Metagestures, a collaboration between Carla Nappi and Dominic Pettman, is an homage to Vilém Flusser’s 1991 book Gestures (Gesten in the original German), which the reviewer has alas not read. Owing to this ignorance, I’m somewhat unclear on the significance of the gesture, which seems to me a superfluity, one step removed from more easily graspable themes. Looking through the table of contents, where the authors’ treatments of “The Gesture of Writing,” “The Gesture of Speaking,” and “The Gesture of Making,” etc. are all set out, I cannot help but see them as unnecessarily cluttered approaches to Writing, Speaking, and Making. Isn’t a study of The Gesture of Writing essentially a study of Writing?
So I guess I don’t get the gesture part. However (and here I raise my pointer finger and incline my head toward it in a Gesture of Qualifying, even though the “however” would have been sufficient), Metagestures is fresh and delightful, just the kind of experimental yet accessible literature that can reinspire a jaded reader. If there isn’t a Gesture of Being Glad I Read Something, there should be – and I would be making it now.
Nappi and Pettman take turns addressing every subject, with Nappi offering prose poetry and Pettman short stories. Actually, Nappi’s contributions nearly defy description but tend toward the shape-shifting, supernatural, and symbolic. I call them poetic because – well, check this out:
He sat on a log on the beach in the drizzle and watched the water fall toward him and pull back out again and he saw that the water had fingers that tried to grip the sand as it was dragged back into the sea and he saw tendrils in the foam on the sand as the watery women put their heads and faces down and flung their hair out to try to reach him, just a little bit, just for a little bit, before they had to leave again.
He was lonely. (p. 183)
Two sentences, each a paragraph, one long, one short, balanced, exquisite, and devastating.
Pettman’s sections are more straightforward, but his take on “The Gesture of Making,” envisioning a factory where workers make do, make light, and make fun is a big smile.
Sometimes the authors’ half-chapters cross-reference, and they seem to work toward a climax of sorts in the concluding Gesture of Loving, which makes the meaning of the gesture a little clearer.
Or maybe it’s obvious throughout, as conveyed by Nappi (via Vilém):
Vilém read, and his emotions were written on his face by the twisting of ropy eyebrows and the pull of flesh and hair around his nose and chin. Eyes and skin and nostrils gathered into a text… (p. 26)
Yellow Crane in the Rain 