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

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by John Plotz

Circulation

Circulation is both cyclical and progressive, concerned both with motion around and motion forward. In "On the Western Circuit," three systems--money, the judicial circuit, and the exchange of letters--become accomplices after the fact to the deceptive simulation engendered at the roundabout. The workings of both fiscal and judicial circulation serve as Hardy's useful introduction to the more complicated and more potentially dangerous postal circulation that perpetuates the triple deceit of Anna, Charles, and Edith.

a. Money

Money is there at the roundabout, if not producing then at least sustaining the original blur. When Charles buys Anna a third ride, he seals their flirtation as more than a mere visual frisson: the cash sends their relationship into the realm of possible futurity, making it one of those things "that means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair" (248).

"`Ha-ha!' laughed the young man in unison, and gallantly producing his money she was enabled to whirl on again" (248).(11) The fiscal system has been abused here--it is cash that enables Charles to continue the (simulated) pleasure he is taking in her motion, a pleasure that is formed in sending her away, not in keeping her near him. Hardy's ethical code might countenance Charles's paying--in the form of sweets, presents, etc.--for the pleasure of her presence, but he is paying instead for the pleasure of her absence, of her reengulfment by the machinery.

This moment bespeaks the contamination of a fiscal system that had managed, prior to the roundabout, to fortify rather than to imperil conventional mores. This fiscal contamination is precisely not paradigmatic of Hardy's other work. The ways that money is naturalized in the rest of Hardy are various--when gambling at night takes place by glowworm in The Return of the Native, for instance, the gold pieces, dice, and worms are all integrated into a syncretic moment that produces something like a natural casino. And even when money does strike one as noticeably an alien power at work in Hardy, its allure is immediately diminished by the unsympathetic actions it provokes. Consider Donald Farfrae's loss of self-control as he rhapsodizes to Lucetta about his style of profit-making:

And so by contenting myself' with small profits frequently repeated, I

soon made five hundred pounds--yes!--(bringing down his hand upon the

table and quite forgetting where he was)--while the others by keeping

theirs in hand made nothing at all! (122)

Money takes Farfrae, as it were, far from the emotional fray at this moment. In talking of his profits, Farfrae fails to charm Lucetta. In much of The Mayor of Casterbridge, therefore, the fiscal propensities of Farfrae are restrained by his larger desire for concord with the community.

Money used to pay to prolong the spectacle in "On the Western Circuit," however, carves for itself no such benign avenue towards normalization. In its first use, as in the later deployment of the judicial and postal systems, money precisely alienates the two who are using it, deferring the conversation (not held till after the wedding) that would undeceive Charles and Anna as to each other's pre-simulation identity.