“The Semiotics of French Gestures”
Henceforth concerned with questions of motivation, I begin with mimic gestures, the iconic character of which is evident. In the following chapter, the motivation of non-mimic gestures will be studied.
During the summer of 1978, one of the TV programs of Alain Bombard dealt with historic shipwrecks. He recreated the events for us with many gestures, ample and symmetric. Thrown together were gestures portraying objects, gestures reproducing movements, and gestures giving the concrete origin of words taken in their abstract meaning. I note here only those which reproduce movements. Palm forward, the narrator plugs holes in the ship or sends it running before the wind. Forefinger pointed, he puts in new stainless steel bolts. With a repeated movement of the face-up hands, he brings up the Wasa. Later, his cupped hands pressed around the hull of a ship make it run gunwale under. His rounded arms come together to clamp down on it. He punches forward: the Titanic has just received a violent jolt. His hand stretches upward as the ship’s bow rises up before she goes under, hand pointing down.
Apart from the representation of movement, as in the above examples, mimetic gestures reproduce either the shape and dimensions of an object, the way it is held and used, or its operation. Also on the concrete level, certain gestures localize an area of pain on the body and comfort it with ‘manupuncture.’ Is the reason physical or psychological? Sometimes one holds one’s stomach to signify, not that one is hungry or has eaten too much, but annoyance and irritation (That gives me a sour stomach), anxiety or fear (It makes my head spin), or moral disgust (Disgusting, what he did). The passage from the physical signification, I had trouble digesting, to the psychological signification, It’s horrible, occurs through a psychosomatic reaction: the event is horrible to the point of making one vomit. Similarly, sentences like You really scared me!—That went straight to my heart—That broke my heart—can be said with the hand on the heart, given the cardiac reactions provoked by emotions such as surprise, joy, and grief. These psychosomatic symptoms linking the physical with the psychological explain the transition toward metaphorical gestures which concretely signify an abstract reality.
Having given these samples, I propose to show that mimic gestures are not shared by all and obey certain principles of symbolizing.
Mimetic gestures are conventional. To telephone (Illustration 9), a French person mimes, in a single gesture, the grip of the caller (digits 234 folded on the palm), the shape of the receiver (digits 15 spread), and the use of the phone (next to the ear and mouth), while a Neapolitan dials the number (small alternating circular movements) in order to be heard (in front of the ear). To evoke a drink, a Hungarian mimes drinking from a glass (cylindrically held hand lifted to the mouth), while the French, in addition to this gesture, can also drink à la régalade (head back, thumb pointing toward the mouth) as in on va s’en jeter un derrière la cravate (lit. We’re going to throw one behind the tie). The first gesture refers to the container; the second depicts the contents. These are thus two ways to refer to the same notion, while in another culture, the distinction between the gestures relating to different functions might express different usage. In Bali, for example, there are separate distinguished and common ways to eat: thumb against fingers of the right hand (distinguished), eating from the palm of the right hand (common) (Pelosse 1956).
Illustration 9. Telephone. Illustration by Zaü for Calbris and Montredon 1986: 138, by permission of CLE International
Size is encoded. One forefinger cuts the other at the first joint to indicate a small size: The rocks were no bigger than that. A pejorative reference to a very small size or quantity—not even that much, no bigger than this—is depicted by part of a fingernail or finger. Onto concrete size, there seems to be superposed here a representation of the verbal symbolism in un bout de (a piece of), bout being literally the end or tip of something, since the same size can be represented by a separation between the thumb and forefinger. While a separation of 1 to 2 cm is reserved for a small quantity, ‘a little bit,’ one of 4 * to 7 cm represents a small size: Someone gave me a small sample of perfume *, and I brought it for you. The size of larger objects is depicted not by a separation of the fingers, but by a distance between the hands—often held at arm’s length *—proportional to the dimension evoked: We had * the big maroon suitcase. Encoded gestural measurements, which rarely correspond to real dimensions, thus distinguish the minute from the very small and small, and the relatively large from the largest.
Getting onto a bus, I saw the driver and a friend who was chatting with him simultaneously portray a nose dive with their hands and say together, L’à pic! (a plummet). The friend continues, this time lowering the edge of his hand, It’s really * sharp. There are places where the cliff * falls straight down. While the movement is the same, the position of the hand is different. It is logical that for à pic (from piquer, ‘sting’ or ‘go into a dive’), the tips of the fingers form a point which dives straight down, while the palm lowered in profile recalls the vertical partition which falls. An unconscious etymological distinction slips into the concrete description. For other examples, see Transfer below (also Chapter 8, Symbolizing the concrete).
