Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

6. Surveying the Scene: The Panoramic Gaze

66 Are We There Yet? and unreal is “always clear . . . [but] simply masked.” Simulation “threatens the difference between the‘true’ and the‘false,’ the‘real’ and the‘imaginary’” (3). The panoramic perspective of the nineteenth century seems to perform a similarly destabilizing gesture. It pulls the rug out from beneath the viewer, erasing the boundary between here and there, real and unreal. This moment of hovering in midair is a transition, a vacation rather than a permanent retreat from ontological security. Nevertheless, the Victorian predilection for visiting this no-­ man’s-­land between reality and illusion may represent an early step toward what Baudrillard describes as a world in which“the image can no longer imagine the real, because it is the real” (1996, 4). 6. Surveying the Scene: The Panoramic Gaze Balloon travel, like panorama viewing, produced a dramatic shift in perspective that allowed the viewer to take a comprehensive overview of a place he or she had previously seen only in pieces, transforming the way in which Victorians viewed the landscape as a whole. The preceding passages suggest that balloon travellers, and readers of their accounts, became more aware of the shape of a city like London: the infrastructure reflected in its rivers, canals, and railways, the way in which it blended into suburbs and finally countryside, and the sense in which it was a home not just for individuals like themselves but for a large and diverse population. Benjamin noted the irony of the urban panorama viewer ’s interest in rural landscapes: “The city dweller, whose political supremacy over the provinces is demonstrated many times in the course of the century, attempts to bring the countryside into town. In panoramas, the city opens out to landscapes—­ as it will do later, in subtler fashion, for the flâneurs” (“Exposé of 1935,” Arcades, 6). By “opening out” the city, the panoramic perspective gives an air of knowability to the vast expanse that allows the viewer to feel he or she has grasped it as an organic whole. Like Bentham’s proposed panopticon, the panorama places the subject at the center of an all-­encompassing view.15 I would argue, however, that it does not constitute the viewer as the kind of invisible observer described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. On the contrary, part of the viewer’s enjoyment of the panoramic perspective derives from his or her own visibility. The sight, description, or self-­ conscious awareness of a“traveller” viewing the scene is an integral part of the spectacle. Going Nowhere: Panoramic Travel 67 As suggested earlier, the capacity of the panoramic perspective to provide a comprehensive view seems to have reinforced an already present sense of mastery and appropriation of landscape generally associated with imperialism. As an effort to synthesize and contain the increasingly complex geography of the world, the panorama resembles the many rituals and spectacles through which, according to David Cannadine, the British“created their imperial society, bound it together, comprehended it and imagined it” (122). Faced with “a global phenomenon of unrivalled spaciousness and amplitude” (121), the British“exported and projected vernacular sociological visions from the metropolis to the periphery , and they imported and analogized them from the empire back to Britain, thereby constructing comforting and familiar resemblance and equivalencies and affinities” (122). This self-­ referential process of mutual replication finds its parallel in the panorama’s attempt to capture a world that had grown too large to be understood, even as the world itself began to look like a panorama. In this sense,the panorama seems to represent an exaggerated manifestation of a crucial impulse underlying real travel in the nineteenth century, according to James Buzard (1993): the effort to grasp“the essence of ‘whole’ places,” to derive from fragmentary experiences an authentic sense of what“places essentially were,” in their totality (10). While the tourist recognizes that he or she has only a partial knowledge of the places visited, he or she seeks the authentic, culturally “saturated” (185) experience that will synecdochically represent the country as a whole. The panorama takes that impulse one step further. It does not claim to convey the people, language, customs, or culture of a place. Instead, it presents a visual synthesis of its landscape and architecture that is defined as the essence of London, Paris, Cairo, or the Mississippi River. To define such a perspective as equivalent to “being there” is, of course, to risk writing culture out of one’s definition of what makes...