[That which washes the other in a holy palmer's kiss]
scratches and twists
[structures which twitch and make things tap].
they used to run up and down
keys blinding [they who listen and clap]
sliding up [the spaced line that gaps a chord]
with joy bursting from the tip.
the glare of hope
begins in the spine
tracks down and settles
matching gut for gut
meeting stab with stab
tearing rutted lines
through pulsing muscle
butcher knife sharp
Apparently, I've been thinking about things without knowing it, again. I remember the first time this happened; I was taking yet another exam at Johnathan Daniels School in Keene, NH, where experimental education programs were running rampant (my first grade classroom had no walls--literally). I was taking the exam, some kind of math test with word problems that I would later recognize as testing pre-algebra skills. The test, like most of these government-sponsored standardized exams, was multiple choice. I read the problem, and instantly knew the answer was B. It was quite clear that there would be three chickens left, although when later asked by the teacher, I couldn't tell her why or how I had come to such a conclusion. Or how I had come to any of my conclusions. Something was working subconsciously or even unconsciously in my brain, and I let it happen.
I let it happen a lot, actually. When Mom was studying aloud for nursing school, droning on about rhizomes and the Kreb's Cycle, I listened while playing Tetris. And then aced science tests without studying for them straight through Anatomy and Physiology. When I hit college, this ability became less important as an English major--reading aloud helped my brain memorize things, but understanding why was often more important than knowing that and I ended up studying like normal kids. It wasn't until I got into heavy literary theory that I realized my brain was still doing its thing, just on a different level. I read Foucault and Derrida and Cixous out loud, I read them silently, I read and read the same passages until I thought my eyes were going to bleed, and still didn't understand them. Then I'd go to bed, or get up to get more coffee, and the answer would be so clear, skipping me past several steps of logical inquiry right to the end. I think that annoyed Lou and Kari, because I got it, but couldn't tell them what I meant.
Lately I've been reading about Burke and ontology, Burke and subjectivity, Burke and epistemology--none of which really relate to my dissertation, but there are a few things I can pull. Somewhere in the fog of synthesizing all of this, namely Monday night, I saw how the pieces fit, and wondered at my earlier confusion. What the hell, Amylea? Why was it all a mess before? I set to rearranging my chapter into something more reflective of my major concerns and moved on to cleaning it up.
Then, in the middle of reading about Burke and various social theories (from Marx to Althusser to Foucault) by Robert Wess, I started thinking about pain. It seemed kind of random, except that I'm hurting--but that's not unusual. But I wasn't dwelling on my own pain, but on the language of pain, in a Burkeian sense. Is not, I wondered, pain the ur-motive? Isn't "pain" really what we are talking about when we discuss "dystopian" fiction--the stories of pain? Thus I began putting forth some propositions:
Hope, I posit, is not an emotion, but a critical perspective attained after evaluating current conditions. Hope is thus constructed by our orientation to our experiences and our critical interpretation of sensory input. As a construct, hope is rhetorical, constructed by language, the result of the application of a terministic screen.
This orientation of hope is entelechial, or at least teleological. We hope for something; a desire that is to be fulfilled at some future date. We hope for some end result of the unfolding of history. That desire--a utopian yearning to eliminate hardships and conflict--is grounded in our interpretations of the current state of affairs and what we see as possible or probable outcomes. In this, we can also hope against something, position ourselves opposite of the possibilities inherent in the present.
When we hope, we construct, through imagination and through the logic of cause and effect, the future. When we hope, we provide a vision made manifest through humanity's symbol-using abilities. The future, an absence made present through our use of symbols as abstracted referents, can be evaluated as something to be hoped for or hoped against, and this prescribes a course of action.
The hope of a text, thus, does not have to remain within the world of the text; a text can be hopeful in its projection of future action for or against onto the readers. The most hopeless dystopian novel (in which our hero dies without resolving anything, and the dystopian culture seems to extend infinitely beyond the end of the text) may in fact be hopeful in its relationship to the reader. In positing the future, in making it manifest (enacting the crime, as Burke would say), the text prescribes actions for its readers, actions which will (with hope) prevent the future it describes.
"Action" of course, for Burke, may be first appear as "attitude." In changing attitudes of readers, a text may, in fact, effect change by changing the scene; the instant readers change their orientations and approaches to their own scene, the scene itself has been altered, thus altering the grounds from which the first entelechial extrapolation the text provides. We might even say that the very writing of the text is itself a revolutionary action in that the act of writing changes the author, who is part of his or her own scene.
The rhetoric of hope is always that of change; even those who hope against change recognize the ambiguities of their situation that would enable the transformations they hope against. Hope is syllogistic in its argument: If, then, else. Hope is dialectic in that it positions the present against the future, thesis and antithesis, denying neither their importance, negating neither in favor of the other.
The dystopian motive, the way of seeing that prescribes action, is essentially hopeful. Because it is a motive, Burke would ask us to examine what it means when we say why people are doing it--to look at the language used in dystopic rhetoric and/or the rhetoric of hope. In Chapters 3 and 4 I take two of the most celebrated dystopian narratives as examples of how we talk about dystopia and the implications made when we would imagine disaster; how authors tend to form their narratives, repeated ideas that become tropes, how dystopian writers feature scene over all else, what we can learn about our understanding of endings and ends from the entelechial principle enacted in these texts.
