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Hands on Film
To Ciara, Clara and Eliot
 Hands on Film
Actants, Aesthetics, Affects

Barry Monahan

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Image from Au hasard Balthazar by Robert Bresson © 1966 Argos Films –
Parc Films – Argos Films – Svensk Filmindustri

Cover design: Kok Korpershoek

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6372 771 6

e-isbn 978 90 4854 476 9
doi 10.5117/9789463727716
nur 670

© B. Monahan / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
 Table of Contents

List of Images 9

Acknowledgements 11

Introduction 13

1. Themes – The Framed Hand and Being 21

Natural and Supernatural Phenomena: Matter Becoming Con-
sciousness 21
The Nature and Origin of Creativity 36
Determinism and Free Will: Possession, Self-possession, Dispos-
session 50
Modernism: Industrialisation and Technology 63
Gendered Hands 76

2. Symbolism – The Semiotic Hand 91

The Meaningful Hand and Metonymy 91
The Manual as Metaphorical 111
Between Metaphor and Metonym: The Hand and Memory 127

3. Aesthetics – The Stylised Hand: Beauty, Ugliness, Genre 135

Behind the Scenes: Unseen Creative Hands 135
The Stylised Hand on Screen 138
The Camp Hand and the Hand in Camp 163
The Haptic Experience: Screened Sensations 172

4. Narration – Hands Doing and Being 189

Hands as Narrative Actants 189
Slow Hands and Slow Cinema 196
Acting Hands and Set Pieces 202

5. Characterisation – Hands and Identity 211

Cultural Contexts for Creative and Destructive Personalities 211
The Psychopathic Hand 223
Vocational Hands 228
Characters and Labour 232
 Manual Details: Emotions and Eccentricities 235
Concealing and Revealing Characters 242

Concluding Case Study – Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) 249

Filmography 253

Index 261
 List of Images

Figure 1.1 Divinely created contorted female hands in The House

is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)
Film – The House is Black by Forugh Farrokhzad
© 1963 – Studio Golestan 49
Figure 1.2 The protagonist enjoys her secret manual pleasure in
Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
Film – Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amélie Poulin de Jean-
Pierre Juenet © 2001 – UGC Images – Tapioca Films
– France 3 Cinéma – MMC Independent GMBH 83
Figure 1.3 The hand of fate in Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
Film – Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amélie Poulin de Jean-
Pierre Juenet © 2001 – UGC Images – Tapioca Films
– France 3 Cinéma – MMC Independent GMBH 84
Figure 2.1 Bruno takes hold of Caroline’s hands in Le lit (Marion
Hänsel, 1982)
Film – Le lit de Marion Hänsel © 2001 – Pyramide Films 105
Figure 2.2 Hands trap the cricket, symbolising repressed
emotion in Cecil Tang’s The Arch (1968)
Film – The Arch by Cecil Tang © 1968 – Photo cour-
tesy of www.lesblank.com107
Figure 2.3 Workman’s gloves inhibit the emotional connection
between father and son in Five Easy Pieces (Bob
Rafelson, 1970)
Film – Five Easy Pieces © 1970, renewed 1998 – Co-
lumbia Pictures Industries, Inc. – All Rights Reserved
– Courtesy of Columbia Pictures 125
Figure 2.4 Manual touch invokes memory in Hiroshima mon
amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
Film – Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais © 1959
– Argos Films – Como Films – Pathé 129
Figure 3.1 Hands and the style of German Expressionism in The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)
Film – Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari / The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari by Robert Wiene © 1920 – Courtesy of FILMS
SANS FRONTIERES 139
Figure 3.2 Hands as stylistic elements in The House is Black
(Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)
10  Hands on Film

Film – The House is Black by Forugh Farrokhzad

© 1963 – Studio Golestan 147
Figure 3.3 Stylised destruction of the evil limb in Dr. Terror’s
House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965)
Film – Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors by Freddie Francis
© 1965 – Tigon Film Distributors Ltd. 152
Figure 3.4 Stylised mise en scène in Harold P. Warren’s Manos:
The Hands of Fate (1966)
Film – Manos: The Hands of Fate by Harold P. Warren,
1966 – Public Domain 155
Figure 3.5 Camp hands as functioning objets d’art in Jean
Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête (1947)
Film – La Belle et la bête by Jean Cocteau © 1947 –
Lopert Films – Publicity Image 169
Figure 4.1 The skilled hand in action in Robert Bresson’s Pick-
pocket (1959)
Film – Pickpocket by Robert Bresson © 1959 – AGNES
DELAHAIE PRODUCTIONS 195
Figure 4.2 The pervasive threatening hand in Dr. Terror’s House
of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965)
Film – Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors by Freddie Francis
© 1965 – Tigon Film Distributors Ltd. 203
Figure 5.1 Lacenaire presents his criminal and creative hands in
Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945)
Film – Les enfants du paradis by Marcel Carné © 1945
– Courtesy of Pathé 213
Figure 5.2 Identification intensified with the silent characters in
Lorenza Mazzetti’s Together (1956)
Film – Together by Lorenza Mazzetti © 1956 – Harle-
quin Productions Ltd. – Courtesy of the BFI National
Archive230
Figure 5.3 Characterisation through manual communication in
Lorenza Mazzetti’s Together (1956)
Film – Together by Lorenza Mazzetti © 1956 – Harle-
quin Productions Ltd. – Courtesy of the BFI National
Archive230
Figure 5.4 The lovers’ manual interactions in L’Eclisse (Michel-
angelo Antonioni, 1962)
Film – L’Eclisse by Michelangelo Antonioni © 1962 –
Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL 235
 Acknowledgements

In the first instance I would like to thank Maryse Elliott, Senior Commission-
ing Editor at Amsterdam University Press, for her guidance, encouragement,
and patience throughout the process of bringing this project to completion.
Maryse was supported by Julie Benschop-Plokker along the way, and both
were indispensable supporters of my work when I most needed it.
From its early incarnations, my erratic and ambitious thinking was
focused and challenged by conversations with friends, colleagues, and
students. Their generous suggestions and intellectual challenges helped me
to mould the idealistic dreamwork into a feasible venture. I am grateful to
those in the Department of Film & Screen Media at University College Cork,
and to others beyond that unit who had wonderful ideas that steered my
thinking: these include Graham Allen, Alan Gibbs, Maureen O’Connor, and
Edel Semple. I had interesting conversations with my graduate researchers
about process and product, during its evolution, and I would like to thank
Sandra Costello, Rachel Gough, Tadhg Dennehy, and Nicholas O’Riordan,
as well as other inspiring cinema enthusiasts from the same research com-
munity: James Mulvey, Marija Laugalyte, and Loretta Goff come to mind
immediately. I would like to acknowledge especially Aidan Power, Máire
Messenger-Davies, John Davies, Conn Holohan and Seán Crosson for valuable
recommendations offered early in the mission.
I am indebted to a large number of people in film archives, holders of
private collections and – I add with encouragement but not surprise – from
independent, less market-dominant distribution companies, who facilitated
my use of the images in this book. Among this cohort of cinephiles are:
Alexandre de la Porte (UGC), Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his assistant Marjorie
Orth (Tapioca Films), Raphaëlle Quinet (Pyramide Films), Emily and Harrod
Blank from Les Blank Films, Margarita Diaz (Sony Pictures), Loli Geneste and
Ellen Schafer (Argos Films), Cécile Meyer-Cases (Cité Films), Anne-Sophie
Mignot (Films Sans Frontières), John Henderson (Tigon Film Distributors),
Jonathan Rechenstein (Pathé), Espen Bale (British Film Institute), Alexane
Durand (Studiocanal), Anne-Laure Barbarit (mk2), and Mylène Bresson.
Without crucial guidance from Dan O’Connell and incredible generosity
of spirit and time by Barry Reilly (both from my home department), there
would have been no visual component to this book: I cannot thank them
enough for turning it into the final version that it now is.
Friends and family have been at hand for support and encouragement
throughout. I want to mention specifically Brian, Sarina, Thomas, Liz,
12  Hands on Film

Christophe, Oisín, Liz, Kevin, Dolores, Stephen, Suzy, Evelyn, Kealan, Peter,
Cathy, and my parents, Christy and Etta. The younger generation of family
members weren’t of much academic help, but they provided a background of
hilarity, naughtiness, and fun, without which I (and this endeavour) would
have definitely suffered. A big thanks to John, Claire, Joey, and Jessica for
abundant provision of this essential energy!
During completion of the book, our son Eliot was born. His arrival
awoke in me the memory that no creativity is as wonderful, and that I am
profoundly lucky to have Ciara and Clara to share the new learning curve
with me. They help me through and listen to moaning, but persist in their
kindness… Thank you C Major and Minor!
 Introduction

It is a truism that the number of hands on the cinematic screen is approxi-

mately twice the number of characters represented in films. This vast quantity
of limbs became a challenge early in the present project despite help by
friends, colleagues, and students who offered lists of important examples that
ultimately became an aggregate filmography of several hundred cases. Having
been initially overwhelmed by this unwieldy collection, I eventually found
some assurance that the research task might not be so daunting. I began to
discern categorical variations on the role played by hands in the cinematic
art. Hands were abundantly available for scrutiny, but the list became more
manageable by concentrating on appearances that were disposed to analytical
attention because of their meaningful value. As the methodology shifted from
enumeration to categorisation it invited a two-sided process: by considering
what cinema had to say about human hands, it was necessary to reflect upon
what that limb could reveal about the art form itself.
The book in front of you uses a familiar modus operandi; one in which
film is considered in relation to another concept – literature, philosophy,
adaptation, history – or objects – cars, guns, costumes, architecture – used
to chart the historical and aesthetic development of both medium and
mediated. If I have achieved my objective even partially, the proposal
that the hand has something of indispensable importance to add to these
studies should become explicit. To offer a visual analogy: this book might
be conceived as an hourglass. In the top bulb, theoretical ruminations on
the cinema lie in layers with wider philosophical questions – ontological,
epistemological, and aesthetic – stratified as theses and antitheses. These
levels blend as they percolate through the narrow neck of the sandglass,
which represents the catalyst of this study: hands. Following that theoretical
amalgamation, new ideas and conceptualisations emerge synthetically to
shed light on how humankind has used the cinema as a mode of artistic
expression to explore what it means to be a sentient, socially participating,
and creative individual. Fundamentally this study comprises a series of
attempts at justifying why the hand has such a crucial role to play in this
process of revelation.

Monahan, B., Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press 2022
doi: 10.5117/9789463727716_intro
14  Hands on Film

The hand can be understood as an entity that mediates between the

material (body) and the immaterial (mind). Consequently, it carries both
literal and metaphorical potential. As an illustration of the former, explain-
ing the evolution of our species in his detailed study The Hand: How Its
Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, Frank R. Wilson has
described the relationship between the limb and the mind and how, over
millennia, the refinement in the functioning of each one contributed to the
development of the intellect and capability of the other. Geoffrey Beattie has
elucidated the diverse possibilities for the hand’s capacity for denotative and
connotative communication in his work Rethinking Body Language: How
Hand Movements Reveal Hidden Thoughts. Both of these studies, as well as
a host of other noteworthy expositions referenced in this work, testify to
the critical importance of the position of the hand in human socialisation,
acculturation, and intellectual development.
Two detailed interventions into the field integrate the hand specifically
as performing entity within the cultural practices of theatre and film. In
her study The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the
Spectacle of Dismemberment, Farah Karim-Cooper considers the Bard’s
manual representations within the historical contexts of its cultural ap-
plications both on stage and in textual and artistic imagery. Closer to home,
in his monograph Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory Volker Pantenburg offers
innovative reflection and astute analysis of the canons of those filmmakers
and dedicates a detailed chapter to how hands have played an instrumental
thematic (theoretical) and artistic (pragmatic) role in their work. Both studies
centralise that part of the human anatomy by justifying the importance of
its role in the artists’ productions and for wider questions into the nature
of homo sapiens. These conceptual enquiries are addressed in three further
works that consider the position of the hand philosophically, without ad-
dressing cultural texts specifically. John Napier’s Hands, Darian Leader’s
Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why, and The Hand: A Philosophical
Inquiry into Human Being by Raymond Tallis, present comprehensive narra-
tives that triangulate the relationship between intelligence, existence, and
the hand, with a view to stressing the predominant position occupied by the
limb in the evolution of humankind. These studies reaffirm and demonstrate
that the corporeal entity bears considerable ontological significance in its
unique connection to the social, intellectual, and cultural development of
the species. Karim-Cooper and Pantenburg’s research further testifies to
its gestural and communicative flexibilities; qualities that make the hand
an ideal subject for aesthetic representation in the plastic arts, literature,
theatre, and cinema. To bring the discourses full circle, we need only propose
Introduc tion 15

that the framed, filmed hand might itself have something to contribute to
our understanding of how the cinematic medium works.
If such a dialectic is possible then it is best sought at the representational
point where unique qualities of film and the hand overlap. As distinct from
other representational cultural forms, cinema is endowed with the possibility
of presenting the hands both in motion and in close-up; characteristics
that elevate them to a position of importance exclusively available to the
filmmaker. In writing on film’s potential to rediscover any common object
anew Fernand Léger mentions the hand in passing:

Before the invention of the moving picture no one knew the possibilities
latent in a foot – a hand – a hat. These objects were, of course, known to
be useful – they were seen, but never looked at. On the screen they can
be looked at – they can be discovered – and they are found to possess
plastic and dramatic beauty when properly presented. (1974, 97)

In a different context, Antonin Artaud has used the hand as one of a set of
things that become meaningfully captured by virtue of isolation within the
film frame. The medium charges diurnal objects with a renewed potency
and aesthetic value by creating a contextual separation from which they

obtain a life of their own which becomes increasingly independent and

detaches them from their usual meaning. A leaf, a bottle, a hand, etc.,
live with an almost animal life which is crying out to be used. (1972, 65)

