Performance Art and the Novel

In The Red and the Black (1830), Stendhal employed to great effect the painting St. William of Aquitaine (1620) by the Italian painter Guercino; in The Idiot (1868), Fyodor Dostoevsky used Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb (1521) to address the idea of kenosis, or the divine emptying, as one of the central themes of his novel; and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) can be seen as an art catalogue dotted by the works of painters that range from Rembrandt and Velázquez to Gustave Moreau and James Whistler. The integration of painting into the novel did not only update the literary device of ekphrasis that goes back to Homer but produced a sub-genre that used painting to question and transform the novel’s literary procedures. Even a cursory overview of the entrance of painting into the modernist novel shows that this encounter coincided with the rise of the...