Music(ality) in Phillips’s Fiction

Caryl Phillips is a contemporary Anglo-Caribbean author. Phillips’s radio play on Marvin Gaye entitled “A Long Way From Home”, the television documentary “Darker than Blue” that he made about Curtis Mayfield, and his novel Dancing in the Dark, which is entirely devoted to Bert Williams, a famous vaudeville entertainer, are just a few examples testifying to his interest in popular music. Surprisingly, although the musicality of Phillips’s writing has been mentioned in passing (Ledent & Tunca xiv) and the author himself has declared that his only model, if any, was music (Clingman 108), a detailed study of what exactly characterizes this musicality or what purposes it serves has yet to be undertaken. What I would like to do in this presentation is not only to conduct an in-depth examination of this pervasive musicality but, more importantly, to attempt to define what musicality is in the first place.