Chapter 5Spinning in PlaceTrapped in the Moving-Picture Machine

Spinning in Place

Modern Times tells the story of the Little Tramp, Charlie Chaplin's indefatigable silent screen persona, “spectacularly failing” to fit into the dehumanizing automated world of the 1930s industrial city, with its skyscrapers, factory plants, and assembly lines.⁸ A Great Depression comedy about the capitalist machine and one worker who perpetually gums up the works, Modern Times is also haunted by Chaplin's childhood. Although he became a Hollywood icon, Chaplin was a Victorian, born in London's poverty-ridden neighborhood of Walworth in 1889, and he fashioned the Tramp after the real-life tramps he saw growing up on East Street.⁹ The opening factory sequence of Modern Times reflected the brutal conditions on American assembly lines, including reports Chaplin heard of men having nervous breakdowns after years of performing the same repetitive work, but it was also inspired by an earlier era of industrialization. The scene of the Tramp pulled into the machine was based on Chaplin's memory of the twenty-foot-long Wharfedale printing machine that he feared would devour him when he worked in a London printshop as a boy.¹⁰ The Wharfedale was an iron giant of a printing press invented in 1856 in response to the growing demand for newspapers and magazines in Britain (figure 5.3). It revolutionized printing through the use of a rotary process known as the stop-cylinder, in which paper is fed into a rotating cylinder on a plate bed that rocks backward and forward. It is not difficult to picture a young Chaplin dwarfed by the Wharfedale and frightened that he could be sucked beneath the rotor and flattened into newsprint.

Figure 5.3. Wharfedale printing press. John Southward, Modern Printing: A Handbook of the Principles and Practice of Typography and the Auxiliary Arts, 3rd ed. (Raithby, Lawrence, 1912–1913).

In Modern Times, Chaplin layers the depression-era US factory on top of the late Victorian industrialized workplace. The rotating wheels that power the conveyor belt are a slick technological reconfiguration of the stop-cylinder rolling over the long, flat plate bed. Comparing Modern Times to Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Garrett Stewart points out that the film is part of the genre of industrial fiction that anxiously and satirically explores the industrial regulation and automatization of labor and the mechanization of human behavior under capitalism.¹¹ My argument is that Modern Times also participates in a nineteenth-century visual history of representing the body-in-machine and body-as-machine through structures of circularity and repetition, and the body as spinning, twisting, and whirling to the rhythms of steam-powered wheels. This history begins, like Chaplin's career, in the printshop, with an unassuming toy called the phenakistoscope.

Invented in 1832 by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, the phenakistoscope is an optical toy composed of a large spinning disk mounted on a handle (figure 5.4).¹² A sequence of figures is arranged around the circumference of the disk and interspersed by small apertures. The spectator plays with the toy by holding it up to their eye in front of a mirror, looking through an aperture, and spinning the disk. When these three actions are performed at the same time, the spectator will perceive the sequence of figures on the disk reflected in the mirror as an unbroken animated flow. The phenakistoscope thus demonstrated the perceptual illusion that nineteenth-century scientists called persistence of vision.¹³ The term was coined by eighteenth-century physicists and taken up by Plateau in his study of retinal afterimages. Like Aristotle and Isaac Newton before him, Plateau was interested in the way the retina retains light impressions after the visual stimulus disappears and the way these impressions can seem to fuse or blend with one another when perceived in quick succession.¹⁴ In Plateau's words, this effect of light impressions “blend[ing] together without confusion” creates an illusion that “a single object is gradually changing form and position.”¹⁵ His 1829 doctoral dissertation at the University of Liège, “Dissertation on Some Properties of the Impressions Produced by Light on the Eye,” fixed the length of a light impression on the eye at roughly one-third of a second, with slightly different durations for impressions of different colors. This meant that if objects or images were presented to the eye every one-third of a second, the illusion called persistence of vision would occur.

Figure 5.4. A family plays together with phenakistoscopes. Detail of an illustration by E. Schule on the box label for Magic Disk, Disques Magiques, ca. 1833.

The phenakistoscope, a neologism composed of Greek roots that means “deceptive view,” was Plateau's proof of concept for this theory. His original disk, printed the following year by the London print seller Ackermann & Co., depicted a ballet dancer drawn in sixteen different poses (figure 5.5).¹⁶ When you spin the disk, you see the dancer turn en pointe with lifted arm and leg. Your eye is not limited to seeing a single twirling dancer; instead, you see at least three twirling dancers in a row. Rather than a singular virtual moving image, the phenakistoscope created a series of virtual moving images simultaneously. As Plateau described it in his first public announcement of the invention in January 1833, “When one subjects this disk to the experiment in question, one sees with surprise, and the illusion is complete, all these little dancers turning round, with the direction of their pirouette depending on the speed and direction of the rotation of the disk.”¹⁷ The result is what film critic David Robinson has called “the earliest form of moving picture.”¹⁸ It is important to distinguish the moving images of the phenakistoscope from those of the phantasmagoria. As I discussed in chapter 4, the phantasmagoria simulated motion in two ways: by progressively enlarging or shrinking the virtual image, creating the effect that it was approaching or retreating, or through trick slides that substituted one image for another, creating the effect of a single image metamorphosing. The phenakistoscope, by contrast, broke down movement into distinct pictorial phases and reconstructed it as an optical illusion of motion. Film historians generally agree that the phenakistoscope is the first moving-picture machine. David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith's Film History: An Introduction, the definitive film history textbook, begins the story of cinema with the phenakistoscope, while Deac Rossell considers the phenakistoscope, along with later moving-image toys like the zoetrope and praxinoscope, among a handful of devices that represent “the origin of the movies.”¹⁹

Figure 5.5. Phenakistoscope disk designed by Joseph Plateau. Courtesy of the National Science and Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.

While these film scholars are not wrong to see the phenakistoscope as a technological precursor to the cinematographic apparatuses of the late nineteenth century, the emphasis on the phenakistoscope's “cinematicity” risks overlooking its quite distinct virtual effects and modes of spectatorship. For instance, film historians and theorists have wrongly associated the phenakistoscope's moving images with a mode of spectatorship in which visual experience is produced for a passive spectator.²⁰ In fact, the phenakistoscope was designed and marketed as a reflexive pedagogical toy that made the creation of virtual images an actively engaged and embodied process on the part of a user who, unlike a spectator at the cinema, was always in control of their visual experience. A product of the tradition of rational recreations and natural magic, the phenakistoscope was meant to demonstrate an optical illusion that occurs at the intersection of technological and physiological optics, of apparatus and eye. Like the stereoscope, it is a pedagogical device that operates through playful interaction—a precursor to what we might today call active learning. This is reflected in Plateau's description of the phenakistoscope's virtual images as the result of an “experiment.” Spinning a phenakistoscope is a science experiment that simultaneously creates an entertaining series of moving images and yields insights into the nature of vision.

