Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices: A Novel [NOOK Book]

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Overview

hloride, New Mexico, is a dusty mining town slowly bleaching away in the sun, a casualty of the big copper firms’ exodus to South America. To the dying place returns Roselle More—hometown girl and faded Hollywood star—for the premiere of her new film. The even is a cynical promotional gimmick, one that her director, Bill Brodkey, making a last-ditch attempt to affirm his own artistic integrity, hopes will also resurrect the actress’ bottomed-out career. Naturally the citizens of Chloride hope the publicity will ...
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Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices: A Novel

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Overview

hloride, New Mexico, is a dusty mining town slowly bleaching away in the sun, a casualty of the big copper firms’ exodus to South America. To the dying place returns Roselle More—hometown girl and faded Hollywood star—for the premiere of her new film. The even is a cynical promotional gimmick, one that her director, Bill Brodkey, making a last-ditch attempt to affirm his own artistic integrity, hopes will also resurrect the actress’ bottomed-out career. Naturally the citizens of Chloride hope the publicity will do the same for their town. But Roselle vanishes. A double assumes her place—and suddenly nothing is as it seems.

In this eerie, beautifully crafted novel, Gladys Swan presents an impressionistic palimpsest of myth and modern life, in which the present is revealed as only a play of light and shadow over a ghost dance that—tenuously—ensures the world’s continued existence. Part history, part myth, part meditation on truth and illusion, the novel becomes a kaleidoscope of plots and subplots, each refracted through the perceptions—the voices—of a cast of characters as intriguing as the Southwest itself.

And as the town giddily whirls toward its rendezvous with truth, these characters find themselves precariously balanced between a lost past of blood-deep spirituality and an unknowable, terrifying future, between the world of drama and the drama of the world. Presiding over and in some mysterious way engineering this ultimate rendezvous is the oracular A.J. (“Bird”) Peacock, archetypal trickster, Oberon, Puck, Prospero to the town. Truth, Bird points out, is not always comforting.

The truth (or a truth) is finally revealed when the voices of the title—of the past, the land itself—speak during the novel’s apocalyptic conclusion. There, in the wilderness, in a dazzling play within a play, the past comes face-to-face with the present, the spiritual with the profane. In this crowning union of memory and desire, this shoring-up of fragments against ruin, the discerning reader will hear echoes of writers as disparate as Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Joyce.

Never less than consummately entertaining, Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices works flawlessly on many levels at once. The demands of this remarkable novel are great, but so are its rewards.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
This haunting novel mixes past and present, reality and illusion, in a powerful, if fragmented narrative. The town of Chloride, N.M., is dying after years of drought and the exhaustion of its copper mines. A veritable Greek chorus of the town's leaders speculates on the area's colorful past and hopes that a festival featuring their own Roselle More, a movie star who dropped into obscurity after McCarthy-era blacklisting, will spark a renaissance. Roselle and her jaded entourage arrive; she disappears, and Joan Gallant, a troubled look-alike, is hired by Roselle's director to fool the townspeople. A stageful of sharply etched characters circles around Joan and her supporting cast, but no one is what he appears to be. Even a posthumous retrospective exhibit devoted to a critically acclaimed local artist seems to be fraudulent, except for one painting: The Ghost Dance , which portrays the tormented townspeople ``trying to dance flesh into spirit.'' Swan ( Carnival for the Gods ) has an acute eye and writes with strength. Although her ultimate message of rebirth and redemption is partly shrouded in hazy mysticism, she calls forth the Native American past and evokes the fantastic in the midst of the ordinary. (May)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780807153673
  • Publisher: LSU Press
  • Publication date: 3/1/1992
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 252
  • File size: 3 MB

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Translator's Note
Preface
Annotator's Introduction and Acknowledgments
Introduction 3
Ch. 1 The Geometric Style 14
Ch. 2 The Heraldic Style 41
Ch. 3 The Introduction of Vegetal Ornament and the Development of the Ornamental Tendril 48
A Near Eastern 53
1 Egyptian. The Development of Vegetal Ornament 53
2 Mesopotamian 83
3 Phoenician 96
4 Persian 102
B Vegetal Ornament in Greek Art 104
1 Mycenaean. The Origin of the Tendril 106
2 The Dipylon Style 137
3 Melian 140
4 Rhodian 145
5 Early Boeotian and Early Attic 156
6 The Interlacing Tendril 161
7 The Development of the Tendril Frieze 172
8 The Further Development of the All-over Tendril Pattern 178
9 The Emergence of Acanthus Ornament 187
10 Hellenistic and Roman Tendril Ornament 207
a Two-Dimensional Palmette-Tendrils 214
b The Acanthus Tendril 220
Ch. 4 The Arabesque: Introduction 229
A Tendril Ornament in Byzantine Art 240
B Early Islamic Tendril Ornament 266
Annotations 307
Glossary of Terms and Concepts Used by Riegl 397
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