles Hamilton (not Frank Richards) is the most prolific author in history. I guess I was thinking about the fact that the only autobiography written by Hamilton, judging by the title, was by and about Frank Richards, as though Richards, not Hamilton, were the person's regular, host personality.

Postpostscript: Was his Charles Hamilton personality a writer? If so, was he not the kind of writer who would write an autobiography?

April 15, 2016

Did Charles Hamilton, the most prolific writer in the English language, use twenty-eight pseudonyms (Frank Richards, et al) because of multiple personality?

Pseudonyms have been a recurrent topic here (search pseudonym), because the alternate personalities of a person with multiple personality often have their own names, which, for the person, are pseudonyms.

Of course, not everyone who uses pseudonyms does so because of multiple personality, but persons who use pseudonyms that have not been imposed on them by obvious circumstances should be suspected of having multiple personality until proven otherwise.

Indeed, some “obvious circumstances” for pseudonyms—like an author’s writing novels in more than one genre—may be only a rationalization for alternate personalities who want to publish under their own names.

I wonder if Charles Hamilton had multiple personality, but all I can say from reading a biography is that his personality had puzzling contradictions (which may be a clue to multiple personality) and his writing process was similar to that of other writers previously discussed.

Frank Richards, et al.

“Charles Harold St John Hamilton [1876-1961] used more than twenty pen-names, created almost a hundred fictional schools and published well over 72 million words of fiction, or the equivalent of a thousand novels. He is better known as Frank Richards, the pseudonym he used when writing about Greyfriars School and its imperishable inmates. He created St Jim’s as Martin Clifford and Rookwood School as Owen Conquest, but Frank Richards became more to him than just another pen-name — it was an alter ego…” (1, p. 1).

“Even when Hamilton had become the grand old man of boys’ writers, he retained a curiously Peter Pan-like quality” (1, p. 18). (Due to child-aged alternate personalities?)

“ ‘It was a curious thing that when I wrote I seemed to see it all happening before my eyes, as if I were looking at a picture. I had a sense of writing down actual happenings’ “ (1, p. 24).

“As Frank Richards he would write quite differently from Martin Clifford (and he seemed to feel that the pen-names themselves somehow governed this)” (1, p. 50).

“In some ways Frank Richards has always been an enigma. Apart from the phenomenon of the vastness of his literary output, there are the strange opposites in his nature, each of which seemed to find expression without involving him in the kind of conflict that someone of his sensitivity might be expected to feel. He was a long-term compulsive gambler, yet the code of behaviour he advocated for his readers with, apparently, total sincerity and conviction, was one that would have eschewed and, indeed, condemned gambling. Until he reached his early forties, he was addicted to traveling in Europe, but a decade later was extremely reclusive. With his interest in language and a passion for the classics, he was the antithesis of his most famous character, Bunter, yet breathed life into him in a way that has made him almost as archetypal as Cinderella. His published writings are more prolific than any other author’s in the English language, yet…according to his niece…he ‘always hoped to be able to break away from writing’ ” (1, p. 169).

“I have lived for fifty years by writing stories: but I still have not the remotest idea of how a story comes into existence…somehow or other — I have not the least idea how — the story took shape and form. I never knew what any character was going to say, till he said it: and seldom what he was going to do, till he did it. I suppose this must have been because the characters, to me, seemed to live: and being, for the moment, living people they had wills of their own and did what they liked. It is difficult for me to imagine an author writing in any other way then this: but no doubt different writers have different methods…

“[I] never did dictate…[since I didn’t think] that I could have talked as fast as I could type: fifty words a minute would be rather a strain on the vocal organs. And an author must work fast if his work is going to be any good: slow writing makes heavy reading. James Joyce told a man once that he had made ‘good progress’ one afternoon: he had written one sentence! After that, it hardly needs a glance at his work to see that it is worthless…

“A whole story was always floating in my mind when I began to write. It really is an odd process, which I do not quite understand myself: once you get going the characters seem to walk and talk of their own accord, as if the breath of life had been breathed into their nostrils: the author has little more to do than to record their sayings and doings. Sometimes it almost seems like writing to dictation” (1, pp. 206-207).

Charles Hamilton’s Twenty-Eight Pen-Names: “Michael Blake, Winston Cardew, Martin Clifford, Harry Clifton, Clifford Clive, Sir Alan Cobham, Owen Conquest, Gordon Conway, Frank Drake, Freeman Fox, Hamilton Greening, Cecil Herbert, Robert Jennings, Gillingham Jones, T. Harcourt Llewelyn, Clifford Owen, Ralph Redway, Frank Richards, Hilda Richards, Raleigh Robbins, Robert Rogers, Eric Stanhope, Robert Stanley, Peter Todd, Nigel Wallace, Talbot Wynyard” (1, Appendix Three).

