“Christine Falls” (post 4) by Benjamin Black (John Banville)

Concluding Comment: The novel should have explained that the protagonist’s name, Quirke, is an Irish name that means “heart.” Otherwise, I have found nothing further of interest in this novel.

1. Benjamin Black. Christine Falls. New York, Picador/Henry Holt, 2006.

“Christine Falls” (post 3) by John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black: Protagonist’s multiple personality is [seemingly, inadvertently] uncovered in a crisis [revised Nov 30]

“Despite the chill of the ending day Quirke felt the sweat along his hairline under the band of his hat. He was afraid, but at one remove, as if his fear had conjured up another version of him to inhabit, and he, the original he, was obliged to attend to this other, fearing self and be concerned for it, as he would be, he imagined, for a twin, or a grown-up son” (1, p. 199).

Comment: The above is different from the well-known depersonalization that may happen when a traumatized person experiences himself as being separate from, or floating above, himself while he is undergoing trauma.

Here the protagonist is observing and concerned for a “twin” or a “son,” not himself, making it multiple personality that is temporarily uncovered in a crisis.

In real life, undiagnosed multiple personality is usually hidden and covert unless and until it is made overt either by 1. a diagnostic interview that makes the alternate personalities feel that hiding is futile or 2. a crisis that causes alternate personalities to temporarily come out and serve the protective function for which they were designed.

Added Nov. 30: Of course, THE AUTHOR DID NOT MEAN THE ABOVE to be a revelation that Quirke has multiple personality. Quirke does not. It is only an inadvertent reflection of the author's multiple personality trait.

1. Benjamin Black. Christine Falls. New York, Picador/Henry Holt, 2006.

A Case of Pathological Lying: Is It Multiple Personality?

An interesting article in the science section of today’s New York Times discusses a theater producer who can’t stop lying (1).

Nothing in the article makes me think of multiple personality except the issue of lying itself, since adults with multiple personality may have gotten a reputation as liars since childhood, because they denied doing what other people had seen them do. They denied it, because they had a memory gap for doing it.

Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, but people with multiple personality usually don’t mention their memory gaps unless you specifically ask them about it. And since memory gaps are not mentioned in the article (1), I don’t know if the theater producer had undiagnosed multiple personality.

Fiction writers, many of whom have what I call “multiple personality trait,” are, according to the old joke, “professional liars,” but they usually don’t “lie” unless they are going to get paid for it.

Search “lying” for previous discussions.

1. Ellen Barry. “Can This Man Stop Lying?” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/health/lying-mental-illness.html

“Christine Falls” (post 2) by John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black: Protagonist has memory gaps, even when he is not intoxicated

“…all mingled to suggest to Quirke something he could not recall, something from the far past that hovered on the tip of his memory, tantalizingly beyond reach. All of Quirke’s earliest, orphaned past was like this, an absence fraught with consequence, a resonant blank” (1, p. 58).

“…and again something spoke to him out of his lost past” (1, p. 63).

Comment: Memory gaps—which happen even without intoxication, in a person, like Quirke, who has no medical or neurological cause for memory problems, for things that he would have been expected to remember—suggest multiple personality. 

However, since there is no indication that either the plot or character development has intended to imply multiple personality, why does the author portray his protagonist this way?

Of course, Quirke’s experience as an orphan may eventually help him to explain how Christine Falls died, and the solution of the mystery must be delayed to hold the reader in suspense. But that did not require Quirke to have memory gaps. He could have had complete memory for his past all along, but only be delayed in connecting what he remembered to the current case. So his memory gaps, per se, would not have been necessary, and there would have to be some other reason for the author to portray his protagonist this way. 

1. Benjamin Black. Christine Falls. New York, Picador/Henry Holt, 2006. 

“Christine Falls” by Benjamin Black (pseudonym of Booker Prize-winning author, John Banville): Is  protagonist’s memory gap an alcoholic blackout or a symptom of multiple personality? 

Like Banville’s protagonist (1) (see past post), Black’s protagonist (2) had been a victim of child abuse (2, p. 46). But unlike Banville’s protagonist, Black’s protagonist, Quirke, is a hospital pathologist and a recovering alcoholic.

