Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Foust on Emma Bolden's "About the Human-Hymen Disambiguation"
I thought this essay was brilliant, if a little bit long. I'd say the narrative is a spiraling one--topics are introduced then returned to and expanded in ever-widening circles like those created by the proverbial pebble dropped into the pond. That water image is an obvious connection to the drowning image that recurs in the essay and also dominates it in the larger sense that this narrator feels like she is drowning, being tossed around in and by external events she cannot control. This piece comports with what I was expecting from the lyric essay form--a personal essay that meanders, that discovers meaning as it goes, that uses personal experience to ground researched facts and more abstract questions--here of power and powerlessness. I LOVED this sentence, isolated from the other lines in the essay: "Despite Wiki's insistence, there is no way to disambiguate the hymen." I found this piece both more accessible and less artful than "Binary," but I can't say I liked it less.
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I thought initially that bringing in all the“expert” outside sources (The Mayo clinic, the Kinsey report, Wikipedia) was a structural device employed to give the narrative its shape, allow it to move in widening spirals, a way to move the story along. Now it occurs to me that bringing in the experts has a deeper function—to show the extent to which this narrator is (until the very end of the essay) cowed by authority. She “does not want to disappoint” her doctor. She does precisely what the endometriosis pamphlet tells her to do. She “wants to be a good patient,” and when the doctor tells her, literally, how to think, she follows orders, casting her lack of libido in the drowning metaphor the doctor provides. All this authority-citing is in the service of trying to “solve” (disambiguate) her medical problem, and she does it until what I see as the crisis or epiphany of the piece, the single sentence graph that reads, “Despite Wikipedia’ assurances, there is no way to disambiguate this hymen.” After this, the narrator understands that her medical condition cannot be rendered in clear terms or solved with a simple surgical procedure and in the last paragraph, there is no more referring to outside “expert” sources, just the narrator finally acknowledging her feelings of powerlessness and rage.
ReplyDeleteThe only part of the essay that did not work for me was the part that brought in the baseball metaphor--it seemed to me like one too many new things to introduce and maybe a place where the writing felt mannered.