1. Mary Cadogan. Frank Richards: The Chap Behind the Chums. London, Viking Penguin, 1988.

April 17, 2016

Charles Hamilton’s autobiography, “The Autobiography of Frank Richards,” has a third-person narrator, who may not be Charles Hamilton or Frank Richards.

As previously noted, “Frank Richards” was the best-known of Charles Hamilton’s twenty-eight pen names. I have just started to read Hamilton’s autobiography, and so far, it is unclear who the narrator is. He says:

“This is the Autobiography of Frank Richards: ipso facto that of Martin Clifford, Owen Conquest, and Charles Hamilton…Charles became so accustomed to the name of Frank Richards, that it grew to seem to him like his own. Since he has used that name, he has thought of himself more as Frank than as Charles: though undoubtedly he began as Charles in the earlier days…

“My readers will observe that these memoirs are written chiefly in the third person. Frank…dislikes a page spotted about with aggressive personal pronouns…He is still rather a diffident chap” (1, p. 18).

And the first three chapters (pp. 7-23) are, indeed, about Frank Richards, and are mostly in third person. For example, the first two sentences and first page say:

“Frank Richards, at seventeen, was at a loose end. He was in the perplexing state of not knowing what he was going to do…

“He wanted to be…an author…And in fact he did write…dating from the age of seven…” (1, p. 7).

Note: In multiple personality, the first alternate personalities arise to cope with childhood trauma. Here, one of the writing personalities, Frank Richards, appears to have originated when Charles Hamilton was seven, the year his father died of tuberculosis.

Now, although the narration is, as quoted above, “chiefly in the third person,” there are lapses; for example, at the bottom of the first page, referring to the writer’s first publisher: “Mr M. was a publisher and printer — I rather think that he was a big printer and a small publisher” (1, p. 7-8).

And above, in the very explanation quoted about why the third person will be used, there is “My readers.” And on the very next page (1, p. 19), there are one “me,” two “my,” and two “I.”

Why this inconsistency and self-contradiction? If Frank is so “diffident” (an adjective that is repeatedly applied to Frank by the narrator), and, because he is diffident, prefers to avoid “aggressive personal pronouns” like “me,” “my,” and “I,” why does he contradict himself, blatantly?

It appears that although Frank may be “rather a diffident chap,” this narrator, whoever he is, is not. Moreover, as quoted above, this narrator lumps the author’s actual name, Charles Hamilton, together with the pen names; indeed, considers it inferior to the pen names, as a name that has outlived its usefulness and whose time has passed.

Samuel Clemens’s pen name, Mark Twain, was featured in the title of his autobiography, which was written in the first person by Mark Twain. Charles Hamilton’s autobiography goes one step further. Not only is the pen name Frank Richards featured in the title of the autobiography, but it is written in the third person, possibly by some other, unnamed, alternate personality.

1. [no author specified]. The Autobiography of Frank Richards. London, Charles Skilton Ltd, 1952.

April 19, 2016

Charles Hamilton’s “The Autobiography of Frank Richards” (post 2): Beloved author of children’s literature on his successful multiple personality.

In this book, photographs of the author have the caption, Frank Richards (one of Charles Hamilton’s twenty-eight pseudonyms). This is neither a joke nor mental illness. It is a manifestation of the psychology that helped make him the most prolific fiction writer in the English language.

Did he think that his twenty-eight pen-name narrators were different people? No, by objective standards, but yes, psychologically:

“Charles [Hamilton] and Martin [Clifford] were one and the same person: but Charles did not write quite like Martin” (1, p. 35).

“…when he used the name, he would feel like a different person, and in consequence write from a somewhat different angle. I have been told—by men who do not write—that all this is fanciful: that a man’s work must be the same, whether he be called Cripps or Cholmondeley. This only means that they don’t understand…To relatives and bankers, and the Inspector of Taxes, I am still Charles Hamilton: to everybody else, including myself, Frank Richards” (1, p. 36).

“When Frank wrote ‘Ralph Redway’ on his title page, he became, to all intents and purposes, Ralph Redway, a person quite distinct from Frank Richards or Martin Clifford” (1, p. 176).

The above is a good example of a fiction writer’s normal version of multiple personality. It is normal because it did not cause him distress or dysfunction, but, in fact, was the basis of his successful writing career. The only thing unusual about it is that an alternate personality, Frank Richards, has assumed the role of host personality and admitted who he is publicly.

