Rarely Diagnosed Conditions: Why is any disease or condition rarely diagnosed? Why would anyone expect multiple personality to be rare?

Since all humans are members of the same species, most things that are found in any one person are also found in many other people.

Conditions are rarely diagnosed for three reasons:

1. Rare genetic disorders

2. Special Situations: including infections, weather, diet, toxins, radiation, trauma, culture, and fads.

3. Diagnostic ignorance

Skeptics do not claim that multiple personality does not exist. They admit that there have been valid cases. All that skeptics claim is that valid cases are rare, because, they say, it is a culturally-bound phenomenon and a recent fad.

But the fact is that multiple personality and other dissociative conditions are not culture-bound. They occur all over the world (1).

Is multiple personality a recent fad or a modern artifact? Well, “demon possession” has been reported since biblical times. So if you think that multiple personality is a recent fad, you have to believe in demons.

Then, if multiple personality is neither a rare genetic disease nor culture-bound nor a recent invention, is its alleged rarity a matter of diagnostic ignorance? Who are these skeptics who allege that multiple personality is rare? Not the American Psychiatric Association, whose diagnostic manual, DSM-5, says that the prevalence of multiple personality disorder (called “dissociative identity disorder”) is greater than the prevalence of schizophrenia.

Then who are these skeptics? They are people who, if you ask them, will admit that they, themselves, have never made the initial diagnosis of even one of those allegedly rare, but valid, cases. They are people who—no matter how otherwise brilliant or expert—have never demonstrated diagnostic expertise in regard to multiple personality.

Do you need diagnostic expertise? Is multiple personality the only disorder in the diagnostic manual that is relatively common, but rarely diagnosed? Another example is body dysmorphic disorder. The diagnosis is usually missed, because, like multiple personality, people who have it rarely volunteer their symptoms.

I have addressed skepticism about multiple personality before, and made other points—regarding normal childhood psychology; how the symptoms are usually camouflaged and kept secret; and how the Freudian model of the mind tricks people into thinking that multiple personality is logically impossible—but I think it is worthwhile to revisit skepticism from time to time, because prejudice against multiple personality is so common, and the skeptics think that they are so enlightened and clever.

1. George F. Rhoades Jr PhD and Vedat Sar MD (Editors). Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Not Just a North American Phenomenon. New York, Haworth Press, 2005.

Saul Bellow doesn’t understand his own novels, because, when he writes, he is often “deaf, dumb, and blind, the slave of” alternate personalities.

“Bellow maintained that his genius didn’t belong to him alone. He was simply the medium. ‘I often feel, when I’m writing, that I’m a composite person” (1, p. 213).

“Bellow professed—indeed, considered it a matter of honor—not to know what his own books were about. [Bellow said,] ‘It’s hard for me to know, because so much of the time I’m deaf, dumb, and blind, the slave of unknown masters.’” (1, p. 269).

If it is permissible to take Bellow at his word, then he is saying that there is more than one writer who writes his books (psychologically speaking), and that he (the host personality, “Bellow”) is, much of the time, no more than a slave of the others (whom Bellow does not know by name).

If there is any metaphor in what he says, then “deaf, dumb, and blind” may mean that, during much of the writing, the regular Bellow personality is not consciously present.

What sense can biographers, professors of literature, and literary critics make of Bellow’s statements? They can’t make any sense of it, because all standard literary theories assume that novelists have one personality, not multiple personality. No standard literary theory considers a novelist to be “a composite person” with “unknown masters.”

What Bellow says makes sense only from the perspective of Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

1. James Atlas. Bellow: A Biography. New York, Random House, 2000.

Novelist Saul Bellow: Doppelgänger Pseudonym and Paradoxical Memory

I just started reading a highly respected biography of Saul Bellow, but, judging by its index, if I find anything in it relevant to this blog, it will probably mention it only in passing. Here is what I have found so far:

Doppelgänger Pseudonym

“Bellow’s contribution to the December 1936 issue of Soapbox, under the pseudonym John Paul—a misspelling of Jean Paul, the pen name of the nineteenth-century German satirical novelist Johann Paul Friedrich Richter—provided a lively polemical account of the Evanston zeitgeist” (1, p. 48).

The biographer does not pause to wonder what Bellow and Jean Paul (1763-1825) might have had in common. Why would Bellow have considered Jean Paul to be an inspiration or kindred spirit?

Jean Paul was the writer who coined the word “doppelgänger,” a literary metaphor for multiple personality.

Paradoxical Memory

“What was Bellow writing [in his early years]? He later claimed that he couldn’t remember, though ‘it must have been terrible.’ A strange notion: He prided himself on the acuteness of his memory and enjoyed dazzling his brothers with his vivid recollections of long-forgotten details from their Chicago childhood. But when it came to his apprentice work, he didn’t want to remember; it seemed to him, if not shameful, at the very least embarrassing. There are few early manuscripts in Bellow’s archive. The literal evidence has been destroyed” (1, p. 60).