The phenakistoscope gave birth to the paradigmatic form of the spectator as showman. Unlike the magic show's strict separation between showman and audience, and cinema's separation between apparatus and image, the phenakistoscope is meant to be both operated and appreciated by one person who has complete control over the speed, direction, and duration of the virtual moving images that they see. Even representations of cospectatorship, such as the many drawings and prints from the period that show lovers or families looking through the apertures of the phenakistoscope together, emphasize the agency of users to create and manage their own visual experience. The spectator's visual and manual participation is as necessary to the creation of virtual moving images as the apparatus itself. This format would continue throughout the nineteenth century in a succession of hand-operated optical toys that refined the phenakistoscope's basic technique through new and innovative technological designs, from the zoetrope and praxinoscope, which retained the circularity and repetition of the phenakistoscope by replacing the spinning disk with a spinning drum, to the flip-book, which introduced a linear and developmental logic to moving pictures.

Throughout the 1830s, printshops in London, Paris, and other European cultural capitals responded to the craze for moving pictures by manufacturing and selling phenakistoscopes as well as artist-designed folios of disks. Their advertisements and packaging often capitalized on the reality effect of the phenakistoscope's animations by declaring them “Living Pictures.” The term acknowledges the discursive association between spinning a phenakistoscope and animating its pictures, coding the process of making still pictures move as infusing representations with life. We also see this connection between the moving picture and the living picture in William George Horner's blueprint for a device based on the phenakistoscope, one that would later be called the zoetrope. Horner called his invention the Daedaleum, after Daedalus, the craftsman of Greek myth whose statues were so lifelike they moved by themselves. Writing in The London Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science in 1834, two years after Plateau's invention, he explained that the Daedaleum would imitate “the practice which the celebrated artist of antiquity was fabled to have invented, of creating figures of men and animals endued with motion.”²¹ The slippage here between the two senses of animation—giving static pictures motion and giving inanimate objects life—can help us speculate about the imaginative dimensions of early moving-image spectatorship. Phenakistoscope spectatorship is active, embodied, physical; it relies, as Tom Gunning puts it, on the spectator's coordination of hand and eye.²² By making pictures move, the person who spins the phenakistoscope disk or the drum of the zoetrope becomes an animator, an endower of life.

Yet as we have seen, the phenakistoscope does not simply make images move—it makes them move in a circle that repeats as the disk spins. To account for the imaginative dimensions of phenakistoscope play, as well as the role of this device in film history, it is critical that we appreciate the formal and phenomenological affordances of this confined and confining serial format. Dulac and Gaudreault write of the phenakistoscope:

The subjects are like Sisyphus, condemned ad infinitum to turn about, jump, and dance. In another sense, the figures are machine-like: untiring and unalterable. They are “acted-upon subjects” rather than “acting-out subjects.”²³

Dulac and Gaudreault base their account on a formal and technical analysis of the apparatus, the way its circularity strips the figures it portrays of agency and condemns them to perpetual motion. I take this argument even further. From the moment of its invention, the phenakistoscope did not simply produce but explored the idea of a mechanical or automated human body as a figure for technological modernity through motifs of manual labor, machines and tools, and behavioral and psychic compulsion. In a literal sense, it is the spectator who acts upon the subjects of the phenakistoscope by spinning the disk, and the act of spinning that “condemn[s]” the subjects to this “acted-upon” position. The spectator is at once animator of the moving image and operator of the figures represented on the disk. By visualizing working bodies and industrial machines whose constrained and repetitious movements are controlled by the leisurely spectator, phenakistoscopes enacted a cyclical temporality expressive of the technological and industrial scene of capitalist labor.

To understand this more fully, we must consider the visual rhetoric of the disks themselves. The imagery of early phenakistoscopes was varied, not only across publishers and the artists they commissioned to design folios of disks but also within folios themselves.²⁴ For example, the first of three folios published by Rudolph Ackermann consisted of six disks designed by Plateau with artist Jean-Baptiste Madou. These included not only Plateau's ballet dancer but also showy and formally innovative designs like “Serpent Disappearing over the Edge,” in which the snakes seem to emerge from the center of the disk and slither out beyond the frame. While much of the scholarship on the phenakistoscope focuses on this type of phantasmagorical disk, with its “unnerving effect of the world of the illusion overlapping on one's own,” the preponderance of disks did not feature gothic imagery or the illusion of the moving image breaching the boundary between disk and world.²⁵ As Meredith Bak puts it, phenakistoscope disks instead “are densely populated by gears propelled by people and animals or running autonomously, modeling relationships between men and machines and lauding the tireless efforts of industrial technologies.”²⁶ Subjects include men and women smelting iron, chopping wood, juggling balls, and performing acrobatic and contortionist feats, and machines made of cogs, wheels, and pulleys (figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6. Assorted phenakistoscope disks.

This is particularly true of two folios produced by Simon Stampfer, the Austrian mathematician who invented an almost identical device to Plateau's in February 1833 and called it the stroboscope. In contrast to Plateau's focus on the human body and phantasmagorical transformation, Stampfer's disks foregrounded machinery and laboring bodies and included subjects like mechanical hammers, toothed wheels, women pumping water, and men sawing.²⁷ Designers working after Plateau and Stampfer, including Thomas Talbot Bury, Thomas Mann Baynes, Alphonse Giroux, and the anonymous designers of London folios published by W. Soffe and E. Wallis, often used a layered composition to make the most use of the space of the disk, with a main subject, usually involving human activity, forming the topmost circle, and smaller inner circles featuring animals, dancing devils, spirals, or wheels.

The phenakistoscope transforms all bodies into working bodies, regardless of subject matter. While many of the disks represent recreational human behavior like horseback riding and men playing leapfrog, I agree with Bak that the disks “synchronize” work and play “to the same tempo.”²⁸ Bodies on the phenakistoscope appear mechanized, automated, moving “with the same precision and fluidity as the workings of machinery.”²⁹ The man who pumps water from a well and the man who tosses his ball to a frog are both condemned to repeat this action again and again; each time the water will flow from the pump into a wooden bucket, the frog will catch the ball in his mouth and swallow it, and each sequence will repeat. The bucket never overflows, and the frog is never full; the working man never tires or takes a break, and the playing man never runs out of balls; the sense of perpetual motion is the same. Just over a century before Modern Times, in which the Tramp's body becomes regulated by the circular and repeating rhythms of the mass production line and is swallowed up by the strange clockwork of the industrial machine, the circular and repeating phenakistoscope “formally replicated the tireless logic of mass production” and depicted the factory worker as “another cog in the larger industrial apparatus.”³⁰ Chaplin picks up on the phenakistoscope's collapsing of the distinction between work and play when he has the Tramp spin through the cogs of the machine to the sound of merry-go-round music, scoring a workplace accident to the cadences of holiday fun.³¹

