Ports
of Entry
By Caridad Svich
At the Damascus Gate:
Short Hallucinations
By Elana Greenfield
Green Integer, 116 pp.
$10.95 pap
A corrosive, beautiful and delicate book
of short stories, poems, and brief dramatic pieces, Elana Greenfield's
At the Damascus Gate: Short Hallucinations enters a reader's
dream life and refuses to leave. Walking through Manhattan readers
may find themselves repeating lines from Greenfield's stories
to themselves in order to better understand their place in the
contemporary world.
Jane Austen and Debbie
Harry appeared out of its darkness, their arms lightly draped
around each other's waists. (p. 26)
a wanderer who finds himself--herself--once
again, a guest in someone's heart… (p. 36)
one
day I stopped, here, in the moonlight, where the silver point
meets the narrow vein (p. 45)
Greenfield has an uncanny ear for everyday
human speech, and an alert and agile mind that, like any true
poet, is able to rearrange the contours of the everyday into something
exceedingly strange and familiar. Her short stories, which move
like poems, evoke the labyrinthian worlds of Borges and Carpentier
shot through with Nabokovian wit and despair. Although she brings
to mind these and other great writers, Greenfield's voice is decidedly
unique. Her prose shimmers and bites. Her humor catches the reader
off guard and also roots her work inescapably in the march of
the daily in which we are caught on this earth.
This is a rare book--a slim volume that defies description and
expectation at every turn, and as such, is a remarkable achievement,
made even more so by the fact that it is Greenfield's first book.
Formerly Director of Artistic Programs at New Dramatists in New
York, and the author of several plays, Greenfield brings to her
prose and poetry the experience, talent, and skill of someone
who has been working in the literary field a long time. The lucidity
of her prose has in it the sharp insight and observation of a
critical thinker, and the detail and freshness of her dialogue
are evident of her craft as a dramatist.
What Greenfield manages to do in the 116
pages that make up this volume, elegantly published by Doug Messerli's
Green Integer imprint, is to dissect the emotional dilemma of
dislocation that is at the heart of contemporary life. In story
after story, poem after theatrical dialogue, Greenfield weaves
a brilliant hybrid, ploy-genre web of circling, eddying, and ruptured
signs that testify to the broken-ness and subsequent search for
wholeness of human wanderers. Devils and soldiers, balladeers
and errant biographers hold court within the pages of this book
to tell their fragmented, hallucinatory tales.
Philosophical in nature and less concerned
with pop culture and its effects than most contemporary fiction,
At the Damascus Gate consciously but without elaborate
and ostentatious artifice acknowledges its place as a text of
inquiry, which juxtaposes local and global concerns as they travel
the map of the human heart. Like the triple gate to the Old City
which its title evokes, the stories in this volume serve as an
entrance to a contemporary city: each story, poem or short play
is a meditation on the randomness and organised chaos of our world.
Each voice and dream evoked, and this volume is a collection of
disparate voices ("The Voice of Peer Gynt," "The Voice of the
High Sierra," "The Voice of a Woman in the Desert," etc.) that
nevertheless makes a whole, charts an arc of motion. The voices
travel, enchant, seek revenge, and roam countries and bodies with
the jump-cut speed of dreams.
Curiously in Greenfield's world, despite
her wide-ranging attention to detail in her rigorous and fluid
presentation of cities and states of mind where one can see "an
alphabet of dust," there is a noticeable absence of disease,
or the ravages, physical and spiritual, of illness and war. Given
the fact that the book serves as a gateway to both the second
century Damascus and the contemporary one, the pin-pricks here
are few, subtle, and far between. Although menace is constant
throughout, bloodshed and disturbances of the body are elided;
instead, the focus is on the voices in the air that behave like
iron ghosts for a new age.
The lack of corporeal sensibility in the
book, save for witty sections in the stories "Talent," and "Neutrino
Blues," has the simultaneous effect of both firmly rooting the
text in the present tense, almost without incident or precedent,
and of lifting it into the reader's unconsciousness; hence the
dreaming-and-wandering effect of the volume I mentioned earlier.
A writer as thoughtful and passionate as Greenfield can surely
not be avoiding the body as subject in her work. Clearly she is
asking the reader to leave the body and gravity behind, and to
ponder instead the consequences of dreaming itself. In the radio
play Desire, one of the voices of Lyca "long[s] for the
Bedouins" and "broken pavement . . . leading to the sea." Bound
by an un-named terror, and increasing dread, the desire, then,
encapsulated here, is for unrestricted motion, freedom, and boundarylessness.
Under siege in the past and present, the voices in Desire
hope and pray, even where and when they are not wanted. Greenfield
eloquently elucidates the yearning of the transient being, the
stranger/foreigner, to belong, to be let be, and to be able to
seek and find affinity despite difference or political obstacle.
Greenfield's dream, seen in the many dreams that comprise this
powerful book, is one of transcendence, hard-earned beauty, and
perhaps impossible hope.
Let a good silence take us over in our
loneliness, while the flags of many countries move insanely
in the wind. (p. 115)
In the voice of At Damascus Gate,
Greenfield asks readers to see beyond themselves, outside themselves
and the structures that bind them, sometimes without their asking,
in this world. She asks us to imagine in a concentrated manner
what God's mind might be like and what the Devil says when we're
not listening. She asks us to contemplate modern panic and anxiety,
and to apprehend with caution and skepticism greed as opposed
to desire. She asks so very much, and rightfully so, for her questions
keep us vigilant to what we avoid, dismiss, or neglect in our
lives.
print version