This aesthetic magnification of the commonplace article reflects the way

we give prominence to the hand on a regular basis. Thus, as we explore
the motivations behind our observation of the limb in routine, quotidian
circumstances, and as we appreciate its capacity to hold our attention, we
might discover why aspects of its cinematic mediation have drawn that
subject and this medium together. A possibility emerges from the hand’s
‘doing and thingness’ marked by its location at the point of intersection
between the active consciousness and the world in which action occurs; two
characteristics that are fundamentally embedded in the process of film-
making. Elements of these cinematic qualities resonate through the film
theory writing of Gilles Deleuze and find expression in a discussion of the
framed hand at the transitional point between his studies Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. At the beginning of the
second work Deleuze emphasises the aesthetic capacities of the hand and
grants it even more potency than the framed face. Setting out the evolution
16  Hands on Film

of his thesis from the movement-image to the time-image he identifies a

shift in the focus from the active doer to the passive seer of the representa-
tion and points to neo-realism for his main examples. There, he finds a
‘pure optical situation’ (1994, 2) that indicates a ‘crisis of the action-image’
where ‘the character has become a kind of viewer […] the situation he is in
outstrips his motor capacities on all sides’ (ibidem, 3). Stating that ‘it is as if
the action floats in the situation, rather than bringing it to a conclusion or
strengthening it’ (ibidem, 4), the author concludes his introductory section
to Cinema 2 with reiterated concentration on the hand. This, he affirms,

takes on a role in the image which goes infinitely beyond the sensory-
motor demands of the action, which takes the place of the face itself for
the purpose of affects, and which, in the area of perception, becomes
the mode of construction of a space which is adequate to the decisions
of the spirit. (1994, 12)

This monograph is a comprehensive study of the history of the human

hand on film. By considering hundreds of case studies, it will assess the
ways in which filmmakers have framed the hand: for purposes of character
and narrative development; with the intention of exploring thematic and
philosophical questions; and as a part of the aesthetic construction of their
works. Its primary focus is on the valuable and varied ways in which that
human feature has enriched the filmic representation. It also explores
the ways in which the specific framing and use of the hand in cinema has
facilitated thematic interventions into several philosophical, sociological,
and theoretical questions about being human. Included in the former
category are analyses of how the hand is used on screen for stylistic effect
in genres as differently designed as the horror and the romantic comedy;
how the hand has been mobilised for dramatic effect in narratives such as
the action/adventure thriller and detective film; and how it has been framed
in the construction of character and in determining agency in films that,
among others, have something to say about working class societies and
individuals, as well as race, gender, social mores and communication. In the
latter group, the book will excavate the ways in which the cinematic hand
can provide inroads into ontological questions about materialism and human
evolution; into debates around free will and determinism; and concerning
notions of good faith and individual moral and ethical responsibility. It will
analyse the cinematic use of the hands by considering five roles that they
perform. Each of these categories seeks to work in a dialectical way: firstly,
by considering how the hand appears and performs diverse functions on
Introduc tion 17

screen for different filmmakers; and secondly, by focusing on how that

cinematic framing might shed light on philosophical and physiological
questions about humanity and the hand.
This methodological classif ication is designed with the intention of
offering clarity and in the hope that it will make the book as user-friendly as
possible. However, as with any taxonomy, it is beset by two main categorical
complications. The f irst of these is an inevitable, pragmatic tautology:
because recognisable characteristics determine the group into which given
examples should be placed, these groups in turn come to be redefined by
their constituents. An interminable dance of a priori and a posteriori selection
thus produces a permanent state of flexible indeterminacy, one which
can only be accepted as unavoidable with such an endeavour. The second
difficulty arises when a given example exhibits qualities that might have
it reasonably situated in more than one taxonomic group. In these cases, I
have used the predominant aspect of the film to assign its category, or else
I have simply included the same film in the alternative sections. This has
led to some repetition in the films discussed across my thematic sections,
however the analytical angle of attack is sufficiently different in revisited
case studies and I have attempted to synopsise the key points of the film for
readers who may only dip in and out of single segments or chapters. Each
of my five fields of exploration is represented by a single chapter.
In Chapter One – Themes – I consider how directors have used the hand
as primary instrument to explore key ideas in their films. It offers close
readings of several films that establish human decision, desire, agency,
and potency as their principal concerns, and it presents a variety of ways
in which metaphysical and ontotheological questions have been rendered
on screen. It looks at films that have something to say directly about the
labouring human hand: whether Marxist ideas about industrialisation,
Lukács’ notion of reification of the working subject, or questions about
the changing conditions of work in the modern age. Within the context of
debates around free will and determinism, and representations of individuals
who suffer manual dispossession, it evaluates films that ask ethical and
moral questions about the disempowerment of suppressed, minority, or
marginalised individuals and groups. In the second chapter – Symbolism – I
analyse the hand as a tool of communication, first assessing how the creation
of on-screen meaning relates to socially-established codes of expression,
and then considering how filmed hands play a role semiotically in the
creation of new hermeneutic possibilities. It also looks at a compilation
of films that focus on manual movement as a part of denotative or con-
notative coding, or as it makes meaning through established social hand
18  Hands on Film

gestures, signalling, or conventional sign language. This section works with

a tripartite structure and divides representations of the hand into categories
of the metonymic, the metaphorical, and specific cases in which both are
combined. Chapter Three – Aesthetics – deals with pro-filmic hands as
creative contributors to the filmmaking process and on-screen hands as
stylistic elements. Thus, it considers the manual labour involved in certain
aspects of film production as well as paying attention to the tonal qualities
generated by different manual effects and designs across various genres.
It interrogates some of the recurring ways that filmmakers have used the
hand as a stylistic entity and analyses how framing the limb as a thing of
beauty or ugliness can create an aesthetic effect that permeates the whole
representation tonally. With a view to exploring theoretical writing on
film studies by analysts who have considered the Camp aesthetic and the
haptic effects of film spectatorship, it uses the hand as a starting point to
propose new possibilities of intervention into those areas: in both cases
attempting to problematise some of the existing lines of debate. Chapter
Four – Narration – explores the relationship between the active human
hand and plot progression. It considers how on-screen hands have played
instrumental roles in the development or suspension of the cinematic story.
A brief opening section explains the underlying distinction between the
operations that hands perform in every cinematic narrative – merely by
‘doing’ and incidentally moving the plot forward – and those films in which
the actions of the hands become a marked object of focus. It explores how,
in a powerfully protracted way, the active hands of inactive protagonists
are tied to examples of ‘slow cinema’ narration, and the section on that
stylistic group uses it as a benchmark in assessing how manual activity – or
inactivity – might determine narrative progression in films more generally.
The fifth chapter – Characterisation – catalogues examples of the use of
the hand in providing information for the development of character, and it
considers what film personalities do with their hands and how their hands
reveal psychological interiority and complexity. The section reads hands as
mechanisms that expose unconscious motives, desires, and pathologies, and
it scrutinises their role in character formation and revelation: as actants,
or as determinants of an existential condition.
In a concluding section, I use Steven Spielberg’s 1975 feature film block-
buster Jaws as a case study to consider the five categories set out in the
preceding chapters. By analysing it from those different perspectives I
hope to show how an application of hand-centric evaluations can shed light
on cinematic elements that might otherwise remain hidden. At the same
time, this closing piece should expose the problematic tautological nature
Introduc tion 19

of the taxonomy that structures the book. While discrete examples of how
the hand is working in a single film justify my categorical distinctions,
the overlapping of elements of theme, symbolism, style, narration, and
characterisation testifies to the dialectical interconnectedness of manual
imagery, framing, referencing, and use for a range of cinematic objectives.
Four lines of investigation are embarked upon here which, for a few
reasons, are not brought to satisfactory conclusions. While I acknowledge
this – and hopefully justify it reasonably – time and space, and the nature
of the debates in question have not permitted fuller closure. Complex and
on-going discussions about humanity’s relationship with free will and
determinism are not resolved in films dealing with that topic and, accord-
ingly, my own findings stop short of a perfect denouement by proposing that
cinematic texts play with the indecision rather than try to draw a definite
line under the argument. Similarly, I hope that my analysis of aesthetics of
Camp cinema does justice to that rich area of investigation – especially as
I attempt to justify Susan Sontag’s early reading of the style – and that my
omitting consideration of a broader range of (contemporary) cases will not
leave the reader too frustrated. On the question of how the film spectator
is haptically stirred by the viewing experience, I have tried to problematise
certain lines of debate without rejecting the concept wholesale. In this
respect, I feel that much more must be done that might borrow from writing
on the ‘paradox of fiction’ in elucidating what is, fundamentally, a core
ambiguity around our tactile relationship with the screened world. Finally,
I mention that consideration of the hand – particularly the detached and
self-conscious entity – might have something to add to conceptualisations
of character. Rather than propose a definite set of theses in this regard, I
suggest that analysis of how the human and animal limb (as the severed but
re-animated extremity) is represented might expose important qualities
that have something to say about all character construction. These might
include, but are not limited to, questions about the anthropomorphic form
imitating physical qualities of the living being, and how identification with
psychological motivations and intentions might be aroused in the viewer.
In all these examples, I hope that more expert and better minds will pursue
lines of study only modestly and tentatively begun here.
In considering cinematic hands and how these might inform discussions
about our being-in-the-world and our (self) representation on screen, it is
hoped that both researchers in film studies and those interested in ontologi-
cal philosophical questions will be satisfied, theoretically challenged, and
informed about a variety of topics in film themes and aesthetics. Readers
will hopefully discover a variety of examples of the hand on screen with as
20  Hands on Film

many questions about the ways in which the moving hand is represented
and mobilised for interrogative and stylistic effect. Ultimately, readers are
invited to consider the meanings offered by this set of representations as
they shed light on critical aspects of our being humans who manipulate
the world we inhabit.

Works Referenced

Artaud, Antonin. 1972. Collected Works: Volume Three. Translated by Alastair

Hamilton. London: Calder and Boyars.
Beattie, Geoffrey. 2016. Rethinking Body Language: How Hand Movements Reveal
Hidden Thoughts. New York: Routledge.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press.
Karim-Cooper, Farah. 2016. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch
and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. New York, London: Bloomsbury.
Leader, Darian. 2016. Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why. United Kingdom:
Penguin, Random House.
Léger, Fernand. 1974. ‘A New Realism – The Object’. In Introduction to the Art of the
Movies, edited by Lewis Jacobs, 96–98. New York: The Noonday Press.
Napier, John. 1980. Hands. New York: Pantheon Books.
Pantenburg, Volker. 2015. Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press.
Tallis, Raymond. 2003. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Wilson, Frank R. 1998. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and
Human Culture. New York: Pantheon Books.
1. Themes – The Framed Hand and Being

Abstract
This chapter considers how directors have used the hand as primary instru-
ment to explore key ideas in their films. It offers close readings of several films
that establish human decision, desire, agency, and potency as their principal
concerns, and it presents a variety of ways in which metaphysical and ontothe-
ological questions have been rendered on screen. It looks at films that have
something to say directly about the labouring human hand: whether Marxist
ideas about industrialisation, Lukács’ notion of reification of the working
subject, or questions about the changing conditions of work in the modern
age. Within the context of debates around free will and determinism, and
representations of individuals who suffer manual dispossession, it evaluates
films that ask ethical and moral questions about the disempowerment of
suppressed, minority, or marginalised individuals and groups.

Key Words: Free will and determinism; gendered labour; creativity; origins;
consciousness

Natural and Supernatural Phenomena: Matter Becoming

Consciousness

Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein’s Monster and James Cameron’s John

Connor’s Model 101 were very much creatures of their time. As their designa-
tions – Monster and Model – attest, they were conceived and projected into
science fiction contexts that reflected the contemporary states of positivistic
knowledge and experimentation at the periods of their conceptualisation.
But although they are separated by two centuries of scientific progress, the
fundamental questions invited by both characters and by those of their diegetic
and extra-diegetic inventors, have not altered much. Foremost among these
are the interrelated themes of the origin of sentient life and man’s relationship
with, and capacity for, intervention into the process of the creation of intel-
ligent, living beings. As much as both stories interrogate the appropriateness

