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

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by John Plotz

Fragmented or dissociated vision is the explanatory key to the phantasmatic effect in "On the Western Circuit." What Charles Bradford Raye and Anna see on the kaleidoscopic roundabout--he watching her ride, she watching him and the world revolve--is a visual phantasm, an irreproducible and finally inexplicable occurrence. The illusion is its own litmus-test, and its own judge. A self-validating vision in a world that has given up holding one sense accountable to the good advices or comparisons other senses could provide.

In fact, the description of Charles watching Anna seems to derive from the experience of watching a "phenakistiscope" (literally "deceptive view"), a device that had been around since the 1830s. As Crary describes it,

It consisted of a single disc, divided into eight or sixteen equal

segments, each of which contained a small slitted opening and a figure,

representing one position in a sequence of movement. The side with the

figures drawn on it was faced toward a mirror while the viewer stayed

immobile as the disc turned. When an opening passed in front of the

eye, it allowed one to see the figure on the disc very briefly. The

same effect occurs with each of the slits. Because of retinal

persistence, a series of images results that appears to be in

continuous motion before the eye. (109-10)

While the scene may not have been written with a phenakistiscope specifically in mind, Hardy certainly intended to convey the idea of rushing pictures forming a continuous gestalt. Charles is described catching glimpses of various country figures spinning by:

The revolving figures passed before his eyes with an unexpected and

quiet grace in a throng whose natural movements did not suggest

gracefulness or quietude as a rule. By some contrivance there was

imparted to each of the hobby-horses a motion which really was the

triumph and perfection of roundabout inventiveness--a galloping rise and

fall, so timed that, of each pair of steeds, one was on the spring

while the other was on the pitch. The riders were quite fascinated by

these equine undulations in this most delightful holiday-game of our

times. There were riders as young as six, and as old as sixty years,

with every age in between. At first it was difficult to catch a

personality, but by and by the observer's eyes centered on the

prettiest girl out of the several pretty ones revolving. (246)

The most obvious comparison of roundabout to phenakistiscope here is in its commercial and voyeuristic potential. The delight afforded here is not the rider's sense of speed, but the fact that the London viewer (and the London reader of Hardy's stories as well) can see provincials slowed down, "quietized" by the mechanical contraption, a mechanization that paradoxically seems more natural (that is, pleasing in its smooth modulations) to him than their "natural movements." Moreover, the inventiveness that gives a sense of continuity is also clearly an arbitrary mechanical one, caused by the steady progression of pitching and springing horses at just the right rate to please the eye. The multitudes of individuals have become, by stepping onto this roundabout, part of its smooth mechanical function.