Going pseudonymous or pseudonymouse?

A young woman in the community college creative writing class I’m currently tutoring has asked my opinion on whether she should use her real name to identify herself as the author of the blog she’s considering starting, or a pseudonym.

My initial response to her, in light of the fact that she sometimes writes stuff that is so risqué as to be socially or professionally risky, is that she should consider going pseudonymous, or, in light of the fact that she’s an unmarried female, pseudonymiss or ms.

Or, even better, to go what I suppose could be called binonymous/miss/ms by starting two blogs. One under her real name for her more conventional or ‘respectable’ writing, and the other under a pseudonym, pen name, or perhaps even more appropriately considering its purpose would be to keep her identity as the author of her raunchier stuff safely under wraps, porn name.

But she responded that, though she could see some sense in this suggestion, she was far from willing to write and publish under a pen, porn or any other name but her genuine or given one, as nobody would know who she was if she had the good fortune to get famous.

At this point I not to persist any further in giving her the advice she’d asked for, keeping to myself the obvious observation that this early in her career it might be a mite premature to worry too much about fame.

And not bothering to argue that Eric Blair didn’t fare too badly fame-wise as the pseudonymous ‘George Orwell’, or Samuel Clemens as ‘Mark Twain’, or Mary-Ann Evans as ‘George Eliot’, to name just a few of virtually countless examples of writers who achieved fame in the past under fictitious names, and their many successors who continue the practice today.

I also drew the line at making the obvious point that, however many writers have achieved fame despite adopting pseudonyms, they are they are probably a small minority compared with their real-name peers, and an even smaller minority compared with, say, actors and other performing artists.

For example, it’s hard to imagine that a girl with as homely moniker as Frances Gumm would have become a star of stage and screen if she hadn’t been pseudonymed Judy Garland. Or Marion Morison making it big without a change to John Wayne, Alan Konigsberg to Woody Allen, Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan (photo), and Issur Danielovitch to Kirk Douglas.

Politicians, too, have been known to get in on the act too, with Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, for instance, having opted for the much racier ‘Stalin’.

And the ancient Greek philosopher named Aristocles at birth has for over 2,000 years been known to the world by the nick-name possibly given him by one of his teachers in childhood, ‘Plato’.

Of course, now that I come to think of it, the name ‘Dean Johns’ under which I’ve worked and written for decades, is something of a nick-name-related pseudonym too.

Anonymous cybertroopers

When I turned up at infant-school with a name twice as big as I was at the time, Adrian Deane-Johns, my equally diminutive classmates shortened it in typically Australian style to Dean or Deano, and I just went with the flow.

Not for the purpose of concealing my identity, however, as so many people do these days, especially on the net, for various reasons.

Nefarious reasons mostly, as in the cases of scamsters ranging from the financially fraudulent through the socially and sexually predatory to the politically propagandist.

This last group comprising every kind of creep from Russian, Chinese, North Korean and who knows what other hackers hoping to disrupt the relatively ‘free’ world by helping elect dangerous idiots like Donald Trump (photo), to the pseudonymous so-called ‘cybertroopers’ corruptly paid by Malaysia’s former Umno/BN regime to aid its ultimately futile efforts to cling to power.

With the regime gone, however, and presumably with it the paid cybertroopers along with the threat of harsh government reprisal against honest citizens daring to utter Umno/BN-unfriendly political opinions under their real names, I’m somewhat surprised to see apparently as many pseudonymous and outright anonymous comments as ever on articles and opinion pieces in Malaysiakini.

What, I can’t help wondering, is the problem here? That people, wisely or otherwise, still don’t trust Pakatan Harapan’s promise to restore Malaysians’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech? Or that 60 years of repression of expression by Umno/BN have so habituated people to staying safely pseudonymous that far too many have become hopelessly meek pseudonymice?

---

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published compilations of his Malaysiakini columns include "Mad about Malaysia", "Even Madder about Malaysia", "Missing Malaysia", "1Malaysia.con" and "Malaysia Mania”. - Mkini