Monahan, B., Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press 2022
doi: 10.5117/9789463727716_ch01
22  Hands on Film

of man’s ‘playing God’, they demand reflection on the consequences of his

having done so for society at large, for the designer, and for the created being.
Made at roughly the historical mid-way point between the first sound cin-
ematic adaptation of Shelley’s novel, the 1931 Universal Pictures production
directed by James Whale, and Cameron’s second Terminator film from 1991,
was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). While Kubrick’s diegesis
is stretched to cover an expansive period of human history and evolution,
and addresses key ethical and ontological questions, in his narrative they
are confronted centrally and explicitly. Character traits and the personality
of the Artificial Intelligence entity HAL are designed with some degree of
futuristic creative projection. However conceptual possibilities for the scope
of AI consciousness were very much a part of technological debates at the
time of the film’s production (see Malik 2000, 294–318). From the narrative
logic established in the opening sequences of 2001, we can infer that from
man’s earliest stages of primal growth, his intellectual progress coincided
with a developmental capacity for the creation and use of tools. The logical
and teleological consequence of this, given enough epochs of evolution, was
the design of an artificially conscious piece of hardware that was capable
of intelligence and emotion, and some degree of autonomy in both. HAL’s
dying words move from expressions of enthusiasm and confidence – which
we can interpret as forms of communication set in place by programmed
reactions to certain stimuli – to the pathetic and emotively plaintive: ‘Stop
Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave’. Because homo sapiens is posited as the
creative force behind this designed consciousness and self-consciousness,
it is fitting that Kubrick has already shown us the dawning moment of
humanity’s intellectual shift when, with his hands, the primitive creature
uses the femur from an animal skeleton as a tool: specifically, as a weapon.
The focus on the hands of characters at moments of their creation or
dawning of intellectual capability or consciousness is a recurring trope in
cinema and is evident in the Frankenstein and Terminator films. In these and
in several others representing bionic, anthropomorphic, or cyborg forms of
life, the framed limb is used to denote the artificial creatures’ coming to life
or passing away. In this recurring iconography of the anthropomorphised
form, we are given framed, close-up insert shots of the still hand beginning
to twitch and move, or the twitching and moving hand coming to rest. The
association between the consciousness and the mobility of the living entity
is set up as a triangulation between that being’s design, its intellect, and its
hands. This association has long roots in the discourses of Western thinking
and the consequence of this longevity – and of the founding connections
proposed between (divine) creation, consciousness and intelligence, and the
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 23

hand – is manifest in the significant and ubiquitous repetition of manual

iconography in certain films. The themes of these stories continue to struggle
with an important ontological and metaphysical question that haunts so
many philosophical, ontotheological, and scientific debates to the present
day: how can inorganic matter become consciousness? We find that this
question had an original focus on the human hand, and the ramifications
of that attention have endured across the history of artistic representation,
finding a comfortable and logical outlet in cinema.
The earliest records of debates that invoke the ontological position and
role of the human hand are repeated in contemporary literature concerned
with arguing the supremacy of that part of the anatomy by its association
with the evolution of creativity, consciousness, and culture. The original
conflicting positions were taken by the Greek philosophers Anaxagoras
and Aristotle, whose assertions were separated by almost two centuries. A
lecturer in science and philosophy, the Athenian Anaxagoras had suffered
some discrediting by the time of his death in 428BC for his proposal that
the planets were not Gods in the Heavens, but solid formations of matter
suspended in the distant skies. Less controversially, he claimed that hands
contributed to man’s intellectual evolution. Man had become a being of
supreme rationality because he possessed the nimble and capable limbs.
Inverting this premise, a century and a half later, Aristotle argued that man
was not intelligent because he had hands, but that he had been given hands
by divine design because his intellect positioned him above other creatures.
The subject matter and philosophical motivation informing this foun-
dational debate were not consigned to history. As recently as 2007, in his
book God Is Not Great, the polemicist and journalist Christopher Hitchens
recollected a personal experience in his own atheistic awakening. Having
set up the context of an informative moment from the earlier years of his
education, Hitchens quotes his primary school teacher:

So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all
the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most
restful to our eyes. (2007, 2)

In a reflection that contained resonances of the ancient Greeks’ declarations,

the shocked young pupil recalled his reaction:

I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that

my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences.
The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way about. (2007, 2–3)
24  Hands on Film

Here he explains that, for reasons of religious faith, motivated causes and
effects and their teleological consequences were inverted for proselytising
purposes.
This contemporary example is preceded by recurring historical
philosophical interventions which have sought to explore the relationship
between human agency and its corporeal manifestations. Several recent
commentators summon the voices of earlier authors, and many begin their
arguments with the Anaxagoras and Aristotle case. In his book The Hand:
How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, Frank R. Wilson
quotes the anthropologist Charles Bell:

In his landmark treatise on the hand, Sir Charles Bell noted that ‘we can
hardly be surprised that some philosophers should have entertained the
opinion, with Anaxagoras, that the superiority of man is owing to his
hand.’ Bell, taking exception to what he judged in Anaxagoras to have
been excessive regard for a mere bodily appendage, opined that these
hands were given man ‘because he was the wisest creature’. (1998, 290)

In her exploration of the metaphorical and practical use of the hand in

Shakespeare’s work, Farah Karim-Cooper references the Greek Physician
Galen, who determined ‘that the hand was a sign of human dignity and
intelligent design for its ability to grasp, hold on to objects and manipu-
late the environment’ (2016, 13). Raymond Tallis also invokes the ancient
philosophers when he considers Heidegger’s juxtaposition of thinking and
handicraft:

Against Anaxagoras, however, who asserted that it is because he has

hands that man became the most intelligent among animals, Aristotle
argues that, to the contrary, it is because of his intelligence he has hands.
This view corresponds to Heidegger’s. (2003, 246)

He quotes the phenomenologist’s work What is Called Thinking? in which

the latter has argued: ‘Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have
hands and be handy in achieving works of handicraft’ (Heidegger 1968, 16).
Setting up the context for his informative commentary on Jean-Luc
Godard and Harun Farocki’s mobilisation of the hand in sections of their
f ilmmaking, Volker Pantenburg succinctly centralises the importance
of the classical philosophers’ argument. With the locus of this historical
disagreement being perspectives on the limb, Pantenburg proposes that
the Anaxagoras and Aristotle debate ‘contrasts two positions’ and ‘sets
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 25

the course of the discussion for the following centuries’ (2015, 223). The
Aristotelian position can be found in creative reiterations, cultural practices,
and representations down through the centuries. With its various expressive
incarnations in different artistic forms, a sense of the supernatural found
its way into generations of depictions and ritualised uses of the human
hand. Karim-Cooper references Microcosmographia, the 1615 ‘Description
of the Body of Man’ by Helkiah Crooke, who was the court physician to King
James I. She indicates by this example that the tendency to associate the
physical, anatomical qualities of the human hand with the metaphysical
interpolation of the divine had been firmly established in the most orthodox
of contemporary scientific doctrine around the time of Shakespeare. John
Napier goes as far as to focus his attention on the precision and complex
role of the thumb and calls upon the writing of previous commentators in
its significance:

The thumb, the ‘Lesser hand’ as Albinus called it, is the most specialised of
the digits. Isaac Newton once remarked that, in the absence of any other
proof, the thumb alone would convince him of God’s existence. (1980, 65)

Examples in support of the importance of this position abound. There

was, as Karim-Cooper has suggested, a conspicuous rise in the symbolic
depictions of the hand even in secular art which testify to earlier religious
and supernatural connotative portrayals. One significant theme offering
reflections on the nature of the infinite or sublime was evident in ‘emblem-
atic images’ which ‘show a saint or person placing their hand into a flame,
which almost always represents constancy’ (2016, 12). This idea is referenced
in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s 1973 Mean Streets when Charlie (Harvey
Keitel) goes to a church to pray. In voice-over, we hear his supplication:
‘Lord, I am not worthy to eat your flesh. Not worthy to drink your blood’,
before he repeats the second line aloud. As he stands from the altar, a second
voice-over conversation continues:

charlie: Okay. Okay. I just come out of confession, right?

johnny: Right.
charlie: And the priest gives me the usual penance: right, ten
Hail Mary’s, ten Our Father’s… ten whatever. Now, you
know that next week I’m gonna come back and he’s just
gonna give me another ten Hail Mary’s and another ten
Our Father’s and… and I mean, you know how I feel about
that shit.
26  Hands on Film

With these last words, Scorsese inserts a close-up shot of the marble hand
of a statue of the dead Christ figure holding some roses. Charlie’s imagined
dialogue goes on:

charlie: Those things… they don’t mean anything to me: they’re

just words. Now that may be okay for the others, but it
just doesn’t work for me. I mean, I do something wrong,
I just want to pay for it my way. So I do my own penance
for my own sins. What do ye say? Eh?
johnny: That’s all bullshit, expect the pain right? The pain of hell.
The burn from a lighted match increased a million times.
Infinite.

On Johnny Boy’s line ‘No you don’t fuck around with the infinite. There’s
no way you do that’, Charlie moves his finger to hold it over the flame of a
candle. Again, in voice-over, we hear his interlocutor add:

The pain in hell has two sides: the kind you can touch with your hand,
the kind you can feel with your heart. Your soul; the spiritual side.

The connection between the natural world and the infinite spiritual is
borne out with a focus on the hand. The religious associations had become
so well ingrained in rituals of faith that Jean-Claude Schmitt has identified
in writing as early as the seventh century the publication of lexicographies
of spiritual gestures:

liturgical gestures were codified in ordines and explained systematically

by Amalarius of Metz. Iconography (such as that of the Utrecht Psalter
or the Stuttgart Psalter) emphasized the central role of the hand of God
as a pattern for human gestures and the main tool for ruling man and
transforming the world. (1991, 66)

The residue of these pre-Enlightenment tendencies can be found in non-

religious representations of handiness and, from the earliest days of cinema,
use of the horrific or possessed hand bore the reiterated theme of the earlier
association that something supernatural or metaphysical could take hold
of the limb. Hands’ capacity for channelling or mediating between worlds
of the natural and supernatural is represented in several films that deal
with curses, spells, and spiritualism. Handholding often facilitates the
connection with the dead, and gestures of the moving fingers of the witch
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 27

or wizard mark the potency of that character’s magic. It can happen that
whole films are dedicated to the exploration of the enchanted powers of the
limb. Such supernatural elements provide the initiating action and drive the
plots of And Now the Screaming Starts! (Roy Ward Baker, 1973), Demonoid:
Messenger of Death (Alfredo Zacarías, 1980), and the Rodman Flender 1999
slacker teenage comedy Idle Hands. What stands out in these films, unlike
the provision of a rationalistic resolution to the narratives of the Hands of
Orlac adaptations and many similar narratives of corporeal possession, is
that there is no naturalistic scientific explanation providing plot denouement
or conclusion. On the contrary: the animating force by which the human
hands are seized is explained by the intervention of a supernatural power.
And Now the Screaming Starts! tells the romantic tale of recently married
Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) who moves to the country residence of her
husband’s ancestors. The mansion is inflicted by an inherited curse that
manifests itself in strange occurrences like the appearance of a detached
animated bloody hand that threatens the female protagonist and lies or
floats ominously around the house. The legacy of the murderous limb has
its origin in a tale that is told by Catherine’s husband Charles Fengriffen (Ian
Ogilvy) to Doctor Pope (Peter Cushing) after the physician has examined
Catherine and failed to conclude a definitive diagnosis following the onset of
her hallucinations. The legend, presented in a flashback sequence, narrates
how Fengriffen’s grandfather (Herbert Lom), a promiscuous and extravagant
character, abused the authority of his ownership of his estate. In drunken
licentiousness on the evening of the marriage of Silas, one of his workers,
Fengriffen assaults him and claims his right to ‘take’ the young man’s virgin
bride. In defence, Silas attacks Fengriffen and the latter says: ‘Twice today
you raised your hand against me… It shall not happen again’. With this he
chops off Silas’ hand. Speaking to the rapist as he leaves, Silas curses him
with the threat that vengeance will be meted upon the ‘next virgin bride’
to come to his estate. In a cut to the present day, as Charles finishes his
tale, it becomes clear that Catherine is the victim of the woodsman’s oath.
Several horror tropes are used for dramatic and tonal affect to sustain
the possibility of a rational explanation for the events depicted. Two factors
are noteworthy in respect of this. First, the diegetic balance of natural or
supernatural justifications for the unusual happenings is maintained until
the final moments of the film. Second, most of these judiciously placed plot
pieces, scenes, and sequences are based on references to hands. Early in
the film but following the inexplicable appearances of the severed hand,
Catherine takes a walk in the woods and stumbles across a cabin. Inside
she finds the Fengriffen estate Woodsman (Geoffrey Whitehead; also cast
28  Hands on Film

as his grandfather, Silas) who is washing his submerged forearms in a bar-

rel. Because his hands are concealed by the soapy water, Catherine seeks
confirmation that both limbs are intact:

catherine: Take your hands out of the water.

woodsman: Which one would you like first?
catherine: Either.
woodsman: Either. Well as I’m right-handed… How about this one?
[He raises the left] Is that the one you want?
catherine: Now the other one.
woodsman: You want to see this one?
catherine: I’ve just said so.
woodsman: [He lifts it slowly, teasingly from the water] Two hands.
Eight fingers, two thumbs, back, front, nothing special
about them.

As the Woodsman delays the point of revelation for Catherine, the audience
is similarly taunted by the suspense. This trope is generically true to the
horror, but within the context of the present narrative, the character’s hands
are invested with the potential to indicate the direction in which the plot’s
resolution may occur, whether natural or supernatural.
Several other generic tropes modulate the spectator’s uncertainty
throughout the film. At times, a ghastly hand appears to one character
but has vanished when another arrives. At others, the murders perpe-
trated – pushing people to their death, strangulation, violent assaults – are
identifiable with manual capabilities, but none is confirmed as an act of an
avenging severed limb. Ultimately, the film concludes – again respectful
of generic convention – when the camera tracks from Catherine in her bed
holding her new-born son (who is missing his right hand) and descends the
stairs to the library. There, in a closing shot that confirms the supernatural
authenticity of the preceding events, it lingers on an open bible.
The opening sequence of the B-movie horror Demonoid: Messenger of
Death places the narrative unequivocally in the realm of the supernatu-
ral. This takes the form of a satanic backstory that establishes both the
mythological context of the diegesis and the tonal situation in which
the main part of the plot will take place. In a pre-credit scene, a group of
robed men wrestles with a female and chains her to the walls of a cave.
One raises an axe and chops off her left hand. As they place it ceremoni-
ously into a small sarcophagus, exterior shots of a devil-like high priest
on a misty hilltop are intercut with their proceedings. The film is beset
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 29

by many of the f inancial limitations one might expect from a B-movie

and the quality of its special effects and stylistic vicissitudes is uneven.
Nevertheless, it is noteworthy as a film in the generic category for its rare
presentation of the demonic hand as variously severed and independently
mobile and then attached to its victim who is, in turn, wholly possessed
by its power. The early representation of the hand-chopping ceremony
acts as a coda for the supernatural motivations of the action that follows.
Unlike the earlier Roy Ward Baker picture, there is never any question as
to the characters’ sanity and self-certainty as they witness the series of
bizarre events showing the ghastly cursed limb take hold of one victim
after another and then evading capture. The plot is designed along a series
of set pieces, with little variation on the cause-and-effect structure: as
the hero and heroine pursue the killing hand, it moves from host to host,
turning moral and sane characters – a doctor, a policeman, a priest – into
possessed lunatics.
As with And Now the Screaming Starts! the divine (or satanic) nature of
the original curse is given religious provenance when lines from the King
James’ version of Matthew 5:30 are recited in one of the final scenes:

If my hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it aside. For it is profitable for
thee that one of my members should perish, and not that thy whole body
should be cast into hell.

