The Spectacle of the Nineteenth-Century City: Hans Christian Andersen

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The Spectacle of the Nineteenth-Century City
Hans Christian Andersens The Wood Nymph (1868)
MA Comparative Literature (Practice and
Methodology)

• Representing The City History, Aesthetics,
  Politics

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Dryaden. Et Eventyr fra Udstillingstiden i Paris
1867 (1868)
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Georg Brandes, Hans Christian Andersen as Fairy
Tale Writer (1869)
The first duty of the fairy tale is to be poetic,
the second to be fantastic it wont simply do,
then, that a fairy tale about a wood nymph sets
her lose from her tree and makes her do
illustrative travels to Paris, attending a ball
at the Mabile, etc.
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Hans Christian Andersen and the Visual
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Andersen at the Photographers
Carte de visite in forest tableau by Müller, 1863
Daugerrotype 1847
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Andersen at the Photographers
Carte de visite by Hansen, 1862
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Andersen at the Photographers
Stereoscope photograph by Melchior, 1868
Cabinet photograph by Müller, 1867
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Vilhelm Pedersen, The Tinder Box
Vilhelm Pedersen, The Drop of Water
Vilhelm Pedersen, The Emperors New Clothes
Lorenz Fröhlich, The Shadow
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Illustrations from Hans Christian Andersens
modern tale In a Thousand Years
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The Great Sea Serpent and the transatlantic
telegraph cable
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Illustrations by Andersen in his diary while
travelling in Germany, 1831
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Christines Picture Book
Paper Cut (1864)
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Hans Christian Ørsteds Picture Book by Mathilde
Ørsted and H.C. Andersen (1869)
Astrid Stampes Picture Book
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The Visual Culture of Modernity
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Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860)
The audience is a crowd of gapers
Théophile Gautier (1811-1872)
the time has come for mere ocular spectacles
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H.C. Andersen, A Journey on Foot (1829)
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The Panorama
The Kaleidoscope


The curtain went up and one looked right into an
immense kaleidoscope which slowly turned. Cliffs
with a waterfall, burning cities, clouds with
rain of fire, and marooned ships plunged
indistinguishably together.
Finally, I reached the dome and could enjoy the
panorama through an open gate as wonderful as
conjured by fantasy. From great height, I gazed
over the city which lay deep below me.
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The Kaleidoscope was patented in 1817 by the
Scottish scientist Sir David Brewster. The name
"Kaleidoscope" is a combination of three Greek
words that mean "an instrument with which we can
see things of beautiful form."
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Robert Bakers panorama on Leicester Square,
London 1798
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The Kaiser panorama in Berlin, 1883
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Jeff Wall, Restoration (1993) Transparency in
lightbox 1190 x 4895 mm
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Edouard Manet, Universal Exposition (1867)
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Advertisement for Stereoscope-projector in
Illustreret Tidende, 1859
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It was a fairy play, or more precisely, a
looking-play (See-stykke), a kaleidoscope with
glimmering colours, a stereoscope with
picturesque images and character groups. Fire was
dripping into the fire bucket electric lights
played the role of the hero
Andersen in his diary upon seeing a performance
of Cendrillon in 1867
The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen
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Q
Spectatorship positions in The Wood Nymph How
is the spectator and the visual thematized and
narrativized in the tale?
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The Wood Nymph and the Universal
Exposition Urban visual culture and the Scopic
regimes of modernity
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Now we are in a large hotel in the middle of
Paris. The staircase is decorated with flowers,
and soft carpets are spread over the steps. Our
room is pleasant the balcony door is open, and
we can look out onto a large square. Down there
is spring, which has come to Paris, having
arrived at the same time we did, in the form of a
big, young chestnut tree with delicate leaves
beginning to open. The Wood Nymph, 1868
Gustave Caillebotte, LHomme au balcon, boulevard
Haussmann (1880)
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Edouard Manet The Balcony (1868)
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A Parisian Ball - Dancing at the Mabille, Paris.
Published in Harper's Weekly, November 23,
1867 Wood engraving by Winslow Homer
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The wood nymph arrives in Paris

What changes! What speed! The buildings seemed to
shoot up from the earth, more and more of them,
closer and closer together. The chimneys rose up
like flowerpots, stacked on top of each other and
side by side along the rooftops. Enormous
inscriptions composed of two feet high, and
painted shapes that shone brightly, covered the
walls from foundation to cornice. Where does
Paris start, and when will I be there? the wood
nymph asked herself. The crowds of people
swelled, the bustle and commotion grew, carriage
followed carriage. There were people on foot and
on horseback, and everywhere shop after shop,
music, song, shrieks, and conversations. The
wood nymph in her tree was in the middle of Paris.
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The Illustrated Magazine and the Universal
Exposition
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Edouard Manet Le Journal Illustré (1878-79)
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Exposition Universelle de Paris, 1867
Illustration from the Danish weekly paper
Illustreret Tidende, 1867
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The salt-water aquarium, from Illustreret
Tidende, 1867
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The Russian Isbah with the Zars horses
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The Swedish exhibit and Norwegian folk-types
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Carstensens exotic amusement park Tivoli in
Copenhagen in the 1860s Illustrations from
Illustreret Tidende
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The Turkish Mosque

Our second picture shows one of the buildings
that every nation was granted to erect on a plot
on the Field of Mars. It shows the Mosque In
small scale it offers a good impression of the
Oriental art of building, which appeals as much
due to its characteristic shapes as too the gaudy
colors covering the exterior The walls are
decorated with Koran-language and arabesques, and
the floor is covered with costly carpets. From
Illustreret Tidende
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From the World Exhibition in Paris III.
Today we continue our stroll in and around the
exhibition building in Paris. We shall not tire
our readers with long descriptions, but rather
through the drawings made available to us
illustrate the stories already recounted in
various correspondences of the daily newspapers.
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The idle spectator the flâneur exposed