“Quirke did not eat, but drank more whiskey instead. Suddenly he found himself in the kitchen, with Maggie [the maid at a family gathering]. He looked about in dazed surprise. He seemed to have come to, somehow just at that moment, leaning against the cupboard beside the sink, with his ankles crossed, nursing his whiskey glass to his midriff. What had happened to the intervening time, from when he was standing with the Judge [his relative] to now? Maggie, bustling about, was speaking to him, apparently in reply to something he had said, though what it might have been he could not think” (2, pp. 38-39).

Comment: At first glance, Quirke appears to have had an obvious alcoholic blackout. Nevertheless, it could actually have been a multiple-personality memory gap if Quirke has an alternate personality who likes to drink, which is a surprisingly common scenario. So I will wait to see if Quirke ever gets memory gaps when he is not intoxicated, and if there are any other signs of multiple personality.

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.

2. Benjamin Black. Christine Falls. New York, Picador/Henry Holt, 2006.

“The Sea” by John Banville: Novel ends without solving protagonist’s problem, that he never had a singular self in the way that others have

“From earliest days I wanted to be someone else…It was not what I was that I disliked…the notion of an essential singular self is problematic…I never had a personality, not in the way that others have. I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone. I know what I mean. Anna [his wife]…would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight” (1, p. 160).

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.

Added Nov. 27 (12:25 p.m.):What is your opinion? If book reviewers and Booker Prize judges had not noted the significance of the above—and of the other things I’ve noted in previous posts on this novel and its artistic author, John Banville—had they appreciated what they were reading? Or, in your opinion, are the points I’ve made beside the point?

“The Sea” by John Banville: Author’s Gratuitous Multiple Personality Phraseology Reflects Author’s Multiple Personality Trait

“There I was, suddenly, with a girl in my arms, figuratively, at least, doing the things that grown-ups did, holding her hand, and kissing her in the dark…I was myself and at the same time someone else, someone completely other…” (1, p. 108).

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005. 

“The Sea” by John Banville: Protagonist's “problems with mirrors” is textbook multiple personality

“On the subject of observing and being observed, I must mention the long, grim gander I took at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning…There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now I am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself…I have many problems with mirrors…” (1, pp. 93-94).

“MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look in a mirror…In some instances, these alterations of perception are so disturbing that individuals may phobically avoid mirrors” (2, p. 62).

Comment: Banville’s protagonist talks about his problems with mirrors for four pages. At times he focuses on a skin condition, and some readers will say that everyone feels this way as they get older, but his concern with mirrors is more than skin deep.

Search “mirror” and “mirrors” for past posts on this recurring subject.

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.

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

“The Sea” by John Banville: Why is Booker Prize Novel Disorganized?

Max is the first-person protagonist (1), and “With Max's unreliable, unorganised and omitted iteration of events, we gradually learn…” (2).

Comment: This novel is disorganized, possibly due to the author’s writing process, as discussed in previous posts. For example, Banville would not remember from day to day what he had written the day before, possibly due to multiple-personality memory gaps.

Years ago, I can recall another novel by another author who had won a different major literary prize. I refused to finish reading it, because the story became disorganized; however, reviewers, wanting to appear sophisticated, said the novel's disorganization was a feature, not a bug.

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.

2. Wikipedia. “The Sea (novel).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea_(novel)

“The Sea” by John Banville: Literary convention of italics is used to distinguish thoughts that come from an alternate personality from protagonist’s own thoughts

“Once on my rambles [as a boy]…I almost stumbled over a couple [of adults]…making love under a raincoat…So this, I thought, or it was thought for me, so this is what they do” (1, p. 55).

Search “italics” to see past posts on this literary convention.

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005. 

“The Sea” by John Banville: Were the sickrooms of his childhood a refuge or trauma?

“Down here, by the sea, there is a special quality to the silence at night. I do not know if this is my own doing…something I bring to the silence…It is like the silence that I knew in the sickrooms of my childhood…Sickness in those days was a special place, a place apart, where no one else could enter, not the doctor with his shiver-inducing stethoscope or even my mother…It is a place like the place where I feel that I am now, miles from anywhere, and anyone” (1, pp. 52-53).

Comment (added 12:45 p.m.): When Banville's main writing personality writes, does he feel "miles from anywhere, and anyone"?

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.

