Umpteen years ago, I read "What's In A Name?" a one-off comic strip by Neil Gaiman in 2000AD about an author who used pseudonyms to cover various genres, imagining each as a different character - a tough veteran for action stories, a Byronic thinker for serious drama and (TG interest alert!) a sultry vamp for romances. He got to the point they were starting to intrude on each other's stories, so he came to a psychiatrist... who (this being 2000AD) had a mental projection booth thingy that allowed each persona to leave the original writer's body and live separately.
(The punchline being the author couldn't think of anything himself, so he had to create a new pseudonym in a new genre... and the double punchline being the psychiatrist considering publishing his notes, thinking no-one would believe him, thinking of a pen name and deciding against it.)
Anyway... the idea of taking another persona out and having it live separately as a different person stuck.
If I could pull Beatrice with all of her desires out into a separate body, leaving (redacted) to look like I do now and not want to look like Beatrice any more, I'm sure we'd both be happier.
But which one would be me...?
This guy was the king of pseudonymous personas - I haven't read him, but heard about him several years ago:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa
Very intriguing parallel to the way you (and sometimes I, too) think - even his own r/l name was turned into one more persona, essentially equal or second-rank to the others.