Music, Musicality, Narrative and the Moving Image in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark

This paper deals with Dancing in the Dark (London: Vintage, 2005), a novel by Caryl Phillips, a contemporary British author of Caribbean descent. This narrative is devoted to the Caribbean American entertainer Bert Williams (1874–1922), who is currently part of a MoMA’s exhibition since some unedited footage has been recently discovered.
Like most of Phillips’s literary production, Dancing in the Dark is shaped by music, both thematically and formally: countless references to music can be found in the narrative, in scenes involving musical performances but also in structural analogies with musical forms, for instance through the recurrent and creative use of repetitions and meaningful variations in rhythm. This pervasive musicality even goes on when the main character, Bert Williams, is shooting a silent movie, which may seem paradoxical. My contention however is that such musicality is not a mere background to the moving image, but partakes, as in the rest of the novel, of the emotional impact of Phillips’s lyrical prose.