Sleepwalking Scene in “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare: Was Lady Macbeth preoccupied but awake, having dialogues of alternate personalities?

The only way to have known for sure whether Lady Macbeth was actually asleep would have been to do an EEG (electroencephalogram), but that was not available.

She appears to have been having complex dialogues, at first addressing her husband and later addressing herself (see below). And from what I read online, although complex speech, including dialogue, does occasionally happen in cases of sleep talking alone, I don’t know if complex speech happens while sleepwalking, especially since sleepwalking and sleep talking may have different patterns on EEG.

In the following transcript of the sleepwalking scene from Act 5, Scene 1, I have labeled it “Lady Macbeth #1” when she talks as herself, and “Lady Macbeth #2” when she talks to herself (as if she were someone else).

       Doctor

32   Hark! she speaks. I will set down what comes

33   from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more

34   strongly.

       LADY MACBETH #1

35   Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,

36   then, 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my

37   lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we

38   fear who knows it, when none can call our power

39   to account?—Yet who would have thought the old

40   man to have had so much blood in him?

       Doctor

41   Do you mark that?

       LADY MACBETH #1

42   The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?—

43   What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o'

44   that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with

45   this starting.

       Doctor

46   Go to, go to; you have known what you should

47   not.

       Gentlewoman

48   She has spoke what she should not, I am sure

49   of that; heaven knows what she has known.

       LADY MACBETH #1

50   Here's the smell of the blood still. All the

51   perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this

52   little hand. O, O, O!

       Doctor

53   What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely

54   charg'd.

       Gentlewoman

55   I would not have such a heart in my bosom

56   for the dignity of the whole body.

       Doctor

57   Well, well, well.

       Gentlewoman

58   Pray God it be, sir.

       Doctor

59   This disease is beyond my practise; yet I

60   have known those which have walked in

61   their sleep who have died holily in their beds.

       LADY MACBETH #2

62   Wash your hands, put on your nightgown;

63   look not so pale.—I tell you yet again, Banquo's

64   buried; he cannot come out on's grave.

       Doctor

65   Even so?

       LADY MACBETH #2

66   To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate:

67   come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's

68   done cannot be undone.—To bed, to bed, to bed!

Two other possible manifestations of multiple personality in Macbeth are, first, in Act 2, Scene 2 when Macbeth hears a voice cry “Sleep no more. Macbeth does murder sleep” and, second, in Act 3, Scene 4, when Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo. When nonpsychotic people hear voices and/or see ghosts, I suspect multiple personality.

Please search “Hamlet” for six past posts. Also "sleepwalking."

Added Sept. 19: On rereading the above, I cannot be sure whether Lady Macbeth #2 was addressing herself or her husband. If the latter, then there may be no second Lady Macbeth personality. She may have been having a fantasized conversation with her husband (or a second personality representing her husband). Lines 62-64 and 66-68 certainly do appear to be two personalities interacting. And although the Doctor refers to her as walking in her sleep, he has not tried to engage her in conversation, so how can he distinguish between sleepwalking and her being awake, but preoccupied in a fantasy, multiple personality, conversation?

“The Collector” by John Fowles: Author’s Existentialist Philosophy and Sympathy for People with Multiple Personality

1963 Author Interview

“I think of The Collector as a parable…to illustrate the opposition of the Few and the Many…I take these terms from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Haracleitus, who’s been a major influence on my life. For him the Few were the good, the intelligent, the independent; the Many were the stupid, the ignorant, and the easily molded…

“I also wanted to attack…the contemporary idea that there is something noble about the inarticulate hero…I don’t admire beats, bums, junkies, psychopaths, and inarticulates. I feel sorry for them…The boy in The Collector stands for the Many; the girl for the Few…

“But to get back to the girl-in-the-cellar situation. How did I come on it? Well, some time during the 1950’s, I went to see the first performance in London of Bartok’s opera, Bluebeard’s Castle…It so happened that about a year later there was an extraordinary case (again in London) of a boy who captured a girl and imprisoned her in an air-raid shelter at the end of his garden…And eventually, it led me to the book”…

“I think the existentialist trend [in literature] will increase…We’ll have more of the key existentialist notion of authenticity in life…To live authentically is not giving in to the anxieties, not running away from the nauseas [search Sartre], but solving them in some way…The girl in The Collector is an existentialist heroine although she doesn’t know it. She’s groping for her own authenticity…What I tried to say in the book was this: we must create a society in which the Many will allow the Few to live authentically, and to teach and help the Many to begin to do so as well. In societies dominated by the Many, the Few are in grave danger of being suffocated” (1, pp. 1-8).

