Tableau Vivant and the Aesthetics of Modernity

Abstract

This dissertation examines the use of tableau vivant — the recreation of a work of visual art through the medium of the human body — as a significant aesthetic feature of French, Italian, and British fiction of the twentieth century. Usually considered a nineteenth-century phenomenon, first in the form of aristocratic parlor games then in theater and literature, the tableau vivant reappears in later novels and films (post-1950), long after it ceased to be a common social practice. Framing the tableau vivant in these late contexts through Walter Benjamin’s concepts of the ruin and the dialectical image, I argue that the very outmodedness of the tableau vivant freed it up to become an experimental form, capable of exposing truths otherwise buried in the detritus of history or ideologically co-opted by ideas of progress. By examining appearances of the tableau vivant in twentieth-century fiction and film, I contend that tableau vivant comes to express new aesthetic ideas and cultural meanings encompassing urban experience, colonial relations, gender identities, and postmodern forms of spectatorship. After an Introduction providing historical context and the key Benjaminian concepts that form a throughline of the dissertation, Chapter One analyzes three early literary texts including scenes of tableaux vivants: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Emile Zola’s The Kill, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. These earlier novels present tableau vivant performances as straightforwardly narrated scenes aimed at exposing the social dimensions of the form during its heyday — its exhibition of wealth and power, and its claims on visual culture. Chapter Two examines Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Topology of a Phantom City and Jean-Luc Godard’s film Passion as works that involve staging and photographing of tableaux vivants, connecting them to broader conversations of potential objectivity, representational violence against women, and the exploitation of laboring bodies. Chapter Three analyzes works of cinema depicting post-war European urbanization — Jacques Tati’s Playtime and the giallo films of Dario Argento — which employ tableau compositions to thematize the insistent framing of vision and increasing rigidity of space that characterized the individual’s encounter with others in the city. Chapter Four considers two works — Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy and Marguerite Duras’s film India Song — that envision the tableau vivant as a visual emblem of growing European narcissism in response to the waning, or already extinguished, state of French colonial rule and influence. Using the works of John Banville to illustrate Pierre Klossowski’s theorization of the tableau vivant as an inscribed form, I argue that these tableaux vivants represent delusive worlds within worlds, colonial fantasies of the end of time. Finally, the conclusion discusses the phenomenon of Instagram tableaux vivants as an expression of anxieties and desires awakened during the Covid-19 pandemic and demonstrates the form’s ongoing potential as a dialectical image that can reveal new facets of the past, present, and future. Through extensive textual and visual analysis, this dissertation considers the tableau vivant as a distinctive modern literary and cinematic technique, tracing its passage from the stage to the novel in the nineteenth century, and its return in avant-garde literature and film from the 1960s onwards as a tool for social and political commentary.