on the other side of the page
by Douglas Messerli
Ascher/Straus ABC Street (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2002)
In April 1992 Sheila Ascher and
Dennis Straus wrote me to ask if I'd be willing to read a manuscript of theirs,
ABC Street. I suspect the manuscript
arrived soon thereafter, but in my files the next serious correspondence was
dated five years later, July 1997, at which time they sent me the dedication to
the book. Only this year (2001) did they send photographs for the cover of the
book, now scheduled for 2002. My only reaction is that Ascher/Straus must be
the most patient couple in the universe, having now waited nearly 10 years for
their book to appear—combined with the fact that another manuscript of theirs,
to have been issued as an early side-stapled book on the nascent Sun & Moon
Press in 1978, was never published!
Given their immense patience, I thought it might be appropriate to at
least indicate through this short essay what I found so interesting about their
writing, particularly since a history has developed around this work that makes
it very appropriate to this year's thematic stitching of My Year.
For despite the rather long relationship I have now had with
Ascher/Straus, like the writing itself, it is a narrative without a coherent
story. ABC Street is part of an
ongoing project on which the two have been working since 1977, titled Monica's Chronicle, a day-by-day journal
penned by the seemingly observant, but determinedly passive narrator, Monica.
This chronicle alternates between intense depictions of the daily
weather—evocative descriptions of the rain, snow, and sun Monica observes
through her window and on her occasional walks—and the often gossipy comments
of a large cast of characters Monica describes as "A Constellation,"
mostly lesbian women friends, and the various neighbors of what is obviously a
location similar to Rockaway Park.
There are also silences ("Days intervene, unwritten"), undated
entries, and sporadic ruminations on the nature of her writing activities.
There is a strong sense that in writing Monica is forgetting or, at least,
replacing the act of memory with the writing itself. If, as Lyn Hejinian argued
early in her career, "Writing Is an Aid to Memory," in ABC Street "Writing isn't an aid to
memory, but a replacement for it." History, accordingly, is eaten up by
the narrator's acts, and as quickly becomes part of the ongoing snowfall of
words that pour from Monica's pen. Individuals and their statements just as
quickly are swallowed up into a kind of nonjudgmental commentary.
Just as the landscape Monica describes, the numerous human figures she
portrays often collide in the reader's mind as a jumble of abstract flesh. Some
families are so extended with sons and daughters, their best friends, various
lovers and boarders that, although on the "Monica's Chronicle
Website," created by the authors, all characters are listed, the reader
loses sight of the individual, and ultimately can hear only the chorus of
communal voices, which is perhaps appropriate, since all the choristers are
themselves singing of one another. Accordingly, although Monica can see
Manhattan's Empire State Tower from her window, ABC Street is a tale of small-town living, a world in which
everybody is somehow interrelated and involved in each other's lives.
Yet unlike, say, Winesburg, Ohio
or any of Sinclair Lewis's tales, ABC
Street does not comment on or evaluate—and only seldom satirizes—its
characters. Rather, they become somewhat flattened reporters of their own
destinies without an audience to coherently receive their messages. As Monica
describes her own conversation with one of the most memorable figures of the
book, Nancy St. Cloud:
It was windy and
Nancy's navy blue wraparound skirt kept
blowing open in
the middle of sentences. Every time she
reached down
words got irretrievably whisked away across
the flat,
dazzling surface littered all the way to the horizon
with sparkling
bits of green, blue and amber bottle glass, so
Monica
remembered the story as incoherent, though it may
not have been.
Unlike the utter falsity of normalized fictions, accordingly,
Ascher/Straus' collaborative work is not just a collaboration between authors,
but a collaboration between characters and readers. As in our everyday experiences,
what we receive from one another is not always what has been communicated—or
even what each of us attempted to communicate. People make their own
conclusions and impact one another, much as in the old game of
"Telephone," through incredibly garbled readings of one another's
lives by people they have never met.
Although the members of the "constellation" have all had
regular encounters with Dr. DaVinci, a psychiatrist influenced by Wilhelm
Reich, their psychological interpretations of one another are most often
mistaken and motives are regularly confused or, as in Monica's encounter with
Nancy's handsome and charming husband, Andre, are represented in multiple
possibilities:
(1) Real,
husbandly concern. (2) Enlisting the aid of a trust-
worthy friend who
happens to be intruding in any case. (3)
Aligning himself
with Monica's involuntary look of distress...
(4) Distancing
himself (and not only in the eyes of
others) from any
accusation of
complicity.
In short, in Monica's chronicles of
the world around her there are no answers and relationships between people and
events are at best tentative.
While normative fiction carefully constructs a set of interrelated
histories that ultimately work together to present a vision of an individual or
community, Ascher/Straus' work, like the characters and events of real life,
keeps their histories secret—even while attempting to reveal them. Like the
streets and lawns of this primarily wintertime landscape, history is buried
under an avalanche of information: readings and misreadings, interpretations
and interventions. As Monica writes: "Our lost history is a daily panorama
though not necessarily a panorama of the everyday."
Despite the enormous joy of encountering this canvas of colorful
characters, accordingly, the reader realizes that in Monica's chronicle there
is no way to imaginatively reach out and touch these figures, nor any way to
interweave their actions into a coherent or even consistent pattern. Writing is
ink on paper, and any narrative, as much as it may seek mimesis, is as
absolutely flat as unprimed canvas. At the end of Ascher/Straus's book, Monica
closes her winter night's tale with the words:
February turns
its sharp edge, black winter on the other side of
the page.
Not only is the tale over, but the
human beings it has mentioned have yet to appear, as they stand in wait on the
"other side of the page."
Los Angeles, December 22, 2001
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (December 2001).