The Collector (1963)

The novel does not have any clear-cut multiple personality, but the protagonist, Frederick Clegg (who kidnaps Miranda Grey and keeps her locked in the cellar), is repeatedly said to be out of touch with another side of himself, which could be interpreted as either existentialist inauthenticity or psychological split personality.

“I went into that coffee-bar, suddenly, I don’t know why, like I was drawn in by something else, against my will almost” (2, p. 13).

“Don’t look like that,” she said. “What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you” (2, p. 72).

“The next thing was I was naked and she was against me and holding me but I was all tense, it was like a different me…” (1, p. 105).

“Sometimes I think he’s being very clever. He’s trying to enlist my sympathy by pretending he’s in the grip of some third thing” (1, p. 129).

“For a second there was that other side of him I sense, the violence, hatred, absolute determination not to let me go” (2, p. 149).

“He said, I can’t say. As if someone else had strictly forbidden him to speak. (I often feel that with him — a horrid little cringing good nature dominated by a mean bad one.)” (2, p. 194).

“There are moments when he is possessed, quite out of his own control” (1, p. 217).

While the above quotes are all about him, the following type of mirror experience, typical of multiple personality, is hers:

“Staring at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I don’t seem real to myself, it suddenly seems that it isn’t my reflection only a foot or two away…I watch my face and I watch it move as if it is someone else’s” (2, p. 242).

1995 Interview

Dianne L. Vipond: The doppelgänger motif is ubiquitous in your fiction. Twins, sisters, parallel characters, and often the dynamics of male-female relationships all seem to point to “the double.” Your poem “The Two Selves” also deals with the idea of a dual persona. Could you comment on your use of the double?

John Fowles: I honestly don’t know, but I suppose it’s a sort of longing for an impossible freedom. I have some sympathy for those suffering from that psychiatric illness, I think they call it multiple personality disorder. I often wish I were someone else…” (1, p. 209).

1. Dianne L. Vipond (Editor). Conversations with John Fowles. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

2. John Fowles. The Collector [1963]. New York, Back Bay/Little Brown/Hachette, 2010.

Jane Eyre (post 11): Did Jane have one episode of telepathy, or, as Saul Bellow, hear voices routinely? Bellow and Brontë probably had multiple personality

Professor John Sutherland notes that when Jane Eyre was far away from Rochester, she heard his voice say “Jane! Jane! Jane!” They would seem to have been communicating by telepathy. Sutherland speculates that telepathy might be possible if both people are in a mesmeric (trance, hypnotic) state simultaneously: “It is, as Jane protests, no ‘miracle’, but an accident produced by their fortuitously mesmerizing themselves at the same critical moment” (1, p. 65).

1. John Sutherland. The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

The two paragraphs below from Jane Eyre are easy to gloss over as simply two opposing thoughts, the first optimistic, the second pessimistic. And the first paragraph does end by suggesting that the next paragraph is a “thought” that “struck” out the previous thought. But this may be only a recognition that what was coming next was something that was also from inside her head.

Note that the two paragraphs are clearly from different points of view. In the first paragraph she says “My” and “I”; whereas, the second says “your” and “you,” and is “urged” by “the monitor,” which would seem to have a mind of its own (the essence of an alternate personality).

I follow the quote from Jane Eyre with a quote from an interview with the Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow, who says that he has his own monitor voice, which he calls the “commentator within.” Thus, hearing such voices—which, to the extent that they have minds of their own, are alternate personalties—are to be expected of novelists and their characters.

October 26, 2015

Jane Eyre (post 8): Jane gets suggestions from “the monitor”—Saul Bellow from the “commentator within”—only experienced by people with multiple personality

Near the end of Jane Eyre, Jane distinguishes between her own ideas and the suggestions she gets from “the monitor”:

     “ ‘My journey is closed,’ I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a box I had into the ostler’s charge, to be kept till I called for it; paid my fair; satisfied the coachman, and was going: the brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters, ‘The Rochester Arms.’ My heart leapt up: I was already on my master’s very lands. It fell again: the thought struck it:—

     ‘Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you know: and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which you hasten, who besides him is there? His lunatic wife: and you have nothing to do with him: you dare not speak to him or seek his presence. You have lost your labour—you had better go no further,’ urged the monitor. ‘Ask information of the people at the inn; they can give you all you seek: they can solve your doubts at once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home.’