Well, I can see that the biographer has not read my posts on Mark Twain, who had a reputation for having an extraordinarily excellent memory, but who also had a reputation for being extraordinarily “absent-minded.” For example, in one post I told of the incident in which Twain could not remember the location of the house—not far from his own house—of one of his best friends (Twain wasn’t drunk or senile).

The only psychological condition in which you see the paradox of a person’s having both an extraordinarily good memory and—on occasion or regarding certain things—a surprisingly bad memory, is multiple personality. They have a surprisingly poor memory if you happen to be talking to a personality who had nothing to do with what you are asking about.

1. James Atlas. Bellow: A Biography. New York, Random House, 2000.

Saul Bellow’s Herzog: Both Madeleine and Herzog Have Multiple Personality; Obvious Evidence Ignored by Standard Literary Criticism

Madeleine

If a person has no medical or neurological condition to better explain it, then amnesia for undeniable behavior is evidence for multiple personality: one personality evidently had amnesia for what another personality did.

Madeleine’s amnesia:

“For a week or two, Field’s delivery truck was bringing jewelry, cigarette boxes, coats and dresses, lamps, carpets, almost daily. Madeleine could not recall making these purchases” (1, p 63).

Amnesia is not something you would lie about, since it says you are so out of control that you literally don’t know what you are doing. You are, in effect, calling yourself crazy. And almost any other excuse would be less humiliating.

Additional evidence relates to the fact that most adults with multiple personality report having had traumatic experiences and memory gaps in childhood. Madeleine reports a history of child abuse, and amnesia for the year that she was fourteen (1, p. 128).

None of this is necessary to character development or plot. Its inclusion in this novel is gratuitous. And when a novel has gratuitous multiple personality, it probably reflects the psychology of the author or of someone the author knew.

Herzog’s Letters

Much of the novel consists of “letters” composed in Herzog’s mind. Why does Herzog consider these “letters” crazy? Because he experiences them as being composed against his will by a person, not himself, inside him (in psychological terms, an alternate personality).

To begin with the novel’s opening line:

“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog…He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun” (1, p. 3)…”He…suspected…that it might be a symptom of disintegration” (1, p. 5)…”He felt he was going to pieces—breaking up” (1, p. 9)…”Two points therefore: He knew his scribbling, his letter-writing, was ridiculous. It was involuntary…There is someone inside me. I am in his grip. When I speak of him I feel him in my head, pounding for order. He will ruin me” (1, p. 14). “…he was aware that his angry spirit had stolen forward again, and that he was about to write letters” (1, p. 31-32).

Superficially, the months of this letter writing could be mistaken for a manic episode, one symptom of which may be that the person is overflowing with ideas. But a person in a manic episode would speak these “letters” out loud or mail them to other people. Another possibility is psychosis; however, from beginning to end, Herzog recognizes his letter writing as “ridiculous” and as originating in his own mind (and not caused by outside forces or a computer chip planted in his brain).

“There is someone inside me.”

Isn’t that psychotic? Only if Herzog meant that the body of another person was physically inside him. But Herzog means only that sometimes there are thoughts in his head that he does not experience as his own, and that these thoughts can be angry and emotional.

Which is the kind of subjective experience that is typical of a person with multiple personality. If Herzog were my patient, I would find—without hypnosis or drugs—that this other personality could temporarily take over, come out, and have a conversation with me. Routine. No problem. (Now that I know what multiple personality looks like, and how it works, from clinical experience.)

Is Herzog’s multiple personality gone at the end?

After all, the “letter writing” stops on the last page of the novel, as though Herzog had been under some temporary spell. But the answer is no, the multiple personality has not gone away. It is just that the alternate personality has gone behind the scenes, where alternate personalities usually reside.

In multiple personality, the regular personality (“host personality”) is usually unaware of the presence of the alternate personalities, except temporarily, during a crisis, or after diagnosis, or if the personalities masquerade as an alter ego, character, editor, or narrative voice.

1. Saul Bellow. Herzog [1964]. Introduction by Philip Roth. Penguin Books, 2003.

Nobel Prize Novelist Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person: A Man with Amnesia Searches for His Identity. Who is he?

The opening sentence is, “I am nothing” (1). Why does the main character say this, since he must be something, even if we don’t yet know what?

And it is hard take his search for his identity at face value. For when the story begins, he has already had amnesia for ten years, and the reader is not told what steps had been taken to discover his identity ten years ago, or why the search has not been pursued for the last ten years.

And the new search, the plot of this novel, is not even followed to its conclusion. It stops, arbitrarily, at some point, implying that finding this character’s true identity is not the novelist’s real concern.

