Dys 2015

We are playing with images here.

Thomas More (1478-1545) wrote “Utopia” in Latin, with a long title: Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia, which translates, “A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, of a republic’s best state and of the new island Utopia”.

He obviously was not short on self-confidence!  It was, of course, fiction, though from its well-known title “Utopia” alone, we get the Greek “ou” (not) and “tupos” (place), so “utopia” is “not an actual real place” but a frolic on the imagination.

Thomas More is known for literally losing his head when he refused Henry VIII’s ascendancy to head the Church of England against the Vatican that opposed Henry’s cohabitation with Anne Boleyn; Thomas was tried and found guilty of treason.

A “dys” in our title refers to dystopia (an imagined place or state where everything is bad like a totalitarian regime or an environmentally degraded one), opposite to utopia though when H. G. Wells in 1905 used the term in A Modern Utopia, (best known for its voluntary order of nobility known as the Samurai that could effectively rule a “kinetic and not static” world state) he was overly dreaming.

“Dystopian” in common reference points to We by the Russian Yevegeby Zamyatin published in English in 1924, the Brave New World 1931 of Aldous Huxley’s sci-fi, the drug culture in Karin Boye’s classic Swedish Kallocain of 1940, the Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) of George Orwell in 1949, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and A Clockwork Orange of Anthony Burgess in 1962.

Related but distinct, “dys” also refers to the dysfunctional-anything in contemporary English literature.  The popularity of the following names comes from their colorful description of the dysfunctional nature of individual and family life, and societal and glocal arrangements.

The first five are sources of fiction and faction: Norman Mailer, John Updike, E.L. Doctorow, Alex Haley, and John Irving.  Alice Walker is known and John Kennedy Toole, Chuck Palahniuk, William Kennedy, and Don DeLillo hold up their own literary candles.

I added the following to the shopping list of a North America friend for her next trip to the secondhand bookstore in case I she puts a care package together: David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Russo, Jeffrey Eugenides, T.C. Boyle, Tim O’Brien, Jonathan Safran Foer, Thomas Pynchon, and Dave Eggers.

The anti-hero theme of Joseph Conrad influenced D. H Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gerald Basil Edwards, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Green, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J. G. Ballard, Chinua Achebe, John Le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson, J. M. Coetze, Stephen donaldson, and Salmon Rushdie.  Like Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver and Philip Roth, some in the list graced my bookshelf at one time or another.

OK, I have not read the works of some of those I listed, but as an English teacher, it is often well to be able to pretend, as if . . .

“Dys” is, however, our interest, particularly on whether we stay that way again this year, our choice.  I decided on the offerings of what is real, what IS rather than what-could-be of wishful thinking, or the what-if of utopian dreaming.  Dysfunction and dystopia are popularly chosen perspectives to reality, perhaps a pretention of a heart broken once too many times, or a head-trip of thinking what is fashionable, rather than the gut-trip of actual living.

The four human sources of discourses are our senses, emotions, thoughts, and action. People find it easier to see the glass half-empty (e.g., victim’s news precedes that of victors); I am not promoting a pollyanna focus on seeing how it is half-full, I would rather that we just look at the glass!

Reality TV has been bashed as being short on reality and full of TV.  The critique is unkind, but perhaps, appropriate to the commercial requirement of the media.  We know that documentaries are scripted and are hardly spontaneous but to pretend that Reality TV is all unedited is unreal!

A roommate at an Institute was fond of saying, “its a matter of attitude”. He made Solicitor General of the Philippines later; his phrase stuck with me a long while.

Dystopian and dysfunctional novels deal with “real” things, but the perspective choice is a matter of attitude.  The long count on the authors mentioned foregoing attests to this choice of perspective as more academically respectable, and sells more copies at the bookstand!

We hold this truth to be self-evident that life is better lived “well” rather than it “sucks”, a choice, a matter of atttitude!  Perhaps, it is time to shift our brains back to experience (sense) and resolve (action) and leave emotions and cognition to the privacy of their internal states of being.  Dys, I believe!