A close examination of phenakistoscope disks reveals shades of Chaplin's Tramp: men and women fated to move in circles by the requirements and psychic compulsions of factory labor and the industrial machine. More than a dancing man, Plateau's original phenakistoscope disk seems to show a windup toy or ballerina in a mechanical music box. He is stiff and expressionless, and when the disk is spun, he turns on pointed toes with inhuman precision, as if moved by clockwork. His movement is perfectly circular, echoing the shape of the disk as well as its circular motion as it is spun by the spectator. Plateau's dancer reflects the device of which he is an icon: a machine that moves in circles (the mechanical dancer) as the visual representation of a machine that moves in circles (the phenakistoscope). The integration of and symmetry between human and machine is similarly represented in a much-copied disk by the London publisher E. Wallis that imagines a mechanical sawmill, turning the human labor of chopping or sawing wood into a feat of industrial machinery, and in a disk published by W. Soffe in which a large, heavy black hammer hovers above a piece of hot metal on an anvil and rhythmically hits it, dwarfing the blacksmith and seemingly rendering him obsolete (figure 5.6). Such disks reflect the effects of the industrial revolution, which moved artisan labor performed in homes and workshops into the factory and streamlined manual labor with the use of machines. Just as Plateau's dancer appears automated, a mechanical toy within a mechanical toy, the E. Wallis and W. Soffe disks explore the mechanization of human labor—the requirement that workers become machines or be displaced by them.

Plateau's first disk not only alludes to the phenakistoscope's mechanization of the human body, what Bak refers to as the synchronizing of human movement to the rhythm of the factory, but equally to the phenakistoscope's circular and repeating format. The dancer does not leap in the air or move from first to second position; he spins in place, embodying Dulac and Gaudreault's insight that the moving figures of the phenakistoscope are “hostage[s]” to circularity and repetition. The phenakistoscope presents spinning in place as the temporality of workers under capitalism and as a fundamental condition of industrial modernity. We see this thematized in the repeated motif of rodents running in wheels, a visual idiom—“like a hamster in a wheel”—that reflects the temporal conditions of the phenakistoscope itself. For example, Alphonse Giroux's “Le bûcheron et le souris” (“The Woodcutter and the Mouse”) layers a mouse running in circles inside a small compartment beneath its main subject of a woodcutter repeatedly chopping a piece of wood on a stump. Giroux thus connects the man's labor to the scurrying of the mouse and implies that both activities are equally fruitless to the one performing them.

The hamster-in the-wheel trope can help us identify a second theme of bodies moving in circles in phenakistoscope disks, one in which the body can be held hostage to spinning in place not by the logic of mass production but by universalizable behavioral or psychological traits. In a disk designed by Thomas Talbot Bury for Ackermann's second folio, a woman grabs a man by his coattails and beats him over the head with a paddle; beneath this plane of action is an interior wheel populated by smaller wheels; inside each of these smaller wheels, a squirrel runs in circles. Unlike the mouse in the wheel in Giroux's disk, Bury's squirrel is the peanut gallery commenting on the man and woman's unresolvable conflict and turning it into a comic parable of shrewish wives and foolish husbands: “it was ever thus, and ever will be thus.” A Punch cartoon from 1848 builds on this trope when it satirizes parliamentary conflict through a phenakistoscope disk depicting two members of Parliament meeting, poised in fisticuffs, and shaking hands: “The following are the points of the circle around which Members revolve,” the accompanying text states, “chasing one another, with as much result as a dog running after his tail; that is to say, only exciting the merriment of those who look on.”³² Like the squirrel in the wheel or the dog that chases its tail, the married couples and politicians that revolve in the phenakistoscope disk are driven by their own folly to repeat themselves again and again without learning from their mistakes.

At the broadest level, the bodies of phenakistoscope disks are in thrall to invisible forces beyond their control, forces that act through them and determine their fate. In this regard, phenakistoscope disks mediate between traditional conceptions of the Wheel of Fortune drawn from medieval philosophy—the wheel spun by Fortuna to determine the fates of men—and its nineteenth-century interiorization in the theory of the unconscious. The spinning men and women on phenakistoscope disks simultaneously evoke medieval paintings of men and women sitting on or clinging to a rotating wooden wheel and what Sigmund Freud would later call the “passive experience” of the psychoanalytic patient, “over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality.”³³ The “compulsion to repeat,” which Freud described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as a state in which the patient unconsciously engineers the same fate for himself again and again, draws on the very notion of an “acted-upon” subject while proposing that the forces that act upon us and that we externalize in the form of enemies, antagonists, or even social and economic conditions, are ultimately psychic and interior. Phenakistoscope disks present us with a vision of acted-upon bodies, bodies compelled to repeat, that is unrulier and more ambiguous than Freud's. The figures on the disks are at once mechanized, automated, animated, and compulsive; compelled by economic relations, machine capitalism, social convention, and human nature; driven by cultural imperatives and unconscious needs.

These visual references to compulsion, mechanization, animation, and remote control come together in a phenakistoscope disk of unknown origin made around 1840 (figure 5.7). As became common after Bury's folio for Ackermann in 1833, the disk is divided into three pictorial planes that all reference the phenakistoscope's logic of circularity and repetition. In the outer ring, a small, elfin fellow in a ruffled collar and red cap spins a top by means of a string coiled around its axis. When pulled quickly, the string sets the top spinning. This kind of top is featured in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting Children Games (1560), where the players include a boy in a red cap similar to that worn by the child on the disk, suggesting that we might read him as a boy at play. The top, meanwhile, is personified with a human face, and as it spins, it quakes in horror, open-mouthed as if screaming, eyes tilted upward to the face of his tormenter. The string, which the boy raises in the air before bringing it back down around the top, reads distinctly as a whip, turning the act of spinning into an assault. The middle ring features black devils, as if in silhouette, cartwheeling against a pale blue background. They turn cartwheels over a center ring made to look like a wooden wheel with alternating green and purple spokes.

Figure 5.7. Phenakistoscope disk depicting a boy and a spinning top. Courtesy of the National Science and Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.