In certain cases, the speaker’s gestures are contrary to what he is saying. For example, an announcer uses a gesture of substitution when he explains the absence of substitution: This embargo is aimed * at not substituting European sales for. . . . Has he been led to absurdity by the animating function of gesture? I see rather a conflict between the various roles of gesturing, the requirement for etymological concretization of a word winning out over one of its psychological functions for the listener, i.e., to represent reality to him. The etymological role prevails over the principle of reality, as the following example shows. A television host asks the viewers to send interesting newspaper excerpts to his show. But please, * don’t circle them, he says while drawing a frontal circle with his left hand. Obvious pedagogical error. In fact, the speaker is concretizing a notion without intending to stick to reality.
In this way, one might go to the point of winding to depict unwinding, another type of contradiction between gesture and utterance. Thus a humorist, in talking of a small and intelligent politician (so many ideas in so little space) with whom the Japanese were so pleased that they wanted to keep him in order to take him apart, mimes the disassembly of a model by screwing to the right. By this gesture, he is simply illustrating the notion of screwing and unscrewing. In the same way, hands turning one around the other in a progressive direction * to depict mixing, represent both mixing up and unraveling or working out: * He worked it out in order to get it by a different treaty.
The arc of a pony-tail is reproduced by a curve of the hand from the top of the head, with the fingers joined at the tips. Hair in waves is represented by a flat palm with the aligned fingers undulating parallel to the scalp. The gesture does not simply indicate the line. In fact, the clustered fingers suggest the hairs in a pony-tail, and the flat palm the ordered arrangement of waved hair. The gesture attempts to render a synthesis of the relevant characteristics of the physical configuration.
Consider two hands cupped over the ears. These two bumps on the ears have no physical reason, but if they were below the ears, they would depict the symmetric swelling of the parotid glands characteristic of the mumps. If the gesture does not refer to a swelling of the ears, it must refer to something on them, such as hair coils or headphones. Even out of context, a viewer would not hesitate, since hair coils have a flat surface, and not a convex one, and hence would be represented by a circular movement of the two forefingers around the ears, a movement which renders both the contour of the surface and the coiling of the hair over the ear. The gesture is thus intended to represent an object with convex surfaces placed on the ears. It indicates both the position of the object on the ears, the symmetric, convex shape, and the movement of putting on the headphones (Illustration 10). The mimed use of an object sometimes gives its shape. Concerning the eyes, one might mime a magnifying glass, a microscope, a telescope, binoculars, or a camera. While the use of a magnifying glass evokes the glass only through the answer to a riddle (What object is held under one eye, with the other eye closed?), the hands which mime the use of binoculars portray them at the same time.
Illustration 10. Synthetic mimic gestures: Headphones, Mumps, Hair coils
An arc may refer to a signified with a circular form in that the gesture depicts only the part that is visible, whether a curve or a surface. For example, a necklace is not depicted by a circle around the neck, but by an arc over the front part of it. Similarly for a bracelet, one reproduces only what covers the exterior part of the wrist. The analogy between the signifier and the physical signified is therefore restricted. This is gestural synecdoche.
The movement sometimes portrays or sketches the use of the object: pushing on a helmet, tying a headscarf, throwing a scarf over the shoulder. There is a compromise between miming an action and drawing a shape.
The surface of a veil which covers the nose and mouth of a woman, leaving only her eyes visible, is reproduced by one or two palms held sideways in front of the nose and mouth. Held vertically, the hands still hide the nose and mouth, but since they no longer portray the transverse line of the veil, they evoke either a blunder, the giggles, or a sneeze. The position of the hand is relevant. Here is another example, one in which three gestures are compared. A bald spot or monk’s tonsure is depicted by drawing a circular contour on the scalp. A skullcap, being a spherical section, is depicted by the convex form of a hand placed on top of the head with the fingers spread. To depict a bump, which has a greater convexity and a smaller circumference, the hand is more cupped and the fingers are closer together. The gestures reproduce the contrast between the contour of a bald spot and the surface of a skullcap, as well as the difference in convexity between a skullcap and a bump. They also portray the contrast in movement: the skullcap is placed on, the bump grows from. Thus, in order to avoid ambiguity, a gesture takes into account the relevant underlying distinctions.
