In all fairness, the subject of ‘Twain’ as a persona separate from “Samuel L. Clemens” may potentially go where the folks raising the argument think it does.

This isn’t about stage names, or even the kind of ‘acting persona’ Hal Holbrook et al. assume to “become Mark Twain” while on stage.  This is about identifying with a complex ‘alter ego’ (who, when created correctly, will think and even develop as a person in ways different from the traditional “I” (“ego” in Freudian terms) that is supposed to be a person’s only real ‘personality’.  

Most peoples’ knowledge of this may be only the more amusing aspects of MPD, where the victim can’t control which set of understandings and reflexes governs foreground attention.  But most everyone has at least one of these unrecognized complex personalities — the one that handles ‘nonconscious’ reflex activity, like much driving, or ‘beginner’s luck’ haptics, or some aspects of fluent reading.  A little Titchenorian introspection often reveals (or at least it has across a fairly wide range of Columbia University students!) remarkable differences in perception, cogitation, and morality for this underlying ‘personality’ than for what a person’s conscious self-conception or even self-presentation is.

It’s not uncommon in Stanislavskian theatre presentation for a created character to ‘take on a life of his/her own’ — in fact, very useful finger exercises include having a character (say, Pa Joad from the Grapes of Wrath) comment on something like the Trump administration or the thinking behind Brexit.  It would not be surprising at all to find Mr. Clemens creating a persona to write as Mark Twain that started to produce a distinct character, with very different characteristics.

Of course, the temptation for all too many “psychologists” (especially, perhaps, academic psychologists, but I digress) will be to, Stead-like, substitute what they want to see as “Mark Twain” in place of what Clemens actually might have had there.  And equally Stead-like it may be expedient to do so … manifestly incorrectly.  I will leave it there.

RME

> On Oct 2, 2017, at 9:18 AM, Martin Zehr <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Yes, there has already been too much "pop psychoanalysis" in Mark Twain
> criticism, although the phrase itself is a redundancy.  "Splitting"
> personalities seems to me to be a highfalutin attempt to "explain" the
> obvious- that authors and humorists of Twain's era commonly used pseudonyms
> and constructed characters.