Although the hand is ultimately burned, in the characteristic inconclusive

ending of the horror, the last scene shows a package delivered to Mrs. Baines.
She opens the gold box to find a mysterious pool of water on her desk beneath
it. A series of atmospheric insert shots builds tension until, on a sudden beat,
the hand leaps from her sink and grabs her hair. She spins around and falls
through a glass table-top to her death.
These accounts point to a certain anxiety over the indeterminacy of the
origin of consciousness and similar films play with that primal anxiety by
invoking supernatural explanations, tradition narratives, and myths. Faith
in deistic determination is rarely the theme of the films, but rationale for
otherworldly events is offered within belief contexts. Some films focus on a
primal anxiety about the origin of human consciousness and pose questions
about our being-in-the-world as sentient, cultured, and social entities. Both
cases nonetheless seek to threaten the centrality of homo sapiens as one of
supremacy among other life forms.
One of the principles of Darwin’s evolutionary teleology of man is
the establishment of humanity’s sovereignty over other species. Many
30  Hands on Film

commentators emphasise the possibilities granted to the hand when it

was freed from brachiation; the mobility afforded to the emerging biped
by swinging from branch to branch. Frank R. Wilson has offered a useful
synopsis of much of this writing:

Darwin is credited with the first formulation of the potential impact of

an upright walking posture: a hand freed of the obligation to support
body weight can take on other tasks. (1998, 28)

A later consequence of the liberation of the arms and hands was the emer-
gence of fully operating opposable thumbs, through the f inger-thumb
juxtaposition. John Napier situates the moment at the core of our intellectual
advancement:

Through natural selection, it promoted the adoption of the upright posture

and bipedal walking, tool-using and tool-making which, in turn, led to
enlargement of the brain through a positive feed-back mechanism. In
this sense it was probably the single most crucial adaptation in man’s
evolutionary history. (1980, 68)

As several writers attest, the relationship between the hand and the other
senses and mind was eventually externalised, so its relationship with the
world accelerated the development of self-consciousness, social connec-
tion (through language) and, finally, culture. One of the first steps in this
evolution was a move from tool-use, to the construction of ‘meta-tools’ –
implements designed with the specific purpose of creating other enhanced
tools. Raymond Tallis determines a new self-awareness that was required
for the emergence of culture:

What the hand brought to the table was not simply increased dexterity but
an utterly different sense of self. This is how the hand comes to be the key
awakening of the ‘cultural’ human being out of the natural pre-cultural
animal. (2003, 273)

In this way an evolutionary dialectic was set in motion from the earliest
moments of humans’ manual manipulation of their environment and
subsequent tool-use. Frank R. Wilson summarises the phenomenon thus:

The brain keeps giving the hand new things to do and new ways of doing
what it already knows how to do. In turn, the hand affords the brain new
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 31

ways of approaching old tasks and the possibility of undertaking and

mastering new tasks. (1998, 146)

However, even beyond the stages of post-brachiation tool-use, meta-tool

adaptation, linguistic development, self-conscious reflection, the onset of
social connectivity, and then cultural identities, a holistic interpretation of
man’s position in the universe had yet to be proposed. Following centuries of
theoretical advancements that challenged mankind’s position of centrality
in the cosmos, the phenomenological approach came to reset the experience
of being by dismantling the subject/object duality. The individual was no
longer simply posited as objectively apart from the world. For Edmund
Husserl and his disciples, the human mind was actively involved in reaching
out to grasp its surroundings, as the same settings impressed themselves
upon consciousness. In much phenomenological writing, direct references
are made to the hand as both symbolic and actual operative in the mind/
consciousness interface. Addressing the position of the body in the writing
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Russell Keat traces an analytical through-line
from Galileo to Descartes to Husserl. Keat sets up the context by explaining
how ‘humans came to be seen as composed of two distinct substances,
consciousness and matter, mind and body [in which] Descartes’ dualism is
essentially a philosophical elaboration of this Galilean conception of science’
(1982, 2). After a centuries-old separation ‘between primary (objective) and
secondary (subjective) qualities’ (ibidem, 2–3), Keat argues that ‘the history
of Western philosophy has consisted in a series of unsuccessful attempts
to overcome this dualism, leading up, as it were, to Husserl’s successful
phenomenological attempt’ (ibidem, 3). With an argument that has a focus on
the sense of sight, which he will later enhance in an extended consideration
of touch, Merleau-Ponty elucidates his point:

[O]ne cannot say that man sees because he is Mind, nor indeed that
he is Mind because he sees: to see as a man sees and to be Mind are
synonymous. In so far as consciousness is consciousness of something
only by allowing its furrow to trail behind it, and in so far as, in order to
conceive an object one must rely on a previously constructed ‘world of
thought’, there is always some degree of depersonalization at the heart
of consciousness. (2006, 158)

With a similar line Adam Roberts reiterates Martin Heidegger’s concentra-

tion on the centrality of the hand in operations of human intelligence and
cognition:
32  Hands on Film

Thought, for Heidegger, is not a disembodied or merely cerebral process;

it is part of the way our bodies function. More specifically he argues that
thought is actually a species of Handwerk – ‘handiwork’, the valorized
process of creative engagement with the world. (2009, 56)

The location of the hand at the interface of corporeal selfhood and the
objective world was paralleled for the phenomenologists with the point of
contact between inner cognitive being and outer bodily essence. Throughout
their writing the hand is mobilised as both objective correlative and symbol
for this connection. Maurice Merleau-Ponty repeatedly explains the subject’s
sense of being-in-the-world by recourse to the hand/mind/body inter-
relationship. In an important passage from Phenomenology of Perception
in which he discusses the ‘spatiality of situation’ – when the body forms
an intentional ‘attitude’ in relation to the world – Merleau-Ponty imagines
the hands as protruding ‘leaders’ for the rest of the body:

I know indubitably where my pipe is, and thereby I know where my hand
and my body are […] if my body can be a ‘form’ and if there can be, in front
of it, important figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in
virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of
its collecting together of itself in its pursuit of its aims; the body image is
finally a way of stating that my body is in-the-world. (2006, 115)

In a useful synoptic treatment of Merleau-Ponty’s dissolution of Descartes’

(and later Henri Bergson’s) mind and matter distinctions, Jennifer Bullington
explains a coterminous interpenetration of both:

The body understood as a lived body is necessarily ambiguous, since it is

both material and self-conscious. It is physiological and psychological,
but Merleau-Ponty asserts that these terms are not as dichotomous as one
would imagine. There is mind in the body and body in the mind. (2013, 25)

While there may be enough ambiguity in the phenomenological dismantling

of Cartesian dualism, to favour a unified Dasein of immaterial and material,
one should exercise caution in overstating the authority of the hand. The
relationship drawn by Heidegger between the organ and thinking must not
be read as imposing intentionality on that limb. While the phenomenolo-
gist moves beyond arguing for a dialectic of hand and brain interaction
of stimulus, he stops short of bestowing upon manual dexterity its own
self-governing agency. Rather, with near-immediate interactivity and relative
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 33

simultaneity, thoughts and mental iterations find incarnation in the mo-

tions and actions of the hand just as those same movements, gestures and
postures are coterminous with new thinking and ideas. In line with this,
many ‘possession’ film narratives explain the misbehaviour of the hand by
a pathology of the mind.
Films that represent a corporeal possession or disruption of cognitive-
manual intentionality present a fundamental rupture in the delicate line
of evolutionary progress that placed man in a position of supremacy in the
natural world. The ultimate terror, therefore, was not merely an interference
with a causal, intellectually motivated set of gestures, postures, actions,
and abilities. The invocations of the horror represent an overthrowing of
man’s divinely instilled moral purposiveness or a dethroning of nature’s
sovereign species in a dissolution of the difference between man and other
animals. While Darwin’s work sought to present a continuity between species
and unseated man from his supreme position, this line of distinction is
severed in films that use manual dispossession to undermine human agency.
Because the hand has been used as a focus to enlighten our understanding
of self – and for so many theorists this focus is of central importance – what
is being possessed in the ‘supernatural films’ is not just the hand (or even
the hand as a metaphor for something else) but our improvements through
materialist evolution.
Adam Roberts justifies the possibility of this horror by invoking a novel
by Philip K. Dick; an author perennially concerned with the f ine lines
separating human consciousness, artificial intelligence, and inorganic
matter. The intertextual reference to a Kubrick film – one in which human
agency and control over technology, society, and the self are core themes – is
apposite for this study:

Another Dick novel of the 1960s wears its indebtedness to Dr Strangelove

rather obviously in its title, Dr Bloodmoney: Or How We Get Along After The
Bomb; and here the malign character of Hoppy Harrington is identified by
his monstrous lack of hands: thalidomide having left him a phocomelus
with flippers instead of arms. (2009, 64)

In Dick’s cited work, the equation of hands and development – the natural
outward growth into finer parts – and a removal of those fine-tuned limbs,
is marked as an evolutionary regression.
It is one thing to be impaired by possession and the challenge of coordinat-
ing and manipulating one’s environment, but it is another entirely to have
full manual dexterity and to choose inactivity and indifference. Darian
34  Hands on Film

Leader has written about the 1999 teenage slacker movie Idle Hands in this
regard, and quotes Isaac Watt’s 1715 poem as the source of its title:

In works of labour or of skill

I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
(quoted in Leader 2016, 56)

In Flender’s film, the slothful stoners are punished for their lethargy by
an ancient curse that takes control of their ‘idle hands’ for murderous and
destructive purposes. The young characters’ susceptibility to the super-
natural possession, it is assumed, is not merely because of a literal manual
stasis or actual comatose corporeal immobility, but because their minds
are as inactive as their hands. In Idle Hands, the greatest affront to this
freedom and agency is lethargy: when the brain is switched off and manual
functions are anaesthetised into apathetic inactivity, another external
force intervenes and stimulates the subject’s whole being, from the hands
inwards. Indeed, with the titular allusion to Watt’s eighteenth-century
verse, the film invokes the demonic proclivity for victim selection based on
the moral vacuity of idleness. In this way Idle Hands brings the themes of
paranormal infiltration of the body (and the hand, more specifically) full
circle back to the domain of the religious. Lapses of faith leave the individual
prone to supernatural infestation.
All cinematic representations work through the premise that ‘seeing
is believing’. This concept informs basic operations of the apparatus and
facilitates playful narrative tropes such as the unreliable narrator (in films
as diverse as Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon [1950] and Bryan Singer’s 1997 The
Usual Suspects) or the mentally unstable protagonist (like Scorsese’s Teddy
Daniels in Shutter Island [2010]). Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) is
a celebrated case of how a film can tease its spectators by undermining the
basic assumption that what is seen on screen (with or across the diegetic
and extra-diegetic divide) can be automatically taken as true. However,
it is often the case that when an epistemological incongruity occurs, for
example between the visual and audio tracks, we are likely to trust the
ocular representation over its acoustic counterpart. The credulity afforded
to sight over sound has precedence in the scriptural story of doubting St
Thomas. In John’s account, the apostle refuses to accept that the Christ
character has risen from the dead and exclaims: ‘Except I shall see in his
hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails,
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 35

and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe’ (20.25). Prompted by
the tactile references in the ensuing biblical passage, and with allusions to
Caravaggio’s seventeenth-century painting The Incredulity of St Thomas,
several commentators have drawn attention to the role of the hand in the
confirmation of reliable evidence. Scrutiny of the Italian’s painting reveals
that the eyeline of Thomas does not match the angle of Christ’s wound.
Rather, it is his raised finger – and not his vision – that seems to be confirm-
ing the fact. Touch, therefore, and not sight, is the sense that bears witness.
Trajano Sardenberg reaffirms the hand’s connection to belief noting: ‘The
gospel by John is clear to state that Thomas needed not only to see, but also
touch Christ’s wounds in order to believe his resurrection’ (2002, 20–21).
Once again, the hand is positioned as a mid-way point between the natural
and supernatural realms, this time acting as a dependable instrument for
measuring the veracity of a claim. However, while the tactile is of concern in
these instances, there are other ways in which deistic belief can be explored,
and interrogated or confirmed through the cinematic hand.
Atheistic scepticism is a principal theme in the f irst installation of
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1988 Dekalog (Dekalog, jeden). The film explores the
relationship between the rationality of science as a means of understand-
ing existence and explanations of a transcendental, spiritual origin. It
tells the story of the relationship between Krzysztof (Henryk Baranowski)
and his young son Paweł (Wojciech Klata) as the latter follows his father’s
vocational interests in the world of technology and science, with a special
passion for computer programming. Krzysztof is an academic dedicated to
positivistic empiricism and he is surrounded by technology. Some of the
electrical devices in the family apartment are automated by a workstation,
significantly removing manual labour from the operations of lighting and
temperature control. Paweł’s mastering of the technology is a source of pride,
but when he needs the computer to calculate a certain ‘fact’, the machine
is inept. Paweł’s mother is abroad, so the boy asks his aunt if the device
can help him understand or know his mother’s thoughts and dreams. She
confirms that it cannot but dishonestly reassures Paweł that his mother
is dreaming of him. Tragically, the calculation that indicates that the ice
on the frozen lake can support the boy’s weight while skating turns out to
be incorrect. Paweł drowns in an accident that takes the lives of a number
of the local schoolchildren. The limitations of the artificial intelligence
and the reliability of a purely positivistic and rationalistic approach to
understanding existence are thus problematised. The associations between
hands, knowledge, and intelligence are marked at two important moments
in the film.
36  Hands on Film

In an early scene, Paweł attends one of his father’s classes and watches him
through a projector stand in the middle of the lecture hall. In a point of view
shot, the lecturer’s hands are framed as he demonstrates the complexity of a
mathematical theorem. His manual movements dramatise his explaining a
scientific detail of the universe, as they gesture to the class. Kieślowski lin-
gers on these long enough to accentuate their movements and to emphasise
their involuntary gesturing. The hands of the scientist – perhaps like the
mind of the sceptic – are detached from their transformative capabilities
and, like the functioning of Paweł’s computer, they can only relate to the
environment in an intellectual capacity, without sentiment.
The prolonged sequence during which Krzysztof comes to realise that his
son is one of the victims of the skating tragedy is punctuated by a string of
ominous events. Reports about the accident from occupants of his apart-
ment block, the sound of a distant fire brigade siren, and the ringing of
his doorbell, all contribute to a sense of his emotional fragmentation and
ultimate collapse, as the fatalistic outcome dawns on the professor. Before
having confirmation of the accident, Krzysztof is shown writing at his desk.
He notices that his ink jar has inexplicably leaked, and he watches as the
blue dye seeps through a stack of pages on his worktop. He attempts to clean
the mess and dispose of the spoiled sheets but stains his hands.
In the final scene Krzysztof goes to a decrepit church where he sees an
icon of the Virgin surrounded by candles. The image is washed in blue light
and exposed to the audible wind outside. He overturns an altar, and some
fallen candles drip white wax onto the icon so they resemble tears. On the
boundary of finding faith – neither believing enough to offer supplications
for forgiveness or justification, nor doubting so completely that the statue and
holy place are beyond his punishing desecration – the bereft father breaks
down. Krzysztof’s final act, one that moves beyond the relative passivity of
his hands as computer programmer and college lecturer, is one of manual
destruction and rage against religion and its divine representations.