So what is this novel about? Why did it win the 1978 Prix Goncourt in France? And why did Patrick Modiano just win the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature?

My interpretation is that the main character represents novelists. Modiano's insight is that looking for the novelist’s true identity is futile, because the novelist has no single true identity. To borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, novelists contain multitudes. In the words of this blog, they have multiple personality, or, as I prefer, multiple identity, as in Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

Which brings me back to that first sentence, “I am nothing.” What is Modiano saying? What does he mean? The novelist is saying: “I am no (one) thing.”

1. Patrick Modiano. Missing Person [1978]. Translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort [1980]. Boston, Verba Mundi/David R. Godine, 2004/2014.

State of the Blog: So Far, Readers Find Multiple Identity Literary Theory and its thesis, Great Novelists have Multiple Personality, Irrefutable.

If you were to ask most authorities—novelists, professors of literature, literary critics, psychiatrists and psychologists—what they think of Multiple Identity Literary Theory and its thesis that novelists have a nonpathological version of multiple personality, they would say that they never heard of it, but it sounds ridiculous.

However, given that submitting comments to this blog is easy, it is quite significant that no reader of this blog—including novelists, professors of literature, literary critics, psychiatrists and psychologists, from around the world—has submitted any comments to refute anything, even anonymously.

So, then, is this blog irrefutable? Well, the blog is not that old, and time will tell. But I thought that readers would like to know that, so far, nothing in the blog has been refuted.

Saul Bellow discusses Herzog and Himself in regard to Multiple Personality

In the course of a 1977 interview (1, pp. 140-160), Bellow discusses the title character of his novel Herzog as suffering from the “complexity” and “chaos” caused by containing so many “personae.”

The character makes “an attempt really to divest himself of all of the personae…He’s decided to go through a process of jettisoning or lightening. That’s how I saw the book when I was writing it…Well, it isn’t that he’s a loser. It’s that he’s so chaotic; no woman can stand so much disorder…it’s the chaos, and the complexity of life which would tire a woman out, just trying to follow it. This complexity is intolerable…”

At another point, the interviewer asks about the way some of his characters, at least superficially, resemble Bellow. As most novelists are about this, Bellow is defensive. But, it is interesting, in denying that any of his characters are a copy of himself, the very words Bellow uses imply that he has thought about multiple personality. “Dissociation of personality” is a phrase that Bellow must have gotten from some book or article about multiple personality:

“I would have to suffer from dissociation of personality to be all these people in the books. I can’t possibly be all of them.”

Well, if they all came from him—and, in another interview, he says that he finds his characters; that he doesn’t create them (1, p. 161)—then by his own logic, he would, indeed, have to have multiple personality.

When, in an interview, authors say that their characters are not them, they are telling the truth, in a disingenuous manner of speaking, because the interviewee is the host personality (see blog glossary), while the character is someone else, an alternate personality. That an alternate personality is not a copy of the host personality is the truth.

1. Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel (Editors). Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

Nobel Prize Novelist Saul Bellow credits an alternate personality, who has been “advising” Bellow since his “earliest years,” as his “fastidious” co-writer

“I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me. I have to prepare the ground for him. From this source come words, phrases, syllables; sometimes only sounds, which I try to interpret, sometimes whole paragraphs, fully punctuated. When E. M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter…

“When I say the commentator is primitive, I don't mean that he's crude; God knows he's often fastidious. But he won't talk until the situation's right. And if you prepare the ground for him with too many difficulties underfoot, he won't say anything. I must be terribly given to fraud and deceit because I sometimes have great difficulty preparing a suitable ground. This is why I've had so much trouble with my last two novels. I appealed directly to my prompter. The prompter, however, has to find the occasion perfect—that is to say, truthful, and necessary. If there is any superfluity or inner falsehood in the preparations, he is aware of it…” (from Bellow’s 1966 Paris Review interview).

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4405/the-art-of-fiction-no-37-saul-bellow

The only thing in the above with which I would take issue is Bellow’s assumption that “all of us” have this kind of alternate personality, or have an alternate personality of any kind. My guess is that no more than 30% of the general public has any alternate personalities (in what I call “normal multiple personality”). But if by “all of us” he was referring only to novelists, then I wouldn’t disagree, since most novelists, perhaps 90%, do have a normal version of multiple personality, which is the subject of this blog.

Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade: Keys to its Theme of Multiple Personality: Nineteenth Century Culture and Chapters 20 & 2

The nineteenth century had new literary metaphors for multiple personality: doppelgängers (1) and doubles (2, 3). It had a new neuropsychological perspective according to which a person could have dual personality, double consciousness, or a second self, based on having virtually two brains, the two cerebral hemispheres (4, 5). What prompted these new metaphors and theories? Among other things, Mary Reynolds, a famous American case of multiple personality, in 1811 (6, pp. 128-129; 7, pp. 77-78). 