     The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to act on it…” (1, p. 360).

In Saul Bellow’s 1966 Paris Review interview, he says:

“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…”

No, all people don’t have this. These personified, rational voices are the voices of alternate personalities. Only people with multiple personality may hear the voice of, and get suggestions from, a “monitor” or a “commentator within.”

1. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. New York, W. W. Norton, 2001.

October 14, 2015

Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë: Brontë describes her creative process; Gaskell describes Brontë’s switch to talkative alternate personality

Alternate Personalities Dictate

“…imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?” (1, p. 255).

“When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them, which becomes their master—which will have its own way—putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-moulding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully-elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. Is it not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it?” (1, pp. 260-261).

Brontë Switches Personalities

At school in Brussels:

“…Emily hardly ever uttered more than a monosyllable. Charlotte was sometimes excited sufficiently to speak eloquently and well—on certain subjects; but before her tongue was thus loosened, she had a habit of gradually wheeling round on her chair, so as almost to conceal her face from the person to whom she was speaking” (1, p. 162).

When Switching Personalities:

“…Women will frequently turn their faces away, momentarily shield their faces with their hands, or let their hair fall over their faces during the moment of switching” (2, p. 121).

1. Elizabeth Gaskell. The Life of Charlotte Bronte [1857], Edited by Elisabeth Jay. Penguin Books, 1997.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

John Sutherland’s “The Literary Detective” inadvertently makes apt connection between “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “A Tale of Two Cities”

John Sutherland, Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, “taught The Yellow Wall-Paper for ten years” (1, p. 440). He cites “a puzzling feature” (1, p. 441) of the story: “Where there was previously a relationship of two (woman and reader), there are now three persons involved (woman, reader, and an unidentified narrator who has stepped in to take charge)” (1, p. 442).

Also, in Sutherland’s discussion of “the enigma at the heart of The Yellow Wall-Paper…is the woman mentally ill or has she been driven mad by solitary confinement” (1, p. 443), he twice mentions, as another literary example of someone on the edge of madness, Dr. Manette in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1, pp. 443, 445).

The “puzzling feature” of “an unidentified narrator who has stepped in to take charge” might have been solved by Professor Sutherland if he had realized that Dr. Manette has multiple personality. The third person, the unidentified narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, is an alternate personality, who takes over at the end of the story, similar to the way the alternate personality takes over at the end of Dostoevsky’s The Double.

And mentioning a third person reminds me of Graham Greene’s The Third Man (his novella, not the film), which has a character with clear, if gratuitous, multiple personality.

Search “A Tale of Two Cities,” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Dostoevsky’s The Double” and “The Third Man.”

1. John Sutherland. The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Partial Apology for Declaring Books Unreadable When They Have Excessive Manifestations of Multiple Personality

On rare occasions in the past six years, I have declined to continue reading books that I found unclear and unreadable. But how could I have been right to put these books down, since I wouldn’t have picked them up in the first place if they had not been either classics or by proven writers?

I may find books unreadable due to the following:

1. unexplained switching among multiple narrators

2. unexplained switching back and forth in time

3. unexplained switching among casts of characters

4. unexplained switching from one story to another

5. puzzling format

Since I read things here in order to find manifestations of multiple personality, it is ironic that I find works unreadable when they have excessive manifestations of multiple personality, such as the five kinds listed above.

Of course, what is “excessive” for me may be delightful to others, who include many readers, reviewers, and literary prize judges.

“Ducks, Newburyport” By Lucy Ellmann: Reviews barely mention or totally ignore that first-person narrator of 1020-page Booker-nominated novel is nameless

All I’ve read are six reviews. One review mentioned in passing that the narrator was nameless. The other five ignored it.

I doubt that the protagonist’s namelessness could be accounted for merely because she is the only one talking or thinking. For a person to discuss her interests and relationships for a thousand pages, without her name ever being mentioned, I think would be implausible.

