5

William Hogarth. Southwark Fair,1730s. Engraving.

6

Detail of Hogarth, Southwark Fair.

Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth CenturyJONATHAN CRARY

Even as our present lurches further into the twenty-�rst century, there is still a pervasive sense that an archaeology of our own rapidly changing perceptual worldbegins in the nineteenth century amid what Jean-Louis Comolli has now memo-rably described as “the frenzy of the visible.”1 The grounds for claiming this wouldcertainly have less to do with the fact that �lm and photography were nineteenth-century inventions (for the relative transience of these forms is now self-evident).Rather, if it is valuable to insist on continuities between the present and 150 yearsago, those links would involve the status of the spectator and the persistence ofcertain imperatives for consumption, attention, and perceptual competence. Ratherthan focusing on the development of speci�c apparatuses or technologies, such asfilm or photography, I believe it is more important to see how a related group ofstrategies through which a subject is modernized as a spectator traverses a rangeof seemingly different objects and locations.

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To move quickly from the general to something concrete, consider William Hogarth’sSouthwark Fair from the 1730s, a work in many ways remote from the more modernproblems I have just outlined. It is, however, an image in which we can see formsof premodern and modern culture coexisting side by side. Clearly we are looking atthe remains of a traditional social phenomenon in an exhausted condition, at thetail end of its presence within European collective experience. Rather than a literaldepiction of a speci�c fairground, we see here the marginal survival of what hadbeen the carnival energies of festival within premodern Europe. Even throughHogarth’s own class prejudices, which privileged thrift, conjugality, moderation,and industriousness, we still get a tenuous sense of how the disorder of carnivaloverturns a distinction between spectator and performer, how it destabilizes any

Grey Room 09, Fall 2002, pp. 5–25. © 2002 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7

�xed position or identity, how with inversions of high and low it parodies and pro-fanes of�cial forms, how it suggests a teeming mix of sensory modalities, the tac-tility of bodies mingling, sounds and smell, all at least coequal with vision. But atthe same time it is clear that the leftover fragments of carnival, the vertigo of thetopsy-turvy world, had by this time been relegated to the terrain of the fairground,segregated from the more rationalized economic life of the city.

This brings me to one particular component of Hogarth’s turbulent scene: the twoseated individuals at the corner looking into a double-sided peep show.2 Here wehave two spectators who are constituted and positioned very differently than anyoneelse depicted in the print. These immobile and absorbed �gures, interfacing withthe window of the peep show, anticipate one of the primary pathways that popularculture will trace out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth and eventuallyeven into our own time. And it is a process that obliterates or at least sublimates thepossibility of carnival. The continuities I am thinking of can be suggested, for example,by considering the peep-show-type setup of the Kaiserpanorama in the early 1880sor the related miniature arrangement of the stereoscope, which was pervasivethroughout the second half of the nineteenth century (or many other similar forms).I’m not pointing to any kind of technological lineage or some sequence dependenton the improvement or development of devices, as if the important questions con-cerned the literal viewing apparatus. Even though the form of the peep show can befollowed in reverse from the 1730s—back to the perspective boxes of the seventeenthcentury and probably further into the sixteenth century—what interests me is themove that begins in the latereighteenth century when thespectator of the peep-show formcoincides in a general way withWalter Benjamin’s account of thereader of the novel as a new iso-lated consumer of a mass-pro-duced commodity. The model ofoptical apparatus in the cornerof Hogarth’s fairground shiftsfrom a relatively minor elementof early modern popular cultureto become a powerful model ofwhat would come to character-ize dominant forms of visual

8 Grey Room 09

Top left: Kinetoscope, 1890s.

Top right: Stereoscopes in use,1860s.

Bottom: Kaiserpanorama, 1880s.

culture in Europe and North America—that is, the relative separation of a viewerfrom a milieu of distraction and the detachment of an image from a larger back-ground. The physical device is simply a �gure for a broader psychic, perceptual,and social insularity of the viewer, as well as a pervasive privileging of vision overthe senses of touch and smell. Mikhail Bakhtin indicates that, after the disappear-ance of carnival, experience in the nineteenth century acquires a “private chamber”character for an enclosed and privatized subject.3

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As much recent work has shown, a major component of the making of nineteenthcentury visual culture was the education and training of both the individuals andcollectivities for whom new forms of visual consumption were being produced.The many ways in which this occurred included the self-disciplining of the spec-tator as an occupant of or visitor to interior spaces and institutions: in a sense, theformation of modern audiences. The prioritization of visuality was accompaniedby imperatives for various kinds of self-control and social restraint, particularlyfor forms of attentiveness that require both relative silence and immobility. AsTony Bennett and others have shown, the public museum (whether of art or naturalhistory) emerged as one of the sites in the nineteenth century where new kinds ofsocial intercourse seemed to pose possible problems.4 Amid the democratizing tendencies in postrevolutionary Europe there was concern that an unregulatedmixing of social classes could import a fairground disorder to interior public spaces,thereby harming the pedagogical and ideological agendas of those institutions. Forexample, when the Crystal Palace was under construction there was considerableof�cial anxiety that this largest-ever indoor space would be threatened by unrulybehavior and public drunkenness. A large security force was recruited and set inplace on opening day and on days of reduced ticket prices, but it turned out to becompletely unnecessary.5 In this turning point in the exhibition of manufacturedconsumer goods, there were virtually no incidents of trouble. The luster of thecommodity radiated its own exhortations for self-control.

