Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism

Conclusion

204 Are We There Yet? Band, the home player is not the star. Nor are the pictured Beatles avatars for the player. The player watches, and plays with, the Beatles as they perform. This position offers the player a hybrid perspective that is quite different from the first-­person role-­playing of Guitar Hero. The player is inside and outside at the same time, much like the “participant observer” that James Buzard describes as satisfying the “ethnographic impulse” in Victorian fiction (Disorienting Fiction , 8). This game is not like watching a concert, nor is it like starring in a performance. It is something in between: what its creators call an “experiential journey” (Harmonix/MTV). Such games present a contemporary version of the same kind of virtuality the Victorians sought through their vicarious travel experiences: a sense of being in two places at once, constantly negotiating the space between them.23 Conclusion I began this study with a question about why the mode of fictive experience I have called“virtual travel” was so appealing to the Victorians. In attempting to address that question, I have argued that the development of a culture of virtual travel in nineteenth-­century England played a fundamental role in the evolution of the Victorian realist novel. But the question is not fully answered unless we ask ourselves what cultural work is being performed by the continuous project of inventing realism. I suggested in the Introduction that literary realism involves, among other things, an interrogation of the relationship between subjective and objective experience. The forms of virtual travel that we have examined here embody a similar tension. In fact, I would argue, they exist precisely in order to identify and triangulate that relationship. The panoramic perspective, as we saw in Part One, presents the world from a fixed point of view, and the sensation of virtual travel it created was predicated on the viewer’s assumption of that predetermined perspective.24 Though a fixed perspective, it was not an entirely stable one; it sketched in a transitional space, creating a mediated,“hypothetical”point of view that spectators were expected to temporarily adopt and then discard. This hypothetical or contingent point of view, I have argued, is a paradigm for fictional representation that was exploited by nineteenth-­ century novelists. River travel on the Thames, with its self-­ conscious repetition of familiar itineraries , also generated a nonlocalized perspective that isolated the viewer from direct experience of the scene surveyed. Similarly, rail travel required spectators High-­ Speed Connection: The Railway Network 205 to place themselves in a kind of limbo, a transitional space in which their usual understanding of their own physical location was rendered irrelevant. Yet as we have seen, the emphasis in many railway narratives on the importance of stations and junctions as points of connection between different parts of the network suggests a growing understanding that the significance of location was increasingly relational, rather than absolute. Individuals now had to position themselves, not in relation to established categories like“home” and “abroad,” “close” and “far,” but in relation to a vast interconnected system that would define its own coordinates in time and space. This recognition of the interconnectedness of places and individuals seems to gesture in the direction of a cosmopolitanism that, Vinay Dharwadker points out,“frequently differentiates itself from more than nationalism, arising out of clusters of cultural formations that are denser in their interactions than binary oppositions.”25 This mode of networked thinking is consistent with the general challenge to dualism, what I have called triangulation, represented by virtual travel. By the end of the century, the Victorians had come to understand that the railway was not in fact a unique symbol of modernity but one strand in an evolving network of communication technology: technology that facilitated, not just the transfer of goods, but the transfer of information from one place to another. The abstraction of imaginative experience from physical context that fascinated the Victorians in train travel was simply one example of an increasing abstraction of information. Understanding the inherent value of information as a commodity separate from its instantiation in a specific form or medium was the first step in a process that has led to continuing development of new media, and of technology to facilitate its circulation. Although most accounts of media history have, as noted earlier, been dominated by analysis of visual media, Friedrich Kittler has analyzed the role of technologies of transcription in creating the “discourse networks” that he sees...