Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Barrie’s Peter Pan, Golding’s Lord of the Flies: Is a boy on a raft like those lost boys on islands, psychologically?

Since I've previously discussed Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies, and I plan to read and discuss Huckleberry Finn, it’s just a question I awoke with this morning.

The Relationship Between President Obama’s “Bucket List” Joke and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn:  Did Mark Twain put the “F” word in the title?

Yesterday, I saw a rebroadcast of a comedy event at which President Obama told a joke. He set up his joke by saying that some people have a “bucket list,” which is a list of things they want to do before they die, before they “kick the bucket.” He said that he doesn’t have a bucket list, but he does have a list that rhymes with “bucket.”

Today, I was thinking of what books I might read next month. And since I once had a whole series of posts in this blog about Mark Twain, I thought it was about time that I got around to reading and discussing his most famous novel, Huckleberry Finn.

So today I was thinking about the title. My first thought was that I wouldn’t name a boy “Huckleberry.” But the character was mostly called “Huck,” and that sounds all right. “Huck Finn” struck me as vaguely amusing, but that’s all.

But then (possibly as an aftereffect of Obama’s joke) I thought, What if you exchanged the first letters of “Huck Finn” (leaving the “h” silent)?

The novel’s use of the “N” word has always been controversial. But what if the “F” word is in the title?

Max Planck, J.B.S. Haldane, William James, and Leo Tolstoy give comfort to people who have ideas that are not taken seriously

Planck’s Principle: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Or, to paraphrase, "Science advances funeral by funeral."

"Theories have four stages of acceptance: 

1) this is worthless nonsense; 

2) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;

3) this is true, but quite unimportant;

4) I always said so.”

— J.B.S. Haldane

"...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them."

— from William James’s “Pragmatism”

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." — from Leo Tolstoy’s “What is Art and Essays on Art”

The Blind Spot of Biographers and The Deafness of Interviewers for What Novelists Say about How They Think and How They Write

In my recent post on Edith Wharton, I quoted from Hermione Lee’s “unquestionably authoritative, impressively exhaustive” (from the New York Times Book Review, printed on the cover) 869 page biography. In this biographical standard of excellence, the little paragraph I quoted is all there is about the dissociative, split nature of Edith Wharton’s mind. Edith Wharton stated that that was how her mind worked, and that was how she wrote, but the biographer did not pursue it.

When I was working on my recent post about Paula Hawkins and her #1 bestseller, The Girl on the Train, I listened to a couple of interviews of the author online. At one point in an interview (which was conducted by three interviewers), Ms. Hawkins mentioned that when she was working on the novel, she knew that the writing was really underway when she started to hear the voice of the main character talking to her. To repeat, she had just stated—and it sounded like a routine experience for her when she was writing—that she had had auditory hallucinations, that she had heard voices. But none of the three interviewers asked her about it. It was as though they were deaf or she had never said it.

These are common, not isolated, instances. Most biographers and interviewers know that many novelists say these things. But biographers and interviewers never pursue it.

And as I have previously said, the only likely way for anyone to hear the voices of, get messages from, and have complex interactions with, imaginary people, on an ongoing basis, is to have multiple personality—which is normal if it doesn’t cause them distress or dysfunction, and is an asset if it is part of a creative process, which it obviously is for novelists.

Interview Novelists: “Many normal novelists have multiple personality, and make use of it when they write. What do you know about yours?”

Interviewers can simply include the question as something they ask routinely. Or, the question could be prefaced as follows: “You may consider this too personal—if so, I’ll understand—but many normal novelists have a form of multiple personality, and use it when they write. What do you know about yours?”

If the novelist responds defensively—with outrage, ridicule, or feigned ignorance of what you could possibly be talking about—drop the issue and move on.

Edith Wharton: More on the writing process and her autonomous characters, who came from nowhere, spoke to her with their own voices, but were controlled by her critical attention

“When Wharton talked in old age about her writing methods, she said (as many novelists do) that her characters ‘arrived,’ ‘coming seemingly from nowhere,’ complete with their names. They ‘then began to speak within me with their own voices.’ It sounds from this as though she subscribes to the idea of the writer as a kind of unconscious medium, through which the narrative flows onto the page. But she also says, firmly, that her characters never ‘walk away with the subject’: she knows ‘from the first exactly what is going to happen to every one of them.’ So she describes a double operation (which parallels the mixture of cool analysis and deep emotion in her fiction). The process of writing ‘takes place in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness’ but ‘is always illuminated by the full light of my critical attention’ “ (1, p. 176).

The biographer, Hermione Lee, is, of course, quite right when she says that what Wharton says is the same thing that many novelists say. I have quoted a number of novelists in this blog saying the same thing.