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One particular site in Europe has been especially fascinating to those studyingnineteenth century visual culture: the Egyptian Hall which operated in London,in the area of Piccadilly, more or less continuously from around 1812 until 1904

Crary | Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 9

when the building, then a hall for early cinematic exhibitions, was demolished.Originally called the London Museum by its founder William Bullock, it quicklycame to be called the Egyptian Hall because of its exterior of simulated Egyptianrelief sculpture and hieroglyphs.6 Though now physically lost, it is important as astrati�ed site through which the historically mutating shape of an exhibition/enter-tainment milieu can be examined over this long span of time. In the nearly 100years of its existence one could have seen displays of natural history, art exhibits,freak shows, and a vast range of curiosities, versions of panoramas and magic-lanternshows, phantasmagorias, ventriloquists, magic shows, movies, vaudeville, andother music hall–type acts.

At its opening in 1812, advertisements promised “Natural and foreign curiosities,Antiquities and Productions of the Fine Arts,” since the Hall’s semipermanent dis-play included various spoils taken from Egypt (alongside, no doubt, a far greaternumber of fakes): mummies, papyrus texts, statues, gems. There were also exhibitsof hundreds of stuffed birds and animals, organized into a rough categorization oftypes and groups. At this point in the late teens the Egyptian Hall was a hybrid of the various possibilities of organized display in the nineteenth century, a mix ofthe obsolete traditions of the cabinet of curiosity with a burgeoning but inchoateinclination to quasi-scientific organization. But it never was to merge into thegrowth of the modern bourgeois museum; instead it remained part of the modern permutation of the older model of curiosities into a nineteenth-century preoccu-pation with “attractions,” to useTom Gunning’s term.7 Gunningsees early cinema as an attractionthat, like many other phenomenain the nineteenth century, reliedon the direct stimulation andshock of display, the inciting ofvisual curiosity and pleasure,and the solicitation of attentionthrough surprise and astonish-ment, as in magic acts or showsof giants or Siamese twins inwhich the mere exhibition ofsomething is self-justifying. Theword “attractions,” as Gunningexplains, operated in the writings

10 Grey Room 09

Top: Egyptian Hall, c. 1900.

Bottom: Egyptian Hall, 1820s.Interior view.

Opposite: Poster for EgyptianHall attractions, 1844.

of Sergei Eisenstein to evoke its fairground origins. In this larger sense it is a question of how the carnival disorder of the premodern fairground, its profusegrotesquerie and strangeness, is deposed onto the peep-show model of visualattraction and how the multifaceted festival participant is turned into an individ-ualized and self-regulated spectator.

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Perhaps the single most important category of exhibitionary attraction in the nine-teenth century encompasses those various techniques of display whose allure wassimply their relative ef�cacy at providing an illusory reproduction or simulation ofthe real, regardless of what was being shown. There will never be a clear separationin this historical period between the appeal of a technique of verisimilitude solelyas demonstration of its own operation and an attention to the referent conjured upby that apparatus. Thus a site like the Egyptian Hall is important for the diversityof “reality effects” that occurred within it. This now familiar phrase is of coursefrom the work, in the late 1960s, of the French critic Roland Barthes, who insistedthat a new discursive model of reality takes shape in the nineteenth century, that“the real” as modernity came to conceive it was invented then. It should be remem-bered that he used this term in several different ways. On the one hand, the realityeffect for Barthes was a speci�c device in nineteenth-century literature that had todo with the function of the so-called concrete detail in a �ctional text—he called

it the “direct collusion of a referent and a signi�er,whereby the signi�ed is expelled from the sign.”8

But he also showed that the reality effect was notonly textual, and he linked it to the emergence inthe nineteenth century of modern assumptionsabout history that were manifested in “the devel-opment of the realistic novel, the private diary,documentary literature, the news item, the histor-ical museum, the exhibition of ancient objects andthe massive development of photography whosesole pertinent feature is precisely to signify thatthe event represented has really taken place.”Important here is that although photography isemphasized as a reality effect it is not in any sensea foundational model or prerequisite for it.

