Developmental Metaphors: The Dialectic of Perception and Creation in the Construction of a Novel

Carole Maso's critically acclaimed first novel Ghost Dance (1986) presents a vision of unresolved mourning. Vanessa Wing, the daughter of a famous Nobel prize-winning poet, is herself possessed by gifts of striking imagination and verbal agility. She witnesses the tragic diaspora of her family, her mother's descent into madness and sudden death, her father's retreat into an icy passivity from which he explores the fjords of Northern Europe, and her brother's quest for justice as a political activist who travels across the country sending her random, disconnected postcards that acknowledge a disturbance with the world, but never a particularity of sentiment for their relationship. She observes, “In my heavy house in which I carry on my back like a turtle, a dark-eyed woman weeps for someone who is permanently lost to her” (Maso, 1986).** This sense of irretrievable loss and its resulting psychic chaos, which is rendered as simultaneously annihilating, exciting, and ultimately redemptive, is the nexus around which the novel coalesces, forming panegyric permutations of densely sculpted language that achieves a quasi-hallucinatory intensity. In this, Maso's first book, which she spent nine years writing, she manages to fuse images, lyrics, and recollections in a manner that constitute the creation of a larger and more continuous atemporal totality of mind and experience. Maso describes blood flowing down girlish legs in bicycle accidents that take on the verve and power of acts of sacred immolation and sexual mystery, suburban garages that are imaginatively transformed into Beaux-Arts ballrooms equipped with gilded chandeliers and courtesans with swiveling hips, repetitive vignettes of wealthy and privileged women at an exclusive college tying themselves up and injecting each other with heroin, and visions of animals “howling, high pitched, at the edge of control. Sex turned their bodies liquid. They