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Aerostatic Bodies and the View from Above in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.2019.0009

1938-6133

Jason H. Pearl,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Aerostatic Bodies and the View from Above in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain Jason Pearl (bio) The first balloonists risked life and limb, sometimes losing both, ascending in machines that were impossible to steer and impotent against the elements.1 The envelopes above them, buoyed by smoke or hydrogen, caught fire and exploded, often failing to lift, which could incite violent riots.2 Indeed, many of the earliest aeronauts were doctors studying the still-unknown effects of the thinner air on the human body.3 Jean François Pilâtre de Rozier, trained as a surgeon, piloted the first manned launch in 1783 with the Marquis d'Arlandes; de Rozier died two years later, with Pierre Romain, in an attempt to cross the English Channel.4 Taking that honor was John Jeffries, a doctor himself, and Jean-Pierre Blanchard, though they would have failed had they not thrown everything overboard, including the clothes on their backs, and still they descended until both leaned over and relieved themselves of "between five and six pounds of urine," which finally did the trick and allowed the balloon to rise.5 For all these balloonists, to look down over the basket was to stare death in the face. Beforehand, the view from above was only an abstraction. This was the perspective of maps and topographic engravings, which pictured the world from the position of a disembodied eye in the sky.6 It was a vista imagined in fantastic voyages featuring whimsical machines of flight.7 And, [End Page 117] throughout the eighteenth century, poets in various genres, from georgic to lyric, assumed viewpoints above for the sake of gentlemanly impartiality and visionary transcendence.8 There are exceptions, of course, but typically these fictions allowed the subjectivity in question to leave the body and its circumstances back on solid earth.9 And, the conceit persists today as an epistemology of authority in geography and urban planning and military reconnaissance.10 The gaze from above—the bird's-eye view but also the god's-eye view—objectifies but can never itself be objectified, and so is removed from contingency, capable of defining value independently of the world below. In contrast, narratives of balloon flight posited a view from above that was contingent and precarious, a perspective that entailed not just ocular superiority, if it was superiority at all, but also bodily vulnerability. We still think of it as a triumph of science when the French papermakers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier invented the hot air balloon, making possible the age-old dream of human flight.11 But, the fact remained: balloons were dangerous, unsteerable, practically useless. Whatever the advantage of the god's-eye view, human eyes are connected to human bodies, which are heavy and fragile. And, actually, like a lot of inventions, the balloon was mainly a showpiece, its usefulness exhausted by mere demonstration. What mattered was not the view from above so much as the view from below, the view of spectators—some, no doubt, attracted by the possibility of disaster. To ride in a balloon, therefore, was to expose oneself to the public, risking not just life but also reputation. And, that is to say nothing of the experience ontologically, aesthetically. Up in a balloon, we become part of the atmosphere, embedded in the material conditions around us, pushed and pulled as one of many meteorological things, our bodies brought to a level with the elements. As Derek McCormack puts it, "The prospect of infinity was one of the more unsettling aspects of aerostatic flight: free ballooning, in particular, involved coming to terms with a new kind of immersive experience, a sense, potentially overwhelming, of the vastness of atmospheric space."12 It is a situation dependent on but irreducible to vision alone, though in the eighteenth century, that sense was generally understood as passive and vulnerable, contrary to contemporary theories of the domineering gaze.13 Thus, balloon narratives give the lie to cartography's myth of the disembodied Apollonian eye, showing how aerial perception was highly variable and how it was shot through with accident and anxiety. Ballooning might conjure ideas of extrication and disengagement, of an un-situated eye unconstrained...