The feature most-noted by reviewers is that, although the novel is 1020 pages long, it consists almost entirely of only one sentence. Why doesn’t the narrator speak in sentences? What is the main reason that people speak in sentences? Like names, sentences facilitate communication with other people.

If the narrator were not a person, and did not normally have conversations with people, she would not need a name or sentences.

So my guess is that the narrator was an alternate personality who was very talkative (as a voice in the author’s head), but did not have conversations, per se, and did not have a name (many alternate personalities don’t).

Search “namelessness” and “nameless” for my discussion of works I’ve actually read.

“Burying the Lead” in Most Front Page Articles of Today’s New York Times: Journalism Affected by Literary Fiction

What is “burying the lead”?

“A lead paragraph (sometimes shortened to lead; also spelled lede) is the opening paragraph of an article, essay, book chapter, or other written work that summarizes the main idea.

“Journalistic leads emphasize grabbing the attention of the reader. In journalism, the failure to mention the most important, interesting or attention-grabbing elements of a story in the first paragraph is sometimes called “burying the lead.” Most standard news leads include brief answers to the questions of who, what, why, when, where, and how the key event in the story took place…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_paragraph

There have long been certain works of literary fiction that are not readily understood, because they are not written clearly. Since the authors had also written things that were quite clear, it was evident that the lack of clarity in these particular works was self-indulgent and/or intentional (and/or a manifestation of the author’s multiple personality trait). How could it be intentional? Because some such works have won major awards and/or prestigious praise.

Indeed, such writing has even affected journalism, where “burying the lead” used to be a sin, but is now the fashion.

“Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination” by Toni Morrison: Goodness is acquisition of morally insightful self-knowledge by protagonists

Morrison’s 2012 lecture to the Harvard Divinity School starts with the Amish community’s altruistic response to mass murder at an Amish schoolhouse in 2006; outlines standard philosophical theories of goodness and altruism; and comments on various works of fiction. Her conclusion is as follows:

“…allow me to signify my own understanding of goodness: the acquisition of self-knowledge. A satisfactory or good ending for me is when the protagonist learns something vital and morally insightful that she or he did not know at the beginning…Such insight has nothing to do with winning, and everything to do with the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge on display in the language of moral clarity — of goodness” (1).

Comment

That is what goodness means to her literary personality. It omits actual good behavior. Another personality, her social personality, would probably say that goodness entails good behavior.

If you wanted to insist that she had only one personality, you could argue that knowing right implied doing right. But in real life, knowing right without doing right is common.

Or you could argue that "knowledge on display" implies behavior, but it's knowledge on display "in the language" of goodness, not in good behavior, per se.

So her definition of goodness in terms of the self-knowledge of protagonists sounds like the specialized perspective of a writing or literary personality.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/toni-morrison-goodness-altruism-literary-imagination.html

In multiple personality, first and middle names may be used by alternate personalities

“When I was in elementary school, a classmate of mine once returned to campus in September to announce that henceforth, she would be going by her middle name. Goodbye Megan, hello Jules. Her friends spent a week quizzing her about her choice and then moved on.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/im-so-excited-for-40th-grade.html

Did they ask her about gender identification? Although both names are unisex, Megan is more commonly a girl's name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan and Jules a boy's name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules

Did the classmate have multiple personality, and did the name change represent a switch to a more masculine alternate personality? I don’t know in that particular case. But I do know that it would have been a relevant question.

Increased Reading of Past Posts

Day to day, for the past six years, the ten most-read posts have usually been the last ten posts. But, recently, the most-read posts have been past posts.

That makes sense, since the odds are very small that the latest posts will be more interesting than all 1,700 previous posts; especially if, using the name and subject indices, you select the past posts yourself.

Margaret Atwood says: For sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” she did not have the ability to write a continuation in the voice of Offred. Why not?

“What they were begging for was a continuation in the voice of Offred, which I would not have been able to do…That voice was there. She said her thing.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/books/handmaids-tale-sequel-testaments-margaret-atwood.html

If Margaret Atwood had created the character of Offred in the way that most readers and literary critics assume, of course she would have been able to write a continuation in the voice of Offred. Why not?

But a great writer like Atwood does not create her major characters. She wouldn’t know how and doesn’t try. What she does know how to do, and actually does, is listen for voices in her head, voices of characters with great stories to tell.