“The Sea” by John Banville: Protagonist Max Morden recalls childhood experiences by the sea, including possible sexual molestation, which he denies

The episode occurs when Max was a young boy and went to the doctor for a dog bite on his wrist. But the doctor orders him to take off all his clothes, sit on the doctor's knee, and then feels Max’s lower abdomen.

Max’s daughter asks, “Which left the more lasting mark, the dog’s teeth or the doctor’s paw?” (1, p. 36).

Max replies that the doctor was not Tiberius in Capri, by which he means it was not child abuse.

However, John Banville has, himself, published an essay denouncing hidden child abuse (2). It doesn’t prove anything about his own personal experience, but, coming in addition to this novel, it does raise the issue.

Comment: Many people with multiple personality report a history of childhood trauma, but not necessarily sexual abuse, and I have no evidence that John Banville had any childhood trauma.

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.

2. John Banville. “A Century of Looking the Other Way.” The NewYork Times, May 22, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/opinion/23banville.html?scp=1&sq=john%20banville&st=cse 

“The Sea” by John Banville: Booker Prize-winning novel begins where yesterday’s post left off; his agreement with a small mad version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“I looked aside quickly for fear my eyes would give me away; one’s eyes are always those of someone else, the mad and desperate dwarf crouched within” (1, p. 15).

Comment (added 1:28 p.m.) : When he says "one's" eyes instead of merely his own eyes, he mistakenly extrapolates his own multiple personality experience to everyone, as many novelists do.

1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.

John Banville, Booker Prize-winning novelist, often has memory gap for writing as himself, but not writing as his pseudonym

“Frequently, the next day I go back to read over what I wrote the day before; I don’t recognize it. I can’t remember writing it” (1, p 106).

“If I’m writing and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, I am so deep in the work that I don’t know who I am. I don’t know where I am. I will use a word that I don’t know the meaning of. When I’ve finished writing, I’ll have to look it up, and I’ll discover it was the right word…” (1, p. 125).

Interviewer: “A lot of your characters…are somehow bifurcated…”

John Banville: “Of course Stevenson got it perfectly in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There is somebody else inside that has to be kept in; otherwise, there would be anarchy” (1, p. 60).

Comment: Above suggests Banville has multiple personality trait.

1. Earl G. Ingersoll and John Cusatis (Editors). Conversations with John Banville [1995-2018]. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou: Both author and readers have been clueless

Now that we know, as discussed in a post earlier today, that the protagonist’s history of selective mutism implicates multiple personality, it becomes clear that both author and readers had failed to understand major clues.

On page one, the protagonist notes her “well-known forgetfulness” (1, p. 1). And two hundred pages later, she says: “The intensity with which young people live demands that they ‘blank out’ as often as possible” (1, p. 201). She apparently refers to her cardinal symptom of multiple personality, memory gaps.

1. Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Foreword by Oprah Winfrey. New York, Ballantine Books, 1969/2015.

“I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou: Protagonist’s post-rape selective mutism suggests multiple personality

After Marguerite was raped, the rapist was convicted in court, released, and murdered:

“The only thing I could do was to stop talking to people other than Bailey [her brother]. Instinctively, or somehow, I knew that because I loved him so much I’d never hurt him, but if I talked to anyone else that person might die too. Just my breath, carrying my words out, might poison people and they’d curl up and die..I had to stop talking…In the first weeks my family accepted my behavior as a post-rape, post-hospital affliction” (1, p. 87).

The significance of selective mutism is that it may be a manifestation of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality):

“Selective mutism is a rare psychiatric disorder that usually has its onset in early childhood. This case study describes a patient in whom selective mutism developed in adolescence. It was later discovered that he had dissociative identity disorder. The study documents his history, which included violence, abuse, and threats to keep silent. The study suggests that in cases presenting with significant trauma or abuse, selective mutism may be a manifestation of dissociative identity disorder” (2).

1. Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Foreword by Oprah Winfrey. New York, Ballantine Books, 1969/2015.

2. T. Jacobsen. Case study: Is selective mutism a manifestation of dissociative identity disorder? J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 1995 Jul;34(7):863-6 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7649956/  

Comment (same day): When I bought this book, I knew that the author had replaced her perfectly good first name, Marguerite, with a pseudonym, Maya. But I did not know about her selective mutism.

