Dancing in the dark: Immersion and self-reflexivity in Nancy Huston's Danse Noire

Nancy Huston's Danse noire (2014) is a formidably complex novel: multilingual, composed throughout of three connected but separately told stories, highly self-reflexive in its intra-diegetic presentation of the narrative as film scenario and its use of capoeira as framing device and analogy. Some critics and readers have found this intricate structure excessive and confusing. This article, on the other hand, situates the novel within Huston's distinctive project as a contemporary French novelist who is as committed to immersive story-telling as she is to self-aware celebration of narrative form. It argues that Danse noire demonstrates fiction's power to carry us in imagination through space and time and into the subjective worlds of others, even as it invites awareness of narrative form itself. Moreover, this combination of entrancing story-telling and self-reflexivity is central to what Huston convincingly maintains is the ethical function of the novel.