Set This House in Order - Matt Ruff

[mystickeeper]

This was for this month's selection at beer_marmalade.

Almost all of the links in this post are courtesy of jesse_the_kAndrew Gage is a man who has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Throughout the course of the novel, he [the POV character] usually refers to it as Multiple Personality Disorder, and is snide when encouraged to use the name "DID." Still, I think DID is the

Comments

[mystickeeper]

See, but the book seems pretty hardcore about separating the house metaphor from integration. Throughout the story, Andrew repeatedly rejects the idea of integration, and seems to rule it out as a valid option, even when integration works for other people. I wonder if that's just an example of Ruff not quite knowing what he's talking about?

[tigrin]

That first quote is interesting; it's obvious enough that Ruff has taken a lot of of his inspiration for the characters from well-known online sites about DID, especially places like Astrea's Web, which emphasize plurality, natural multiplicity, etc. It sounds like he makes rejecting integration sort of a radical concept, which it might be to most people who are only familiar with Sybil or think that multiple personalities is inherently "wrong" and has to be corrected. But there have been stories and autobiographies before his that didn't end with the main character integrating. I know First Person Plural and This Alien Shore both end positively with the narrator/character functioning, but still multiple

[mystickeeper]

He does talk about different degrees of personalities. One of the reason the protagonist feels that integration wouldn't work is because he feels that after a whole personality has shattered, the pieces take root and grow, making it impossible to reform the original whole.

Ruff has a specific word, I think it's Hollows, for nameless souls who never take control of the body. They are sometimes wandering around in the back of the house. Their job is to hold on to various memories that contributed to breaking the whole personality in the first place, so that the other personalities don't have to deal with them.

I would be very interested in knowing what you thought of the book, if you ever do read it.

[tigrin]

That reminds me of a Stargate SG-1 episode; one of the main characters gets the consciousness of several different people put into him. One of the personalities attempts to explain why they can't just be taken out of the body and leave the original personality behind.

TRYAN IN JACKSON: "No. That's not possible. Here ... " (he walks around to the table at the end of the bed and picks up a glass of water) "Could these same water molecules ever be returned to this glass, just as they were before? No more, no less? In precisely the same configuration?"

Then he pours the water into the pitcher that is also on the table.I somewhat agree with the idea that it's impossible to "reform the original whole"... but not entirely. There is no set way that multiple personalities are formed. It may be that one personality shatters and forms fragments that "grow" into their own personalities. There is also the idea that the "original" personality at some point slipped into a dissociative state, and that the parts of consciousness that dealt with the