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Article Excerpt
In the 1787 patent for his new panoramic painting medium, the London artist Robert Barker claimed that the invention of a 360[degrees] viewing experience was intended "to perfect an entire view of any country of situation as it appears to an observer" (Wood 102). Offering cramped urban residents the experience of seeing scenes such as the city dilated into landscape (Benjamin "Paris" 150) or vast natural settings, the "entire" views depicted in panorama paintings soon became wildly popular throughout Europe. Such expansive sights were enhanced several decades later in diorama exhibitions. Explaining "the principles upon which Dioramic paintings are executed," Daguerre noted in 1839 that his enormous canvases depicted not just panoramic vistas, but views adumbrated by light shifts producing "an infinity of other effects similar to those which nature presents in her transitions from morning to night, and the reverse" (An Historical 85). The idea of infinite expanse captured the imaginations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century viewing publics. Their eagerness to see "the true city" (Benjamin Arcades 532) and "natural" effects through the illusion of the vista invited the proliferation of viewing exhibitions--Eidophusikon, Phantasmagoria, Diorama, etc.--that soon followed Barker's invention.
Audiences were aware that they had purchased admission to highly refined perspectival illusions, their pleasure in the vastness of the scenes presented had grounds in their willingness to imagine that what they were seeing was real. As Baudelaire put it of spectacles such as the diorama and theatre, "These things, because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth." (1) Though applied toward the construction of a (false) re-presentation, the technical expertise of the painters and entrepreneurs who mounted such spectacles nonetheless could move the viewer toward the apprehension of truths. One period commentator noted that such early exhibitions offered viewers an imagined seeing that surpassed pictorial mimesis: "the most difficult problem" for painters to overcome was that of the appearance of frameless depth, or "perfect relief, deep perspectives carried to the most complete illusion." (2) Sir Joshua Reynolds agreed that panoramic vistas could represent nature "in a manner far superior to the limited scale of pictures in general" (Wood 103). The lighting effects, elevated viewing platforms, enormous size and "endless" surround of dioramas, panoramas and other spectacles sought to render the most complete illusion-- and thus the most truthful assay-- of the real.
The "entire" illusion of the real excited or moved nearly every viewer who first saw a panorama of diorama. Balzac called Daguerre's diorama "one of the miracles of the century" (Benjamin Arcades 535); Baudelaire treasured the diorama's "enormous magic" (536); and Queen Charlotte became seasick at a view of Barker's panorama of "The Grand Fleet Anchored at Spithead" in 1791 (Wood 103). Garelick has suggested that both nineteenth-century realist fiction and period spectacles such as the panorama provoke viewers and readers to bodily response through images of the real: "tears in the case of the :novel; vertigo, nausea or breathlessness in the case of physical entertainments" (297). Certainly Pérez y Zaragoza's enormously popular Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras ensangrentadas (1831) targeted such physical and emotional responses in its readership. According to the author, this collection of erotic and violent novellas related "sucesos horrorosos y verídicos" (47) to stimulate readers' enjoyment of bodily response: "escribiré sólo para las personas de una imaginación viva y exaltada por las impresiones fuertes" (54); "el lector que fuese codicioso de sensaciones fuertes, que nos siga a la luz opaca de nuestras lámparas lúgubres" (60). The effects produced by "una imaginación exaltada por el miedo y el terror" are among the most pleasurable to the body (62). During the first half of the century, authors and artists of some of the most popular realistic literary and spectacular pastimes expertly stimulated emotional and physical reactions in their audiences.
The Galería fúnebre has been called a gothic text, though (with the exception of the phantasmagoria) visual exhibitions such as dioramas, panoramas and peepshows are rarely discussed with relation to the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century literary practice of the gothic. My first question in this paper, then, is "how gothic is it?"-- that is, what, if anything, is gothic about Pérez's text? It shares with Spanish gothic works a preponderance of murderous bandits, mysterious spectres, gloomy castles, and imprisoned maidens (see Carnero "La Holandesa," Gies, and Bertsche). Yet the Galería fúnebre also seems to share with popular visual and spectacular entertainments an emphasis on the emotional reaction of a viewing observer. In aiming for such shock value, gothic texts, visual pastimes and much realist fiction of the first half of the century invoke eighteenth-century concepts such as Burke's "terror" (detailed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757]), in which fear, apprehension, and amazement are linked as "the ruling principle of the sublime" (102). (3) Further, works such as the Galería fúnebre employ the Burkean concept of "privation", that is, the viewer's or reader's awareness of "vacuity, darkness, solitude and silence" (113), while building on an Enlightenment fascination with the sighting of "vague and potent distress" (Todd 3) that the literature of sensibility, with its detailed and minute observations of emotions, made so popular across Europe. (4) Common to representations of the real across Europe during the period under discussion is the use of the sublime-- in particular, the emotional responses of awe and fear-to engage questions around phenomena not explicable by the use of reason. The panorama's "entire" illusions, and the spectacular horrors of gothic fiction, expand the moral implications of perception and imagination beyond the scope of the body's sensing, physical responsiveness, and toward acknowledgement that a...
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