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

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by John Plotz

Vision

The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by

means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be

grasped directly) naturally finds vision to be the privileged

human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs.

The most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the

generalized abstraction of present-day society. (Debord 18)

Vision, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, is credited with almost mystical powers and acknowledged as the site of imponderable occurrences: occurrences, that is, that cannot be weighed against other sensory input. That visual imponderability, or incommensurability, and the corresponding rise in fascination with mechanical phantasmagoria, opens up an entire sphere of the world that can neither be "brought back into focus" nor "brought back to earth" (Castle 30). If the fascination of mechanical phantasmagoria partially depended on the knowledge that they were not "real" ghosts but "only" optical illusions, their allure was only heightened by the realization that this merely transplanted the realm of the eerie into the subjective mind: made alchemy psychology.

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer documents the rise of interest in the phantasmagoric and illusionary and the era's increasingly strange and vivid speculations on the science of optics. A chart in Johannes Muller's Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1833), for example, lists all the agencies capable of producing the sensation of sight. After mechanical abrasions, electrical influx, chemicals, and blood, photons are ranked a poor fifth, and with this caveat: "although they [photons] may have many other actions than this; for instance they effect chemical changes, and are the means of maintaining the chemical processes in plants" (90). Muller also goes on to document the effects on the other sense that the aforementioned stimuli may have (effects that do not correspond to their effect on vision). What is being created is a world of hermetically riven senses, in which there is no reason that any one sense can serve as standard for another.

The idea that the senses are, or indeed ought to be, integrated to each other is related to the notion of an ordered and known social setting. It is reasonable to expect to be able to relate visual and auditory stimuli--to pick the easiest example--when spending one's days in a landscape where every sound and sight is known. There, the song of a bird can be matched up with the appropriate tree, and the tractor on the horizon explains a characteristic buzz. But (and here Hardy tends to desert us, since the modem city is not his usual bailiwick) in man-made and technology-rich realms, there is little hope of integrating the senses or of judging the failings of one sense by reference to another.(7) In an integrated world, neither roundabout nor correspondence would have entered Anna's life. Even if they had, in Hardy's Wessex--a world of continuities and traces of permanence, not intermittent arrivals and departures--most such interruptions (the thresher and the sowing machine) can be shrugged off. In this story, though, they finger, and they matter.