Civil War Cycloramas and Ambrose Bierce’s Interventional Realism

Abrupt, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon-shot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it.

—Ambrose Bierce (1906)

Publishers want nothing from me but novels—and I’ll die first!

—Bierce to George Sterling (1903)¹

In their heyday, cycloramas were a stunningly immersive art form—precursors not only to film but to IMAX—and ubiquitously praised for their verisimilitude. Invented in the late-eighteenth century, cycloramas started to peak in the U.S. with the premier of Paul Philippoteaux’s The Battle of Gettysburg in Chicago on 22 October 1883. The Gettysburg Cyclorama was an instant sensation, quickly inspiring reproductions and panoramas of a half-dozen other battles around the country.² From coast to coast, up to two hundred spectators at a time crowded together on viewing platforms in the center of elegant rotundas, encircled by immense panoramas of gruesome battle scenes. The fight was further extended into three-dimensional space through faux terrain and dioramas: cannons, rifles, dummy corpses, and shrubbery were illusionistically scaled so as to blend imperceptibly into the painting. The Washington Post proclaimed, “It is even more than a representation, it is a battle itself”;³ and the Chicago Tribune remarked, the “dead and wounded soldiers, the smoke of cannon, the bursting of shells,” and “the blood stained ground” are rendered “with a realism that is almost painful.”⁴ Coupling sentimental mythmaking with a mimetic approach to visual realism, Civil War cycloramas astounded their visitors, shattering the bounds of what many thought possible in artistic representation.

Michael Fried has pointed to an insurmountable “disjunction” in realist painting and writing—the perspectival discrepancy between the “vertical” plane of reality, or experience, and the “horizontal” plane of writing, drawing, or narrative—which he frames as realism’s central problem of representation.⁵ Yet the cyclorama complicates Fried’s argument not only by extending a two-dimensional representation back into three-dimensional space but by amalgamating various moments from battles that spanned hours or even days into a single composite painting, the implications of which were not only aesthetic but ideological.⁶ The patrons and artists who undertook these tremendously technical and expensive projects hoped that as a mass cultural art form, the Civil War cyclorama could inspire feelings of national cohesion: works such as the Gettysburg Cyclorama sought to provide a decisively reconciliationist form of postbellum healing, superseding the ideological causes and consequences of the war with unifying myths. They concealed historical “disjunctions” by providing spectators with a deceptively immersive and reliable recreation of historical space rent from historical time.

Whereas Fried develops his reading of Stephen Crane’s realism in relation to Thomas Eakins’ two-dimensional paintings, this essay begins with cycloramas in order to shift the focus in studies of American literary realism from space and referentiality to time and affect. Recent work in the field has drawn long-neglected attention to the temporal and affective relationships between works of realism and their readers, which is indeed the crux of Ambrose Bierce’s interventional realism in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891).⁷ The epigraphs relate Bierce’s disdain for the novel to the intersection of temporality, literary form, and trauma that underpins his theory of art. Bierce had likely seen the most combat of any veteran who went on to write Civil War fiction, a distinction which is by no means incidental to his art.⁸ Bessel Van der Kolk’s recent work in trauma theory has helped clarify that traumatic experience at the neurobiological level involves the dis-integration of affective experience from time, along with the breakdown in the centers of the brain responsible for language and narrative.⁹ I argue that Bierce imports the neurobiological dynamics of trauma into his narrative forms, creating distance among the disparate temporal modalities and timescales that comprise historical experience and memory—the second-to-second, microtemporal vicissitudes of affective experience in the midst of crisis, the arc of a battle or war, a decade, a millennium—modalities that were implicitly glossed in the composite scenes of Civil War cycloramas...