The more time one spends on the Field of Mars the
more the diversity of buildings attracts the idle
spectator den ørkesløse Tilskuer, while he
drifts between them with the purpose of
travelling around the world for a short while.
Undoubtedly, this is much more interesting than
the travels you can do while sitting in a theatre
with wide-open eyes in front of a continuously
moving panorama rundmaleri. Here the buildings
surely remain in their place, but they are
animated by the ever changing mass of people.
Involuntarily, the flow carries one away.
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Today, we go from the Jena Bridge to the building
on the Field of Mars, which for a long time has
beckoned due to its splendour, the Emperors
summer pavilion. Still it attracts curios people
whom with their noses pressed against the windows
throw long glances into the enclosed spaces of
the rooms.
The Emperors Pavilion
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Tom Gunning, From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray
Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic
in Souls (1913), 1997

One can find a model for this purely visual
delight in a constantly changing spectacle
irrelevant to the knowing gaze of the classical
flâneur modelled in David Brewsters
philosophical toy, the kaleidoscope, patented
1817 The kaleidoscope provided a purely
visual spectacle, the mechanical complement to
the badaud.
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Illustreret Tidende, Årgang 6, Nr. 306,
 06/08-1865 , s. 363
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Andersens friend, Robert Watt, writing about
Paris in Illustreret Tidende, 1865

For hours one can sit like this and still make
good use of ones eyes. It is as if one observed
an unending panorama. The customers one
encounters in or most likely outside the cafes
also change with the time of the day.
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Listening to women talk in the cafe compares to
reading an illustrated magazine or visiting an
exhibition.

There is much teasing and laughing, looking and
speaking, amongst themselves and with the crowds
constantly flowing by. One is invited into
intrigues, experiences exciting introductions and
intriguing resolutions to love affairs one
listens to politics, gains knowledge of arts and
sciences, a mouthful of scandal, and does
countless discoveries by just spending an
afternoon outside a café on the boulevards.
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Andersens friend, Robert Watt, writing about
Paris in Illustreret Tidende, 1865

Daily you see workers preoccupied with uprooting
the old, sick trees to replace them with the
young and fresh. You often meet small wagons on
which the fertile and hopeful child of the forest
struts as it is taken to its new home where its
life force soon will decompose. It is as if
Parisian life rapidly used up its powers and soon
again the wagon will make a stop by the now
withered tree to take it away from the beautiful
city which proved to be its deathbed . . . To the
passing observer the boulevard maintains the
constant smiling and shining front.
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Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities

The visual representation of reality as spectacle
in late nineteenth century Paris created a common
culture and a sense of shared experiences through
which people might begin to imagine themselves as
participating in a metropolitan culture...
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M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective
Memory. Its Historical Imagery and Architectural
Entertainments, 1994

A ramble through these fairgrounds of the
nineteenth century was no different from the
visual experience received by turning the pages
of an illustrated Picturesque Voyage, or
scanning the random juxtaposition of news
columns, illustrations, and advertisements in the
popular press. Spectators simply compared one
image to another, contrasting the difference
between nations and gauging the distance between
the past and the present, the so-called developed
and the backward.
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The density and variety of the magazines
topography mimics the crowding and intensity of
experience in a major metropolis. Thus the
magazine not only mirrors the topography of the
city, but serves to indoctrinate the reader into
a certain way of looking. James Werner
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France
England
The Orient
Germany
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Boyer on the influence of train travel on space
and the city

Mobility in space train travel thus enabled a
juxtaposition - even a collision - of disparate
but sequential images. So too the city was no
longer seen from a static frontal perspective, or
as a centered and composed picture, but as a
multidimensional traveling view that was itself a
new spatialization of time.
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Dryaden is a tale which adopts into its
fragmented body the discursive and formal
strategies of the new mass media (the illustrated
magazine), visual devices (kaleidoscope and
panorama), and above all the phantasmagorical
nature of the World Exposition. It is a textual
space in which one can experiment in visual
interaction and practice urban crowd behavior, it
is a performance of a kind of cultural masquarade.
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Walter Benjamin, Der Erzähler (The Storyteller)
Eine Generation, die noch mit der Pferdebahn zur
Schule gefahren war, stand unter freiem Himmel in
einer Landschaft, in der nichts unverändert
geblieben war als die Wolken und unter ihnem, in
einem Kraftfeld zerstörender Ströme und
Explosionen, der winzige, gebrechliche
Menschenkörper. A generation that had gone to
school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under
the open sky in a countryside in which nothing
remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath
these clouds, in a field of force of destructive
torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile
human body.
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Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into
Air The Experience of Modernity

To be modern is to find ourselves in an
environment that promises adventure, joy, growth,
transformation of ourselves and the world - and,
at the same time, that threatens to destroy
everything we have, everything we know,
everything we are.

They are moved at once by a will to changeto
transform both themselves and their worldand by
a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of
life falling apart. They all know the thrill and
the dread of a world in which all that is solid
melts into air.
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New Graduate Module option in the MA in
Comparative Literature UCL Centre for
Intercultural Studies
CLITG004 Spring term 2009 20 credits

• Investigate how the conception of memory has
  changed in our globalised culture
• Explore the role of new communication
  technologies in memory and literature
• Engage in international dialogue with graduate
  students in Denmark

http//memoryandliterature.blogspot.com/
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