Crary | Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 11

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In the early years of the Egyptian Hall, for example, one of the most successfulexhibits was the display of Napoleon’s battle carriage captured after the Battle of Waterloo and shipped back to England. What went on view was not simply acarriage but a model of the “real” in newly distilled form. Obviously it was of inter-est because it was luxurious, bulletproof, painted dark blue with gold trim and wheels of vermilion, and Napoleon’s wounded, one-armed Dutch coach driver hadbeen brought back to be part of the exhibition. But apparently a feature that was ofoverwhelming interest to the thousands of spectators was the chance to look insideat the plush drawers and built-in cabinets that contained his personal wardrobe,bars of soap, a pocket watch, �asks of liqueurs, and numerous other minor articles.In line with Barthes argument about the concrete detail, these mundane itemsbecame a supplementary but vital confirmation of the authenticity of the objectitself. It is particularly noteworthy that after years of exhibition on tour through-out Britain and other parts of Europe the carriage was sold to the then thrivingestablishment of Madame Tussaud’s in London, to become part of her permanentdisplay of waxwork �gures of Napoleon (for whom she had previously worked).9

This was a familiar strategy in wax museums, where the simulation was aug-mented by the adjacency of objects having a literal presence—that is, a wax �gureseated at the desk or table actually taken from their prison cell, or, even more simply, the proximity of illusory wax skin with the real clothing that often hadactually belonged to the subject. But despite the unquestioned popularity of waxmuseums, it was such “mixed” reality effects that �nally were the most problem-atic in the nineteenth century, usually occupying an outer limit of popular taste or fascination.

At this point I want to examine another piece of the heterogeneous visual culture of the Egyptian Hall, an object placed on display there in June of 1820,Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa.10 There are many reasons why the exhi-bition of this work in this particular venue is of historical importance, and therewill only be space here to indicate a few of them. First, it should be noted that the Egyptian Hall was, for awhile, one of the most important sites in London forthe temporary exhibition of paintings, usually paintings that either in terms ofsheer scale or subject matter had a viability as a popular commercial attraction.11

My larger point, however, is an obvious one, though it certainly bears stating: theobserver of painting in the nineteenth century was always also an observer whosimultaneously encountered a proliferating diversity of optical and sensory expe-

12 Grey Room 09

Théodore Géricault. Raft of the Medusa, 1819.

riences. In other words, paintings were produced and assumed meaning not interms of some cloistered aesthetic and institutional domain, but as one of the manyconsumable and �eeting elements within an expanding �eld of images, commodi-ties, and attractions.

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Thus, with Raft of Medusa there are two distinct but not unrelated problems: thecircumstances of its production and of its reception. The fact that Géricault chosefor the subject of his painting a contemporary news item made it already compat-ible with a larger social arena in which information was transformed into com-modities and attractions.12 But this is almost incidental to the particular approachGéricault staked out for his representation of this subject, which is why this paintingoccupies its unstable position between two distinct historical worlds—betweenthe enclosed order of reference organized around the rhetoric of the human body inthe art of antiquity and the Renaissance and an unbounded heterogeneous infor-mational �eld of journalistic, medical, legal, and political sources of evidence, tes-timony, fact, and other guarantees of the real.

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Géricault made extraordinary efforts to master, to assimilate the facts, the truth,the evidence, the very immediacy of the horrible event, an event which already bythe time he began working on it had assumed a multilayered informational exis-tence. Géricault engaged the project as if all of this new data could be distilled andforged into a visual experience that would synthesize and transcend its fragmentedcharacter. According to Charles Clément, one of his earliest biographers, Géricaultassembled an immense “dossier crammed with authentic proofs and documents ofall sorts,” indicating that Géricault attempted to collect every news story and public

Crary | Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 13

document about the expedition and shipwreck, every bit of eyewitness testimony,including the best-selling �rsthand account by two survivors, J.B. Savigny andAlexandre Corréard. Not only did he assemble all the journalistic images he could�nd, but he commissioned the surviving carpenter of the Medusa to build him asmall-scale model of the raft, which he tested out in water to see how it �oated andmaneuvered. He made the acquaintance of Savigny and Corréard (the former wasthe ship’s surgeon) and interviewed them at length even though their publishedaccount was already exhaustive. In fact, Géricault used Savigny and Corréard asmodels for two of the �gures standing near the mast, fastening them onto the paint-ing for their stature as eyewitnesses but also as a way of making actual the repre-sentation. We should note the utter discontinuity between the semantic status oftheir images in the painting and the various references to old master art, whetherMichelangelo or Rubens; this is part of the discursive �ssure that I suggest runsthrough the painting. However, the most extreme and notorious measure under-taken by Géricault to ensure the authenticity of his work was his insistence onbecoming familiar with the immediacy of death—not death in a narrative, psy-chological, religious, or symbolic sense—but death as the literal degradation of thephysical body, the body drained of any living coherence. What Clément referredto as the immense documentary dossier of Géricault would �nally have to includealso the corpses and body parts he had delivered to his studio (or studied in hospitals)in order to live with the sights and smells of decaying human bodies, just as the sur-vivors of the raft who kept parts of the dead on board for their own sustenance. Asfar as we know, the only thing Géricault didn’t do while immersing himself in theevent was experiment with cannibalism. It is this whole dossier of fact, of evidence,of direct experience that produces, to use Barthes’s phrase, “the referential pleni-tude” of the work. Of course it is not a work that looks real by virtue of its literalcorrespondence to a speci�c viewpoint of a speci�c moment. As critics have notedfor a century and a half, we see no starving, emaciated bodies; we don’t see the raft asit really was, submerged a few feet below water level. Its verisimilitude is based onits more profound embeddedness in new networks of the real, in which older modelsof visibility are exceeded.

