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Sophie Read, Moving Words: Enargeia in Early Modern Devotions, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 49, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 33–54, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfz034
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Extract
It is mid-morning in a French seaside hotel in the 1950s, and a waiter brings a small glass of beer to a smart customer, pomaded and moustachioed, who is reading some papers at a table. As he approaches, two things happen simultaneously: the waiter notices a tall man entering the room, of whom he obviously has cause to be wary, and starts to watch him cautiously; the hotel clock begins to strike the hour. The tall man, bending forward from the toes, tilts his wrist to check his watch: a gesture at once large and precise. The vigilant waiter automatically mirrors this action. In a curious sense, the waiter is at this moment both attentive and distracted; this echoed movement causes him to pour the drink he is carrying neatly into the lap of the startled customer. The tall man who is the oblivious cause of this commotion is of course Monsieur Hulot, on his celebrated Vacances, one of the greatest comic films ever made.1 This short scene – it lasts less than twenty seconds – demonstrates the exaggerated logic of physical action and reaction on which much of the film’s effect depends; as an example of echopraxis (the clinical term for involuntary imitation of movement) it also visibly encapsulates an intimate phenomenon of muscular sympathy that is at the heart of this essay’s concerns. Jacques Tati exerts his disruptive influence through silent physical magnetism, in contrast to the expansive rhetoric characteristic of the writers to whom I will shortly turn; the gentle, frictionless world he inhabits, whose frequent disasters are attended, surprisingly, by no lasting consequences, could not be much further from the studies and pulpits of post-Reformation Europe. But the response Hulot’s simple gesture elicits, exaggerated into our sight by the susceptible waiter, helps us to understand something of the subtler play of physical and emotional coercion often at work in early modern theological discourse.