This is the most explicitly reflexive phenakistoscope disk that I have come across in my research because it not only references the device's status as a spinning toy but also explores the role of the active spectator in creating “living pictures” through the act of spinning. The boy stands in for those who play with the phenakistoscope, while the uncannily personified spinning top, with its pug nose and full set of teeth, can be read as a commentary on the marketing of the phenakistoscope by Soffe and others as a “Living Picture.” Like the boy who spins the top, the spectator who spins the phenakistoscope brings pictures to life. Here we have a representation not only of the manual and perceptual process of animation—persistence of vision achieved through the coordination of hand and eye—but equally of Dulac and Gaudreault's characterization of the figures on the phenakistoscope as “acted upon.” While the boy plays gleefully and absorbedly, his tongue stuck out irreverently, the top's obvious terror implies a relation of dominance and submission, even of master and slave. The top spins because it is captive to the player, under his control. In this tongue-and-cheek disk, to play with a phenakistoscope is to possess and exercise control over the life and movements of another by making it work—making it spin—for your pleasure. The devilish imps are a common trope in moving-image toys as well as in nineteenth-century stage magic and early cinema, likely drawing on the many variants of the Faust story that depicted Mephistopheles as a visual conjurer and master of illusions.³⁴ Here, the devils subject the image to overdetermination. The top is controlled by the child who spins it, but the devil may have possessed the child to perform this action in the first place—indeed, the devil serves as a figure for the compulsion to sadism that animates the boy to animate the top. The disk imagines the moving images of the phenakistoscope as subject to and possessed by mysterious forces—not coming to life but brought to life, not acting but acted upon.

I have offered a reading of the phenakistoscope as a toy that comments on labor and power under industrial capitalist modernity through its serial format, circular and repeating structure, and representational content. The phenakistoscope and the spinning moving-image toys that followed it prefigure and contextualize the factory scene in Modern Times not only by depicting “acted upon” bodies subjected to forces outside their control, bodies like machines activated through buttons and levers, but more specifically bodies technologically conditioned to move tirelessly in circles. The motif of the wheel, at once evoked through the phenakistoscope's circular design and reflexively represented on the disks themselves, is an overdetermined figure for the industrial machine, civilizational and technological progress, compulsive hamster-in-the-wheel behavior, the Wheel of Fortune, and unconscious drives. In the following section, we will see how these ideas come together in new configurations in the late fiction of Thomas Hardy. Hardy develops an account of what I call the mechanical unconscious as a driving force in the operations of industrial capitalism. He draws his account from the visual rhetoric and procedural logic of phenakistoscopes and other spinning moving-image toys.

Circuits and Reels

The factory is not a scene in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, but it is a presence. Hardy's novels and short stories take place in Wessex, his fictional Dorset, among woodsmen and dairy maids, pig farmers and corn threshers—the preindustrial agricultural laborers whose lives were being uprooted by the industrial revolution. Because of his nostalgia for and identification with the culture and the lifeways of a rapidly disappearing rural England, Hardy is sometimes misread as a Luddite disengaged from the forces of urbanization and mechanization that his novels critique.³⁵ The second half of this chapter challenges this characterization by tracing the phenakistoscope's logic of spinning in place through the final decade of Hardy's career as a fiction writer, from the mid-1880s to mid-1890s. As Margaret Kolb has noted, Hardy's Wessex novels have circular structures driven by the circular movements of their characters.³⁶ Her chief example is Michael Henchard, the protagonist of The Mayor of Casterbridge, whose journey through the novel takes him back to where he started, “the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before,” after having lost his position as mayor and his distinguished station in the town following a scandal.³⁷ Rather than what Kolb calls “plot circles,” circularity as a narrative form for the novel, I am interested in circularity and repetition as a representation of technological or automated human behavior across Hardy's fiction. Following Caroline Lesjak's description of Hardy as a chronicler of “the local, lived experience of emergent capitalist relations,” I argue that Hardy turns to the motif of circling bodies to show how human lives and labors are automated by the machinery of modernity.³⁸ By placing The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) alongside the short stories “On the Western Circuit” (1891) and “The Fiddler of the Reels” (1893), I reveal how Hardy builds human narratives structured by the phenakistoscope's formal logic of circularity and repetition—narratives that are suggested by the phenakistoscope but that this device, with its inherently non-narrative structure, is unable to develop itself. These narratives generate an account of the mechanical unconscious, or unconscious drives expressed through mechanical motion, that are incipient in the phenakistoscope disks that I discussed in the previous section.

Through Henchard and his circular journey, The Mayor of Casterbridge develops the relation between circular repetitions and unconscious drives. This latter term is obviously anachronistic, and I realize that it risks incorrectly conflating Hardy's strange and complicated account of human behavior with Freud's later definition, so let me be more specific. In speaking of unconscious drives in Hardy, I am referring to a structure of nonconscious motivation that he described in his notebook variously as “human automatism” and “people moving under enchantment.” This force “works to make a person, a people, &c., do one set of things while believing another”³⁹ and leads to “human action in spite of human knowledge.”⁴⁰ These notes, all from the mid to late 1880s, describe Hardy's interest in a split consciousness that drives people to act in opposition to what they know or believe. “Automatism,” a term drawn from the world of technology (automata) to describe actions undertaken mechanically rather than from consciousness or will, leads to what Dulac and Gaudreault call in the phenakistoscope “acted-upon subjects.” In this case, however, a person can be acted upon by themselves. One can act in spite of one's “knowledge”; that is, action can be driven by something other than conscious knowledge.

Henchard's circular trajectory exemplifies this “automatic” state of being. When he finds himself on “the road by which his wife and himself had entered . . . five-and-twenty years ago,” a reference to the opening scene of the novel, he means merely to “visit.”⁴¹ But Henchard's intention to “go on from this place” is overpowered by “thoughts of Elizabeth,” his stepdaughter:

Out of this it happened that the centrifugal tendency imparted by his weariness of the world was counteracted by the centripetal influence of his love for his stepdaughter. As a consequence, instead of following a straight course yet further away from Casterbridge, Henchard gradually, almost unconsciously, deflected from that right line of his first intention; till, by degrees, his wandering, like that of the Canadian woodsman, became part of a circle of which Casterbridge formed the center.⁴²

The circle that Henchard “almost unconsciously” walks around Casterbridge is not only in opposition to the “straight course” but also to “that right line of his first intention.” In other words, his circling is a symptom of that “automatism,” or unconscious drive, that makes people act in spite of their intentions, decisions, or plans. This description of automatism draws, like the term itself, from the mechanical world. Henchard's “unconscious” movement is governed by “centripetal” and “centrifugal” forces, the opposing forces that cause an object to rotate. The “tendency imparted by his weariness of the world”—the desire to move farther from Casterbridge but also the desire to die—is “centrifugal,” while the “influence of his love for his stepdaughter”—the desire to return to Casterbridge but also the desire to live—is “centripetal.” Henchard's circling is a paradoxical form of stasis—immobilized movement that comes from ambivalence and contradictory desires. Henchard not only traces a circle from the beginning of the novel to the end, as Kolb has argued; he spins in place.⁴³