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Working amid this �eld of effects, Géricault’s �rst inclinations are highly telling.Initially he was convinced that the project could be achieved only through a sequenceof several paintings, that the event could be narrated only in terms of its temporal

14 Grey Room 09

Right: Théodore Géricault. Study of severed limbs, c. 1819.

Opposite, left: Raft of the Medusa.Detail.

Opposite, right: ThéodoreGéricault. Madwoman, c. 1821.

dispersal, its inherent dislocations. But much of the historical signi�cance of the Raftis how Géricault forced this content and its discursive substructure back withinthe rhetorical terms of a classical model of representation. That he could not dothis seamlessly, that these incompatible projects collide and fracture is part of whatmade this such a charged object at this threshold of modernity. Even so, as MichaelFried and others have indicated, it is no accident that in his efforts to reduce theevent of the disaster to a single image he chose this moment—a moment in whichvision takes on such an exclusive priority, in which the focus of attention is fun-neled and narrowed to a single barely perceptible point.13 To redirect the terms ofFried’s argument, the painting incarnates a vision all but cut off from the possibilityof a reciprocal exchange of gazes. For reprieve and deliverance in this image wouldconsist in a mutual exchange of gazes, in being acknowledged by the ship, whichis here tragically denied or at least deferred.14 But this is part of what Bakhtin sawas the “private chamber” character of experience in the nineteenth century, wherethe peep-show model of looking describes both an intensi�cation of visuality andalso an isolation of the subject from a lived embeddedness in a given social milieu.

We get an even more piercing sense of this new understanding of the privatizationof vision in Géricault’s late portraits of the insane. We are here a long way from Goya’snearly contemporary renderings of the madhouse. The line between the normaland the pathological is made disturbingly indistinct. Seen from across a room,these pictures appear more or less congruent with the conventions of middle-classportraiture, and it is only on closer examination that one realizes something aboutthem is different. A key feature of these images is the breakdown of a reciprocalgaze, not only the impossibility of a mutuality but a sense of the complete non-identity of worlds, the loss of a shared objective reality. Music historian LawrenceKramer, in an essay on Chopin, thematizes the �rst half of the nineteenth century

as a time when “human subjectivity ceases to be acommon �eld and becomes instead a secret recess.No longer a shared sameness, the self becomes anessential difference, constantly threatened withseparation from the outer world.”15 Here Géricaultdiscloses that separation, that difference in extremeform. And it is alongside this shift that the needarises for at least a simulation of a real world

experienced incommon, that apreoccupation

Crary | Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 15

with the real emerges, eventually leading to whole industries of reality productiontaking shape in a rapidly modernizing West. Yet it is not just that the possibility of oureyes meeting the eyes of the insane is unthinkable here, because any reciprocitywould include an unbearable moment of self-recognition and self-differentiation.Rather, it is that Géricault has recorded, with apparent clinical objectivity anddetachment, individuals who were perceiving a hyperdelusional world. It is as ifthey were optical instruments whose lens we will never look through, but which,if we could, would reveal a radically different vision of the real. In a related way,Géricault was repeatedly drawn during his stay in England to architectural motifsthat functioned as perceptual “black holes.” He showed figures on the verge ofentrances into dark unfathomable spaces that communicated nothing back to theobserver except the shiver of an annihilating loss of redemptive possibilities.

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But back to the spring of 1820, when a somewhat melancholy Géricault made arrange-ments for the huge painting to be rolled up, crated, and shipped to London whereit opened for public exhibition in June at the Egyptian Hall. Newspaper ads empha-sized the grim but sensational subject of the painting and equally stressed its sizeas an attraction in its own right. That the public in England was already wellacquainted with the horri�c details of the story is in part attested to by the fact thatwhen the painting arrived a stage play about the wreck of the Medusa, titled TheFatal Raft, was already showing to sold-out houses a few streets away. Thus the work,now extracted from the universe of the Louvre, was made continuous with anothernetwork of “actualities,” a �eld of rei�ed current events, which supported its value asan attraction. In the six months Raft of the Medusa was on display at the EgyptianHall, it drew over 50,000 visitors. Admission was a shilling, which included anabridged edition of the English translation of the book by Savigny and Corréard.The availability of this text at the exhibition, of its authority as objective historicaldiscourse, functioned alongside the painting as a reality effect, complicit in estab-lishing what Barthes calls the authenticity and “omnipotence of the referent.”