The Nature and Origin of Creativity

If cinematic interrogations of the origins of intelligence are played out with

a concentration on characters’ hands, then it is logical to assume similar
types of exploration of the nature and origins of creativity. Several films
that deal with the processes of artistic invention and expression establish
protagonists whose hands are the focus of attention. Raymond Tallis posits
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 37

the primal tactile interrelationship between the left and right hands as an
initiating point of self-consciousness:

it is possible that something not too far from knowledge comes out of the
encounter and a division – of the kind necessary to raise self-consciousness
– or a bodily awareness that generates bodily self-consciousness, emerges.
(2003, 125)

The point of manual differentiation on the grounds of tactility as a form of

perception is invoked by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who marks the experiential
dissimilarity of both left and right as a sensory and corporeal doubling:

My body, it was said, is recognized by its power to give me ‘double sensa-

tions’: when I touch my right hand with my left, my right hand, the object,
has the strange property of being able to feel too. We have just seen that
the two hands are never simultaneously in the relationship of touched
and touching each other. (2006, 106)

Concentrating more closely on the possible explanations for the emergence

of a creative impulse from a burgeoning self-consciousness, Tallis suggests
that its origin might reside in the asymmetrical physiology of the human
grasping limb. He proposes that the

instrumentality of the hands, and the altered relationship to our bodies

that arises retroactively from this, is by this asymmetry underlined.
The non-superposability of our hands […] is an important aspect of our
wakening out of our bodies and their mechanisms to ourselves as agents
using our bodies for definite purposes. (2003, 122)

Not entirely dissimilar from Lacan’s primordial ‘Mirror Stage’, we might

find in Tallis’ description a certain Spaltung in the visualisation of the
left and right hands that instigates a primitive notion of possibilities of
representation in the subject. Differentiation facilitates recognition of
variation from a norm: a mode of awareness that is the rudimentary first
step in any creative act. Tallis implies this idea of copy and original when
he considers the reflected physicality of the two limbs juxtaposed:

The interlocuters in the dialogue between the left hand and the right
are enantiomorphs; that is to say, they are similar but not identical, ‘the
38  Hands on Film

same and not the same’; rather, each is related to the other as an object
is related to its image in a mirror. (2003, 122)

From this preliminary moment of recognition, an evolutionary process set

humanity on a course from primitive tool use to the formation of social
systems and cultural landscapes. With specific reference to the appear-
ance of tools in the teleology of human development, John Napier inserts
a considerable cognitive wedge between tool appropriation, application,
and construction. The distinction, Napier argues, between man’s ‘using and
making’ tools is a significant one that separates Homo sapiens from other
animal species. This, he states,

is largely an affair of the central nervous system and involves a qualitative

shift in cerebral activity from percept to concept. Abstract thinking is not a
talent of non-human primates which live on a strictly ‘here-and-now’ basis
and for whom the past and the future have very little meaning. (1980, 113)

For biologist Edward Wilson the process has entirely pragmatic conse-
quences. Bipedalism liberated the hand for alternative activities, facilitated
man’s refinement of hunting practices – increased speed and agility and
precision aiming – and improved dietary conditions. Wilson connects the
development of society and humanity to the sharing of meat, which brought
about collective cooperation firstly through hunting and then through
campfire consumption of the meat that was cooked in later evolutionary
stages. Communal hunting subsequently encouraged the development of
cooperative communication (and language), while later gatherings for fire-lit
feasting brought about a new acculturation through campfire ‘conversation’.
While Wilson states that ‘it is of consuming importance to estimate what
the ancestral humans said and did in the firelight’ (2018, 22), his namesake,
neurologist Frank R. Wilson, elaborates the thesis. He is in no doubt as to
the consequence of this line of teleological development:

When people created formal languages, they created mechanisms for

sharing knowledge, and in so doing authenticated the existence of mutual
awareness and cohesive purpose in their lives. The word that we use for
that arrangement is ‘culture.’ (1998, 37)

With a philological focus, the author delineates specific aspects of cogni-

tive development by referencing the work of prominent linguists David
Armstrong, William Stokoe, and Sherman Wilcox on a gestural morphology
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 39

that connected hand movements to language. Wilson quotes their study

directly:

with their hands and developed brain and greatly increased eye-brain-
hand neural circuity, hominids may well have invented language – not just
expanding the naming function that some animals possess but finding
true language, with syntax as well as vocabulary, in gestural activity.
(quoted in Wilson 1998, 204)

The talented flexibility and adaptability of the prehensile limb is justification

for its placement at recurring points in humans’ development as an essential
mechanism of evolution. As this process is detailed chronologically, insinu-
ations begin to emerge as to the nature and extent of the hand’s capacity
for rudimentary cognition, one not merely acting as a secondary agent in
response to the demands of the conscious mind. Raymond Tallis endows
the hand with such authority and emphasises his proposal with italics:

The dexterous hand is thus a choosing hand […] It is important to appreci-

ate that the diversity of manipulations, of modes of prehension, is possible
because of the relative non-specialisation of the human hand. (2003, 278)

So it is that for many authors the hands are not merely the agents that
realise creative design (in terms of intent and manufacture), but they also
play a fundamental role in enabling the imaginative leap from our cognitive
grasping of the world to our material rearrangement of its elements. Although
films that explore the creative process and personality rarely consider its
moment of inception thematically, cases do occur where a certain focus on
a character’s newly inherited skills are presented in scenes that concentrate
on manual proficiency. Common tropes appear, for example, in superhero
films when the protagonist learns of his/her acquisition of supernatural
or superhuman powers. The scene in which Peter Parker discovers his
web-shooting wrists and suction-climbing palms in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man
(2002) is a good example of this.
Frequently, the source of the creative instinct and capacity are framed
when an alteration occurs in the condition of the character’s hands: the
skilled piano-playing of Paul Orlac; the painter in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood
of a Poet (1930); or Oliver Stone’s cartoonist Jonathan Lansdale. In these and
similar cases the modification in manual ability examines the nature of
artistic talent and the origins of its inspiration. When the film falls within
the horror genre, the focus tends to be on provoking fear around the degree
40  Hands on Film

to which manual agency is limited to muscular actions, reactions, and

interactions, and the extent to which the hand is the motivating source of
these movements. In rationalistic scientific discourses, when severed from
the brain and central nervous system, the limbs are only dead biological
matter. They are incapable of motion beyond residual twitching as electrical
pulses subside. If divested of their capacity for sensory input, no other
characteristic from the former host – personality, consciousness, creativ-
ity – can continue to inhabit their material.
Notwithstanding the materialist positivism of such scientific explana-
tions, some contemporary commentators are keen to draw attention to the
limitations of this biological, neurological, and psychological model. They
grant the hand an active role in the generation of cognition. The premise
of such arguments is that when the brain is severed from its sensory termi-
nals it, too, is deprived of its sense-based knowledge and a rich plethora of
meaningful conceptualisations of the world is lost to it. So where do these
‘sensations’ go? Even from a phenomenological perspective, the dialectic
between the two points – subject/object, mind/body, consciousness/world
– must first assume the relative autonomy of those positions. The fissure
between the mind and the hand has inspired the thinking of many writers
of science-fiction and several films have addressed the question directly.
In addition to films that narrate tales of the supernatural possession of
the hands, many interrogate the idea that hands can possess a degree of
consciousness, knowledge, and creativity. A common version of the idea is
invoked by Darian Leader in his book Hands: What We Do with Them – and
Why. The author references a supernatural trope common to the horror
film in which the mind is not the author of the body’s behaviour but, in a
threatening inversion, the hands are capable of commanding governance:
‘In zombie and Frankenstein movies, the creatures walk with hands held
out in front of them, not to suggest difficulties in vision but, on the contrary,
pure purpose’ (2016, 4). While this is a useful recurring aspect of generic
characterisation, other examples with specific interrogation of the hand’s
creative agency have informed the themes of whole films.
In his book The Clever Body, Gabor Csepregi offers a rich examination of
the relationship between corporeality and creativity. With an impressive
array of referenced sources that have addressed the location of creative
impulses and the origins of artistic innovation within the body, Csepregi
proposes that imagination and inventive skills reside as much in the limbs
of their execution as they do in the mind of the producer. From different
theorists, he takes a range of terminology with frequent concentration on
the manual dexterity involved in artistic production. Before invoking the
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 41

book Painting and Reality by art historian Etienne Gilson, Csepregi sets out
Gilson’s rejection of ‘the view of those philosophers who claim that the art
resides wholly in the mind and the hands merely execute the orders they
receive’ (2006, 9). He goes on to quote the author directly:

Man does not think with his hands, but the intellect of a painter certainly
thinks in his hands, so much so that, in moments of manual inspiration,
an artist can sometimes let the hand do its job without bothering too
much about what it does. (quoted in Csepregi 2006, 9)

Elsewhere, Csepregi brings music theorist David Sudnow into the argument.
Of Sudnow’s own jazz piano playing, Csepregi explains that

he was able to focus conf idently on the moving of the hands and let
his fingers choose the notes […] A significant change occurred in the
improvisatory process when the ‘melodic hand’ was able to dispense with
an abstract musical scheme or thought and, by ‘tasting possibilities,’ to
produce melodies of its own accord. (2006, 65)

When he goes on to cite Arnulf Rüssel in respect of improvised musical

performances, agency is granted to the f ingers as bearing ‘a readiness
towards the execution of movement’ (ibidem, 67; original emphasis).
Csepregi synopsises Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on the body’s ‘spontaneous
improvisation’ across any number of performing arts, by celebrating its
‘singular potential for invention, variation, and adventure’ (ibidem). Csepregi
then cites related writing by Jürg Zutt and Felix Hammer that challenges
reductive materialistic or biologistic interpretations of corporeality, often by
recourse to phenomenological approaches. In another important concluding
section, Csepregi turns to Géza Révész for a terse summation of the core
point of his argument. It is fair to conclude, he suggests, borrowing the
words of the Hungarian-Dutch psychologist, that ‘the hand is more intel-
ligent than the head and is endowed with a greater creative power’ (2006,
141). Many of these sources propose a manual origin for the possibility of
creativity (see also Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2003). They conceive the subject’s
relationship with the world – in whole or part, whether through inference
or direct reference – in a phenomenological way. A decade before Maurice
Merleau-Ponty turned his attention to the ontological importance of the
hand in Phenomenology of Perception, Martin Heidegger had established the
hand-cognition connection without ambiguity. Proclaiming that the hand is
endowed with an expertise of profound significance, Heidegger explained:
42  Hands on Film

The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand
reaches and extends, receives and welcomes – and not just things: the
hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others.
The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably
because man is a sign. […] All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.
(1968, 16)