The Mayor of Casterbridge takes place in the historical past, beginning “before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span” and continuing eighteen years later, probably around mid-century. If the action occurs at a distance from the factories, production lines, and industrial machines referenced in phenakistoscope disks, it is also set during the period of the phenakistoscope's popularity. The novel's depiction of human agency evokes the phenakistoscope's connection between spinning and acted-upon bodies, the compulsion to repeat and the mechanization of human activity. Henchard is governed by the physics of spinning bodies, an invisible pair of forces that metaphorically represent the equally mechanistic, invisible, and totalizing effects of unconscious motivation. In this regard, we should read this scene of walking as an example of what Elaine Scarry, in the well-known essay “Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novelists,” describes as Hardy's technique of representing work through displacement so that even when “labor is suspended . . .the motion of the body at work seems to surround [Hardy's characters] like a ghost of perpetual action.”⁴⁴ For Scarry, what interests Hardy about work is precisely this sense of perpetual motion. “Work is action rather than discrete action,” she writes, and “has no identifiable beginning or end . . . It is the essential nature of work to be perpetual, repetitive, habitual.”⁴⁵ When we look closely at Henchard's circular walk, it becomes clear that Hardy draws on the logic of the spinning moving-image toy as a “solution” to what Scarry calls “the deep problems” in the representation of work as an ongoing activity.⁴⁶ The phenakistoscope not only offers a model for action without beginning or end but, as I have argued, it is deeply engaged in the representation of labor as a “perpetual, repetitive” activity.

Even as it seems to map so neatly onto Scarry's essay, my reading of Henchard's walk also poses an important challenge to hers. Scarry views both the activity of work and Hardy's perspective on it in romantic terms. To work, by threshing corn or trussing hay or cutting down trees, is to experience a sublime integration of self and world that analogizes the act of writing a novel, to be an “embodied human consciousness” and “embodied maker” who is “immersed in his interaction in the world, far too immersed to extricate himself from it.”⁴⁷ Yet the centrifugal and centripetal forces that act on Henchard more powerfully than his own will do not point to an experience of work as embodied, conscious making but rather of work as the body being divided from the mind so that it can be made use of. In the scene of Henchard walking, as in the other examples I will discuss in the remainder of this chapter, Hardy draws on the language of physics and automation and the visual and technological procedures of the moving-image toy to represent embodied labor as alienated labor. These scenes have very little to do with the experience of plenitude that Scarry finds elsewhere in Hardy's representation of work and the body. Instead, they show bodies governed by forces that are at once externally and internally generated, beyond conscious control.

Hardy's representation of the alienated working body that spins in place finds its most articulate form in two of Hardy's short stories. Originally written for magazines, “On the Western Circuit” and “The Fiddler of the Reels” were republished in Life's Little Ironies (1894), a collection that Martin Ray calls “an alternative fictional world” to Wessex novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge. Instead of “the world of rural occupations and traditional craft” that takes center stage in his novels, the stories in Life's Little Ironies are populated by urban professionals—“outsiders” to the country villages where they predominantly take place.⁴⁸ “On the Western Circuit” and “The Fiddler of the Reels” are set in the present day (when Hardy wrote the stories) and feature tropes of urban and industrial modernity like steam-powered machines, technologized popular culture, and world's fairs. Through optical and mechanical motifs drawn from the modern world and registered by the “circuits” and “reels” of their titles, these stories represent working people in thrall to the compulsion—at once technological, economic, and psychic—that drives them to move in circles.

“On the Western Circuit” opens with Charles Braford Raye “endeavoring to gain amid the darkness [of night] a glimpse” of the ruins of a cathedral.⁴⁹ Raye, whom the narrator immediately warns us will “[play] the disturbing part” in the story, is a judge on the West Country judicial circuit who has stopped over in Melchester on business and is doing a bit of sightseeing. Despite his name, Raye is unable to see much of the cathedral, but the walls “reflected sharply a roar of sound” from the city square and draw him into the tumult of a fair replete with the noises of “steam barrel-organs, the clanging of gongs, the ringing of hand-bells” and the kinetic technological activity of rides like “swings, see-saws, flying-leaps” (244–45). The centerpiece of the fair is “three steam roundabouts,” or steam circuses, better known today as merry-go-rounds (245). Raye stops in front of the largest roundabout to watch its brilliant musical revolutions; among the many “gyrating personages” on the ride he spots the “prettiest girl,” Anna (245–46). They spend the evening together, later have sex, and after Raye has moved onward on the Western Circuit, she finds herself pregnant. She is illiterate, so she asks her employer Edith Harnham to write Raye love letters on her behalf. Raye falls in love by correspondence with the writer of the letters; he marries Anna, only to realize his mistake.

“On the Western Circuit” points through its title to the story's central metaphors: circuits and circling. While the narrative mostly deals with letter writing, and indeed was nearly called “The Writer of the Letters,” Hardy's ultimate choice of title places the thematic emphasis on the opening scene of the fair and its powerfully realized central figure of the roundabout: another sort of “Western circuit” powered, like industrial capitalism itself, by steam.⁵⁰ The roundabout registers industrial modernity's disruptions and transformations of traditional English life and particularly its effects on the body. Like the merry-go-round music that scores the Tramp's twirl through the machine, Hardy's roundabout collapses technologies of work and play. The pleasure-seekers Raye sees on the rides, like the conveyor-belt workers in Modern Times, are “so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by machinery” (245). Of course, as Raye notices a moment later when the riders themselves come into view, the riders are moved by machinery. Yet the momentary ambiguity about the motion of these bodies registers the story's broader concern with how industrial modernity “seems” to mechanize the body. As Michael Niblett argues, the scene at the fair conveys “the dislocating, estranging effect of the contemporary modernization of the English countryside” on those who traditionally worked the land—laborers now “reduced . . . to lifeless bodies animated only by the movement of the machinery.”⁵¹ The condition of being “moved by machinery” applies as well to Raye, the professional man: a circuit judge travels in circles powered by another kind of steam engine, the train.

The circular nature of the roundabout is critical to Hardy's representation of the industrial animation and automation of the body. Unlike the train, the paradigmatic symbol of technological and industrial modernity, the roundabout is a steam circus, meaning that it is incapable of moving forward. Its inexorable circling not only literalizes the “circuitry” of the West England circuit court that Raye traverses by train but also provides a metaphorical framework for Hardy's diagnosis of the acted-upon body, compelled to circle and repeat, as a product of capitalist industrialization. This laboring body is made to work in service of the capitalist ideal of technological and civilizational progress, but progress is precisely what it is incapable of. There is no progression, no forward movement, in Hardy's vision of capitalism. His Western civilization is a Western circuit.