To write The Handmaid’s Tale, she had listened. She had heard the voice of Offred. And Offred had evidently said all she had to say. "That voice was there. She said her thing."

Search “Lady Oracle” and “Margaret Atwood.”

“Native Son” by Richard Wright (post 4): At novel’s conclusion, Bigger inadvertently reveals he has multiple-personality memory gaps for murders

“I didn’t want to kill!” Bigger shouted. “But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder” (1, p. 429).

“I must have felt it awful hard to murder” means that he doesn’t actually recall how he felt, because he has that cardinal symptom of multiple personality, a memory gap (search it on this site).

Wright’s essay, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” (1940) (1, pp. 433-462) makes no reference to multiple personality. However, in googling, I find that Wright was interested in existentialism (search “Sartre” and “Kierkegaard” in this blog) and “double consciousness” (search it), the latter a concept borrowed by W. E. B. Du Bois from 19th and early 20th century psychology, where it referred to multiple personality and related phenomena.

Thus, Native Son is one more novel with unlabeled, unacknowledged, multiple personality.

1. Richard Wright. Native Son [1940]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

“Native Son” by Richard Wright (post 3): Bigger, the protagonist, switches to a gun-shooter alternate personality

Bigger (who killed the white girl, Mary, and disposed of her body) has been interviewed by a detective. He has told lies to implicate Mary’s communist friend, Jan, in her disappearance.

Jan confronts Bigger on the street, asking why Bigger has lied about him. Bigger takes out his gun, as he switches to his gun-shooter alternate personality. But before the personality switch is complete, Jan backs off and walks away.

“Jan backed farther away, then turned and walked rapidly off…Bigger stood still, the gun in hand. He had utterly forgotten where he was…The tension in him slackened and he lowered the gun…He was coming back into possession of himself; for the past three minutes it seemed he had been under a strange spell, possessed by a force which he hated, but which he had to obey…” (1, p. 172).

Comment

The novel does not label or identify the above as having anything to do with multiple personality. I don’t know how Richard Wright thought about it, privately.

In his text, he uses the words “possession” and “possessed.” Before multiple personality was understood psychologically, it was thought of as spirit or demon possession.

1. Richard Wright. Native Son [1940]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

“Native Son” by Richard Wright (post 2): Bigger kills a white girl.

Bigger, the new chauffeur for the rich, white, Daltons (who have contributed millions of dollars to African-American schools), has driven the family’s headstrong daughter, Mary, home, after her date with a communist friend. 

Mary is so drunk that Bigger has to carry her to her room, where she now sleeps in her clothes on her bed. But before Bigger can leave her bedroom, Mary’s blind mother, Mrs. Dalton, enters Mary’s room.

Bigger is panicked to be found with the white girl in her bedroom. Mary mumbles and moves on her bed, so Bigger—fearing these sounds and movements will draw Mrs. Dalton to Mary’s side, and in the process, make her aware of his presence in the room—covers Mary’s mouth with his hand and a pillow.

Mrs. Dalton says, “Mary! Are you asleep? I heard you moving about,” but then exclaims, “You’re dead drunk! You stink with whiskey!” (1, p. 86). She prays, and leaves the room.

Bigger then realizes that his restraint of Mary’s mouth and movements have accidentally suffocated her. She is dead. And in his panic, he decides that he must dispose of the body, which he does by putting it in the building’s furnace, to cremate it.

Comment

Since Mrs. Dalton had been described as super-sensitive to her surroundings, in compensation for her blindness, it seems unlikely that she would not hear either Bigger’s breathing or the cessation of her daughter’s breathing. Also, I do not see why Bigger did not just leave the body on the bed, since his presence in Mary’s bedroom was not known.

On the other hand, since it was Bigger’s job (besides driving the car) to tend to the furnace, he would be connected to any bones found there.

In short, I find the above pivotal event, as written, implausible. But the plot required that Bigger kill a white girl.

1. Richard Wright. Native Son [1940]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

“Native Son” by Richard Wright: Tentative, early impression that Bigger Thomas, the protagonist, may have multiple personality

At the beginning of Richard Wright’s Native Son, Bigger Thomas, a young black man, is called “crazy” (1, p. 8) by his mother. She doesn’t mean that he is psychotic or evil, but that he does thoughtless and bad things she finds puzzling. Puzzling inconsistency may be a clue to multiple personality.