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Following its run in London, which did much to ease, at least temporarily,Géricault’s �nancial problems and depression, a deal was struck to have the paint-ing do a run in Dublin. Here, we learn from standard accounts, the painting did

16 Grey Room 09

Right: French Panorama.

Opposite: Egyptian Hall exhibition of modern and ancient Mexico, 1820s.

less well, and after two months in the spring of 1821 the decision was made to havethe work shipped back to France. Why did it not do as well in Dublin as it had inLondon? In a remarkable historical intersection, Géricault’s painting competed forattention in the Irish capital with another artifact of nineteenth-century visual culture,a moving panorama titled “The Wreck of the Medusa,” which represented preciselythe same recent news item.16 Sometimes called a Peristrephic panorama, a movingpanorama involved a long band of canvas on which a continuous sequence of sceneshad been painted and which was unrolled before a seated audience. Colored light-ing enhanced the effect of individual scenes, and often a small orchestra addeddrama to the whole. Thus, for roughly the same price, a consumer had the choice ofseeing over 10,000 square feet of moving painted surface or about 450 square feet ofmotionless canvas. Moreover, one of the scenes in the moving panorama was effec-tively a copy of Géricault’s painting, so one really didn’t need to pay to see the orig-inal as well. If Géricault’s painting and the Dublin panorama were rivals forpatronage within an economic space around 1820, it certainly should not be seenas some opposition between elite culture and a crude popular form. Rather it wascompetition between two types of reality effect that each represented the sameevent, and the marketplace decided which was the more compelling attraction.

The word panorama was used in a variety of ways in the early nineteenth century,and the Egyptian Hall was a place where large mural paintings, billed as panoramas,were created as components of exhibitions. One such exhibit displayed a largequantity of objects and specimens brought back by Bullock from a six-month expe-dition to Mexico. These included a mix of real and simulated artifacts: casts ofAztec sculpture such as Montezuma’s calendar stone, as well as hundred of birdsand fish, fake plants and fruits, all placed in the context of a large, three-sidedpainting of a Mexican landscape (like a twentieth-century museum diorama) witha three-dimensional dwelling abutting the two-dimensional painted mural surface.The word panorama would, of course, soon be used overwhelmingly to signify a360-degree circular painting exhibited on the interior of a cylindrically shapedstructure. A patent was issued for such a form of exhibition in 1787, but the wordpanorama was not used until 1791, and by 1800 numerous panoramas were oper-ating in large European cities.17 The panorama is a compelling object for histori-ans in that it flourished in a relatively consistent manner for a period of timecoinciding very closely with the nineteenth century itself. A key problem is to

Crary | Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 17

explain its historical durability in a time when constant innovation and rapidobsolescence were already integral parts of cultural production and consumption.At the same time, within any discussion of reality effects, it should be noted thatthe panorama is a distinctly nonphotographic form.

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This is hardly to imply that the meaning or effects of the panorama remained staticfor over a century. For in fact its status continually mutated in relation to social,technological, and cultural developments. And about the early 1820s one pointneeds to be stressed: the panorama had an uneasy but relatively uncontested prox-imity to traditional modes of painting. The situation was very different from thatof a few decades later, when the panorama was clearly situated within the terrainof popular entertainment and the term panorama painter was an expression of dis-dain. At least into the mid-1820s there was still a pervasive though often uncertainsense that panoramas were part of the same representational codes as older exist-ing forms of painting. It was a startlingly unfamiliar format, but there was the tacitassumption among many writers that over time panoramic painting would becomea conventional way of representing certain kinds of subjects and that graduallymajor artists would gravitate toward it. Initially many artists and critics immersedin traditional practices were favorably disposed to the panorama. In one of the lastmajor academic treatises on perspective, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, in 1800,saw the panorama as fully within the terms of classical representation, as just anew twist on familiar problems.18 In the popular press of both London and Paris thesame reviewers who wrote about conventional art exhibitions would often reviewthe opening of a panorama painting, generally applying the same aesthetic criteriain evaluating the latter’s success or failure. We know that many artists (includingDavid, Ingres, Friedrich, Constable, Turner, and others) were familiar with andfavorably disposed to the panorama. Although this familiarity means really nomore than saying that an artist living in 1920 went to the movies, it also suggeststhe degree to which panoramas were pervasive urban phenomena.

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I think it is reasonable to see the panorama as one of the places in the nineteenthcentury where a modernization of perceptual experience occurs. The panoramafalls into the general category of the phantasmagoric as de�ned by Theodor Adorno:

18 Grey Room 09

Right: Leicester SquarePanorama. London, c. 1802.