Hardy develops these themes by styling the roundabout as a kind of large-scale, interactive moving-image toy. John Plotz has compared the scopic dimensions of Hardy's roundabout, which spins in circles repeatedly for the pleasure of the “idle spectator,” to the experience of playing with a phenakistoscope.⁵² There are some obvious drawbacks to this comparison, which runs the risk of collapsing the discrete contexts of the parlor room and the fairground and flattening the differences in technology, scale, and qualities of movement between the two devices. Not all circular, spinning devices are phenakistoscopes after all. Yet Plotz's observation is an important one and even richer than his analysis bears out because Hardy's description of the roundabout actually sees him drawing on two dimensions of Victorian moving-image culture. First, the roundabout reflects the cultural imaginary of the phenakistoscope as a medium through which the spectator mechanizes and remotely controls the laboring body by making the apparatus spin. When Raye pays for Anna to take another ride, “producing his money” so that “she was enabled to whirl on again,” the situation recalls both the capitalistic and industrial imaginary of phenakistoscope spectatorship and the portrayal of the phenakistoscope's moving bodies as working bodies (248). It reimagines what phenakistoscope disks portrayed as the fraught and controlling relationship between the spinner and the spun, the spectator and the body in motion, as a narrative situation structured by dynamics of gender and class. Second, Hardy draws on the language of optical technology to portray the roundabout as a technology that produces virtual images.

Rather than viewing the roundabout as a kind of phenakistoscope, I want to propose that Hardy's roundabout is constructed out of the moving, mechanical, and virtual effects of a variety of optical toys. For instance, the story clearly invokes the optical and technological regime of persistence of vision in its description of the roundabout's mechanical horses. They move with “a galloping rise and fall, so timed that, of each pair of steed, one was on the spring while the other was on the pitch,” like Eadweard Muybridge's instantaneous serial photographs of a galloping horse in Animal Locomotion (1887) and their reconstruction as moving images through the zoopraxiscope, his combination phenakistoscope/magic lantern (245–46). With its “long plate-glass mirrors set at angles” that “revolved with the machine” and “flashed the gyrating personages and hobby-horses kaleidoscopically into [Raye's] eyes” (245) the roundabout also resembles the praxinoscope, a toy that creates circular and repeating moving images when a paper strip with pictures of successive motion is placed inside a spinning drum with long flat mirrors forming a circle at the center (figure 5.8). Just as Raye sees the horses and people moving in the mirrors at the center of the roundabout, so do the static pictures on the paper strip transform into moving images when seen reflected in the central mirrors. The term “kaleidoscopic” derives from the kaleidoscope, an optical toy that reflects small pieces of glass in an infinite array of luminous patterns. Its use here makes it explicit that Raye does not see Anna herself, “the prettiest girl out of the several pretty ones revolving,” but a virtual image mediated by mirrors and light.

Figure 5.8. The praxinoscope. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

The construction of the object of desire as a virtual image is a motif across Hardy's work, as is the encounter between lovers mediated by mirrors.⁵³ “On the Western Circuit” modulates this theme of erotic desire as visual and perceptual illusion through the roundabout's spectral mechanics.⁵⁴ Anna is not just a mirror image—she is a persistence of vision illusion created at the intersection of the roundabout's circuitry, the mirror, and Raye's observing gaze. Like Muybridge's horse or the merrymakers and horseback riders on a phenakistoscope disk, Anna is part of a series composited into an animated moving image when the roundabout spins. The narrator claims that “the observer's eye centered on the prettiest girl out of the several pretty ones revolving,” positioning her as one in a series of girls on the ride, only to interject in Raye's free indirect discourse that “it was not that one with the light frock and light hat whom he had been first attracted by; no, it was the one with the black cape, grey skirt, light gloves and—no, not even she, but the one behind her.” Hardy implies that Anna is not “selected” as the “prettiest”; rather, she is a product of all the women fusing together in the “kaleidoscopic” whirl of images (246). Anna is, as her name evokes in this context, an animation, a lifelike illusion produced at the interface of the spinning, mirrored roundabout and Raye's “observer's eye.” This basic idea undergirds the story as it progresses: Raye will fall in love not with Anna herself, but with the composite figure of Anna and Edith produced by Edith's ghost-written letters.

In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard's “centrifugal” and “centripetal” condition of spinning in place represents his psychological state. With “On the Western Circuit,” Hardy is less concerned with individual psychology than with modern experience broadly conceived. He turns to the visual and technological imaginary of moving-image toys and to the tropes of circularity, repetition, and optical illusion to express a vision of industrial modernity as a condition of spinning and being spun. Raye, Anna, and Edith all emerge from and are characterized by Hardy's infernal fairground, an “eighth chasm of the Inferno” in which “human figures” swing up, down, and around “like gnats against a sunset” (244–45). This is a world in which men and women do not move and act deliberately but rather are moved and acted upon—a world in which you are either riding the roundabout, subject to its illusions, or compelled, like the wealthy Edith, to fuel the engine to keep the machine running. The “Inferno” referenced here is, of course, Dante's; the “eighth chasm” is the eighth circle of hell that Dante reserved for fraudsters. The hell of modernity is its technological circularity, its steam circuitry, that dooms those who dwell in it to endless repetition and to the illusions (visual frauds) that circularity and repetition produce. Put another way, in “On the Western Circuit,” the hell of modernity is a virtual moving-image toy.

A year after Hardy published “On the Western Circuit” in Harper's Weekly and The English Illustrated Magazine, he started work on a second story that centers even more explicitly on acted-upon bodies that move in circles. “The Fiddler of the Reels” was commissioned by Scribner's for a special number of the magazine devoted to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The story begins with a group of men who recall London's Great Exhibition of 1851 while “talking of Exhibitions, World's Fairs, and what not” in the present day.⁵⁵ This leads them to remember the story of three South Wessex people “whose queer little history was oddly touched at points by the Exhibition” (286). Car’line is a young Mellstock woman engaged to marry the mechanic Ned Hipcroft, but she is seduced by the itinerant fiddler Mop Allamoor after hearing him play his violin. Car’line's response to Mop is physiological and involuntary. When he plays the fiddle, “the aching of the heart seized her simultaneously with a wild desire to glide airily in the mazes of an infinite dance.” Mop, in effect, possesses her to dance to his music: “her tread convulsed itself more and more accordantly with the time of the melody” and “her gait could not divest itself of its ‘compelled capers’” (289). Thrown over by Car’line, Ned moves to London where he helps to build the Crystal Palace, the structure that housed the Great Exhibition. Shortly after the opening day of the Great Exhibition, he receives a letter from Car’line begging him to take her back, and she surprises him by arriving in London to marry him with a small child in tow: Little Carry, her daughter by Mop, who has abandoned her. Charmed by the child, Ned marries her anyway, and three years later they decide to leave London and return to Mellstock as a family. On the way, Car’line and her daughter stop at a pub, where she discovers Mop playing his fiddle. Her susceptibility to Mop's music undiminished by time, she finds herself dancing at the center of a reel, “weak” and “overpowered with hysteric emotion” but unable to stop (299). She faints; Ned arrives in time to revive her; but Mop disappears with the child. Their whereabouts are never discovered, but the “general opinion” finds that they have emigrated to America, the girl now trained “to keep him by her earnings as a dancer” while he plays his jigs and reels (304).