What is striking across a sample of these cases is the precision or nebulous-

ness in the specif ic qualities that are being ascribed to the hand. While
total self-consciousness of the limb is clearly impossible and its reification
to pure biological matter deemed overly problematic and reductive, most
of the theorists position their arguments somewhere on a continuum in
between these extremes. The language used in their various descriptions
is most revealing in this respect. In a sliding scale of agentive creativity
and cognitive capacity, a range of thinkers might be put in the following
order: Révész (1938) writes of the hand’s ‘intelligence’ and Sudnow (1993)
of f ingers ‘choosing’ and ‘producing’. Hammer (1974) and Rüssel (1995)
blur the line somewhat by speaking of hands’ ‘creative urge’ and having
a ‘readiness towards’. In even more abstruse terms Ricoeur (1966) talks
of the ‘singular potential’ of the hand, Gilson (1957) of ‘not thinking with,
but thinking in’ the same limbs and, as we have seen, Heidegger (1968)
loosely connects cognitive functioning with manual effect by stating that
the ‘work of the hand is rooted in thinking’. The conclusions of films that
situate a creative protagonist as manually challenged do so with degrees
of recourse to both natural/scientif ic and preternatural/metaphysical
explanations and the resolutions of their plots accord well with this
duality.
When the mind/body (or, more precisely, the mind/hand) relationship
is explored thematically, the creative impulse is dramatised through the
protagonist’s artistic skills. In the film adaptations of Maurice Renard’s Les
Mains d’Orlac (1920) there are variations on the extent to which capacity
for manual skill resides in the limbs that have been severed from the knife-
throwing murder once they have been reattached to the concert pianist. A
train accident results in the protagonist’s traumatic brain damage in the
original novel and in Robert Wiene’s 1924 version and Karl Freund’s film
Mad Love from 1935. In a deviation that opens supernatural possibilities,
the Edmund T. Gréville 1960 remake (also titled The Hands of Orlac) has
the pianist’s plane struck by lightning as a precipitating justification for his
manual alteration. The same medical surgical intervention that effects the
limbs’ transplantation is invoked in the empirically rationalistic resolutions
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 43

of the films and the acquisition of violence where there was once creativity
is explained by the brain injury.
Owing to its surreal aesthetic and diegetic structure, Jean Cocteau’s 1930
film Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) is less bound by conventional
narrative logic, and accordingly rational motivations for action and event
are downgraded. The opening is marked by the title card ‘First Episode: The
Injured Hand or the Scars of the Poet’. This is followed by a scene in which
a melodramatically posing artist is shown sketching at an easel. Wearing a
white glove on his right hand, he uses this to erase sections of the drawing.
On the second occasion he rubs out the mouth of the portrait’s face. Later,
when washing his hands in a basin of bubbling water he notices that the lips
have appeared on his palm. He stares at this for a considerable time, with
his arm held aloft reminiscent of the pose of the man in Un Chien andalou
(Buñuel & Dalí, 1929) who discovers ants crawling through a small hole in
the centre of his palm. Another intertitle explains: ‘Taken out of a portrait
where the naked hand had constructed it like leprosy, the drowned mouth
seemed to fade in the small pool of white light’. The artist becomes fixated
on his hand and shakes it violently. True to the surreal aesthetic, there’s an
unmotivated insert shot of a plaster head with a hand at its side: this hand
has lips that are talking to the ear of the plaster head, asking it for ‘Air’.
The ‘poète’ smashes a window and holds his hand outside. When he takes
it in again, he holds it to his mouth in a kind of embrace, before sexually
caressing his bare chest with it. Presently, as he lies asleep, there’s a second
insert shot of the plaster head. When he wakes, he presses his hand onto a
statue of a woman in the corner of his room. Ultimately, the film concludes
with his smashing this statue; a gesture suggestive of an internal conflict
between his own creative drive and an unidentified source of inspiration.
While caution should be exercised in the application of the terms ‘narrative’,
‘initiating incident’, ‘theme’, and ‘symbolism’ in the context of a surrealist
film, Cocteau’s piece is concerned with the idea of the inspiring muse as
origin of the creative process. Although the gloved hand is engaged in the
original sketch, the transfer of the drawn mouth onto it results in the lips
becoming animated and sexualised. They begin to direct the process of
creation until the artist is overwhelmed and destroys the statue. The ease
with which the metaphorical transference of agency occurs challenges the
authorial position of the creator and is evocative of the supernatural Gothic
presence that haunts Basil Hallward in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1890) and its 1945 filmed adaptation by Albert Lewin.
A delicate balance is struck and set out between the creative and de-
structive (or pathological) powers vested in the hands in different but
44  Hands on Film

comparable ways in Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Amadeus,

the 1984 adaptation by Miloš Forman of the Peter Shaffer play. In the earlier
film, creativity and pathological impulses are juxtaposed as earthbound
and human, while in Amadeus, as Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham)
identifies Mozart (Tom Hulce) as his nemesis, he admonishes God as the
creator of both musical genius and insanity. In Sophie’s Choice an Unheimlich
association is made between good and evil by Sophie (Meryl Streep) as she
recalls the aural memories of her childhood. She tells Stingo (Peter MacNicol)
about her mother’s piano playing and her father’s night-time typing of Nazi
propaganda. Evidently, with the story so fundamentally structured upon
the plot device of an individual’s choice, the fact that Sophie’s beloved,
intellectual father has committed himself to the side of evil – literally
played out in her reminiscences of his manual labour – while her mother
is associated with the refined pacifism of music, is a key element of the
film’s thematic interrogation. The story of Sophie’s parents is reflected
in the representation of her present-day lover, Nathan (Kevin Klein), who
is a diagnosed schizophrenic, but displays many symptoms of a bipolar
personality disorder. He is an accomplished amateur pianist and in one
scene he sits behind Sophie on a piano stool and begins to play Schumann’s
‘Of Foreign Lands and Peoples’. As he performs, during a shot that tilts to
his hands and then up to the couple, Sophie tells Stingo:

When I was a little girl, I… I remember I lay in bed, and I hear my mother
downstairs playing the piano. And the sound of my father’s typewriter.
I think: no child has a more wonderful father and mother ever. And a
more beautiful life.

Nathan’s pathology is symbolically enacted as he transforms the slow rhythm

of the Schumann piece into an up-tempo ragtime version. As it concludes,
with the camera tilting again towards the keyboards, Sophie and Stingo have
begun adding notes to the melody, with five interacting hands dancing on
the keys. Later in the film, Sophie juxtaposes the creative and destructive
impulses within a broader cultural socio-historical context when she says
of her father: ‘He was a civilised man in an uncivilised time’.
Divine purpose, human creativity, and insanity are brought together
in Amadeus when Antonio Salieri explains his incredulity towards God’s
purpose in bestowing Mozart with such magnificent musical talent. While
this is a recurring thematic concern for the rival composer, it is foregrounded
in several important scenes. In one instance, when Salieri promises to speak
to the Emperor on Mozart’s behalf about the threatened censorship of his
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 45

new opera – The Marriage of Figaro – the young recalcitrant gratefully kisses
his hand, to which Salieri replies: ‘Please, please. Herr Mozart, please: it’s
not a holy relic’. They both laugh at this, but the irony is that for Salieri, it is
precisely a blessed thing. His confessed hatred of God comes from the fact
that he believes Wolfgang’s hands are in fact holy and have been a conduit
for divine utterance. In a climactic expression of loathing, Salieri tells the
young priest Father Vogler (Richard Frank) about his intention to murder
the composer. In sinister retribution, his plan is to convince Mozart to write
his own requiem mass and then to kill him. He explains: ‘The only thing
that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? How does
one kill a man? It’s one thing to dream about it: it’s very different when you
have to do it with your own hands’. As Salieri finishes his monologue, in a
medium close-up shot he raises his hands to his face. In both Sophie’s Choice
and Amadeus degrees of distortion of the manual artistic self-expression
erase distinctions between creativity and insanity. They complicate the
origins of impulses towards good, beauty, and the ethical on the one hand,
and evil, profanity, and immorality on the other.
A formally complex f ilm that invites consideration of the thematic
relationship between the creative and destructive compulsions is Oliver
Stone’s 1981 picture The Hand. Based on Marc Brandel’s book The Lizard’s
Tail, the film tells the story of graphic novel illustrator Jonathan Lansdale
(Michael Caine), who loses his hand when it is snapped off in a car ac-
cident. In an establishing scene, in which Lansdale’s daughter is poking a
detached twitching lizard’s tail with a stick, the young girl asks him how
it knows she’s prodding it when it doesn’t have a head. He tells her that it
doesn’t know, suggesting that it’s just a reflex. However, she shows him
that the tail moves even before the stick touches it. This detail introduces
an important thread of otherworldly mystery that allows a balancing
of supernatural possibilities against scientif ic justif ications. Several
recognisable cinematic devices are used to sustain this metaphysical
navigation. Medical and psychoanalytical experts contribute articulate
interventions at judicious moments to inform Jonathan about his condition
and to explain strange phenomena that he encounters: from the sensation
of phantom fingers in his missing hand, to the growing series of psychotic
breakdowns that he experiences. At the same time, however, the f ilm
is haunted by standard tropes and iconography of the horror genre: the
ubiquitous presence of his black cat; the ominous expressionistic weather,
lighting, and shifts from colour to black and white footage; and, most
signif icantly, the extended use of point of view from the perspective of
the detached hand.
46  Hands on Film

In other films using a similar device, the crawling or attacking hand is

shown in the presence of the character whose psychotic state is in doubt.
Here, however, Stone presents it as an autonomous living entity. Stone’s
use of the hand as a pivotal signifier – one around which the question of
rationalistic versus supernatural explanations of its animation revolves
– undermines some of the core expectations of cinematic coding. What
the spectator sees independently of the motivated gaze or scrutiny of a
diegetic character is generally understood as a representation of objective
(diegetic) reality. German Expressionism constructed entire story worlds
as externalised correlatives of the inner mental and emotional states of its
protagonists, making the internal psychological condition of the central
character a ubiquitous conceit. The independent appearance of the graphic
illustrator’s hand as a freely moving agent in Stone’s film works against
established expectations.
Having suffered several blackouts, after which he discovers unexplained
drawings in his sketchbook, Jonathan discusses his concerns with Brian,
a psychologist friend. The artist tells the scientist that he has been hav-
ing seizures during which he misplaces things and makes sketches. To
undermine the certainty of the empirical reliability of the psychologist’s
rationale, Stone uses a flash insert of the severed hand in the process of
completing the artwork. Taking a stereotypical Freudian line, Brian asks
if the drawing was obscene and Jonathan answers affirmatively:

brian: Maybe you were tired, and some automatic pilot took over.
jonathan: No, I could never do work like that with my left hand. This
was like the work I used to do with my right hand.
brian: You never know what you can do: the unconscious is
capable of anything.
jonathan: Like what?
brian: Guy under hypnosis: one subject spoke fluent German…
Never spoke a word of it before in his life. We used experi-
ments like that at Berkeley.

As the conversation continues, Stone inserts another shot of Jonathan doing

the drawing himself with his prosthetic, and Brian explains that the new
limb might have been receiving impulses from the brain. In either case,
natural explanations are offered and simultaneously undermined. Some of
what Jonathan perceives might be scientifically and rationally explained by
degrees of trauma or burgeoning insanity. However, this is not the case with
everything that the spectator is shown, and we are consistently invited to
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 47

interrogate the conceptual ambiguity of the film’s visuals. In this respect,

Stone’s film plays cinematically with the viewers’ expectations and faith
in the visual much as Michelangelo Antonioni does in Blow-up.
During a notable sequence in The Hand the severed limb attacks
a down-and-out character played by Stone. In considering moments at
which directors purposefully position themselves as victims or assailants
within the diegesis – one might recall Hitchcock missing the bus in North by
Northwest, or Polanski slicing Gittes’ nose in Chinatown – the droll gesture
usually underscores a point being made by the filmmaker. This is precisely
what the director is doing here, as Stone denies his audience any ‘easy out’
on the question of the true source of creativity and this is carried through
to the final sequence of the film. In direct opposition to the conclusion
of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in which a ponderous denouement offers a
rationalistic psychoanalytical explanation for everything that has occurred
in the narrative, The Hand vacillates inconclusively between the possibility
that empirical sciences can provide the requisite answers and thus maintains
that an otherworldly justification is needed to explain the phenomenon of
the possessed limb (and, by implication, the source of the artist’s creativity).
The final scene begins with a monologue delivered by a female psy-
chiatrist. It is peppered with clichéd turns of phrase and technical jargon:
‘It’s an old rage, Jon… an ancient rage’; ‘instead of facing the feeling, you
blacked out… Once again you chose to eliminate someone else’s life in
order to forget your own’; and ‘Don’t be afraid of the pain: just go into it.
Deeper and down. Sense it, feel it, touch it. Don’t deny it…’ These hackneyed
expressions are set around explanatory plot sequences in flashback insert
shots. Halfway through the doctor’s monologue a medium shot reveals that
Jonathan is in a hospital lab, strapped to a chair, and connected to a chiming
monitor. Up to this point, the narrative resolution is firmly set within the
rationalistic discourse of the expert. It builds suspense as the pace of the
bleeping machine accelerates:

doctor: Do you want to tell me something, Jon?

jonathan: The hand…
doctor: Where is the hand now?
jonathan: Near your neck…

When Jonathan warns that it might kill her, she laughs, telling him that
his hate has provoked his murderous impulses. On her line ‘There is no
hand’, she is violently strangled by the limb which pushes her to the floor
to a bloody death. As Jonathan sits in the chair laughing, his right hand
48  Hands on Film

undoes the strap on his left and he stands up. The film fades to black. By
mobilising recognisable horror conventions but subverting the generic
expectations that these would ordinarily cue for the audience, the film
leaves open extra-diegetic possibilities that relate to the very act of narra-
tion. Rationalistic hermeneutics, authorial control (by the filmmaker), and
diegetic conclusion are undermined in ways that are usually employed to
set up the potential return of the antagonist in a sequel. Here, definitive
confirmation of the nature and persona of the villain is withheld: is the evil
hand the true perpetrator (in a supernatural way) or are we dealing with
unreliable narrators – both Jonathan and Stone – which would suggest a
logical justification for the events depicted? In either case, the obvious
connection between the personality of the artist and the source of his
creative impulses is at the core of Stone’s thematic endeavour. Inspiration,
for the director, cannot merely be reduced to materialistic or positivistic
scientific principles and, while the film unsettles its audience by avoiding
commitment to alternative possibilities, its real achievement may be how
it reflects the irresolution of debates around the same topic.
The emotive Iranian film The House is Black, directed by Forugh Far-
rokhzad in 1963, considers the origins of creation and creativity with a
theistic focus that centralises the hand. The documentary poetically presents
the inhabitants and conditions of a rehabilitation institution for individuals
suffering from leprosy in Tabriz County, Iran. Its voice-over quotes passages
from the Koran and the Old Testament, interwoven with original lines of
monologue. Like the cine-poetic post-World War Two films Le Sang des bêtes
(Georges Franju, 1949) and Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1956), The House
is Black works with a lyrical juxtaposition of narrating voice, synchronised
location sound, and interior and exterior images of the hospital. These
include a combination of fly-on-the-wall observation shots and pictures of
patients and caretakers at the Bababaghi Hospice. If, as John Napier points
out quoting Aristotle, art ‘consists of the conception of the result to be
produced before its realisation in the material’ (1980, 113) then the ‘material’
in this case is the human body, brought into existence by a divine power
and fashioned in its own likeness. In his 2010 book Michelangelo’s Finger
Raymond Tallis describes how God’s hand is the focal point of the Sistine
Chapel ceiling representing the process of life’s initiation. This original act of
creation was passed into the artistic activities and capabilities of our hands.
Farrokhzad’s film reflects this dual quality. Through readings of excerpts
from holy books it invokes the heavenly design of the human form and
then juxtaposes these with images of leprosy sufferers to interrogate and
criticise the divine intention behind the corporeal distortions of the disease.
THEMES – THE FRAMED HAND AND BEING 49

