Best American Essays 2005: Susan Orlean
Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start... [channelling my inner Maria]There's something incredibly appealing and enticing about Susan Orlean's Introduction to The Best American Essays 2005. Which is entirely fitting - it's what a good introduction ought to do - entice the reader. How does she accomplish this? I think in a very womanly way: by asserting with clever wit that what we most want is to know each other and to be known, that "our voices matter to each other."
She gets a lot of whimsical mileage out of the metaphor of The Visible Cow. It's as if we can see her, contemplating it her office, and imagine that we might do something similar - she lets us in on the joke. She draws us in with her belief that if we pay attention to each other, we can see through to the heart of things. She calls essays, with their "elasticity" of form, "the most intimate of reading experiences," wherein we are "invited deep inside someone's mind." Seductive stuff, that. What's not to love?
As we read the essays, I think we would do well to keep in mind Orlean's idea of what an essay is, but more importantly, what it is for, in "taking a small notion and finding a universe inside it," and thereby revealing something soulful and true about human nature and experience. She likens the essay form to an "idiosyncratic conversation," but one whose purpose is to only connect. She values the subjective voice in that conversation, a voice that is able to articulate "one writer's jouney" with intelligence, grace, and honesty.
But as we read the essays with Orlean's vision of the essay form in mind, we can also look for some of the darker shades in the lovely picture she paints. She herself suggests some with her Visible Cow. What can be seen in her cow, so spectacularly transparent, is after all, only a cartoon cow. What can be seen are only its "most popular organs," only a vague representation of what someone thought were its important structural components. It is merely "a marvelous construction," not a cow. Think about another Visible Cow, one represented by a its profile on the periodic table of elements, or the Visible Cow as seen as a collection of commodities derived from it. Think about the cow that Picasso might have seen. Think about Ernie and Bert's cow.
If we are discover some bit of truth about human nature in these essays, some insight into intimate truths about each other, we can't imagine that what is advertised as "visible" is all there is to see. It's our pleasure as readers to look more deeply than that, to look for other structures and methods and stories that aren't immediately apparent. Without doing so, we run the risk of consuming a mere cartoon version of our desire for connection and understanding, and we impoverish the possibilities that stories have to offer.
posted by weltatem @ 6:57 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
What's not to love, indeed welt.
Several things capture me about Orlean's introduction and maybe, if you know me at all, you know what they are. I'd also throw it out that maybe those things are a commonality between all of us here too.
The Visible Cow
* the exterior was invisible, it was the innards that were visible.
Isn't that what people strive for?
We see each other's exteriors.. eyes, hair, body shape, noses, hands but it's the inside that takes so much time to know and see. Orlean's idea is that an essay can be most anything the writer or reader wants it to be. All have the same goal though, to get to the innards.
* our voices matter to each other.
This is a sentence I'll latch onto everytime. In this case, the essays will offer up the individual writer's voices. I'm looking forward to seeing their inner thoughts or their view outward.
I love the fact that Orlean bought the cow but hasn't assembled yet. She "put it on her long-term ToDo list" I would have brought it home and put it together right away so I could sit and stare at the real deal, not the box :)
Oh, and have I mentioned how much I really like cows?
I noticed I managed to drop food on the page where Orlean said, “I realized only after the fact that I’d chosen to include a number of essays that deal with the same subject – cooking for instance. What’s notable is that they deal with their subject so differently that they stand as a perfect example of how singular an essay is, and how they reflect the thinking and emotions of the writer, rather than merely recording a subject.” I’m looking forward to those essays. Just as words, paint, and clay are vehicles for artistic expression, so is food. Words and food together, well, that combo makes me sit up straight and salivate.
Orlean said, “essays take their tone and momentum from the explicit presence of the writer in them and the distinctiveness of each writer’s perspective.” This is precisely why I am fond of the essay. For a fiction writer, like Andrea Barrett, I get a peek into her writing process and that gets me a bit closer to seeing her inner self, or as much as she is willing or able to share with me.
Orlean made my point much more eloquently when she said, “In many ways, it’s the most intimate of reading experiences, in which the reader is invited to eavesdrop as the writer works through a thought or excavates a memory.”
“. . . that we want to know each other; that we want to be known.” To that I would add that we want to know ourselves and to see reflections of ourselves in others.
I love what you both pick up on here - indeed, you both articulate some of our most constant longings as humans, and you both resonate with Orlean. But is it just me who thinks Orlean was a bit too fluffy in how she framed what an essay is for? And did you find the gendered nature of her essay inviting or confining, or something else?
Thanks for the cows, clammy! This was my favorite cow. It spoke to me about the difficulties of seeing cows at all - the way that our armor plating imprisons our vision, and that the best we achieve are glimpses through port holes out at the vastness of what we wish to know of the thing.
I'd love to make a cow from the inside looking out, a pastoral idle as it might appear were we cows. Technically, I would use digital photography to photograph 360 degrees around a cow in a field, and collage all of the vantage points onto a model cow from their particular point of origin. Kind of like Hockney's Pearblossom Hwy, only 3-dimensional and about grazing cowness, not driving on American blue highway. Anyhow. (Ideas such as these probably a good reason why I'm not an artist!)
Weltatem said, But is it just me who thinks Orlean was a bit too fluffy in how she framed what an essay is for? And did you find the gendered nature of her essay inviting or confining, or something else?
I think she framed it for the common folk who frequent Borders or other booksellers and thumb through the pages. She’s selling through invitation.
Can you explain what you mean by “gendered nature of her essay” weltatem? I have my own thoughts about this, but would like to hear your clarification before I reply.
Hockney streamed through my mind before I got to your Pearblossom Hwy link. We could collaborate, if you would allow me to join you. I would suggest adding an olfactory layer to your dimensional cow to really bring it to life.
Toggs, with regard to the "womanly" voice in the Intro - I'm more so noticing qualities that are traditionally thought to be more apparent in women than in men, or more openly valued by women taking on traditional gender roles, rather than wanting to take issue with that idea itself (although forests of trees have been felled exploring the issue!).
Orlean's tone emphasizes ideas of intimacy, insideness, specific experience, conversation - and, cooking, for pete's sake. I was trying to draw attention to that, to see what influence it might have on the selection of essays the collection.
Weltatem said, Orlean's tone emphasizes ideas of intimacy, insideness, specific experience, conversation - and, cooking, for pete's sake. I was trying to draw attention to that, to see what influence it might have on the selection of essays the collection.
I would say it completely influences her selection of the essays. Having read only two essays so far, I would like to revisit this topic when I’ve read all of them. As an aside, how does gender ever get omitted from our perspective, our communication, or our art? I don’t think it can without any of those aspects appearing false. For a volume like this, I want the gender bias of the editor to influence his or her selections. For me, reading this is about entertainment, and maybe a little enlightenment along the way, not scholarship which isn’t to say scholarly essays can’t be entertaining. I just think the goal is different here.
Robert Atwan describes the criteria for qualification for inclusion in the 20th volume as follows: The essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during he calendar year. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone. A positive move to prop open the back door.
Atwan says this about Orlean: . . . Susan Orlean, a writer who weaves together the art of the essay and the craft of reporting so skillfully that no seams ever show. This volume of twenty-five remarkable essays reflects what we are accustomed to find throughout her writing: an abiding honesty, curiosity, humor and civility.” Perhaps Atwan should have added and a woman’s touch to his list.
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