Melville got the basic plot idea for this 1857 novel from the real life cases of a New York City swindler known as the Confidence Man (1849) and a notorious trickster, The Cosmopolitan (1845), which gave him the title of the novel and the name of one of his character’s identities.

Melville’s novel could hardly be more obviously about multiple personality. After all, it is about a man whose life is a “masquerade” and who switches from one identity to another. Yet literary critics have tended to interpret the confidence man as the Shapeshifting Devil, in spite of the fact that he never bargains for anyone’s soul.

Moreover, as the reader eventually realizes, the confidence man’s primary motivation is not criminal, but emotional. He sincerely yearns for people to trust him.

Why does he have that emotional need to a greater degree than the average person? Perhaps, as we saw with Isabel Allende (see past post), he was considered a liar as a child, a child in whose truthfulness his own mother could never have confidence. For it is known that some people with multiple personality have a history of being considered a liar when they were children, because one personality would deny responsibility for what another personality had said or done.

Chapter 20

The confidence man, now in his alternate identity known as the herb-doctor, encounters an old man who has a very bad cough. The old man is actually looking for the herb-doctor, who was recommended to him to cure his cough by a man who had sold him (bogus) securities in Chapter 15; the securities salesman being another of the confidence man’s identities.

Why doesn’t the text say that the herb-doctor immediately recognizes the old man as one of his previous swindling victims? Once the old man tells him about the securities salesman, the herb-doctor knows whom he is talking about. But, to repeat, why doesn’t the herb-doctor immediately recognize the old man as his past victim (from when he had been using his securities-salesman identity)?

If he were a shapeshifting devil—or anyone with a single personality and consciousness—he would have remembered. But if the herb-doctor and the securities-salesman are two separate personalities of a person with multiple personality, then one personality might very well have amnesia for the other personality’s victim. Having a memory gap or amnesia for what a person would ordinarily be expected to remember, is one of the cardinal clues to, and signs of, multiple personality.

“Chapter 2: Showing that many men have many minds” (8).

Following the above chapter title, the chapter immediately quotes nineteen people, who each gives a distinctly different opinion about the same topic. Thus the chapter’s content prejudices the reader’s interpretation of the chapter’s title to think it means that different people have diverse opinions.

However, if you stop to consider the chapter title in and of itself, you see that it could just as easily be read as meaning: Many men have multiple personality (many minds).

Since the content of Chapter 2 seems gratuitous, and really doesn’t enrich or advance the story, I don’t think that this alternate meaning of the title was inadvertent or accidental. Melville was subtly communicating one of his novel’s major themes: multiple personality.

Multiple Personality in Last Novels

This is the fourth time that this blog has found multiple personality in a last, or even posthumous, novel. The other three were Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Perhaps these novelists felt that multiple personality was a sensitive issue.

1. E. T. A. Hoffmann. The Devil’s Elixirs [1816]. Translated by Ronald Taylor. Oneworld Classics, 2008.

2. Edgar Allan Poe. “William Wilson” [1839], in The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Stephen Peithman. New York, Avenel Books, 1981.

3. Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Double [1846]. Translated by Evelyn Harden. New York, Ardis, 1985

4. A. L. Wigan, M.D. The Duality of the Mind, Proved by the Structure, Functions, and Diseases of the Brain, and by the Phenomena of Mental Derangement, and Shown to be Essential to Moral Responsibility [1844]. Foreword by Joseph Bogen, M.D., F.A.C.S. Joseph Simon publisher, 1985.

5. Anne Harrington. Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Thought. Princeton University Press, 1987.

6. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York, Basic Books, 1970.

7. Eugene Taylor (Editor). William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.

8. Herman Melville. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Edited by Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince: The Term “Characters” is a Misnomer Whenever They Function Autonomously like Alternate Personalities

Definition of Terms

Both characters and alternate personalities are imaginary: both are products of the mind. But they are very different concepts.

Characters, by definition, are created and manipulated by the novelist. They are, functionally, lifelike puppets. Everything about them, including what they think and say, is put there by the writer. A character cannot know things that the writer does not know, and does not have free will.

Even if you claim that some things about characters come from the writer’s “unconscious,” once anything is conscious to a character, it is conscious to, and controlled by, the writer, because, in this model of the mind, there is only one personality, and, therefore, only one will and consciousness.

A character, per se, cannot do things behind the writer’s back, on its own initiative, or to bolster its own reputation at the expense of the writer’s credibility.

Alternate personalities, in multiple personality, are not created or controlled by the person’s regular self (“host personality”). Alternate personalities may know things that the host does not know — since they have separate, independent consciousnesses — and they may do things of their own free will: they are autonomous.

Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince 

Bradley Pearson, the first-person narrator, is a 58-year-old, divorced, unsuccessful novelist, who falls madly in love with the 20-year-old daughter of his much more successful novelist friend. 

According to Bradley, the successful novelist is eventually killed not by Bradley, but by his own wife; however, Bradley goes to jail for the murder, because the police and jury don’t believe him.

At the end of the novel, there are Four Postscripts by four of the other characters (including the dead novelist’s wife). Three of the four say that Bradley was guilty and deluded in regard to both the love affair and the murder. The fourth postscript, written by the daughter of the murder victim, is not very clear, but tends to support Bradley’s story. There is also an Editor’s Forward and Postscript by a peripheral character named Loxias, who supports Bradley’s story. But this Editor’s credibility is questionable.

One Interviewer: [Given the postscripts] there is no way in the world to know what really did happen. Which is what you were aiming for.

Murdoch: Yes, yes. (1, p. 69)

Another Interviewer: What attitude are we to take to your characters, such as Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince?

Murdoch: …he’s reliable in the most important respects: the author does not intend us to imagine that he murdered his friend. (1, p. 186).

Interviewer: [re the fourth postscript by the murder victim’s daughter, with whom Bradley had claimed true love, but which the other three postscripts had called delusional] …there she was saying it was a true love affair…

Murdoch: Yes, she does say casually, actually it’s all true…yes, all this did happen, you may take what you’ve just been reading about as true… (1, p. 188).

Thus, in one interview, Murdoch says that she added the postscripts to make sure that the reader could not be sure what really happened. However, in another interview, she says that the reader is to know that on the most important issues, Bradley told the truth. But if that was the author’s intent, why add the three postscripts that say he lied about those things?

Judging by these contradictory interviews, Murdoch doesn’t seem to really know what she intended or why those unusual postscripts were added.

Now, I would argue, the reason she doesn’t know is that these are not created characters under her control. On the contrary, they are autonomous, like alternate personalities:

“…when one has got the thing really going, the story invents itself, and the characters invent the story…(1, p 85). “Yes, if you get hold of a good character, he will invent himself…”(1, p. 198). “The second stage [of writing a novel] is that one should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself. One piece of imagination leads to another. You think about a certain situation and then some quite extraordinary aspect of it suddenly appears…Somehow things fly together and generate other things, and characters invent other characters, as if they were doing it themselves…”(1, p. 221).

Evidently, those three postscripts, which told lies about Bradley, were added because those other three so-called characters were not really characters under Murdoch’s control, but were autonomous alternate personalities, who insisted on the postscripts as a platform to defend their own versions of the truth and their own reputations.

This reminds me of a past post in which I quoted Nobel Prize novelist, Toni Morrison. She said that a novelist must control her characters, and that, as a former editor, she could see when a novelist’s characters had run away with the story. But how “characters” could do that, she did not explain.

1. Gillian Dooley (ed). From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

Iris Murdoch’s first-person narrators were all male, because those novels were written by a male-identified, male-chauvinist, alternate personality.

In 1976, an interviewer asked Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) why all her novels that were written in the first person had a male narrator/hero. She answered:

Murdoch: I identify with men more than women, I think. I don’t think it’s a great leap; there’s not much of a difference, really. One’s just a human being. I think I’m more interested in men than women. I’m not interested in women’s problems as such, though I’m a great supporter of women’s liberation—particularly education for women—but in aid of getting women to join the human race, not in aid of making any kind of feminine contribution to the world. I think there’s a kind of human contribution, but I don’t think there’s a feminine contribution (1, p. 48).

Consulting two biographies, I see that Murdoch was an extraordinarily variable person. She had affairs with men and women; she was alternately and simultaneously heterosexual and lesbian. She was reported to have “fantasied in her inner life that she was a male homosexual”  (2, p. 164), but she also had a lesbian relationship for many years. In general, “she had a striking ability to be different with different friends” (3, p. 538).

So it appears that her novels that had male first-person narrators were written by the male-identified, male-chauvinist personality, who answered the interviewer’s question. But her history of having dramatically and distinctly different senses of identity and relationships indicates that this male narrator was not her only personality.

It is common for people with multiple personality to have an opposite-sex personality, as was dramatized in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (see past post).

1. Gillian Dooley (ed). From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

2. A. N. Wilson. Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her. London, Hutchinson, 2003.

3. Peter J. Conradi. Iris Murdoch: A Life. New York, W.W. Norton, 2001.

In Literary Interviews, Authors Say They Hear Voices: Is it Psychosis, Ordinary Imagination, or Multiple Personality?

