208
PETER BROOKS
gesture can be so meaning-full, its transcription, its writing down,
becomes the process of revealing the latent meaning of everything,
the sense of all the
animae
inhabiting a world totally invested with
meaning. The totally significant and legible gestures of pantomime
constitute a step toward a novelistic enterprise where transcribed ges–
ture, the world described, will be totally significant and legible, and
totally expressive of emotional and moral conditions.
Gesture has this same intense charge of meaning in Balzac and
James because of its metaphorical ambitions. Its meaning comes, not
from its place within a code of gestures which assigns meaning (which
is the case in most eighteenth-century comedy of manners, or
in
Jane Austen, for example), but from its claim to express moral and
emotional qualities beyond
itself.
The dandy De Marsay, refusing
to recognize Lucien de Rubempre, lets his lorgnon fall "so singularly
that it seemed to Lucien the blade of the guillotine" (IV, 624). In
the tale
Facino Cane,
the old blind musician replies to the narrator
with "a frightening gesture of extinguished patriotism and disgust for
things human" (VI, 71) - an extreme example, because the gesture
is so overcharged with meaning, meaning in excess of its vehicle, that
the literal gesture is itself virtually obliterated by the meanings it
implies. Another example would be Mme. de Mortsauf's "forced
smile" on her deathbed, in
Le Lys dans La vaUee,
in which the nar–
rator reads "the irony of vengeance, the anticipation of pleasure, the
intoxication of the soul and the rage of disappointment" (VIII,
1003). Such a gesture is overdetermined, it produces not only mean–
ing but super-signification.
It
suggests a world of such electrically
charged interconnections and correspondences that everything is inhab–
ited by meaning. With James, we may be tempted to think that ges–
ture receives its charge from its social context; this
is
after all a
classic view of James, but it really does not stand up to scrutiny. The
social signification is only the starting point for the immense implica–
tions of Jamesian gesture. Take the moment in
The Wings of the
Dove
when Densher is told by Milly Theale's gondolier, Eugenio, that
Milly can't receive him -
his,
and our, first indication that a crisis,
the crisis, has arrived. Eugenio
now, as usual, slightly smiled at him
in
the process - but ever
so
slightly, this time, his manner also being attuned, our young man
made out, to the thing, whatever it was, that constituted the
rup–
ture of peace.