Both Bigger and the narrator explain his violent and self-destructive behavior by relating it to racial oppression, which is real, and often does prompt his behavior. But since even his mother finds him puzzling, and since all African-Americans don’t respond to racial oppression the way that Bigger does, that can’t be the whole explanation.

“It’s like I was going to do something I can’t help” (1, p. 22), meaning that he sensed behavior was about to be initiated by an alternate personality?

“He was divided and pulled against himself” (1, p. 25).

“Confidence could only come again now through action so violent that it would make him forget [meaning behavior of a violent alternate personality that would leave him with a multiple personality memory gap?]. These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence…like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force” [meaning an alternate personality with which his regular personality was not co-conscious?] (1, pp. 28-29).

“He was going to do something to Gus; just what, he did not know…he saw his fist come down on the side of Gus’s head; he had struck him really before he was conscious of doing so” (1, pp. 37-38).

Have you ever assaulted someone before you were conscious of doing so? Probably not, unless you have multiple personality.

1. Richard Wright. Native Son [1940]. Restored text by Library of America. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

“A Dark-Adapted Eye” by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell post 2): Rendell sees people as a problem that can be solved, but Vine finds people an enigma

This is the first novel that Ruth Rendell published under her Barbara Vine pseudonym. Rendell has said (see prior post) that Vine is her more feminine personality, which is evident, for example, in her narrator’s much greater attention to how characters are dressed.

The first-person narrator immediately informs the reader that the older of her two aunts, Vera, has been hanged for murder: the mystery is whom she had killed and why she did it.

Barbara Vine’s narrator is careless with her clues and perplexed by her characters. Two-thirds through the novel, she inadvertently reveals who Vera had killed. And the narrator never does learn who was telling the truth, Vera or her victim, about which of them was Jamie’s mother.

On page 162 of this 264 page mystery novel, the narrator inadvertently reveals who Vera killed, when she says: “What has become of Eden’s wedding photographs? I suppose Tony has them still or more likely, has long ago thrown them away. He has never remarried…” Eden is Vera’s younger sister. If her husband, Tony, never remarries, then Eden is probably the one who was killed. (And that is what is eventually revealed.)

At the end of the novel, several whole pages are devoted to the narrator’s puzzlement about who was really Jamie’s mother, Vera or Eden. The narrator discusses the evidence for each possibility, but can’t be sure which of her aunts was telling the truth.

Thus, for the Ruth Rendell personality, clues are to be carefully screened and people are a mystery that can be solved. But for the Barbara Vine personality, clues are not as carefully screened and “People are a mystery, an enigma” (1, p. 233).

I would speculate that the author’s Ruth Rendell personality dominated her character personalities, who were obliged to tell Chief Inspector Wexford anything he wanted to know. But when Barbara Vine’s narrator asked the characters who was the real mother, they told her it was their business, and she respected their privacy.

Of course, judging by Rendell’s first Inspector Wexford novel (see previous post), people were an enigma to her, too, but she was less aware of it.

1. Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell). A Dark-Adapted Eye. New York, Bantam Books, 1986.

David Brooks in today’s New York Times, on Mattis vs. Trump, mistakenly invokes Kierkegaard to say that good character is engraved, deeply etched

Brooks quotes James Davison Hunter, who wrote “The Death of Character,” as saying that good “character resists…expedience; it defies hasty acquisition. This is undoubtedly why Soren Kierkegaard spoke of character as ‘engraved,’ deeply etched.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/opinion/jim-mattis-trump.html

I don’t know the context in which Kierkegaard said that character is engraved, but he, himself, was not a model for the solidity and stability of character; just the opposite. He is famous for having a multiplicity of pseudonymous alternate personalities, as previously noted:

Kierkegaard’s influence on 20th Century Writers, and his Well-Known, Pseudonymous, Alternate Personalities

From Wikipedia

“Kierkegaard [1813-1855] has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, David Lodge, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger and John Updike…

“Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonyms that he used to present distinctive viewpoints and to interact with each other in complex dialogue. He explored particularly complex problems from different viewpoints, each under a different pseudonym…

