The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative by Guillemette Bolens (review)

The Style of Gesturesbrings interdisciplinary research from the field of embodied cognition to medieval textual criticism, and the results are remarkable. For Guillemette Bolens, we read with our bodies, in a sense, or at least with the knowledge of our bodies; that is to say, with our ‘kinesic intelligence’, defined by Ellen Spolsky as ‘our human capacity to discern and interpret body movements, body postures, gestures, and facial expressions in real situations as well as in our reception of visual art’ (p. 1), a definition extended by Bolens to include literature. Her stated goal ‘is to develop a narratological perspective that pays close attention to the interpretive processes whereby a reader retrieves kinesic information, taking into account the way in which a text triggers sensorimotor simulations of salient properties in conceptual combinations’ (p. 12). Bolens likens her incorporation of scientific models of cognition into her reading practices with cultivating an ability to listen to detail in music: ‘The point is not to impose new harmonies on the piece but to fully hear those already there, in all the force of their particularity. In the same way as it is possible to sharpen one’s ear, kinesic intelligence can be refined by an increased kinesthetic sensitivity’ (p. 167). The skill, subtlety, and sheer dynamism of her readings attest to her success.

The Style of Gesturesdoes not restrict itself exclusively to medieval literature (the first chapter is a reading of Ulysses, and examples from Proust are prominent throughout), or indeed to literature (the conclusion includes a lengthy discussion of Jacques Tati’s films), but in three chapters, Old and Middle English texts predominate. Chapter 2, ‘Kinesic Tropes and Action Verbs’, explores the blurring of the distinction between the literal and figural in Patience, foregrounding the reader’s necessary ‘resort to the concrete literality of his sensorimotor cognition and kinaesthetic and kinesic intelligence’ (p. 67) to tease out textual complexities associated with ‘Jonah’s stomachic travels’ (p. 75), especially their evocation of a masculinised process of gestation and birth. Jonah’s abject envelopment within ‘the guts of another body from within his own body’ (p. 76) is brought about by his desire to ‘create a state of nonperception between himself and God’ (p. 79), culminating in his sinking into ‘a heart that has no location other than an absolute and impossible interiority’ (p. 86), a place neither entirely literal or figurative, but a locus that is essential for him to embody (and voice) his own status as prophet. The theme of the ‘blurring’ of male and female reproductive processes continues with the ‘uncanny kinesic trope’ (p. 90) of the breastfeeding Arthur in Laȝamon’s Brut. Drawing on traditions that inform the symbolic representation of the masculine breast(s), Bolens works through the connections between the king’s socialrole, the corporealtrope, and the physicality that the image bestows upon the process of narrative transmission: ‘the figural cannot be severed from the literal, nor the mind from embodiment’ (p. 90).

In Chapter 3, ‘ Verecundiaand Social Wounding in the Legend of Lucrece’, Bolens directs her considerable talent for weaving kinesic representation, semantic nuance, and the relationship of the subject to the social, towards the social emotion of verecundia(loosely, ‘shame’), which serves to ‘regulate interpersonal behaviour’, and thus has a powerful impact on ‘kinesic communication’ (p. 100). In successive versions of the legend, Lucrece’s personhood is subjected to a variety of erasures according to the differing value systems within which the material realities of her rape and suicide are interpreted.

Bolens draws an insightful parallel between Lucrece and Gawain in Chapter 4, ‘Face-Work and Ambiguous Feats in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. This time, the immobilised protagonist is male, and courtesy is the key concept in the ‘intricate relational net’ that forces him to submit to the axe...