Figure 1.1: Divinely created contorted female hands in The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)

The introductory voice-over talks of notions of ugliness and how it is a

decent human being’s obligation to confront it. The opening shots show
boys who are scarred in some way by leprosy – facially or to their limbs – all
reading from scripture that offers thanks to God. A caustic tone is taken
when one boy, who has deformed hands, is heard to read: ‘I thank you God
for giving me hands to work with’. Many shots emphasise the scarring or
deformity to faces but the focus moves to increasing close-up framing of
the patients’ hands. As an accumulation of afflictions is represented, divine
responsibility is inferred and obliquely condemned. Over a fixed profile
shot of men against a wall, we hear the line: ‘In your book all my parts have
been written… And your eyes, O Lord, have seen my foetus’.
Farrokhzad is innovative with her framing, and in her use of movement
and perspective in set ups that invite us to consider the beauty of the human
hand, even in diseased conditions. Where general cover might have been
provided in a sequence in which a doctor examines patients, Farrokhzad
conveys the personalities of the characters and captures the atmosphere of
the scene in a series of close-up shots that focus on their contorted hands.
The film candidly presents therapeutic sessions undergone by patients. One
woman is shot from below a glass tabletop onto which her bent fingers are
pressed with the aid of two weighted cushions (Fig. 1.1).
Another scene shows the massaging of a hand with the stretching of
the fingers. Following these shots, we are shown some men praying inside
the mosque of the medical institution. A tracking shot displays several
patients kneeling or standing in various positions. One man prays with his
deformed hands raised: ‘Your hands, my left and my right, my north and
50  Hands on Film

my south, my sides and my destiny. All to thy command and power as there
is no turning and no power except from God’. This supplication is intercut
with deformed body parts – mostly hands – which ironise the power of the
divine and implies cruelty of action and purpose, rather than love. Inserted
into this sequence is placed – in another ironic gesture – a shot of a hand
holding rosary beads. As an inspired objective correlative of one of the core
themes of the film, the item for the counting of verses of prayer – how the
human and divine connect – is held in the filmed hand.