Novelists see and hear their characters just like Hamlet saw and heard his late father in the famous bedroom scene (Act 3, Sc 4), cited in my post of August 1, 2014. This is the way that people with multiple personality sometimes see and hear their alternate personalities.

And neither Wharton nor Shakespeare—who, I am guessing, like Wharton, had had such subjective experiences—were psychotic. They had a normal, creative version of multiple personality.

1. Hermione Lee. Edith Wharton. New York, Vintage Books, 2008.

Most Novels are Not Mechanically Constructed: So when novels have features of multiple personality, it is likely that their authors do, too.

A novel has features of multiple personality when it has any of the following:

—a character who is acknowledged to have multiple personality

—a character who has unacknowledged multiple personality

—gratuitous multiple personality: it plays no part in the plot

—the theme of the double in any of its versions

—a character has multiple personality type of memory gaps

—a child character who never grows up, like child-aged alters

—peculiarly unreliable narrators (alters have limited perspective)

—nameless characters (alternate personalities are often nameless)

—magical thinking or magical realism (multiple personality is magical)

—a character refers to himself with “we” or “our”

—themes of hiddenness or dividedness or transformation or mirrors

—a character sees someone else in the mirror

Of course, some of the above imply multiple personality only when taken in a certain context. For example, not all hiddenness implies multiple personality. However, when it is unusual in kind or degree, consider multiple personality, which is a condition of hiddenness.

But what has all this to do with the author? Novels are fiction, not autobiography!

This raises the question of how novels are written. Do you believe that the kinds of things listed above get into novels because novelists mechanically and methodically construct them?

If you have read what great novelists say about their creative process—some of which I have quoted in this blog—you know that, for the most part, mechanical construction is not how their creativity works.

What about imagination? Well, if the author’s imagination works like the imagination of a person with multiple personality, what is the difference? Multiple personality is imaginary. People who have it are not really more than one person.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: Stories of lost boys, without adult supervision, on islands where time stands still

The ending of Lord of the Flies, “Ralph wept for…the darkness of man’s heart” (1, p. 285), is misleading. For it is silly to conclude anything about “man’s heart” based on a story of young boys. Their brains are not fully developed.

To understand Lord of the Flies, it helps to compare it to a similar story, Peter Pan. Both stories are about lost boys on an island, who have no adult supervision. One has a “beast,” the other has a crocodile. One has a tribe of bloodthirsty hunters, the other has bloodthirsty pirates. Both islands are magical places where time stands still.

In Peter Pan, it is directly stated that Peter and the lost boys, as long as they live on the island, will never grow up. In Lord of the Flies, the same thing is implied, since there is almost no reference to the boys’ growing up, or being likely to grow up, while on this island. For example, the question is never raised as to whether the face-painting, bloodthirsty hunters would be likely to still be interested in that in six months. To conclude anything about “man’s heart” from this story, you would have to assume that all or most of these boys, psychologically and morally speaking, will never grow up.

Now, jokes aside, most boys do grow up. The only “children” who never grow up are the child-aged alternate personalities of adults who have multiple personality. Child-aged alters are very common in adults with multiple personality, and they are child-aged because they arose when the person was a child and are frozen in time.

So when I read stories about children on magical islands where time stands still, I suspect that the characters are based on the author’s child-aged alters.

1. William Golding. Lord of the Flies. Introduction by Stephen King. New York, Perigee, 1954/2011.

Paula Hawkins The Girl on the Train: Did Rachel have Alcoholic Blackouts or Multiple Personality Memory Gaps for the periods of time that she was drunk?

Alcoholic Blackouts

Alcoholic Blackouts are categorized as either complete or partial. If Rachel had blackouts, she had the complete kind, because the next day she would remember nothing at all of the period of time she had been drunk.

In complete blackouts, the alcohol’s toxic effect on the brain prevents any memories from being recorded, so there are no memories to remember, either the next day or at any later date.

The person may infer or guess what happened during the blackout period, from memories of the time before and after the blackout period, and from circumstantial evidence, such as physical injuries or what other people have said, but they have no direct memory of the blackout period.

Multiple Personality Memory Gaps

When the person was drunk, the regular, non-drinking personalities were not in control of behavior and consciousness, and so had no memories for that period of time. And when the regular personalities resumed control (afterwards and the next day), all they had was a memory gap for the period of time in question.

However, the drinking personalities did have complete memories for that period of time. And since the memories had been recorded (in the memory banks of the drinking personalities), it would be possible for the regular, non-drinking personalities to eventually get those memories, if the drinking personalities were ever willing to share them, and if the regular personalities were ever willing to listen.

