Motion sickness: spectacle and circulation in Thomas Hardy's "On the Western Circuit."

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by John Plotz

c. Letters

In the gale of mystification and deceit blown outward from the roundabout, even epistolary communication falls under suspicion. All along we have known Charles and Anna were wrong for each other--their forced physical intimacy only a temporary byblow of their whirlwind courtship. Now their mistaken union produces as consequence the most physicalized example of "body and soul" separation: Edith becomes the soul of Anna, writing love letters to help her illiterate servant win back Charles. As Pether puts it, Edith changes from "protector to pander" (35).

Hardy refuses to show the reader any samples of Edith's letters themselves, merely asserting their "inspiration," their odd intuition of exactly the right thing to say, their ability to calculate beyond calculation into the heart of Charles.(14) These letters (unlike the many other sorts of documents that Hardy quite freely "extracts from" in other works, among them valentines in Far from the Madding Crowd and marmalade-jar slogans or religious slogans painted on rocks in Tess) are irreproducible on the printed page in exactly the same way that the roundabout experience is. They participate in an economy of incommensurability, which only comes into being after the initial incommensurability of the roundabout vision. The "niceness," "inspiration," and "telepathy" that Charles and Anna praise in these letters can affect those of us outside the charmed circle of the vision as little as a spectacular phantasmatic effect would affect those outside its camera obscura. The letters can no more be reproduced as mere words on a page than the vision of Anna or of Charles on that roundabout could be reduced to a series of pictures.(15) "On the Western Circuit" asserts that in certain situations--when the characters have gone too far into this realm of simulation and deceit--even verbal creations cannot be recreated verbally.

It is of course true that the difference between the initial ingenuous misreading of the figures on the roundabout and the later intentional deception by mail has substantial ethical weight for Hardy: the blame for the roundabout deception is diffuse, while there are clear culprits in this latter affectation of affection. This exchange of letters, however, is simulation rather than dissimulation, and this works to make the occurrence at the roundabout and the exchange of "false" letters seem quite closely interrelated. That is, Edith may start out only feigning love in letters, but the continuing correspondence creates the very love (inside her) that it is intended merely to falsify. The mouth-to-mouth kiss that Edith exchanges with Charles just after he has married Anna affirms that (267). It is not only that the simulation of letter-writing mimics that simulation of affection that takes place at the roundabout; it is also that this secondary deceit can take place only because the roundabout scene touched off events in the first place.

The turn to epistolary production--the system Hardy would have been most reluctant to admit could be contaminated by the modern and yet clearly the system the most affected in this story--returns us inevitably to Hardy himself and to the image this paper started with: the inexorable stoker. As the grim stoker turns the roundabout, as Charles circles from Wintoncester to London to Melchester, as Anna spins on her horse and then spins out an epistolary lie, as Edith circulates false letters, so too the story itself circles in a slow spiral progression, leaping forward and then "returning now" (255) to chronicle a past event elsewhere. At the heart of this story is Hardy's desperate fear, and partial conviction, that he too is like that stoker. A man in a machine grimly producing and controlling the pleasures of his riders, supplying the motive force for the whirl, but unable himself to be anything but a wizened precipitate of everything that his images are not: not carefree but careful; not beautiful but ugly; not female (like Hardy's most sympathetic protagonists) but male; not a semi-lettered peasant but an all-too-knowing professional.(16)