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

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.

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