Pseudonyms do not prove, but should alert you to the possibility, that a person has multiple personality.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou: Protagonist, “Marguerite,” is called “Maya” on the back cover and mostly called “Maya” in Wikipedia

It is evidently so absurd that a memoir by “Maya” has a protagonist named “Marguerite” that neither the publisher (back cover) (1) nor the public (2) believed its eyes when reading the actual text.

I will discuss this further when I have finished the book.

1. Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Foreword by Oprah Winfrey. New York, Ballantine Books, 1969/2015. 

2. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Know_Why_the_Caged_Bird_Sings 

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou: Memoir’s author and protagonist have different names, and “well-known forgetfulness”

I have just started this book, and since it has been very popular, I presume that most readers have not found the above issues problematic. The protagonist, Marguerite, will probably get “Maya” as a nickname, stage name, or pen name. And her “well-known forgetfulness” (1, p. 1) may have been nothing more than anxiety as a child at church. But it is conceivable that Maya and Marguerite are different personalities, and that her “well-known forgetfulness” is a symptom of nonclinical multiple personality. I will keep reading.

Comment (added same day): If Maya is just a pen name, this would be the first time I've seen an author use both her pen name and her real name in the same work.

Now, the author could explain that Maya is a later name, not used until the this memoir was written. Nevertheless, using both names simultaneously—in the same work—is like multiple personality, in which more than one personality exists simultaneously, but each having its own age and role. In this case, Marguerite would be a child-aged alternate personality and Maya an adult-aged alternate personality or host personality.

The idea that she was named "My" or "Maya" after her brother learned she was My sister (1, p. 68) appears to be the author's belated excuse for her being known as "Marguerite" earlier in the memoir, when her brother had already known she was his sister and their grandmother had always called her "Marguerite." It appears to be a belated rationalization.

I do consider it plausible that she had an additional personality named "My" for the above reason. But that should have been accounted for at the beginning of the memoir, perhaps as a nickname, not as an afterthought, after the author or an editor noted the discrepancy.

Actually, "My" sounds like a way her brother might have referred to her among the rough crowd they later knew in St. Louis, as a way to say she was his, and therefore not to be molested. But the author's explanation of the discrepancy between the author's and protagonist's names is definitely belated and incomplete.

1. Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Foreword by Oprah Winfrey. New York, Ballantine Books, 1969/2015. 

George Saunders continues his reflections on multiple personality in a 2019 Paris Review “The Art of Fiction” interview

“But here’s what I find interesting. There’s something that happens in the moment of creation of a good sentence, or a good swath of sentences, that feels like the dropping away of self. Somebody else shows up and that person is better than the normal everyday you. I’m guessing that the various approaches to writing are ultimately all about getting to that moment” (1, p. 196).

“That’s one way of looking at craft—we develop a storytelling style that accommodates the different people who exist inside us” (1, p. 201).

“So, to me, there’s something really interesting about this notion that there is a below-the-surface part of the mind participating in the writing of a story, and that what we call “process” is about getting out of the way of that part of the mind, so it can assert itself more freely” (1, p. 205).

“And then that wise little voice in my head asked, “Well, is it getting better? If so, then yes. It may not be normal, per se, but obviously it’s what you have to do” (1, p. 210).

1. Michael O’Connell (Editor). Conversations with George Saunders. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2022. 

Novelist George Saunders was interviewed by novelist Zadie Smith in 2017: They agreed that both Writers and Readers have Multiplicity

George Saunders: I was thinking about something I heard you [Zadie Smith] say recently, about multiplicity. That meant a lot to me. When I think about what fiction does morally, I’m happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities—sort of fragmented. Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time. It’s maybe for just a few days even, depending on the book. Although there are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven’t died yet.

Zadie Smith: I think we understand this experience more from being readers than writers.

George Saunders: Yes, that’s right. I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That’s the highest aspiration. So A Christmas Carol  [which they had mentioned because it has ghosts like Saunders’ 2017 award-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo] would enliven a certain subset of those 100,000 internal people” (1, p. 175)…“…like you [Zadie Smith], I have multiplicities” (1, p. 181).

Comment: They exaggerate the degree of multiplicity—100,ooo personalities—apparently based on their own subjective experience.

They suggest that readers of novels, like writers of novels, are more likely to have multiple personality trait than the average person.

1. Michael O’Connell (Editor). Conversations with George Saunders. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2022.