Did he think of it as multiple personality? That depends on how you interpret his anecdote in Chapter X about an editor whose “life was a queer kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. His two characters ran side by side for years” (1, p. 69). I don’t know if this is truly about someone else or is an indirect way of talking about himself. At the very least, it shows that he thought about “Jekyll-and-Hyde” (a metaphor for multiple personality).

What about the issue I raised in the previous post as to who is narrating this autobiography? It is written mostly in the third person for the alleged reason that Frank Richards is “diffident” and does not like to use the first person.

Sometimes, like in the passage quoted above, concluding “to everybody else, including myself, Frank Richards,” the narrator does, indeed, seem to be the Frank Richards personality.

But at other times, the narrator seems to be someone else, commenting on Frank, for example:

“Characters ‘grew’ in Frank’s hands. They became more and more like themselves, if I may put it so” (1, p. 54).

In these instances, the narrator seems to be some other personality, who prefers to remain incognito, which is quite common in multiple personality.

In conclusion, this appears to be the autobiography of a person with multiple personality. The one thing it lacks to confirm the diagnosis is memory gaps (search “memory gaps”), which is probably because it is written from the point of view of alternate personalities, especially Frank Richards. The Charles Hamilton personality would have been more likely to report memory gaps.

1. [no author specified]. The Autobiography of Frank Richards. London, Charles Skilton Ltd., 1952.

April 20, 2016

Autobiography, Pseudonyms, Multiple Personality: Title pages that omit the author’s real name may be a sign that the author has multiple personality.

When the title page of an autobiography—by a famous author or anyone who is best known by a pen name or pseudonym of any kind—omits the person’s real name, most readers don’t give it a second thought.

But they should, since autobiographies are nonfiction, and when you read nonfiction, the least you have a right to expect is that the title page will give the author’s real name.

For example, the title page of “The Autobiography of Frank Richards” (search recent posts) did not give the author’s real name, Charles Hamilton. Why didn’t it? Because, psychologically speaking, it was not written by Charles Hamilton. It was written by his Frank Richards alternate personality.

In short, whenever the title page of an autobiography omits the author’s real name, it may be a sign of multiple personality. This is not, by itself, proof of multiple personality, but should make you wonder.

“Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life” by Max Saunders (post 3): Subtitle of two-volume, 1326-page biography actually refers to multiple personality

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), previously discussed in regard to his most celebrated novel, The Good Soldier (1915), was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in England. He changed his name to Ford Madox Hueffer, and finally changed it to Ford Madox Ford in 1919. Multiple names (apart from standard cultural practice or job necessity) raise the possibility of multiple personality.

In my previous post, I made an issue of the fact that the novelist in A Good Soldier, when writing, addressed himself to a “silent listener.” I speculated that it was an alternate personality. That might seem contradicted by Ford’s statement in 1930 that he and his friend Joseph Conrad used to read their works-in-progress to each other (1, p. 114). But then they wouldn’t have been “silent” listeners.

And Volume Two of this autobiography, which discusses Ford’s imaginative, revisionist memory, would suggest that Ford’s “silent listener” was probably an imaginary “secret sharer” (the title of Conrad’s famous short story, previously discussed), who was possibly envisioned by Ford as his friend, Joseph Conrad.

“Many have testified to Ford’s ‘imaginative memory’…‘That is how it comes back to me’, he could note, as if with surprise, at his own reminiscence: ‘but no doubt my memory is doing a little imagining for itself’ ” (2, p. 439). If it is doing something for itself, it is probably an alternate personality.

Because Ford had spoken of himself as being an example of “homo duplex,” and since there is a literary tradition of thinking in terms of duality (e.g. Jekyll/Hyde, although people with multiple personality rarely have only two personalities), the biographer refers to Ford’s multiple “literary roles”:

“His literary roles were multifarious. He was the Poet, the Historian…, the Novelist, the Art Critic, the Topographical and Nature Writer, the Literary Critic, the Travel Writer, the Cultural Commentator, the Autobiographer—often most of these in the same book” (2, p. 461). But these multiple roles were probably played by multiple narrative personalities.

Since, today, Ford is mostly known for The Good Soldier, it may not be appreciated the degree to which his later novels show “preoccupation with the double, or doppelgänger. We have seen the centrality of dual personalities and doubled protagonists in Ford’s writing. The figure of the double becomes progressively more explicit and important in the five last novels” (2, p. 386).