In my first post, “Dickens, Multiple Personality, and Writers” (June 19, 2013), I reported that after Charles Dickens had mentioned to someone that he often heard the voices of his characters, they thought, since he was evidently having hallucinations, that he must be crazy.

However, since the 1950s, when in-depth author interviews began, authors have said this kind of thing so often that interviewers now shrug it off as a routine, normal feature of the writer’s imagination.

But it is NOT ordinary imagination like, for example, a daydream. In ordinary imagination, you willfully control what happens, whereas authors describe their characters, once they “come alive,” as not being simply puppets. They have minds of their own. They may disagree with the author and come up with things that the author hadn’t thought of.

If you can explain authors’ hearing the voices of their characters—an explanation other than Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the subject of this blog—please comment.

History of the Literary Interview: Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Died Before Authors Were Interviewed

“…Literary interviews became popular in the eighteen-eighties…In the early eighteen-nineties, Henry James wrote in his notebook about ‘this age of advertisement and newspaperism, this age of interviewing’…Some sixty years later, a new age of interviewing dawned. The first issue of The Paris Review, published in the spring of 1953, contained a lengthy interview with E. M. Forster that would set the pattern for the magazine’s legendary ‘Writers at Work’ series…[In the] twenty-first century…unless you’re Thomas Pynchon, [authors give] interviews after the publication of every book: to newspapers and Web sites, on the radio, in bookshops, and at literary festivals. Not that writers these days are any more pleased about giving interviews than James was. ‘A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him,’ Joyce Carol Oates said in a Washington Post interview earlier this year…”

Hannah Rosefield. “No More Questions.” The New Yorker, January 2, 2014.

Novelist John Updike’s Interviews: Remarks and Scenarios that Indicated He Had Alternate Personalities

When John Updike’s interviews indicated that he had alternate personalities, nobody ever asked him about it or followed-up, because interviewers and literary critics have never thought in those terms. They assumed he was joking or speaking metaphorically. And if you haven’t read this blog, you might think so, too.

Interviewer: How does Mrs. Updike react to your work? Time quotes you as having said she never entirely approves of your novels.

Updike: …if I sometimes…persevere without her unqualified blessing, it is because somebody in me—the gagster, the fanatic, the boor—must be allowed to have his say. (1, p. 29)

“I’m of two minds about the events in novels. One has this sense that the old-fashioned novel, and indeed films and television plays, are falsifying life terribly by making events happen, by creating tensions and then resolving them…On the other hand, there is a delight in making things happen…” (1, p. 48).

Note: There is no continuous “I” in the way he phrases it. He does not say, I am of two minds: On the one hand I have this attitude, and, on the other hand, I have this other attitude. Instead he says, “One has” one attitude, and then “there is” also this other attitude.

Another thing Updike did was publish three “interviews” in which John Updike is interviewed by Henry Bech, one of his fictional characters. The first of these was “Bech Meets Me” (1, pp. 55-58). Note: In multiple personality, it is common for two personalities to speak to each other.

In another interview, in which Updike is discussing The Centaur,

he says that one of the main things he wanted to express in that novel is “the sense that everybody comes to us in guises” (1, p. 96). Well, that happens to be one of the main features of multiple personality: Alternate personalities usually come and go incognito, which is why, clinically, the diagnosis is so often missed.

To write the three sequels to Rabbit Run, Updike said he did not have to reread it, because he “had faith that Harry [‘Rabbit’] Angstrom would be there for me yet again as he has been before.” Although the character did not usually come out between novels, “I was conscious of him watching the Phillies in those playoff games,” and when the team won, “He was very pleased” (1, pp. 156-157).

How alive was that character for Updike? Alive enough to die, as he was on the verge of doing at the end of the last of the four books in that series. After all, said Updike, “we’re all mortal, including fictional characters” (1, p. 236).

Finally, says Updike, about writing, “That manipulation of the alternatives that we all have within us is the most creative and honest thing we do…my alternative selves” (1, p. 206).

1. James Plath (ed). Conversations with John Updike. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

Novelist Isabel Allende said in interviews that she was a liar: The Paradox of the Honest Liar, a Clue to Multiple Personality

Allende: I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time.

Interviewer: Lying?

Allende: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying.

Interviewer: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth?

Allende: For me, I can no longer say…For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I received it I think it was more or less like this (holds hands a foot apart), but then I started telling the story and now it is this big (arms open wide). Very soon it will be a monument. [1, pp. 115-116]

She has a good sense of humor, but don’t let that obscure her serious, lifelong concern with lying.

The obvious problem with Allende’s explanation is that she (the host personality, who is doing this interview) actually does recall the original, true size of the bronze statue. The only way her explanation could make sense would be if the exaggerations in her stories were honestly believed by a separate, story narrator, personality, and it was the latter personality whom her mother and others would accuse of lying.