“Kierkegaard's most important pseudonyms, in chronological order, were:

— Victor Eremita, editor of Either/Or

— A, writer of many articles in Either/Or

— Judge William, author of rebuttals to A in Either/Or

— Johannes de silentio, author of Fear and Trembling

— Constantine Constantius, author of the first half of Repetition

— Young Man, author of the second half of Repetition

— Vigilius Haufniensis, author of The Concept of Anxiety

— Nicolaus Notabene, author of Prefaces

— Hilarius Bookbinder, editor of Stages on Life's Way

— Johannes Climacus, author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding

— Unscientific Postscript

— Inter et Inter, author of The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress

— H.H., author of Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays

— Anti-Climacus, author of The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity.”

Kierkegaard Said:

“I suffer as a human being can suffer in indescribable melancholy, which always has to do with my thinking about my own existence…Only when I am producing do I feel well. Then I forget all life’s discomforts, all suffering, then I am absorbed in my thought and happy. If I let my work alone for a couple of days I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, troubled, my head heavy and burdened.” It was due to his melancholy, he tells us, that he “discovered and poetically traveled through a whole fantasy world.” His writing was not an agreeable amusement, but “the product of an irresistible inward impulse, a melancholy man’s only possibility…As Scheherazade saved her life by telling stories, so I save myself or keep myself alive by writing…

“…in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine, I have no opinion about them except as a third person, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them…My wish, my prayer, is that if it occur to anyone to cite a particular saying from the books, he do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonym…

“Each time I wish to say something, there is another who says it at the very same moment. It is as if I were always thinking double, as if my other self were always somehow ahead of me…” (1, pp. 135-151).

1. Josiah Thompson. Kierkegaard. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

“From Doon with Death” by Ruth Rendell: In this first of the twenty-four Chief Inspector Wexford novels, he fails to understand the murderer

The murder victim is a woman who had received love letters from someone named “Doon.” For most of the novel, the unknown Doon is assumed to be a man. But it turns out that Doon is a pseudonym of one of the married female characters, whose secret lesbian love for the victim had been rejected. 

Neither Chief Inspector Wexford nor anyone else in this novel ever wonders why the murderer had written private, confidential, love letters using a pseudonym, or why she even had a pseudonym. Nor does anyone wonder what kind of mental illness she suffers.

Back in 1964, when this novel was published, did the public think that lesbianism, per se, was a potentially violent psychosis? Or does this novel simply invoke what I have previously referred to as “literary madness,” which does not distinguish between schizophrenia and multiple personality?

People with schizophrenia do not have multiple names. People with multiple personality do.

Interestingly, Ruth Rendell, herself, grew up in a family that referred to her by two different names, Ruth and Barbara, which correspond to the two names under which she published novels, Ruth Rendell and Barbara Vine. As she explained:

“Growing up with two different names doesn’t make you into two people. It does give you two aspects of personality, and Ruth and Barbara are two aspects of me. Ruth is tougher, colder, more analytical, possibly more aggressive. Ruth has written all the novels, created Chief Inspector Wexford. Ruth is the professional writer. Barbara is more feminine. It is Barbara who sews. If Barbara writes it is letters that she writes” (1).

1. “What’s the difference between Vine and Rendell? https://www.gusworld.com.au/books/vine/why.htm

P. D. James (post 3) on Characters and Fiction Writing Process: “It feels as if what I am doing is not inventing them but getting in touch with them”

“And however well I think I know my characters, they reveal themselves more clearly during the writing of the book, so that at the end, however carefully and intricately the work is plotted, I never get exactly the novel I planned. It feels, indeed, as if the characters and everything that happens to them exists in some limbo of the imagination, so that what I am doing is not inventing them but getting in touch with them and putting their story down in black and white, a process of revelation, not of creation” (1, pp. 157-158).

What kind of known psychological entity could these imaginary characters be if they feel to writers more like people they get to know than like puppets they had invented? Hint: alternate personalities are imaginary characters that seem more like people you get to know than like puppets you had invented.

1. P. D. James. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York, Vintage/Random House, 2009/2011.

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini (post 3): Importance of protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality (his voices) is their irrelevance

Why, on two occasions, is the protagonist portrayed as hearing the kind of voices that are typical of multiple personality (see previous posts)? I have finished this novel, and there turns out to be no good reason for his hearing such voices in either plot or character development.