Opposite: Panorama viewingplatform, Copenhagen, c. 1880.

borrowing from Marx, Adorno used this adjective to describe any form or processunder capitalism that concealed or mysti�ed its actual production or operation.19

How, specifically, was the panorama phantasmagoric? After purchasing entry, aspectator usually entered into the rotunda by means of a staircase that led one outonto the central viewing platform. The interior was darkened in such a way thatonly subdued light entering indirectly from the top of the building illuminated thepainting on the walls of the structure, leaving the rest of the interior in relativeobscurity. Such lighting conditions made the painting seem to radiate its own light;and it was sometimes found that on bright summer days the light would be toostrong—enough so that the seams of the separate canvas became visible, revealingthe painting’s constructed character and thus disrupting the illusion. Part of thereason for the elevation was purely functional—no doorways could interrupt thecontinuous surface of the painting. This also meant that spectators could never castshadows on the image, the effect of which would obviously be antiphantasmagoric,disclosing it to be merely a two-dimensional surface.

Almost all panoramas sought to create a spatial remove from the image, with amoatlike area surrounding the viewing platform. The spectator therefore had nothing like the �oor in a museum- or gallery-type interior to assist in a subjectiverationalization of the intervening distance between eye and image. We haveaccounts indicating that audience members occasionally tossed coins at the imageas a way of determining how far away it was. Forms as seemingly different asDaguerre’s Diorama, Wagner’s theater at Bayreuth, the Kaiserpanorama, theKinetoscope and, of course, cinema as it took shape in the late 1890s are other keynineteenth-century examples of the image as an autonomous luminous screen ofattraction, whose apparitional appeal is an effect of both its uncertain spatial loca-tion and its detachment from a broader visual �eld. This is how the panorama canat least be partially associated with the peep-show model discussed earlier: itinvolves a detachment of the image from a wider �eld of possible sensory stimu-lation and creates a calculated confusion about the literal location of the paintedsurface as a way of enhancing its illusions of presence and distance. At the same

Crary | Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 19

time the panorama is another instance of how spectatorship accompanied by a nar-rowed focus of attention produces social docility, even in group circumstances,even for an ambulatory spectator.

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But the panorama is unique: unlike these other forms, it presents an unboundedimage, an image that is to the viewer endless. It has no frame (and in this certainlydeparts from the peep-show model).20 Strictly speaking, it does have upper and lowerboundaries. But as one moves one’s eyes, head, or body laterally, the image appearsas a continuous boundaryless �eld. This is its self-de�ning feature. In one sensethis horizontal orientation is a decisive culmination of a secularization of sightlong underway, not only for its refusal of the obvious symbolic resonances of theceiling and the vertical, but also for its more important evaporation of the vanish-ing point and its residual theological implications. And it was within this formatthat a popular taste for concrete actuality asserted itself. Developing out of lateeighteenth-century enthusiasms for view painting and picturesque landscape (asopposed to images with mythological, allegorical, or erudite historical themes),panorama audiences were attracted by cityscapes, landscapes, or recent events thatone would have read about—battles, sieges, or views of remote regions of the world.

What was it about the panorama that seemed to guarantee a heightened verisimil-itude? Clearly it had to do with the novelty of its new encircling format, but whatare some of the ways to understand this? Going back to Barthes’s essay, we �nd thathis most extensive example of the reality effect is one that he himself describeswith the word “panorama.”21 Barthes has derived this characterization from a tex-tual object, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. It is from a point in the novel when Emmahas been making regular trips to Rouen to see her lover. She has made the coachride to Rouen often enough so that she knows every turn in the road, every land-mark along the way, including the crest of a hill from which the entire city ofRouen spreads in full view below.22 Here are Flaubert’s words: “Then, all at once,the city came into view. Sloping downward like an amphitheater, drowned in mist,it sprawled out shapelessly beyond its bridges. . . . Thus seen from above, thewhole landscape had the static quality of a painting.”23 The rest of the paragraphis an accumulation of details—about the boats anchored in the Seine, the distantgray hills, the factory chimneys, streets lined with bare trees, roofs wet with rain,and so on. Thus Flaubert himself introduces in his text, if not specifically thepanorama, the idea of a visual image that is circular or round (an amphitheater)

20 Grey Room 09

Panorama of Prague, 1840s.Fragment.

and which is like a painting. Important here are the af�nities between the strategiesof the real at work in panorama painting and in literary realism; it is a pretendingor seeming to transcribe the world in a scrupulous fashion while avoiding the trapof what Barthes calls “the vertigo of notation,” whereby an authentic realism wouldseem to demand the deliriously impossible inclusion in representation of every-thing present to sight. This is where the “insigni�cant detail” in the text intervenesas if to proclaim that if this level of minutiae, of narrative irrelevance, is given, thenthe world is being seen in its completeness, its reality.