“So many times I don’t remember people’s names, or the places I have been…I don’t remember the names of the men I have married. At times I even forget the names of my own children…They had always told me that I was a liar…” ( 1, p. 218).

This is seen with a person who has multiple personality, in which life experiences are divided among the separate memory banks of different personalities.

“I have a terrible memory. I’m always inventing my own life, so I find that in different interviews I tell different stories about the same subject…The truth is I’m a born liar” (1, pp. 288-289).

This reminds me of when William Faulkner (see past post) warned interviewers not to ask him personal questions, because he might give different answers when future interviewers ask him the same question.

“…I have a special voice for storytelling, a voice that, although mine, also seems to belong to someone else…” (2, p.  227). When writing, she is “transformed into a multifaceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors, living countless lives, speaking with many voices. The characters became so real that they invaded the house…” (2, p. 263).

“We learn early on to wear masks we change so frequently that we are no longer able to identify our own faces in the mirror” (3, p. xiv-xv). [My novel Eva Luna] “is dotted with autobiographical observations about the practice of writing” (3, p. 63). [People with multiple personality may have a problem with mirrors. Search “mirrors” in this blog.]

If you are new to this blog, you might think that all the above about lying, memory, and mirrors are just some idiosyncrasies of Isabel Allende, and have no wider significance.  But these same issues have come up with many of the other novelists discussed in this blog. For relevant prior posts in this blog, search: liar; lying; duplicity; mirror; memory.

In conclusion, whenever you have a person who has a reputation for being a liar, or even admits to having repeatedly lied, but this doesn’t make sense to you, because the person seems to be a basically honest and moral person—in short, the paradox of an honest liar—the solution to this mystery may be multiple personality, in which different personalities have different memory banks and different views of reality; which has been seen previously in this blog’s discussion of other great novelists.

1. John Rodden (ed). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

2. Isabel Allende. Eva Luna. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

3. Celia Correas Zapata. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Houston, Arte Publico Press, 2002

Isabel Allende: Quotations on Creative Writing, Consistent with Multiple Identity Literary Theory

“First of all, I have the feeling that I don’t invent [my characters]. I don’t create them; they are there. They are somewhere in the shadows, and when I start writing—it’s a very long process; sometimes it takes years to write a book—little by little they come out of the shadow into the light. But when they come into the light, they are already people. They have their own personalities, their clothes, their voices, their textures, their smells. I don’t invent them; somehow they are there. They always were there” (1, p. 258).

One of her best-known characters, Eva Luna, “is the woman I want to be. We are so different, in every way but one: we both tell stories. But she is my dreamself” (1, p. 273). She “was always there. I know that the character was within me. She doesn’t resemble me; it’s not my biography. I’m not her. But somehow she was inside me…By writing, [the character] got out of me and existed by itself…So that’s my relationship with my characters—very strange and very powerful. [Sometimes they come out right away, fully formed, and she can’t change them even if she wants to]…sometimes they [start out] ambiguous, but by the end they are so real that my children play with the idea that they are living in the house. And we talk about them as if they were part of the family” (1, p. 259).

Once a novel is started, she hates to interrupt the writing process. For example: “Now, while I’m here in Toronto, the voices keep on talking and I’m not there to take them down. I feel like a traitor when I’m not writing” (1, p. 275).

“I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don’t talk to anybody; I don’t answer the telephone. I’m just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I’m creating a world that is fiction but that doesn’t belong to me. I’m not God there; I’m just an instrument” (1, p. 290).

When she starts one of her novels, does she invent the first sentence?

“When I’ve lighted the candles and turned on the computer, I write the first sentence, which I let bubble up from my intuitions, not from reason. That first sentence opens the door to the story that’s already there—only it’s hidden in another dimension. It’s my task to enter that dimension and to make the story appear. When I wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits, which is “Barrabas came to us from the sea,” I didn’t yet know who Barrabas was or why he had come…It’s something magical that I can’t explain very well, because I don’t control it myself” (1, p. 295).

If you are new to this blog, you might think that the above sounds weird, but it’s not; it’s rather typical. The details are unique to Isabel Allende, but the general process is similar to what I have previously quoted from Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, J. M. Barrie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and other great writers.

This is the psychology of great writers and the process of creative writing, but you wouldn’t know it from other literary theories.

1. John Rodden (ed.). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Translations by Virginia Invernizzi and John Rodden. Foreword by Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

Who wrote The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Would Agatha Christie have made Marple and Poirot vouch for an unreliable narrator/murderer?

It is unlikely that the same personality who wrote most of Agatha Christie’s novels wrote this one, since both Caroline Sheppard (the prototype for Miss Marple) and Hercule Poirot are employed to establish the credibility of Dr. Sheppard, the narrator/murderer.