This is what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” And the reason for it is that it reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology—or, at least, in this case, his view of the psychology of fiction writers, since the protagonist of this novel is a novelist—based on the author’s own psychology.

My finding gratuitous multiple personality in many novels is part of my evidence that many fiction writers have multiple personality trait.

Another thing I have found in many novels is “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which means that a work of fiction has unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality that are integral to plot or character development and are relevant to understanding what you are reading.

Search “gratuitous multiple personality” and “unacknowledged multiple personality” on this site for previous discussions in regard to many other writers.

Of course, you need the Search Box to do that, and if you don’t see it on your mobile device or smartphone, please visit this site with a larger category of device, whenever available.

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini (post 2): An alternate personality cautions cowardly Amir against a fight to the death with a psychopath

Many years later, Amir—having been living in California, gotten married, and published several novels—learns that Hassan is dead, but that Hassan’s son is an orphan living in Taliban-terrorized Afghanistan.

Indeed, as Amir is shocked to learn, Hassan had been his half brother, making Hassan’s son Amir’s nephew. So now the only way that Amir can resolve his guilt for not having intervened in Hassan’s rape (see previous post) is to save the nephew.

Coincidentally, the psychopathic Taliban ringleader who has taken abusive custody of the young nephew is the very same man who had raped Hassan many years before. And so there is going to be a showdown, a physical fight, potentially to the death, between the mild-mannered novelist and the brass-knuckled sadist.

In the following passage, italics are once again used by the author to indicate when an alternate personality is talking. Also note Amir’s reference to it as “part of me” who is speaking. People with undiagnosed multiple personality often to refer to their alternate personalities as being “parts” that have their own voice and mind.

“I was thousands of miles from my wife…There was a very realistic chance that I was going to render [my wife] a widow, at the age of thirty-six. This isn’t you, Amir, part of me said. You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is…God help him” (1, p. 275).

1. Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner [2003]. New York, Riverhead Books, 2013.

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini: Amir hears the cold, dark voice of his alternate personality, who criticizes Amir’s childhood playmate, Hassan

In the first hundred pages of this novel, the first-person protagonist, Amir, looking back from 2001, recalls his life as a twelve-year-old boy in 1970s Afghanistan. His mother had died when he was born. His father, rich and manly, has always treated Amir, a budding writer, as a big disappointment.

After winning the Kite-flying competition, Amir witnesses his Kite-flying partner and lifelong playmate, Hassan, being raped by a Hitler-admiring bully and two accomplices. Amir fails to intervene, because he fears that he, himself, would be severely beaten. Moreover, he does not tell his father about the rape, because his failure to defend Hassan would reinforce his father’s disappointment in him. Then he compounds his moral guilt by plotting to have Hassan move far away, so that Amir would not be continually reminded of his own cowardice.

Earlier in the novel, there had been an incident that helps explain why Amir later fails to defend Hassan: Amir reads one of his short stories to Hassan, a story in which a character commits murder to make himself cry, because his tears are magically turned into pearls. Hassan asks why the character could not have made himself cry with an onion.

“I was stunned. That particular point, so obvious it was utterly stupid, hadn’t even occurred to me…Taught by Hassan, of all people. Hassan who couldn’t read and had never written a single word in his entire life. A voice, cold and dark, suddenly whispered in my ear, What does he know, that illiterate Hazara? He’ll never be anything but a cook. How dare he criticize you?” (1, p. 34).

Comment

Most nonpsychotic, normal people do not hear rational voices who seem to have opinions, and who address the regular self as “you.” Only people with multiple personality hear such voices. Thus, Amir, who is a nonpsychotic, normal, budding fiction writer, was hearing the voice of an alternate personality.

Assuming that the author was not knowingly and intentionally building a case that Amir had multiple personality, then the author may have mistakenly thought that most people hear such voices, because the author occasionally did.

1. Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner [2003]. New York, Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2013.

New York Times asks, “What Book Does Ruth Ware Call ‘Truly Terrifying’?” Ruth Ware cites Shirley Jackson. Both writers feature multiple personality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/books/review/inside-the-list-faq.html

Please search “Ruth Ware” and “Shirley Jackson” on this site to read my interesting discussions.