Rhythm and Repetition in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark

My proposal is to deal 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 was the first black performer in the Ziegfield Follies and it traces his frustrating life as a black performer who had to blackface.

Like most of Phillips’s literary production, Dancing in the Dark is shaped by music, both thematically –there are scenes involving musical performances, lyrics interspersed throughout the novel– and formally through the recurrent and creative use of repetitions and meaningful variations in rhythm, and sonic effects. Indeed, various elements of sound are present through poetic language and forms to emphasize elements of rhythm: repetitive devices such as rhymes, meters and alliterations. My contention is that these rhythmic devices partake in the emotional impact of Phillips’s writing; sonic elements emphasize the musical properties of language, strike the reader and prevent them from forgetting the traumatic experience of Bert. Through repetition, they transfer the character’s traumatic experience into the writing and create a sense of sympathy with the reader which privileges immediate empathy.
If Bert Williams has been largely forgotten until recently, I believe that Phillips’s rhythmic prose will enable Bert’s story to resonate in the reader’s mind long after closing the book.