Rachel (the main character)

Rachel says, “for four years I’d had problems with alcohol… ‘I don’t remember things…I black out and I can’t remember where I’ve been or what I’ve done,’ " (1, p. 189).

Rachel describes “the person I am when I drink. Drunk Rachel sees no consequences, she is either excessively expansive and optimistic or wrapped up in hate. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment” (1, p. 105). This is what Regular Rachel has inferred from what others have told her about how she behaves when she is drunk. It is unclear whether there are two different drinking personalities, or one that is more rounded. In either case, Drunk Rachel is not just some physiological state of disinhibition. She has personality. But she is still only an alternate personality with limited perspective (not a total person, which would mean all her alternate personalities put together and taken as a whole).

Eventually, (Non-Drinking) Rachel does remember what she had previously not remembered: “She got into the car with him. That night. I saw her. I didn’t remember it…But I remember. I remember now” (1, p. 282).

If it had been an alcoholic blackout, there would have been no memory to remember.

In short, posing as a novel of alcoholic blackouts, this is actually a novel of multiple personality memory gaps.

1. Paula Hawkins. The Girl on the Train. New York, Riverhead Books of Penguin Group, 2015.

T. M. Luhrmann’s “Faith vs. Facts” on self-contradictory “cognitive attitudes” in tomorrow’s New York Times: fails to consider alternate personalities.

“Most of us find it mind-boggling that some people seem willing to ignore the facts…and…a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than a religious mind-set…

“…They tell a story…about a woman who had taken her tuberculosis medication and been cured — and who then told Dr. Farmer that she was going to get back at the person who had used sorcery to make her ill. ‘But if you believe that,’ he cried, ‘why did you take your medicines?’ In response to the great doctor she replied, in essence, ‘Honey, are you incapable of complexity?’ "

I would wonder whether she had one fact-minded personality and another faith-minded personality; that is, whether she had what I call “normal multiple personality” (multiple personality that does not cause distress or dysfunction, and which, I have speculated, may be present in 30% of the general public and 90% of novelists).

There are two cardinal clues to the possibility that a person might have multiple personality. One is memory gaps. The other is a puzzling inconsistency, which is the subject of Luhrmann’s essay.

Each Alternate Personality in Multiple Personality is an Unreliable Narrator, Because Each One Has a Magical, Idiosyncratic, Partial View of Reality

In multiple personality, each identity has it own reality in regard to self-image, memories, interests, and world view. Each identity’s self-image—as to appearance, age, and even sex—may be quite different from how they appear to you. Each identity’s memories may have gaps, and each identity’s interests will lead it to attend to certain things only. So each identity’s overall view of reality will be distorted accordingly.

Thus, if a character is an unreliable narrator—and if the unreliability cannot be completely explained by ordinary common sense—then you should consider multiple personality.

What about drugs and alcohol? Couldn’t memory gaps be caused by alcohol blackouts? Possibly. But are you sure that the character has never had a memory gap when not drinking? And even if you could be sure that they never have, are you sure that the character does not have an alcoholic alternate personality? Are the story or character more peculiar than you would expect from alcoholism alone?

In short, consider the possibility of multiple personality whenever confronted with an unreliable narrator—especially if the narrator is inclined to idiosyncratic, magical thinking—because that is the nature of alternate personalities.

William Golding (Lord of the Flies; Nobel Prize) agrees with Margaret Atwood that a novelist’s regular self and writing self are distinct, alternate personalities

“Some of those who knew him best, among them the critic Stephen Medcalf, felt that the man they met and talked to was simply not the same man who wrote the novels. Medcalf went so far as to imagine that the novels were written by a ‘daimon’ or supernatural agent. Golding himself was half-prepared to countenance the idea. ‘That is right,’ he agreed, ‘Sometimes I have felt it myself and been astonished at what it accomplishes’. But he also felt the daimon idea was ‘too simple’, even if there was ‘something in it’. When writing in his journal he gave his ‘real’, everyday self curious comic nicknames (‘Pewter’ and ‘Bolonius’) to distinguish the ordinary Golding from Golding the novelist, who remained, it seems, outside his knowledge and control” (1, p.176).

Golding’s “everyday self” was really more than one identity—at least two—as indicated by the two names.  How many identities did the work of “the novelist”? He didn’t know. It was outside his knowledge and control.

Of course, the nature and number of identities, and what they know or don’t know about each other, is unique to each novelist. The only general conclusion is that normal novelists have multiple personality.

1. John Carey. “William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.” New York, Free Press, 2009.

Edith Wharton says the novelist’s characters are “as solidly real as the world of experience…but in a way…different.” As in multiple personality.

