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

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by John Plotz

Anna's reaction serves to remind us that the mystification of the roundabout is not unidirectional. "The lives of Hardy's characters are as frequently disrupted by their acts of observation as they are by being spied upon" (Levine 537). During her second turn on the roundabout, Anna finds in the young man what he has already found in her: some semantic content for the glorious spectacle, a locus amoenus for all the exhilaration of a new sort of visual stimulus:

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and to the light-hearted

girl, the figure of the handsome young man, the market-square with its

lights and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began

moving round as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her

right hand, she being as it were the fixed point in an undulating,

dazzling, lurid universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of

all the form of her late interlocutor. (247-48)

A world of buzzing sensation provides the pleasure that is conveniently deposited in the one nearby site of "legitimate" pleasure: a marriageable young man. All the thrill of the machine has accrued to the benefit of a nearby human host.(9) That the pleasure of motion seems to work to the benefit of that man is one of the deceptions built into the roundabout. The joy that is scaled and supplied by machine can never be accommodated (in Hardy's economy) to the man who seems to be there so conveniently to receive it.

It is true that such female dazzlement occurs elsewhere in Hardy, "The Fiddler of the Reels" and the dance scene in The Return of the Native being only two of the most prominent examples. But those other intoxications are auditory, and moreover embedded in a long tradition. Adorno is right to speak of the normalizing powers of a myth, and the myth used by Hardy to explain fiddling enchantment is the ecstatic powers of the fairy fiddle.(10) With these new visual phantasmagoria, the consequences are a good deal more serious, and there is no standard myth of visual enchantment around to smooth things over again.

A remarkable event occurs here: the purely intangible, and irreproducible thrill of the world viewed in motion is, for Anna and Charles, solidified in the form of each other. They think they are falling in love, but they have actually made the first of many mistaken identifications in this story--they have confused the thrill of motion with the thrill of romance and cut the cloth of their romance to a machine-made form. It is not merely that they are ill-suited to each other, it is that they--or any two human beings, Hardy seems to say--are by nature incapable of bearing the representational burden of living up to an illusory love born on a steam-driven machine, of trying to suit their "live lips to a plummet-measured" ideal. This young couple has been formed, and will unhappily live, in the image of a machined dream. "Machine-made castings depart by degrees from the sharp hand-work of a mould," Hardy writes in his preface to Wessex Tales, but no departure is available for these two castoffs of the roundabout--at least, no departure from each other.