Parks and Wreck
51
nervous strain inside an enclosure whence the ocean cannot
possibly be seen? .. . “Never tell me again the Americans are
a nervous people!” They are, though, and yonder amazing
institution proves it. Manhattanitis, with its numerous
congeners, isn’t merely a disease, it’s an obsession. It doesn’t
ask relief, it only asks aggravation. The sole treatment that it
welcomes is the counter-irritant—powerful, drastic, and like
in kind to itself. (“The Amusement Park” 677)
Hartt rightly recognizes the amusement-seeker’s willingness to subject himself
to the pseudo-perils of what he calls Coney Island’s “whirling death-traps” and
“mad cyclonic bugaboos” as the very symptom of nervousness rather than the
absence of it. However, he is not able to appreciate how this specific type of
aggravation paradoxically provides relief Hartt quotes a park patron who claims
that
if a man suffered in a trolley car what ten thousand New
Yorkers pay ten cents to have done to them at Coney Island,
he would go to a hospital for a month, call himself a nervous
wreck for the rest of his days, and sue the trolley company for
$20,000 damages. (674)
Maybe so, but what Coney Island consumers consume is the peculiar alchemy
that turns trauma into thrill and thrill into reassurance.
The most conspicuous example of how the amusement park works on
the turn of the century body is the roller coaster. Developed by LaMarcus
Thompson and debuted at Coney in 1884, the roller coaster, along with that
other prominent icon of the amusement park landscape, the Ferris Wheel, was
first and foremost a rideable feat of engineering. If the screams of riders of early
roller coasters (such as the aptly named “Gravity Pleasure Railway”) signaled
the simultaneously frightening and titillating kinetic chaos engendered by
technological innovation, the visible sturdiness of the machine’s manifold
mechanisms, the soothing aural ebbs that follow the manic aural flows of the
gears, and the quotidian monotony of waiting in line, all assure the anxious
spectator of the triumph of American ingenuity over the chaos. But once on the
coaster, the rider tenders her body to the disorienting effects of the ride. As Bill
Brown argues, the function of what he calls “the pleasure machine” is to “reduce
the self to an agentless sensorium” and produce “the dehumanized, fully
embodied subject, the subject that is all body.”^ The roller coaster distills the
locus of the train passenger’s neurasthenic anxieties and repackages it, in
Brown’s terms, as a “post-panoramic,” “non-linear,” and “repetitive” means of
“intensifying yet framing the time-space compression of modernity” (47).
In this way, the pleasure machine dramatizes the sensory experience of
bodily abandon and impending collision minus the mortal consequences of
impact. In the words of one nineteenth century rider, it offers “all the sensations
of being carried away by a cyclone, without the attendant sacrifice of life and