“To the artist his world is as solidly real as the world of experience, or even more so, but in a way entirely different; it is a world to and from which he passes without any sense of effort, but always with an uninterrupted awareness of the passing. In this world are begotten and born the creatures of his imagination, more living to him than his own flesh-and-blood, but whom he never thinks of as living, in the reader’s simplifying sense. Unless he keeps his hold on this dual character of their being, visionary to him, and to the reader real, he will be the slave of his characters and not their master. When I say their master, I do not mean that they are his marionettes and dangle from his strings. Once projected by his fancy they are living beings who live their own lives; but their world is the one consciously imposed on them by their creator. Only by means of this objectivity of the artist can his characters live in art” (1, pp. 85-86).

Thus, Wharton agrees with Toni Morrison, whom I quoted in a past post as saying that the novelist experiences her characters as “more real than real,” making it necessary for the novelist to control her characters by reminding them whose novel it is.

The paradox described by both Wharton and Morrison is that novelists have two contradictory views of their characters: as both real—even more real than real—and not real.

That is similar to multiple personality, in which the person experiences the alternate identities as separate, real people, but in which there is always at least one identity who sees what is going on.

1. Edith Wharton. The Writing of Fiction. New York, Touchstone, 1924/1997.

The literary “Double” is a misleading myth; truth is stranger than fiction; persons who have multiple personality rarely have only two identities.

How did the myth of the “double” get started in the nineteenth and early twentieth century? There are two explanations, one biological and the other psychological.

The biological reason is that the two hemispheres of the brain became of scientific and popular interest in the nineteenth century. It was like a discovery that everyone had two brains! So there was a “scientific” basis for a person to have two, but only two, identities.

There were two psychological reasons for the myth of only two personalities: the experimental and the clinical.

Psychologists would do experiments such as “automatic writing.” They would find that with some people, if you put a pen in their hand, suspended the hand over a piece of paper, and then you distracted the person, the hand would write things that the subject was not aware of writing. This was seen as proof that the person had two selves: the regular self who was distracted, and a second self, who was doing the writing. These results were seen as demonstrating “double consciousness,” which was also a common term for multiple personality back then.

The clinical reason for thinking in terms of “doubles” or “double consciousness” is that in cases of multiple personality, it is typical that you initially find only one (or at least very few) alternate personality. And if the clinician doesn’t know any better, and stops there, it will appear that there are only two (or very few) personalities. But there are almost always others that are more hidden.

And this multiplicity (as opposed to duality) is no modern artifact. In a past post, I cited the case of Legion in The New Testament. His name was Legion, because he had a very large number of alternate personalities (thought of, in biblical times, as his being possessed by a multitude of demons).

So I wanted to follow yesterday’s post with this post’s clarification, in case any novelists, reading what Margaret Atwood said, and knowing that they have more than two identities (or “voices”) are thinking that they must be crazy. But no, when a person has more than one identity, having only two is rare. And in regard to mental health, whether you have a dozen identities or hundreds of identities is of no significance. (Of course, when you have hundreds of identities, only a limited number are major.)

Margaret Atwood, in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), says that all fiction writers have at least two personalities

“I grew up in a world of doubles…a superhero was nobody unless he had an alter ego…Yes, there were earlier examples of disguises and doubles. Yes Odysseus disguised himself to reenter his halls in Ithaca; yes, in the Christian religion God came to earth as Jesus of Nazareth, a poor carpenter. Yes, Odin and Zeus and St. Peter wander the world as beggars in legend and fairy-tale…But it was the Romantics, par excellence, who fixed this doubleness in the popular consciousness as a thing to be expected, and expected above all of artists…

“As for the artists who are also writers, they are doubles twice over, for the mere act of writing splits the self into two. In this chapter, it is therefore the doubleness of the writer qua writer I will discuss…

“What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’? The particular writer. By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward…and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing…

[When she writes things that are out-of-character] “Who was I then? My evil twin or slippery double, perhaps. I am after all a writer, so it would follow as the day the night that I must have a slippery double…

“All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read…

“There has been a widespread suspicion among writers—widespread over at least the past century and a half—that there are two of him sharing the same body, with a hard-to-predict and difficult-to-pinpoint moment during which the one turns into the other. When writers have spoken consciously of their own double natures, they’re likely to say that one half does the living, the other half the writing…”

Atwood elaborates on the above in her twenty-seven page Chapter 2, which is titled: “Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double, Why there are always two" (in every writer).

Yet, like the dictionary of literary terms whose entry on “the Double” was quoted in a recent post, Atwood seems not to know that what she is describing about the “double” nature of writers is that they have a normal version of multiple personality.