Like “On the Western Circuit,” “The Fiddler of the Reels” signals its interest in circular movement in the title. A reel is a folk dance in which the dancers form traveling figures, circling one another in a figure eight. The climax of the story sees Car’line Aspent “lose her power of independent will” (299) as she dances the center, or “axis,” of a five-handed reel to the violin strains of her ex-lover, moving in circles and unable to stop until she collapses in exhaustion. She is “the axis of a dizzily rotating human wheel,” Isobel Armstrong writes of Car’line, the dance's pattern “form[ing] a human zoetrope that becomes the center of the narrative.”⁵⁶ Although it is not clear to me that Hardy's dancers take the specific form of a zoetrope as opposed to another related optical toy, like the phenakistoscope, the reference to moving-image technology is clear. The title puns on the “reels” of many nineteenth-century moving-image devices, with strips of images wound or placed around a spinning drum, wheel, or cylinder—the term would soon be used, of course, to refer to the celluloid strips used to record film images. However, Hardy's description of Car’line is decidedly noncinematic. For instance, the dance is not a tableau or spectacle produced for the patrons of the bar: she moves at Mop's pleasure and for his pleasure alone. If she is like Plateau's mechanized dancer, Mop is the paradigmatic showman-spectator who both watches and sends her reeling:

She thus continued to dance alone, defiantly as she thought, but in truth slavishly and abjectly, subject to every wave of the melody, and probed by the gimlet-like gaze of her fascinator's open eye; keeping up at the same time a feeble smile in his face, as if a feint to signify it was still her own pleasure which led her on. (301)

Mop's gaze recalls what Armstrong calls the “voluntary” dimensions of optical spectatorship—the act of peering through the aperture—as well as the way playing with an optical toy creates movement out of static images in a manner that phenakistoscopes thematized as “involuntary,” or forced.⁵⁷ A gimlet “pierces,” and Mop's eye simultaneously immobilizes her and forces her to move. Car’line is spinning in place.

The subjugation of Car’line's body in this scene—indeed, the bodily violence of Mop's fiddling—is a critical dimension of the story's use of and reflection on moving-image toys. The “slavish” and “abject” nature of Car’line's dance recalls the phenakistoscope disk of the spinning top, with its visual ambiguity that turns the child's act of spinning the top by uncoiling the rope into a violent whipping (see figure 5.7). Hardy reimagines this relationship between toy and slave, play and torture, in the story's portrayal of dance as what Shannon Draucker terms “musical rape.” As Draucker notes, Mop's music has distinct and violent “bodily effects” that are “at once unwanted and uncontrollable,” causing Car’line literal pain and leaving her “in convulsions, weeping violently.”⁵⁸ Like the spinning top in the phenakistoscope disk, personified through its horrified demeanor, Car’line's distress is the human face of the objectification and automation enacted in moving-image toys.

We can better understand these dynamics of violence and subjugation when we attend to the layered meanings of the word “reel.” As a noun, “reel” refers both to the song Mop plays and the dance Car’line performs, exposing the way they are deterministically linked by the mysterious power that flows from the strains of Mop's instrument to Car’line's body. Dancing is not a matter of choice or will because Car’line “did not want to dance” (299). She is “seiz[ed],” instead, by a “saltatory tendency”—a tendency, that is, to dance, although the word's secondary meanings (leaping, abrupt movement) convey a physiological reaction to the music like a seizure or spasm. As a verb, “reel” doubles down on the power asymmetry that allows Mop to act on Car’line's body—Mop reels her (as a picture made to move) and reels her in (as a fish on the line), the result of which is that Car’line reels (spins, whirls, sways, staggers, shakes, becomes giddy, collapses).

The story hints that the mysterious power Mop has over Car’line's body is supernatural—he is after all “elfish,” “impish,” “wizardly,” and “fantastical,” a purveyor of “devil's tunes” and “witchery,” a character Frank Giordano calls “a composite folk and mythical figure” who is at once a “gypsy fiddler” and the devil himself.⁵⁹ If Car’line's “slavish” dance recalls the involuntary spinning of the top, Mop's “elfish” appearance and devilish power to bewitch is strikingly similar to the boy with the spinning top on the phenakistoscope disk I discussed in the last section (refer again to figure 5.7). Meanwhile, the narrator of the story disenchants these explanations by marshaling the evidence of modern science, comparing Mop's ability to control Car’line's body remotely to galvanism and mesmerism. Hardy's choice of names reveals a third possible explanation for Mop's capacity for remote control. Mop's given name, Wat, is a homonym for “Watt,” the inventor of the steam engine that powered the industrial revolution as well as what was at the time the recently coined name for a unit of electrical power. The apostrophe in “Car’line” turns her into a line of train cars powered by steam or electricity. The story thus coordinates sciences of mind like mesmerism, which allow one person to exercise their will over another, with the force that animates machines to illustrate a condition like Freud's compulsion to repeat, rendering Car’line as the passive subject possessed to act in the same way again and again in spite of the harm it causes her. (It is worth mentioning here that in his notebooks, Hardy uses “mesmerism” interchangeably with “automatism” and “enchantment” to name the force he describes as “human action in spite of human knowledge.”⁶⁰) Like the Dantean circling of the roundabout in “On the Western Circuit,” this story's vision of human bodies “driven” by an unseen and immaterial mesmeric-mechanical force is mediated by the atavistic motif of the devil. Devilry is not an explanatory mechanism for Hardy. As in the phenakistoscope disk of the spinning top, with its devilish imps turning cartwheels, devilry in Hardy is a signifier for the will to perpetual motion, to circularity and repetition, a drive that is at once technological and industrial (watts, cars) and physiological and psychic (mesmeric, unconscious). In this sense, Mop is less of a character than he is an expression of social, psychic, economic, and technological forces that make people spin.

We have seen that “On the Western Circuit” and “The Fiddler of the Reels” turn to the optical structure of circling and repetition to explore the relationship between determinism and free will and the way people are “whirled” by forces beyond their control. In doing so, Hardy critiques and reimagines the late Victorian civilizational ideology of capitalist, industrial, and technological progress. Rather than the linear, evolutionary, and teleological trajectories implied by the notion of progress, Hardy turns to the circular and repeating format of the phenakistoscope and the Sisyphean perpetual motion of its moving pictures to represent the temporality of bodies laboring under the requirements of industrial capitalism and the internalization of its requirements as drives. In both stories, machines and the unconscious are collapsed into a single force that simultaneously animates people and alienates them from themselves. Through characters compelled to circle and repeat—Anna, who spins on the roundabout for Raye's pleasure and coin; Raye, who spins along the western circuit for a wage; and Car’line, who spins on the dance floor transfixed by Mop's will—the stories play on the phenakistoscope's correlation of the optical animation of static bodies and the mechanization of working bodies by the requirements of industrial capital. Yet like the figures on phenakistoscope disks whose dancing and playing corresponds to the rhythms of the production line, Hardy's characters are pleasure seekers who find that fairgrounds, dances, courtship, and sex are mediated by and hold them hostage to the mechanical logic of the factory. For Hardy, there is no freedom from circling and repetition, compulsions that are at once imposed from without and generated from within.