Figure 10 - Gestural representations of a cylinder.
Figure 10 shows the diversity in representing a cylinder depending on whether it is immobile or can be turned or rolled up, and depending on its size. An immobile cylinder is defined by its cross section: the thumb and forefinger joined in a ring (neon tube) or the curved hands close together (a large vase) slide along the imaginary cylinder. Note that the long, straight shape of a pipe or curtain rod would be traced with the forefinger. In contrast, the gestural depiction of a steam roller, a roasting jack, or a hair curler corresponds to the geometrical definition of a cylinder: a solid generated by rotating a straight line about an axis parallel to it. Depending on the object, the entire forearm, the hand, or just the forefinger executes a repeated circular movement parallel to the ground. Note that finger movements correspond to small cylinders, while hand movements correspond to large cylinders. This is an example of a general principle: a manual representation corresponds to large objects, a digital one to small objects. The choice of body element and of movement gives several variants for representing a cylinder according to its size and the way it can be moved.
A movement may be divided into two symmetric movements (one → two hands for the contour of an Afro) or on the contrary doubled to better render either the surface (one → two hands for a loose-fitting garment) or the symmetry (two hands descending from the rib cage to the hips for a close-fitting garment). However, the doubling seems to be avoided if it is physically awkward, such as crossing the forearms to represent a pair of puff sleeves. Even when the physical signified is necessarily symmetric, the gestural signifier need not be. Symmetry in the latter becomes necessary when there is a distinction between dual and singular in the referent. For example, the representation of rings under one’s eyes is optionally symmetric, while that of round eyeglasses or wide open eyes is preferably doubled, since there is a choice between eyeglasses and a monocle, or between goggle eyes and a glass eye.
For smaller referents, one or more fingers can be substituted for the hand(s). The tip of one finger replaces the ends of all of them to draw smaller lines; the edge of the forefinger replaces the edge of the hand to cut reduced surfaces; the surface of a finger replaces that of the palm to depict smaller obstacles; the separation between two fingers replaces that between the hands to measure something of smaller dimension, etc. For example, a vacationer recounts his first underwater dive: I saw one hell of a grouper, a fish this big [70 cm between his facing palms]. When I got it out of the water. . . [20 cm between his forefingers]. Even smaller distances are measured between the thumb and forefinger held parallel to one another: With a little rum that you find [4 cm between the thumb and forefinger] in small bottles. Cutting with scissors is mimed with the forefinger and middle finger. What about bigger blades? I have seen the edges of hands abruptly crossed in a frontal plane in front of the privates, depicting the movement of pruning shears, to allude to castration. Closing or opening the fingers of one hand is equivalent to moving the two hands closer together or farther apart. Hence an initial whole under pressure and bursting into pieces is depicted either by abruptly opening a hand, projecting the fingers outward, or by abruptly separating side-by-side fists. The explosion is slightly nuanced however: the finger movement better reproduces the image of bursting or of impact: It’s better argued, but you see, * the impact isn’t quite as good; the fist movement renders more of the unleashing of violence: What slaughter there will be * if all of a sudden, violence is unleashed!
While it evokes something concrete, the act of miming can imply an abstraction, a transfer:
• in time. Culinary pleasure for example is depicted in the same way whether anticipated, present, or recalled.
• of person. Here is how a woman relates and mimes to her husband the indulgence of a voyager intent on returning from a cruise with a new-found husband: He was hot [she places her hand on the forehead of her husband facing her], she wiped his forehead [she wipes his forehead], she held his hand [she takes his hand]. Thus the listener sometimes becomes a partner in the reported action. More often, the speaker mimes both protagonists in action, for example himself and a policeman: [palm turned outward] I show him my press card; [turning palm toward himself to examine it] he looks at it.
• of active body part. The act of climbing, running, or crawling implies a synergistic parallel movement of the upper and lower limbs. The various movements are reduced in mimic gestures to those of the upper body. More generally, one observes a transfer upward, the hands for the feet, the shoulders for the hips. It is the palms which avancent à petits pas de loup (lit. move forward with small wolf’s steps = stealthily). The fists ‘pedal.’ Note that in this case, the fists represent the feet on the pedals. ‘Accelerator to the floor,’ the oblique palm pushes downward. He came out of gear with respect to a certain kind of reality, someone says, reproducing with his hands the movement of a driver’s feet in switching gears. The striking similarity between the joints of the fingers and the legs seems to predispose the forefinger and middle finger to depict walking: There was a mean police line, * I crossed the line of protesters. The shoulder movement depicting the swaying walk of a coquettish young woman is a gestural euphemism: *She wriggles like this. Lastly, for skydiving, the hands fall, representing the movement of the whole body.