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If we can speak of the panorama as a reality effect, it is an effect produced througha con�uence of more elements than I could begin to discuss here. But perhaps theoverriding way in which a related impression of completeness, of an inexhaustibleinclusion of the real, is achieved is through the novel 360-degree format of theimage. Like the name itself, the setup of the panorama presumes to present a totalview, characterized by a seemingly self-evident wholeness. And one important def-inition of the adjective panoramic as it was used in the nineteenth century is thenotion of a full 360-degree view that has no obstructions, nothing blocking an opti-cal appropriation of it. In this sense the panorama provided an imaginary unity andcoherence to an external world that, in the context of urbanization, was increas-ingly incoherent. The viewing platform in the center of the panorama rotundaseemed to provide a point from which an individual spectator could overcome thepartiality and fragmentation that constituted quotidian perceptual experience. Butwhile seeming to provide such a simulation of perceptual mastery and identifyingthe real with that sense of coherence, the panorama was in another sense a dereal-ization and devaluation of the individual’s viewpoint.

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The authority of the panorama was founded on the limitations of subjective vision,on the inadequacy of a human observer. It posed a view of a motif, whether a land-scape or city, that seemed immediately accessible but that always exceeded thecapacity of a spectator to grasp it. Unlike eighteenth-century topographical paint-ing, the panorama image is consumable only as fragments, as parts that must becognitively reassembled into an imagined whole. A structure that seems magicallyto overcome the fragmentation of experience in fact introduces partiality and

Crary | Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 21

incompleteness as constitutive elements of visual experience. Very generally, per-spective had for several centuries established the pervasive �ction of an adequacy,a congruence between the subjective point of view of an observer and the world.That a perspectival representation allowed only a partial and delimited openingonto that world was offset by the universality and rationality of the laws by whichit was composed. Panorama painting, to the contrary, with both its cancellation ofthe vanishing point in the work and the reciprocal loss of a localizable point ofview, heightened the disparity between a subjective visual �eld and the possibilityof a conceptual and perceptual grasp of an external reality. It simulated a totalitythat was necessarily beyond the reach of a human subject. In one sense it became adegraded simulation of the sublime, available to anyone for the price of a ticket;but, at the same time, perception was transformed into the accumulation of infor-mation, of details, of visual facts that finally resisted synthesis into perceptualknowledge. The proliferation of reality effects in the nineteenth century coincidedwith the collapse of the scienti�c, philosophical, and aesthetic systems that had ina variety of ways posed an imaginary reconciliation of the limitations of a humanobserver with a full possession of a perceivable world.

Two almost contemporary images disclose very different intuitions about thepanoramic viewpoint. Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveler above the Sea of Clouds(1818) has long been associated, perhaps excessively so, with the effects of thepanorama, and it has been suggested that Friedrich not only was extremely famil-iar with early panorama painting in Germany but that he brie�y had plans around1810 to undertake one himself.24 In the painting the position of this depictedobserver and his relation to the surrounding landscape certainly correspond to thecentral viewing platform in a panorama and the illusory sense of a distant image. Itseems to incarnate the ascendancy ofnewly released bourgeois aspirationsand fantasies of autonomy; it impliesthe mastery of a position that tran-scended local provincial viewpointsand permitted at least an opticalappropriation of a natural world thatwas increasingly being parceled andabstracted into smaller units of prop-erty. Of course, within Friedrich’s workany sense of exhilaration is insepara-ble from a metaphysical melancholy

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Right: Caspar David Friedrich.Traveler above the Sea of Clouds,1818.

Opposite: Plan of the raft ofMedusa. Published in Narrativeof a Voyage to Senegal, 1818.

at the tragic insuf�ciency of the relation between subject and world. And in a largerEuropean context this image gives a piercing sense of how the panorama coincidedwith new forms of subjective isolation, of a sensory impoverishment and emotionalprivatization.

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The other image, again almost historically simultaneous with the Friedrich, has,as far as I know, never been associated with a panoramic viewpoint and certainlydoes not have the same de�ning high vantage point of The Traveler. But if we con-sider the perceptual conditions that are diagrammed within Géricault’s Raft, we havea group of observers no less situated on what we could call a viewing platform, sur-rounded by an unobstructed 360-degree view.25 The sail itself, a curved piece ofcanvas, hovers on the horizon line like a section of the assembled painted canvasthat lined the interiors of the panorama rotundas. And the group of spectators onthis platform have a far more pressing motivation to scan the perimeter of the cir-cular �eld than Friedrich’s mountain climber. Unlike The Traveler, which suggeststhe security of a stable point of view, Géricault’s work discloses a very differentsense of the conditions of panoramic experience—it is to be uprooted from anypoint of anchorage and to be drifting on an amorphous surface like the sea, withoutmarkers, without a center, and on which homogeneity and repetition overwhelmsingularity. At stake in this work is an apprehension of the numbing disproportionbetween the limits of human perception and the implacable otherness of the exte-rior world. This is the �eld on which Géricault’s dossier of documents, facts, evidence,images of reality effects drifts, tied together precariously like the raft itself, nevercongealing into a reassuring armature of meanings. And also unlike Friedrich,Géricault is incapable of imagining a crisis of perception in terms of a solitary indi-vidual. The sensory and cognitive dislocations of modernity can be mapped onlythrough the tangled and hazardous destiny of a collective subject.