The Mayor and the Tramp

What has any of this to do with Modern Times? I acknowledge the strangeness of claiming a Chaplin comedy as a genealogical descendent of the naturalist tragedies of Hardy. But what Hardy and Chaplin both offer us, I argue, is an industrial vision of the compulsion to repeat, in which the body is at once estranged from itself and animated by industrial modernization. The Tramp is not just compelled to repeat the same action, tightening nuts on a steel plate with a twist of his wrist, by the orders of the overseer; the repetitions begin to infect his body like a twitch, his shoulders and hands seizing up with the urge to keep moving in the same patterns. Once he is rescued from his revolution through the machine, this tendency to repeat the same circular action of twisting and tightening the nuts becomes compulsive. At first, it is as if the machine has automated his body. He cannot resist an opportunity to twist the tiny nutlike circles that now appear to him everywhere: as nipples, buttons, the handles of a fire hydrant. But eventually, this mechanistic behavior resolves into a paradoxical grace: the Tramp begins to dance, twirling about the factory and elegantly kicking his leg in the air as he squirts oil on the assembly line workers, no longer able to tell the difference between man and machine. What both versions of this “mad” routine have in common is the compulsive repetition of circular motion, whether twisting or twirling. Like Hardy's characters, the Tramp moves to the rhythms of the machine—he is the acted-upon subject of the factory's seemingly infinite rotating wheels and endlessly revolving conveyor belts.

Rather than thinking of the Tramp having a “nervous breakdown,” as the narrative instructs when the Tramp is loaded into an ambulance and committed to an asylum, we might read the opening factory sequence as a slapstick representation of the compulsion to repeat seen in the phenakistoscope and developed in the novels and short stories of Thomas Hardy. The circularity and repetition of the assembly line and its symptomatic manifestation in his body express the transformation of industrial capitalism's requirements into internal compulsions and drives. By associating the attempt to automate the Tramp's body with madness, Chaplin underscores what Hardy views as the close relationship between repetitious labor, the mechanics of spinning, and unconscious motivation. The Tramp's “breakdown” allows us to read him as a comic variation on Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge. His spinning in place in the factory literalizes Hardy's proto-psychoanalytic notion of “human automatism,” a psychic and embodied condition that he illustrates through Henchard's circular walk around Casterbridge buffeted by competing “centrifugal” and “centripetal” desires.

On closer examination, we can see how Modern Times develops its opening motif of the Tramp caught in the moving-picture machine by creating its own versions of some of Hardy's key metaphoric figures. Hardy's “circuit” and “reel”—the roundabout of “On the Western Circuit” and the dance of “The Fiddler of the Reels”—appear in the film's final act. The Tramp's companion, the Gamin, will find both of them jobs when she is spotted dancing outside a café and hired as a showgirl. The segment fades in on children riding a merry-go-round and then pans right, past the entrance of an establishment called the Red Moon Café, to show the Gamin dancing on the street; she twirls and leaps in circles to the sound of the carousel music for the pleasure of a group of bystanders, as if embodying its technological revolutions. Of course, the merry-go-round is also a callback to the Tramp's revolution through the factory machine. The scoring of the Tramp's workplace accident to the sounds of calliope music turns the Gamin's dance and the Tramp's assembly line work into doubles of each other, an association that is reinforced by the Tramp's own dance through the factory after he emerges from between the cogs. It also connects the Gamin's free-spirited movement to the mechanistic workings of the factory and the determinism of capital. Like the children who exchange a coin for a spin on the carousel, the man who runs the café—a white-haired capitalist smoking a cigar who recalls the factory owner at the Tramp's first job—will offer her a wage in exchange for dancing.

Spinning returns in the film's climax. This sequence of the film, in which the Tramp works as a singing waiter at the Red Moon Café, is famous because of the first use of the Tramp's voice, not only in the film but in more than twenty years on the screen. The nonsense language in which the Tramp sings is often read as a tribute to silent cinema as a universal visual language. The sequence also pays tribute to the serial technological formats out of which the cinema was born. The scene begins when the Tramp takes the order of an angry patron—another wealthy, white-haired man—who has been waiting for his roast duck. But just as he emerges from the kitchen with the tray, piled precipitously with dishes and a bottle of wine and held high above his head, all the customers have stood up to dance. As couples crowd the floor of the restaurant, the Tramp is trapped in the middle; jostled from side to side, all he can do is spin in a circle. Like Car’line in “The Fiddler of the Reels,” the Tramp is dancing involuntarily, against his own will. In a callback to the opening of the film, the silver tray that spins above his head begins to resemble one of the cogs or wheels from the steel factory. Chaplin's choice to transpose the comedy of automation from the factory into the dance hall shows the invariability of capitalist labor conditions and the requirement that workers perform with the regularity and ease of machines. Whether the Tramp is caught in the gears of the machine while working on an assembly line or caught in a crush of dancers while trying to serve dinner, spinning in place is the ineluctable condition of his life as a working man. Spinning in place at once shows the comic breakdown of human-as-machine, as in his failure to perform the seemingly simple task of walking a straight line from the kitchen to the patron's table, and represents its apotheosis: his infinitely repeating labor has separated the movements of his body from his will, turning him into a cog spun by and for the machine.

Alongside the phenakistoscope and the late fiction of Thomas Hardy, I propose that we read Modern Times as part of an alternative genealogy of moving pictures as non-narrative animation. Lev Manovich famously argues in “What Is Digital Cinema?” that we see the return of cinema's disavowed origin in animated loops, visual plasticity, and attractional forms of the optical toy in digital cinema, a claim that has only become more relevant with the rise of TikTok and the resurgence of the moving-picture loop as a popular form.⁶¹ But Modern Times reminds us that the virtual aesthetics of the loop and the format of the spinning toy never entirely disappeared from the twentieth century's imagination of the moving picture. By returning moving pictures to their origin in the noncontinuous, fragmented, looping, and iterative motion of the phenakistoscope, Hardy and Chaplin both reproduce and reimagine the phenakistoscope's circular and repeating structure textually and cinematically. They put non-narrative moving images to narrative purposes, building out the phenakistoscope's association between the loop, the industrial machine, factory labor, and the unconscious to tell stories about bodies under capitalism. They help us understand what the spinning and looping virtual moving image means.