Whilst—ah how detestable a word– on the subject of inspiration for L . O. V. E., see previous post, I’ll back up briefly to dwell on the seeds for The Prairie Dancers.
While many have found it appealing some of its readers have found it too over the top. That’s good. It’s what I wanted for it. I’ve written that it’s American magical realism, that’s so in Possie’s taunting teasing assault on the proprieties and mind set of Possum Trot. It’s an attack on the America I grew up in and that remains even more potent to this day.
The story, the characters are satiric of class and high culture, of any kind of pretention, of our delirious need for sex and love, of religion in the many deluding forms it can take. The novel has one true religion, that of the imagination, an invisible organ of the human being that may well exist in the universe only in us.
But also it was derived from my keen enjoyment of Disney’s Fantasia. Itself a work of incredible imagination. Especially I took from The Dance Of The Hours segment.
When my parents first took me as a young boy to see the film I was infatuated by it. Most of all I fell for the dancing hippo in her tutu being pursued by the lascivious male dancer, Ben Ali Gator, the alligator to out dance all alligators.
Scenes imprinted in me from the movie flitted about in my head as I sat composing the novel in my grad student dive. The word compose is quite apt too because in the writing I indulged my passion for musical language—I made it not only dance but sing. I included snatches of melodies in the language, a line here from Beethoven, a scrap there from Handel or Mozart. This makes it naturally poetic in many places.
This compulsion for the magnum opus of American cartoon art explains Madame Eglantine and her dance troupe of shopworn ‘girls’ who render Possie her Greek Chorus.
The Prairie Dancers is illusion, allusion, frolic and fun.