Henry James appears to have used the multiple personality “We” and “Our” in his famous quotation on “The Madness of Art,” when you read what follows it.

Quoting from his short story, “The Middle Years”:

"You're a great success!" said Doctor Hugh, putting into his young voice the ring of a marriage-bell.

Dencombe lay taking this in; then he gathered strength to speak once more. "A second chance—THAT’S the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"If you've doubted, if you've despaired, you've always 'done' it," his visitor subtly argued.

"We've done something or other," Dencombe conceded.

If you consider the “we” and “our” in the famous passage only, you might think that the novelist is referring to writers in general, but “We’ve done something or other” shows that he is referring to himself only, and that he experiences himself as plural.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: What is Victor Frankenstein’s Mental Illness? Why Doesn’t the Creature Have a Name? A Multiple Personality Story.

How did Victor Frankenstein construct a man eight feet tall? Did he have eight-foot-tall cadavers to get body parts? And why would a creature who was so superbly constructed—he had a superior brain, since, after a few years of self-education, he was speaking with all the erudition of his creator; not to mention the creature’s superhuman running speed—why would he be constructed with an appearance that was ugly? And since ugliness was the basis of his social rejection (which was what turned him from good to evil), why wasn’t plastic surgery the relatively easy, obvious solution?

The reason that the story doesn’t make sense is that Victor is an unreliable narrator. He is unreliable because, as the reader is repeatedly told, Victor is mentally ill. For example, after his creature first comes alive, Victor has a “nervous fever, which confined me for several months…The form of the monster on whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes, and I raved incessantly concerning him” (1, p. 39). For several months! And Victor has “nervous fevers” and other emotional disturbances recurrently, throughout the novel.

Indeed, the novel is so repetitive and consistent on the theme of Victor’s mental instability that the author, at the end of the novel, is obliged to have the creature appear after Victor dies, just to show that, after all, the story was “real.” Otherwise, the reader would have thought that Victor was just crazy, and might have closed the book feeling cheated.

Of course, once you acknowledge Victor’s mental illness, the question is diagnosis. And since murders were committed that Victor honestly doesn’t remember doing, and the alternate personality who committed them is described, the diagnosis is multiple personality.

An interesting feature of this novel is that the creature has no name. And since naming is such a common, natural thing to do with any creature (a pet, etc.), the creature in this novel has often, erroneously, been given a name, “Frankenstein.” (However, if the creature is an alternate identity of Victor Frankenstein, calling the creature “Frankenstein” is actually an insight, not an error.) But the fact is, in the novel, the creature has no name.

So it is worth noting: in multiple personality, alternate identities who have no name are common.

1. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by J. Paul Hunter. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Many people do not know the theme of the double, and of those who do, many do not know it is a literary metaphor for multiple personality

As noted in a past post, many dictionaries of literary terms do not have an entry for “the Double” or “Theme of the Double.” Here is the entry from one dictionary that has it. But note the glaring omission: It does not mention that “the Double” is a literary metaphor for multiple personality. 

Dictionary Definition with Glaring Omission

“Double, the: A device whereby a character is self-duplicated (the Doppelgänger, “mirror image,” or “alter ego”), as in the case of Leggatt and the Captain in Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, or divided into two distinct, usually antithetical, personalities, as in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which objectifies the internal struggle of good and evil.

“Masao Miyoshi…outlines three categories of the Double:…an author’s conscious use of the device to express the theme of a work;…thematic…self-alienation…; and the biographical…revelation of the author’s own…divisions…

“The widespread use of the Double in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature (e.g., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dostoevsky's The Double, Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace) suggests to many critics the increasing awareness that the ‘self ’ is in reality a composite of many ‘selves’…” (1).

What is a Multiple Personality or “Double” story?

In this blog, when I call something “a multiple personality story,” I mean that it has a character who has multiple personality or that it is a “double” story and has one of the following literary, multiple personality, equivalents:

One character is an incarnation of another character’s alternate personality.

One character expresses hidden or denied aspects of another character.

One character is complementary to, or completes, another character.

One character is a duplicate of another character.

One character is the alter ego of another character.

One character is the evil twin of another character.

One character switches identities with another character.

One character is a creation of another character.

[Added April 24, 2015: Also, I may call something "a multiple personality story" if it has features typical of multiple personality, such as the children in Peter Pan who never grow up (which are like child-aged alternate personalities, who never grow up) or characters with no name (many alternate personalities are not named) or characters who are peculiarly unreliable (which most alternate personalities are, due to their limited perspective).]

1. Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. Third Edition. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.