What is the relation between Ford’s vivid, revisionist memory and multiple personality? People with multiple personality may be among the most highly suggestible. Some are highly hypnotizable by others; others are not easily hypnotized by others, but are prone to self-hypnosis. Hypnosis and self-hypnosis can sometimes create false memories. So, in therapy, implausible memories must be corroborated.

However, people with multiple personality often also have exceptionally accurate powers of memory (except for memory gaps for times when another personality was in control), which can be corroborated. It is complicated. But suffice it to say that Ford’s memory was not unique.

1. Max Saunders. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life [1996]. Volume I: The World Before the War. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

2. Max Saunders. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life [1996]. Volume II: The After-War World. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.

“As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner (post 13): The multiple-narrator structure reflects how Faulkner’s alternate personalities were organized

Some readers of this novel are in awe of how brilliantly Faulkner juggled fifteen narrators. Other equally intelligent readers are driven up a wall.

My opinion is that he wrote it this way because it came natural to him. It was a reflection of how his alternate personalities were organized.

But if it was just a reflection of his multiple personality, and most fiction writers have multiple personality, why aren’t all novels like this? Two reasons.

First, there are narrative fashions and degrees of permissiveness that vary with the era and culture.

Second, different people with multiple personality have different systems of personalities. The most obvious difference is that some multiples (people with multiple personality) have many personalities (dozens to thousands), while others have two to twelve. Some multiples have a few powerful personalities, while others have many different realms, each with its own organization. In short, each multiple’s system of personalities is unique.

People play the hand they were dealt. (Some play it better than others.)

“As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner (post 12): Darl is depicted as having a split personality, the condition Faulkner said was typical of fiction writers

Darl’s doppelgänger or double (alternate personality)—“Against the dark doorway he seems to materialise out of darkness” (1, p. 126)— burns down a barn. And Darl, referring to himself in the third person (typical of multiple personality, not schizophrenia), is sent to a hospital (1, p. 146).

But Faulkner was sympathetic to Darl. He depicts him as the most articulate character. And he has one of the other characters say: “But I aint so sho that err a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It’s like there was a fellow [an alternate personality?] in every man…” (1, p. 137).

Moreover, in post 7, I have a link to an audio interview of Faulkner in which he say says: “I think that—that a writer is a—a perfect case of split personality.”

Of course, a “split personality” is an informal term that may refer to either a clinical disorder or a nonclinical trait. Darl’s burning down a barn made it multiple personality disorder, a nonpsychotic, clinical diagnosis. But if a person just writes novels and wins Nobel Prizes, it’s what I call multiple personality trait, a creative ability, not a diagnosis.

1. William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying [1930]. New York, WW Norton, 2010.

“As I lay Dying” by William Faulkner (post 11): Passages in italics are interruptions in stream of consciousness by alternate personalities

I have just begun this novel and am only up to the chapter narrated by Darl on pages 28-31. This chapter is the first one to have certain passages in italics.

As previously discussed in posts on other authors, italic passages in novels are often used to indicate that the character is hearing a voice in his head of an alternate personality.

But that simple scenario cannot explain everything that is going on here. For example, it could not explain this: “…I am I and you are you and I know it and you don’t know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl” (1, p. 30).

I have looked online to see if Faulkner or anyone else has explained his use of italics. There is no consensus. Explanations range from thoughts coming from a different place or time to mental disturbance. There above-quoted passage looks like crosstalk among unidentified alternate personalities, but most of the italic passages in this chapter are not like that.

In my online search of Faulkner’s use of italics, I found that it is present in a number of his novels, and that when an editor wanted to do away with it, Faulkner was adamant that it was necessary and meaningful, but his explanation was unclear.

My hypothesis is that the first-person narration is being interrupted by thoughts of unidentified alternate personalities, and that Faulkner did not always understand the interruption, but he felt that it was a genuine part of the narrative being provided to him, and must be included.

1. William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying [1930]. New York, WW Norton, 2010.

“As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner (post 10): Faulkner said he wrote his characters as he found them, and that they said and did what they wanted

Many readers and reviewers of this novel have two misconceptions. First, they believe that Darl, the first and most frequent first-person narrator, becomes insane in the course of the novel. Second, they believe that whatever Darl says or does was put into his mouth by, and was under the direction of, William Faulkner. But Faulkner said in interviews that neither of these things was true.

In one interview, Faulkner was asked “was Darl out of his mind all through the book? Or did that come as a result of things happening during the book?” Faulkner replied that “Darl was mad from the first” but “got progressively madder…” (1, p. 190).