Caroline establishes his credibility by knowing him his whole life (they are siblings), and currently living with him, yet detecting nothing more about him than that he is “weak.” Poirot, through most of this novel, refers to him as a substitute Hastings, his former, trustworthy sidekick (like Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson).

Whose idea was it to write a detective novel with an unreliable narrator? It was suggested to Agatha Christie by two people. James Watts said, “Why not have a Watson do the murder?” And Lord Louis Mountbattan “did not merely offer the device but explained exactly how it should be used. Agatha very rarely took advice on her plots…And only she could have pulled it off so completely. Only she had the requisite control, the willingness to absent herself from the authorial scene and let the plot shine clear” (1, p. 155).

My theory is that, when these suggestions were made, they were responded to by one of Agatha Christie’s personalities who, ordinarily, would have taken the role of a villain. In short, this novel was mostly written by the Dr. Sheppard personality, just as it appears to be.

This is not to say that regular Agatha Christie did not also participate. For example, on the first page of the novel, she may have made Dr. Sheppard begin two sentences with the phrase “To tell the truth” (2), which implies that he is a liar.

1. Laura Thompson. Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. Headline Review, 2007.

2. Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery [1926]. New York, Black Dog & Leventhal, [?].

Literary Voice and Personality are much the same thing, but it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that fact in literary theory.

Some people talk of writers' finding their one true voice. Others say that writers can, and do, have many voices.

But everyone would agree that the writer’s characters must each have their own voice, and that the characters must have voices that differ from each other.

So, one way or another, most writers and literary theorists acknowledge that writers have multiple voices.

Now, the thing is, there is no basic difference between voice and personality. “Voice” is a euphemism for “personality.” Why is there a need for euphemism? Because people are comfortable with the idea that writers have multiple voices, but not with the idea that writers have multiple personalities.

In my last post, I pointed out that a book by Agatha Christie had a different authorial voice from that of two books by Mary Westmacott (a pseudonym for Agatha Christie). And people who read that post may have thought, “So what. A writer had two voices? Is that news?”

Well, if you think of it in terms of voice, it is not news. But if you realize that voice is personality, it is.

Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd: Written by Mary Westmacott’s Alternate Personality

This Hercule Poirot mystery is one of Agatha Christie’s most celebrated and analyzed novels. It is famous—some would say, notorious—for being a detective story with an unreliable narrator.

I am, if not the only one, then certainly one of the few, to have read it shortly after reading two novels by Mary Westmacott, Agatha Christie’s pseudonym (see previous posts). This juxtaposition led me to notice a peculiar difference: The two Westmacott novels had characters with whom it was easy to sympathize or empathize, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had characters who were strange.

The main Westmacott characters were like real people with real feelings. In Unfinished Portrait, Celia had a touching relationship with her mother. Even the villain, her unfaithful husband, was at least understandable in terms of common human emotions. In Absent in the Spring, I could sympathize with both Joan—who didn’t understand herself or her family, but who always tried to do the right thing—and her long-suffering husband.

The main Christie characters are the narrator, Dr. Sheppard, the village physician; his spinster sister, Caroline, with whom he lives; Hercule Poirot, a famous detective, who has recently retired to this quaint English village; the wealthy victim, Roger Ackroyd; and the obvious suspects, Ackroyd’s family, friends, and employees.

If I had not just read the Westmacott novels, in which the characters are portrayed with sensitivity and psychological understanding, I might have accepted the Christie novel’s world at face value. After all, it is a plot-driven, murder mystery, detective story. But even given the genre, its characters are remarkably strange and two-dimensional.

For example, Caroline Sheppard is an amateur detective, with a network of informants throughout the village (household staff, milkmen, etc.). Much is made of how she always knows what has happened before everyone else does. Indeed, in later Christie novels, she became Miss Marple. Yet in this novel, she is depicted as living with the murderer, her brother, but being one of the last to know.

In a Hercule Poirot Mystery, like this, the most admirable character should be Hercule Poirot. But at the end of this novel, the night before Poirot will expose the murderer to the police—and when he has just made it explicitly clear to the murderer that this will happen tomorrow morning—the author has Poirot suggest to the murderer that he might prefer to overdose with sleeping pills tonight, and so avoid tomorrow’s messy unpleasantness for himself and his family. This portrays Poirot as having a greater sense of neatness than of justice.

In short, the world of Mary Westmacott has people with normal human feelings, which may get tragic or messy, but which are sympathetic and make sense. In contrast, the world of Agatha Christie (at least, in this novel) is a kind of dystopia in which people are strange.

This illustrates that pseudonyms may be used by novelists to accommodate the existence in the writer of more than one distinct narrative voice; in other words, multiple narrative personalities.

Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery [1926]. New York, Black Dog & Leventhal, [?].