• of movement. So, I rented a chain saw, and then I went and *cleared it all out: the hand does not simulate holding the tool, but reproduces the action of the blade, at ground-level. Like a scythe, the edge of the supine hand cuts transversely. This movement, abstracted from concrete reality, illustrates any idea of cutting at the base. Another example: *I drove around (Fr. tourner dans: lit. to turn within) Marseilles for three-quarters of an hour (before being able to leave the city). The gesture does not reproduce holding the steeringwheel (reserved for the act of driving a car), nor the actual path of the car, but the etymology of the expression tourner en rond (go in circles) by a repeated, horizontal, circular movement of the hand. Even when evoking a concrete situation, a gesture does not reproduce the concrete action but the idea abstracted from the concrete reality.
Gestural representation of acting and being acted on
Several humoristic drawings with the common theme of slaying show the relationships of the body (acting) to the object (acted on) mimed differently for different situations.
• The actor acting. An old woman mounted on her husband’s back is playing the cowboy: Westerns! Westerns. . . . She is miming the use of Colts, pulling the trigger with her forefinger. This gesture corresponds more to a game situation than to everyday conversation.
• The actor ‘pre-acting.’ They think they’re cowboys, they’re shooting down. . . . This time, rather than acting on an imaginary Colt, the hand represents a rifle, characterized by a barrel and stock, i.e., a more or less long cylinder in line with a shorter, fatter element. This form can be schematically represented by the closed fist (stock) and extended forefinger (barrel). Since the index is already occupied, serving to represent the barrel, it can no longer pull the trigger. The only way to show ‘acting’ on the rifle is to perform the act which precedes, and is corollary to, pulling the trigger, i.e., aiming. The hand-rifle is close to the pressed-back shoulder; one eye is half-closed to allow the other to better sight along the axis of the forefinger-barrel.
• The object. Why don’t we shoot. . . . The body serves only to symbolize the object: the rifles are represented by the closed hands, forefingers extended. Is it the generalization of the ‘we’ which motivates the multiplication of the rifles and hence the use of both hands?
• The object and the victim. The only thing left for him is suicide. The killer is his own victim. He holds the revolver to his temple. The result is immediate and certain. Is that why suicide is symbolized by this gesture rather than by a portrayal of slitting the wrists?
Dynamic or static characterization of the signified
Let us first consider the dynamic characterization of an object or animated being. An object is characterized by
• its manipulation. It is held in order to be squeezed (tweezers), pressed (a spray bottle), pushed (a carpenter’s plane), turned (object with a crank), etc. By holding it, one indicates its form: the concave form of a bowl, the cylindrical form of a glass, the symmetric form of a headset. In addition, one localizes it with respect to the ground and the body, making the gesture easier to decode. Moreover, since the concrete signified often implies a person who acts, the use of an object often evokes either the user, the action, or the tool: a fisherman fishes with a fishing-rod.
• its use. Hands which move along a transverse line, with the fingers wriggling, evoke a piano. According to the selective procedure mentioned above, an automobile is symbolized by the handling of the steering-wheel, the bicycle by pedaling. However, driving an automobile involves a movement of the feet, and riding a bicycle requires holding the handlebars. The most visible movement is selected. In the same way, a moped or motorcycle are depicted by the throttle, i.e., by a bending of the wrists, with the hands closed. Thus, the use of one element can recall the entire object.
• its operation. A movement of the forearms can reproduce that of the connecting rods of a train. A horizontal circle with the raised forefinger reproduces the typical movement of helicopter blades.
We have successively considered an object held in the hand, operated by the hand, or apparently moving by itself. Here is a particular case that seems to be an exception to the rule. Scissors, just like tweezers, a saw, or a hammer, should be identified by their use. But the actual repeated movement of the thumb against the forefinger visually portrays pinching and evokes the use of a stapler. Is it to avoid this confusion that one uses instead the movement of the blades of a pair of scissors (forefinger and middle finger likened to the cutting blades from the pivot point to the tips) as if they moved by themselves in the same sense as the connecting rods of a train?