In another interview, Faulkner said: “Darl was mad. He did things which it seemed to me he had to do or he insisted on doing. His reasons I could try to rationalize to suit myself, even if I couldn’t rationalize his reasons to please me I had to accept the act because Darl insisted on doing that. I mean that any character that you write takes charge of his own behavior. You can’t make him do things once he comes alive and stands up and casts his own shadow. Darl did things which I am sure were for his own mad reasons quite logical. I couldn’t always understand why he did things, but he did insist on doing things, and when we would quarrel about it, he always won, because at that time he was alive, he was under his own power” (1, p. 202).

When fiction writers say such things about the autonomy of their characters, people often think they are joking, because they say it so matter of factly. Why would they say such outlandish things so matter of factly unless they were joking? Because they have always had that kind of subjective experience, and they assume that other people have similar experiences, to one extent or another.

Autonomous characters are alternate personalities, and although most people do not have them, I have speculated that up to thirty percent of the general public does have what I call “multiple personality trait” to some extent. And that thirty percent is where fiction writers come from.

1. William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying [1930]. Edited by Michael Gorra. A Norton Critical Edition. New York, W. W. Norton, 2010.

“Two Women of China—Mulberry and Peach” by Hualing Nieh (post 2): Author says she used multiple personality to dramatize immigrant experience

This edition of the novel, which includes an interview with the author in its Appendix, is a 1981 translation of its original 1976 Chinese edition. The author interview suggests that the protagonist’s “schizophrenic character” is  employed as a vehicle to dramatize the Chinese immigrant experience. The author’s misnaming of multiple personality as schizophrenia suggests either that she felt she knew enough about multiple personality without researching it or that adequate research resources were not immediately available.

Toward the end of the story, Peach (the alternate personality) tells Mulberry about the time when she, Peach, for the most part, took over. Peach has to explain things to Mulberry, because Mulberry, the regular, host personality, has memory gaps:

“You were dead [figuratively speaking], Mulberry. I have come to life. I’ve been alive all along. But now I have broken free. You don’t know me, but I know you. I’m completely different from you. We are temporarily inhabiting the same body. How unfortunate. We often do the opposite things. And if we do the same thing, our reasons are different…Sometimes you are stronger; sometime I am. When I’m stronger I can make you do things you don’t want to do…(1, pp. 223-224).

“Mulberry, I’m glad I’m the one who came to New York, not you. I’m having a wonderful time. I’ll be certain to write down everything that happens. If you show up by chance, you will know what’s been happening. Look, I’ll cooperate with you if you won’t spoil all the fun” (1, p. 230).

I have no way of knowing whether this author had multiple personality or was merely using it as a metaphor to dramatize the immigrant experience. That’s why I don’t like to read novels with explicit multiple personality. Unless you have clear biographical evidence of multiple personality, it is only when works of fiction include symptoms of multiple personality that are inadvertent and gratuitous, or, at least, unacknowledged, that it is fair to make inferences. [Added May 27] However, the Chinese immigrant experience was so personally meaningful to the author, I wonder why she would structure her whole story about that around multiple personality unless that were also personally meaningful.

1. Hualing Nieh. Two Women of China—Mulberry and Peach [1976]. Translated by Jane Parish Yang with Linda Lappin. Beijing, New World Press, 1981.

“Mulberry and Peach” by Hualing Nieh Engle: Peach is Mulberry’s alternate personality in novel by author associated with Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Hualing Nieh Engle, born in China in 1925, is a novelist, poet, and professor emerita of the University of Iowa (1). She co-founded their International Writing Program (2) in 1967 with Paul Engle, her husband, who was Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1941 to 1965.

I have just started this novel (3), which I chose to read, because of the author’s association with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ordinarily, I don’t read novels that have explicit multiple personality. This site is about finding multiple personality in widely read and classic works of fiction in which it is not labeled as such, but is what I call “gratuitous multiple personality,” meaning that features of multiple personality are in the work only as a reflection of the author’s own psychology.

Other writers I have discussed who have been associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop include T. C. Boyle (alumnus and faculty), Frank Conroy (Director and faculty 1987-2005), Philip Roth (faculty), Kurt Vonnegut (faculty), Andrew Sean Greer (faculty), Deborah Eisenberg (faculty), Jane Smiley (faculty), Robert Penn Warren (faculty), and Marilynne Robinson (faculty).

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the best-known graduate writing program in the USA (4). I don’t know whether they or other writing programs ever discuss multiple personality in works of fiction, fiction-writer psychology, and the fiction-writing process.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualing_Nieh_Engle

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

3. https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/167788/Review%20Mulberry%20and%20Peach.pdf;sequence=1

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Writers'_Workshop

“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