Crary | Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century 23

NotesThis essay is the text of a lecture delivered recently at various locations, and I’m grateful to my hosts andaudiences at Brown, Cornell, Princeton, Emory, Yale, University of Washington, and the Whitney ISP.My thanks also go to the Grey Room editors for their help and advice.

1. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Laueretisand Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 122.

2. On the history of the peep show, see Der Guckkasten: Einblick, Durchblick, Ausblick, ed. DavidRobinson, Wolfgang Seitz et al. (Stuttgart: Füsslin Verlag, 1995); and Richard Balzer, Peepshows: A Visual History (New York: Abrams, 1998).

3. See, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1968), 276–277; and Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 130–132.

4. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: Theory, History, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).5. See the account of these concerns in Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on

Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 136–148.6. See the extensive factual account of the Egyptian Hall in Richard D. Altick’s indispensable The

Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 235–252. See also Celina Fox, ed.,London: World City 1800–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 418–421.

7. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” inEarly Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990): 56–62.

8. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,1986), 147.

9. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds., The London Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan,1983), 255.

10. On the exhibition of Géricault’s work in England and Ireland, see Lee Johnson, “The Raft of theMedusa in Great Britain,” Burlington Magazine 46 (August 1954): 249–253; Suzanne Lodge, “Géricaultin England,” Burlington Magazine62 (December 1965): 616–627; Lorenz E. Eitner, Géricault: His Life andWork (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 209–212; and Rupert Christiansen, The Victorian Visitors:Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), 6–41.

11. See, for example, the account of the exhibition at the Egyptian Hall of Benjamin Robert Haydon’senormous Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, which coincided with the display of Géricault’s painting in1820, in David Blayney Brown et al., Benjamin Robert Haydon 1786–1846 (Kendal: The WordsworthTrust, 1996), 12–13.

12. The Medusa was part of a convoy of French ships en route to Senegal in July 1816. Due to theinexperience of the captain, the ship ran aground on ocean shoals many miles off the African coast.After two days a decision was made to abandon the ship; however, because of negligence, there wereonly a few serviceable lifeboats. To accommodate everyone, a raft was hastily assembled out of the ship’stimbers and 150 passengers rode on it, towed by one of the lifeboats. When the crew in the lifeboatrealized the raft was impeding their own progress to safety they cynically cut the cable, leaving the raftand its company to drift on the open sea. Thirteen days later, after storms, drunken and murderous

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Fragment of panorama painting.

�ghting, cannibalism, starvation, and delirium, �fteen survivors were rescued by another ship. Ofthese, �ve died soon after reaching shore. An event devoid of anything heroic or ennobling, it becamea political scandal, focusing public attention on the corruption of the Restoration regime, which hadawarded command of a ship to an incompetent Royalist of�cer, thus causing 140 unnecessary deaths.

13. Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 29–31.14. In creating that “reversed telescope” effect of vast separation between raft and distant ship,

Géricault was obviously aware from Corréard and Savigny’s book that the eventual rescue occurredbecause the raft was spotted through a telescope, that is, through the use of a visual technology thatexceeded the mere human vision deployed on the raft, surmounting the obstacle of distance andspace. J.B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Corréard, Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 (1818;reprint, London: Dawsons, 1968), 142–143.

15. Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1990), 88.

16. Valuable studies of the panorama include Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of aMass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York:Abrams, 1999); Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19., exh. cat., Jahrhunderts,(Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993); Ralph Hyde, Panoramania (London: Barbican Art Gallery,1988); and Albrecht Koschorke, “Das Panorama: Die Anfänge des modernen Sensomotorik um 1800,”in Die Mobilisierung des Sehens, ed. Harro Segeberg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996), 147–168.

17. Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, Élements de perspective pratique, a l’usage des artistes . . . (1800;reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1973), 339–343.

18. See Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981), 85.19. See my comparison of the nineteenth-century optical models deployed by the panorama and

the stereoscope in Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 295–296.20. Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” 145.21. Perhaps the most stunning visual treatment of this particular hilltop view of Rouen is the

watercolor by J.M.W. Turner and subsequent engraving by William Miller for the 1834 volumeWanderings by the Seine. In the summer of 1829, in order to promote sales of Turner’s engravings,an exhibition of his watercolors was held at the Egyptian Hall.

22. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Modern Library,1957), 299.

23. See Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. DeborahSchneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 47.

24. That the rescuing ship, the Argus, was actually named after a mythological creature with ahundred eyes has struck many as an extraordinary coincidence. Less often remembered is that the fullmythological name was Argus Panoptes, accidentally evoking a range of forms through which thecapacities of an individual (merely mortal) human observer were exceeded, including the panoramaand Panopticon. Savigny and Corréard report that “One, among others said, joking, ‘If the brig is sentto look for us, let us pray to God that she may have the eyes of Argus,’ alluding to the name of the vessel,which we presumed would be sent after us. This consolatory idea did not quit us, and we spoke of itfrequently.” Savigny and Corréard, Narrative of a Voyage, 132–133.

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