Are animals seen as autonomous beings or objects that are moved? Depending on whether one wishes to evoke horseback-riding or a horse, one describes the horse as an object moved by the reins or as an animated being that gallops. An animal is defined by the way it moves only if this is characteristic: a horse gallops, a flea jumps, a snake crawls, etc. If it lacks a particular mode of locomotion, the animal is mimed by some distinctive behavior: a rabbit constantly wiggles its nose, a monkey scratches itself often. Finally, very young children designate animals by vocal mimicry. The example of Marcel Jousse (1936: 209) is well known: a young country boy from Sarthes tells his mother that the cat has snatched a chicken: Miaou ham со. This imitation in sound is used in poetry: Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur vos têtes?, and in music: e.g., Le Carnaval des Animaux by Saint-Saëns and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.
In the absence of a specific dynamic characteristic, an animated being or object may have a distinctive static trait, reproduced (1) statically or (2) dynamically. The entire surface of a dome might be depicted by (1) a hand held convex, face down, with the fingers spread, or (2) by drawing a semicircle from left to right with the surface of a hand, or else two symmetric quarter-circles with both hands. To evoke a small, round object, one has the choice between joining the thumb and forefinger in a ring or drawing the circumference with the forefinger.
‘Static’ or ‘dynamic’ gesture? Before or after action?
All gestures imply movement, even to indicate a state. A dimension is represented by a stopped movement: wideness by separating the hands, narrowness by bringing them closer together. A configuration can be portrayed only by one or more movements of some body segment, and the gesture becomes the dynamic representation of a state, or of keeping in the same state: the gesture opposes movement, interrupts it. The outward palms, held vertically, react against (a push or aggression from) the outside. This is a common gesture, originally one of protection, which has come to signify stopping. An obstacle which prevents advancement, conventionally depicted toward the front or to the right, is represented by lowering the vertically held palm, some distance in front of oneself or to the right.
The hand may also portray a movement by being placed in readiness. Abruptly raised diagonally to the side, the hand is ready to slap or spank. Similarly, the brandished fist announces a blow. Preparatory to a dangerous action, these gestures become a sign of threat.
A state often seems to be considered as the result of a movement. For example, a summit results from a push upward, a heap from accumulation, the top level from elevation: the hand, held horizontally, rises. Thus, instead of illustrating the end result, the gesture recreates the history.
Note that neutralization on the gestural level between state and movement is also found on the verbal level. For example, ‘in’ is used both to localize (ablative), It’s in the box, and to indicate direction (accusative), I put it in the box.
We gesturalize time spatially (Chapter 4, Time) and space temporally. The principle is simple. Someone is walking: one step, then others, allow him little by little to cover a certain distance; he needs little time to go a short distance, and a lot of time to go far. The repetition of the movement, or its slowness, evoke time and also distance. By repeatedly throwing his fingers forward, a meteorologist explains that due to the north wind * the clouds will move away during the afternoon. Here is an amusing example: the UPWARD PALM CHOP gesture (see Chapter 1) has a repeated variant often used by adolescents who have done something wrong; the repetition evokes both the urgency and the distance to be covered in order to get far enough away! Similarly, the slowness with which the hand in profile is lifted forward indicates distance: It’s a long way away!
Inversely, we note a transfer from time to space. So, * a brief recapitulation now, proposes a TV newsman. Brevity was rendered not by a rapid movement, but by the smallness of the gesture which commonly illustrates the idea of recapitulation, i.e., the hemisphere: he sculpted a very small dome simply by rotating his wrist without moving his forearm.
We mime everything that can be characterized by distinctive dynamic or static traits: actions, states, objects, animals, and people. Although it is intended to render concrete reality, mimic gesturing implies the power of abstraction. The abstraction concerns the thing to be characterized (what is the distinctive visible element, and should it be represented dynamically or statically?) and the way it is done (choice of the most appropriate body elements and movements). Mimic gesturing often involves a transfer in time, of person, of element in action, or of movement. Even in evoking a concrete situation, a gesture does not reproduce the concrete action, but the idea abstracted from the concrete reality. The dimensions of objects are mimed according to symbolic norms. Finally, the choice of a gesture is often determined as much by etymology as by the depiction of the object.
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