Gesture as Language
David Trotter
- A Cultural History of Gestures: From Antiquity to the Present edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg
Polity, 220 pp, £35.00, December 1991, ISBN 0 7456 0786 1 - The New Oxford Book of 17th-Century Verse by Alastair Fowler
Oxford, 830 pp, £25.00, November 1991, ISBN 0 19 214164 3
According to Boswell, Johnson was so hostile to gesticulation that ‘when another gentleman thought he was giving additional force to what he uttered, by expressive movements of his hands, Johnson fairly seized them and held them down.’ But in restraining someone else’s gestures, he himself gestured; he gave additional force to his opinion by expressive movements of his hands. Gesture is unavoidable, because the body is seldom completely at rest, and almost any of its movements might assume significance in the eyes of an observer. History does not record that Johnson made any effort to restrain the limb with which he was about to refute Bishop Berkeley.
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