Determinism and Free Will: Possession, Self-possession,

Dispossession

The film adaptations of Maurice Reynard’s 1920 novel Les Mains d’Orlac fall
within the horror and psychological thriller genres. Aesthetic rendering var-
ies from the German Expressionism of Robert Wiene’s pioneering adaptation
The Hands of Orlac, to the subtle naturalistic reworkings of Mad Love (Karl
Freund, 1935) and Edmund Gréville’s 1960 version. Despite their stylistic
differences and changing emphasis on the degree of supernatural explana-
tions for narrative resolution, all the remakes retain the central plot device
of the pianist’s (belief in his) inheritance of the hands of an assassin and his
coming to terms with the possibility that the evil residing in the organs has
possessed his own soul. The films offer reflection on a Cartesian associa-
tion, or disassociation, between consciousness and corporeality; cognitive
functions and physical endeavours; and – in Descartes’ terminology – the
extended and the unextended. The complex interaction between will and
action are focused on the hands as empowered or disempowered symbols
of agency. The protagonist’s crisis invites the question of the character’s
self-determination.
In most cases the haunting of the protagonist or monster by a demonic
supernatural force overwhelms his agency. As the character is possessed
by an evil entity the hands come to represent his impotency, loss of bodily
control, and free will, as a new all-consuming force takes ownership of the
innocent and impotent subject. While philosophical debates about humans’
degree of self-determination have existed for more than two millennia, some
contemporary commentators challenge the claim that homo sapiens is a
wholly free-willing, self-determining being. According to such detractors,
‘decisions’ on actions are influenced either by environmental factors beyond
our remit, by series of causes and effects that have been historically set in
motion and predate our involvement, or by the unconscious mind, over
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 Ez az asszony úgy beszél, mintha soha keresztvíz nem érte volna.
Minden csak e világból való. A vallás csak poézis.
– Sőt tíz esztendeig sem tart ily módon a szépség, folytatá még
erősebb nyomattal Mayerné, mert az olyan hölgyek, kik a világ
örömeitől megfosztják magukat, hamarább hervadnak.
– Csitt, Boltay jön!…
Az öreg úr belépett, jó reggelt kivánt s kérdezé, nem izennek-e
valamit a városba, mert rögtön indul, a kocsi be van már fogva.
– A mama be akarna menni, felelt Fanny egész készséggel, nem
lenne szives bácsi, hogy bevinné?
Mayerné szemet, szájat meresztett. Ő nem mondta, hogy el akar
innen menni.
– Szivesen, felelt Boltay, hová parancsolja?
– Haza akar menni leányaihoz (Mayerné megijedt), nekem
vannak ott holmi hímzéseim, nem akarom, hogy a nénéim elhányják,
még zsibvásárra vetik, azokat fogja elhozni nekem.
(Ah, okos leány, arany eszű leány!)
– Nevezetesen egy pamlagom van ottan, tudja mama, magam
hímeztem, azzal a két galambbal, azt már most semmi esetre sem
akarom nénéimnek hagyni. Érti?
De hogyne értené? Ez azt teszi, hogy elfogadja annak a
pamlagülő úrnak az ajánlatát s mily finoman adja tudtára, ez a
vastag fejű Boltay egy betűt sem gyaníthat semmiből. Bölcs leány,
arany eszű leány!
Boltay egy perczre kiszólt a kocsisához, hogy csináljon ülést az
asszonyságnak, e perczet fölhasználva, suttogó szóval kérdé
Mayerné:
– Mikor jöhetek vissza érted?
 – Holnapután.
– S mit feleljek ott?
– Holnapután, ismétlé Fanny.
Erre ismét belépett Boltay.
– Egy perczig várjon még, édes bátyám, szólt Fanny, néhány sort
irok Teréznek, vigye magával.
– Szivesen. Ámbár azért kár betintáznod az ujjadat, mert ha
szóval megmondanád is, átadnám.
– Jól van bácsi, tehát mondja meg a néninek, hogy vegyen
nekem egy köteg cashmir harrast, egy rőf pur de laine, vagy poil de
chévre…
Boltay megijedt ez idegen szavaktól.
– Csak ird le, jobb lesz. Mert ezt meg nem tanulom.
Fanny mosolyogva vevé iróeszközeit s egy rövid levelkét irt,
összehajtá, bepecsétlé s átnyújtotta Boltaynak.
Mayerné még egy titkos egyetértő pillantást lopva leánya
szemébe, fel hagyá magát emelni a szekérre, s a víg ostorpattogás
közt elhajtatott.
Fanny utánuk nézett egy ideig, azután hideg, megvető gunyorral
fordult vissza szobájába, megöntözé virágait, megeteté madarait, s
dalolt igen-igen jó kedvűen.
A szekér a városhoz érvén, a legelső boltnál ismét leszállt Boltay;
tűzkövet, vagy mit árultak ott, a miből okvetlen vásárolnia kellett
neki. A kocsisnak megparancsolá, hogy csak vigye Mayernét, a hova
parancsolni fogja. Ő majd haza talál gyalog.
Mayerné nemsokára ismét szerettei körében volt. Épen ott találta
Abellinót. A dandy leste már, mit fog végezni? s mindnyájan várták,
midőn betoppant. Ugyanazon öltönyben volt, melyet Boltay mester
vett számára. Ah minő nevetség volt az! Hogy ugrálták körül, hogy
forgatták erre-arra a dévaj leányok! Abellino megkérte, engedje
meg, hogy ily alakban lefesse. De nem, most nem ért rá. Csak
gyorsan. Mit végzett?
Mayernénak két óráig tartott, míg elmondta szerencsés
merényletét, mennyit küzdött, milyen ékesszólással volt, míg a
leányt rávette az engedékenységre. Mert a leány szemérmes
szörnyen, s el kellett vele hitetni, hogy a lovag bizonyára nőül veendi
őt, hát csak mindig azt mondja neki.
Abellino nem állhatá meg, hogy össze-vissza ne ölelje a duennát,
a mit azzal bánt meg aztán, hogy Mayerné elmondá neki, milyen
szép alaknak irta ő le Abellinót Fanny előtt. – Hagyjuk őket ott
vigadni.
Ez alatt Boltay uram is szépen hazaballagott. Teréz már várta az
ajtóban, mert a kocsis elébb haza ért, s jöttét hírül adá. Első dolga
volt a levelet átadni.
– Levelet hoztam, mert a mi benne van, az törökül van, el nem
tudtam volna mondani szájjal.
Teréz felbontá a levelet, elolvasá, Boltayra nézett. Megint
elolvasá. Harmadszor is elolvasá s ismét Boltayra nézett.
– Ez igazán törökül van. Én sem értem. Nézze ön.
S azzal Boltaynak nyújtá a levelet.
– Hm, dörmögé az öreg úr, csakugyan azt gondolva, hogy a levél
tele van vad idegen szavakkal, s elbámult, midőn ezt olvasá benne:
«Kedves nagynéném! Mindent tudok. Azon nő, kit anyámnak
nevezni irtózom, ne jőjjön hozzánk többet. Izenjék meg Kárpáthy
János úrnak, hogy még ma keressen fel, fontos, sietős beszédem
van vele. Jőjjenek kegyetek rögtön. Szerető rokona Fanny.»
 Mit jelent ez? Mi történt ezek között? Mikor volt ideje valaminek
történni? Olyan szép csendesen kávéztak együtt, oly bizalmas
suttogással váltak el egymástól. Kezet csókoltak egymásnak… Boltay
mester nem értett semmit.
De Teréz kezdé érteni.
Tehát rögtön izenni kell Kárpáthy Jánosnak. Ki megy érte?
Elmegy Boltay mester maga. Az ő lábai jók, egy percz alatt ott van.
A vén Palkó már ismeri, s karonfogva czepeli be urához. A vőlegény
megérti az izenetet, rögtön hintajába fogat, öt percz alatt útban
vannak. Boltay, Teréz a hintóban ülnek mellette, a fedett ablakon át
senki sem látja őket, az öt sárkány-paripa, három előre fogva, kettő
hátul, nyargalva vágtat végig az országúton. Két óra alatt megjárják
az útat, a mi Boltay mester csendes hajtásával jó négy óra járás.
Fanny maga fogadja az érdemes vendéget, arcza valamivel
halványabb mint máskor, de a halványság úgy illik neki. János úr
magánkívül volt elragadtatásában, meg nem állhatta, hogy a szép
ara elé járulván, ilyen szokatlan beszédet ne ejtsen, kezét
ünnepélyesen mellére téve:
– Kisasszony, engem az Isten úgy segéljen, a hogy életemben
nem lesz egyéb gondom, mint hogy kegyednek örömet szerezzek.
– Én pedig uram fogadom, szólt Fanny határozott, nyugodt
hangon, hogy életemben nem fogok erősebb kötelességet ismerni,
mint az ön nevének becsületére válni. Most legyenek önök mind a
hárman szivesek néhány órai beszélgetésre elzárkózni velem.
E szavak oly nyugodt, oly határozott hangon voltak mondva,
hogy engedelmeskedni kellett nekik s mind a négyen eltávoztak a
legbelsőbb szobákba, bezárva minden ajtót maguk után.
Néhány óra mulva ismét egyenkint felzáródtak az ajtók s
előjöttek mind a négyen.
De minő változás minden arczon!
 Fanny arcza nem volt többé halvány, hanem piros, mint a hajnal,
kinyilt, derült, mint a feslő rózsa.
Boltay mester egyre pödrötte a bajuszát, mint ki rettentő
fenyegető dolgokra készül; ha olykor el nem nevetné magát,
haragosnak is láthatnók.
Még a jámbor Teréz szemei is szikráznak, de a szikrák a
diadalmas bosszú szikrái azokban.
Hát még a vőlegény, János úr! Hol van a János úr, hová lett az
öreg Nábob? Ismeri őt valaki? Ez a vidám, ugráló, szökellő, nevető,
diadalmaskodó alak; vajjon ő volna az? Ej, ej, bizony húsz évvel
megifjult. Oly kedve van, hogy madarat lehetne vele fogatni.
Kicserélték!
Nem találja helyét, oly kedve van; el van bűvölve, el van
ragadtatva, ez a leány tündére, angyala, istennője. Nem hiába
támadt ő fel halottaiból.
– Tehát holnap délután! monda örömtől reszkető hangon.
– Igen, holnap; viszonzá Fanny igéretteljes hangnyomattal,
szemök különös tűztől villog, a mint egymásra tekintnek.
Kárpáthy túláradó érzelemmel szorítja meg Boltay kezét, azután
Terézét, most Fannyra kerül a sor.
– Szabad-e e szép kezet megszorítanom?
Fanny szivélyesen nyújtá eléje a legparányibb, a legsímább, a
leggyöngédebb kezecskét. A villanyos érintésre egészen oda lett
János úr; nemcsak kezébe, hanem ajkaihoz is szorítá azt s a leány
nem haragudott érte.
E merénylet sikerülte feletti örömében sorra ölelte János úr még
egyszer Boltayt és Terézt, s azon vette magát észre, hogy egyszer
csak Fannyt is karjai közt tartá. A leány szeliden simult hozzá,
minden prude, ízetlen vonakodás és minden kaczérság nélkül, a
hogy minden természet gyermeke fogna tenni.
Erre azután rohant János úr a hintajához, maga kinyitva annak
ajtaját, s nem várva, míg Palkó lebocsátja a felhágót, onnan is
visszakiálta:
– Holnap délután!
– Csitt! inte, kicsiny ajkaira téve mutatóujját Fanny.
– Hajts Pozsonyba! kiálta János úr, nyugtalan sietséggel, míg
Palkó egész tempóval kapaszkodott fel a bakra, onnan phlegmatice
nézett vissza urára.
– No mit bámulsz? Hajts!
– Valamit itt hagytunk, mondá az öreg szolga.
– Mit hagytunk itt, te?
– Húsz esztendőt az öregségből, nagyságos ifjú úr! viszonzá
amaz, el nem mosolyodó képpel s nagyot húzva azon a legelső «ú»-
n.
János úr jókedvűen nevetett e tréfás megjegyzésre. A kocsis
pattogva ereszté ki sudarát, a sárkányok belekaptak az útba s percz
mulva messze porzott a hintó az országúton.
… Vajjon mit végezhettek ott benn?
***
Másnap reggel hetivásáros kocsin érkezett ki Boltay falusi lakába
valami cselédféle egyéniség, kit Mayerné küldött a hímzett
pamlaggal Fannyhoz.
A cseléd titokban megsúgá, hogy a pamlag aljában levél van
eldugva.
Igen jó.
 Fanny előkeresé a levelet. Anyja irása volt az. A gazdag úr
nagyon örül. Örömében Fanny tiszteletére másnapra nagy estélyt
rendez Kecskerey úr ő nagysága szállásán, s arra Fannyt
ünnepélyesen meghívja; ide van mellékelve a czifra meghívási jegy.
«Mademoiselle Fanny de Mayer avec famille.»
Családostul.
Értve alatta anyját, nénjeit s más efféle pereputyját.
Ah, tehát közönségről is van gondoskodva! Nagy sokaság lesz,
nézők, bámulók! Annál jobb. Az előadás is jó leend.
Fanny visszabocsátá a cselédet azon izenettel, hogy az estélyre
való meghívást elfogadja s üdvözletét küldi nagyságos Kecskerey
úrnak.
Hát ez a Kecskerey úr kicsoda? Még ezt is meg kell ismernünk?
Egy derék gentleman, ki a finom társaságokban nem megvetendő
szerepet szokott játszani s egy olyan korszükséget pótol, melyet nála
nélkül sokkal nehezebb volna elviselni.
Ismeri őt mindenki, a ki magát nevezetességnek szereti tartani,
legyen az nagy úr, vagy nagy művész.
Az ő termei, az ő estélyei, az ő reggélyei szoktak gyűlpontjai lenni
az egész finom világnak.
Előkelő hölgyek, kiket a művészet iránti buzgalom kényszerít egy-
egy hírneves művészt közelebbről is láthatni, szabadelvű amazonok,
kik Hymen lánczain túl terjeszték viszonyaikat, éltes dámák, kik
szeretnek jó kedvű népet látni magok körül, unalmas, illedelmes
salontársalgások helyett; kegyelt művésznők, kiknek társalgása
valódi fűszere a vigalmaknak, egy pár bas bleu, felvilágosult szellem,
philosophasszonyok, kik naplót irnak minden emberről, a kit láttak, a
kivel beszéltek; egy-egy delnő a magasabb körökből, kit nagy
énekesnőnek tart a világ, s ki szereti magát bámultatni; homályos
születésü divatszépségek, kiket egy vagy más tónadó kegyelése a
finom társaságokbani megjelenhetésre jogosít, s tisztességes anyák,
kik leányaikkal együtt jőnek ide, s kik elég együgyűek nem találni ki
azon okot, mely őket e szerencsére jogosítá; ifju gavallérok, szellem
és vagyon aristocratái, gourmand öreg urak, kiknek csak a szeme és
szája élvez már gyönyörüséget; egy-egy satyricus szellem, ki szeret
mások balgaságain mulatni; holmi idegen dúsgazdag gavallérok, kik
a szépség és élvezet műkiállítását kívánják magok előtt látni; blazirt
kedélyek, kik az unalom ragályát terjengetik; őrült poéták, kiknek
csak inteni kell, hogy rögtön kiálljanak a középre s rettentő grimace-
okkal elszavalják tulajdon verseiket, s végre két-három feuilletonista,
a ki a lapokban mindent leirjon, a mit Kecskerey úr estélyén látott,
hallott, evett, ivott és a mit mások láttak, hallottak, ettek és ittak.
Ilyenforma elemekből állanak a finom társaságok, melyek
Kecskerey úr estélyein össze szoktak gyűlni. Ily estélyek pedig
tartatnak minden héten kétszer, sőt rendkívüli esetekben, például
valamely vendég-művész keresztülutaztával, soron kívül is és minden
legfényesebben szokott azokban menni.
A ki ebből azt következtetné, hogy Kecskerey úrnak valami
képtelenül gazdag embernek kell lenni, az csalatkoznék. Semmije
sincs annak a nap alatt, sőt a föld alatt és a víz alatt sincs; de van
«renomméeja!» Finom, lovagias, művészetismerő, mívelt és tudós
férfinak tartatik. Nála megjelenhetni megtiszteltetés. Nála nem
szégyelheti magát senki, mert ő valóban hódol az aristocratiának,
csakhogy nála egyesül a czímer, pénz, szellem és szépség
aristocratiája. Ez elmés közvetítése a különböző társadalmi köröknek.
Ez elmésség indítja azután gazdagabb főurainkat, a derék
bankárfiukat s galant öreg mágnásokat, hogy maguknak ily
szellemdúsan összeállított világot alkossanak, melyben az anyag az ő
szerzeményök, csak a művészi kezelés a házi gazdáé. – Magyarul
beszélve: ők adják a pénzt az estélyekhez, mikre Kecskerey úr hívja
meg a vendégeket.
A ki erre azt a szót ejtené ki a száján, hogy Kecskerey úr e szerint
«kerítő», az nagyot vétene az illedelem szabályai ellen.
 Kecskerey úr nem biztat, nem szerez meg senkit, az ő estélyein
minden a legszigorúbb illedelemmel történik.
Elébb a művészek és művésznők szavalnak, énekelnek,
furulyálnak, zongoráznak, azután zongora mellett néhány szerény
quadrillet, keringőt tánczolnak el, akkor vacsorához járulnak szép
rendben, a hölgyek ülve, a férfiak állva falatoznak, néhány pohár
pezsgő üríttetik, a jelenlevő hölgyek s netaláni celebritások
egészségére; azzal rövid, szellemdús társalgás után ismét egy pár
quadrille, keringő tánczoltatik le, tizenegy óra után a hölgyek
fölkészülnek, eltávoznak, csupán néhány dandy – ifjabb és vénebb –
marad hátra poharazni és kártyázni.
Ebből láthatja mindenki, hogy ez estélyeken legkisebb illem- s
erkölcssértés sem szokott történni.
Oh, Kecskerey úr azt meg nem engedné! ő büszke a maga
renomméejára. Ő csupán alkalmakat szokott szerezni
összejövetelekre, de ő szerelmet nem szerez. – Az már megint másik
személy dolga. – S ha őt ezért valaki kerítőnek nevezi, annak csupán
ez az ostoba magyar nyelv az oka, miért nincs benne két különböző
kifejezés – ugyanazon dologra?
Kecskerey úrnál tehát nagy estély készült a kitűzött napon.
Abellino erszénye bánta a költségeket, tulajdonképen nem is az övé,
hanem Fennimoré, kinek ez estve Fanny megjelenésével ezer
aranyat kelle veszíteni, fogadás fejében.
A dolog pedig már oly bizonyos volt, hogy titkot sem kellett
belőle csinálni. A tréfa angolos. Abellino kivetett hatvanezer pengőt
azért, hogy megnyerjen egy ezer aranyas fogadást, a többi csak
mellékes dolog.
Hivatalos volt az estélyre, s meg is igérkezett mind a finom világ,
a szabadelvű delnők, a jókedvű öreg dámák, a kegyelt
divatszépségek, a művészek és művésznők, a naplóiró kékharisnyák
és a versmondó költők, a dandyk, a gourmandok, a banátusi
szellemdús földesurak, s más efféle buzgó közbirtokosok, kiknek
halmaza kétségbeejteni képes egy szegény feuilletonistát, ha
mindeniknek külön megtisztelő epithetonnal akar felszolgálni.
A válságos nap reggelén, mely ifju honatyáinkat jobban érdeklé,
mint a legújabb válaszfelirat, bérkocsiba ült Mayerné ugyanazon
öltözetben, melyet Boltay mester vett neki; az úton így főzte ki
magában a további tervet: a bérkocsit elhagyja az erdő mellett s
gyalog megy Boltayék lakáig; ott azt fogja mondani, hogy
vásárosokkal érkezett. Fannyval azután lesétálnak a mezőre, mintha
a vetéseket néznék s a bérkocsihoz jutva, felülnek, azzal aztán Isten
hozzád kapufélfa! Búcsúzzék el, a kinek tetszik.
Igy kicsinálva kegyesen jó szándékát, be is érkezék szerencsésen
Boltay mezei lakába; a mennyei gondviselés olyan kegyes volt iránta,
hogy sem kezét, sem lábát nem törte az úton.
Hanem abban a kellemetlen meglepetésben kellett részesülnie,
hogy a mint a cselédektől Fanny után tudakozódott, ezek azt
válaszolták neki, hogy a kisasszony még reggel bekocsikázott
Pozsonyba.
Helye volt a megijedésnek.
– Tán az öregek vitték be?
– Nem, azok még hajnalban elmentek, s ő csak pár óra mulva
távozott el fogadott szekéren.
Jajjaj! – Mit gondolt ez a leány? Talán bizony csak ki akarja az
anyját játszani, s egyedül lát a nyereséges üzlet után? Tán csak nem
világosította fel valaki, hogy hasonló szolgálatok után a szolgálattevő
közbenjárókat legjobb nélkülözni. No ez szép volna, ha őt
skizzirozná!
Utczu! vissza a bérkocsihoz. Rajta, vissza Pozsonyba, lóhalálába.
Vajjon hova lehetett ez a leány? Jaj, ha az ideig össze talált jönni
Abellinoval; vagy hátha mást gondolt s most már nem fog eljönni?
pedig már mindenki arról beszél, az estély is azért van rendezve.
Nem, nem lehet, jobban ismeri ő már az asszonyi szíveket,
hamarább attól fél, hogy nála nélkül fog megjelenni. Mindegy,
mindegy, azért csak mégis az ő érdeme, az ő fáradsága, hogy őt
rábeszélte. Ah, minő keserű aggodalmakkal kell küzdeni egy anya
szívének!
A vendégek pedig már mind gyülekeznek Kecskerey úr
termeiben, egymás után szállnak le a kecses delnők a bejárás előtt,
finom kaczérsággal engedve láttatni szalagos lábacskáikat a
szemüvegező gavallérok előtt, a hintókból alálépve; a tornáczban
kölcsön adott egyenruhás inasok szedik el a meghívó jegyeket, mikre
szokásos felügyelet van s a burnusokat, sliffereket; a háziúr, ő
nagysága Kecskerey, magas leereszkedéssel fogadja az ajtóban az
érkezőket; minden ember tudja, hogy az estély nem az ő pénze ára,
ő is tudja jól, hogy erről mindenki megvan győződve, hanem azért
olyan diszesen bókolnak egymásnak, mintha igazi házigazda s igazi
vendégek volnának. Kecskerey úr éles orrhangja keresztülhangzik az
egész társalgáson.
– Nagyon örülök, hogy nem veté meg szerény meghivásomat. –
Nagysád nagy tiszteletben részesíti szegény házamat jelenléte által.
– Mesdames, önök kegyesek voltak nem feledkezni meg legőszintébb
tisztelőjökről. – Uram, ez igen szép öntől, hogy fontos
tanulmányozásait félbeszakasztá miattam! – Grófné, az estély
legfőbb öröme önnek syrénénekében gyönyörködhetni stb. stb.
Azután jönnek az ifju gentlemanek, s bemutogatják egymást a
házigazdának, ki mindezt természethű prosopopoeiaval fogadja.
Ezután nem paradoxon azt mondani: természethű prosopopoeia.
Az érdemes házigazda nagy mértékben lelkére vette, hogy
vendégei jól és fesztelenül mulassanak. A kik még nem ismerik s
ismerni kívánják egymást, azokat egymásnak bemutatja, meglehet,
hogy azok nála nélkül is régen ismerik már egymást. A poétának
lapokat ad, melyekben tulajdon munkáit olvashassa; a művészt
zongorához ülteti s állít háta mögé valakit, a ki dicsérje, s
mindenkinek tud valami lekötelezőt, valami érdekest mondani,
frissen sült újdonságokat, pikant anecdotákat szór a csoportozatok
közé, theát főz, a mit senki sem ért jobban és mindenkit lát,
mindenkire szeme van. Ez már derék házigazda.
Végre jön Abellino. Neki nem volt szabad jókor érkezni. Egy éltes,
idegen férfiut hoz karján, egyenesen a háziúr elé vezeti és
bemutatja.
– Kecskerey barátunk, monsieur Griffard, banquier.
Meghajtások, bókok, kézszorítások.
– Megbocsát, tisztelt házigazdánk, ha e nagyon tisztelt
világcelebritás, mint kebelbarátaink egyike, ez órában véletlenül
érkezvén Párisból, siettem az alkalmat megragadni, őt becses
vendégei elitejével megismertetni.
Oh, Kecskerey úr nemcsak hogy megbocsát, sőt ezerszer
lekötelezve érzi magát, hogy ily jeles egyéniséggel
megismerkedhetni szerencséje lehet. Ismét bókok, hajlongások,
kézszorítások. S mindez oly komolysággal történik, mintha nem
Abellino volna valósággal az estélyt adó háziúr, s mintha nem tudná
ezt minden ember.
Tulajdonképen a derék banquier azért jött le Párisból, melyet
még akkor nem hoztak oly közel a vasutak Pozsonyhoz, mint most,
hogy saját szemeivel meggyőződhessék róla, hogy vajjon az a vén
Nábob, kinek bőrére ő már annyit kölcsönzött, akar-e hát voltaképen
valahára meghalni, vagy sem?
Kecskerey úr a kitünő férfiut a legkiválóbb figyelemmel iparkodott
mulattatni, a legkellemesebb delnők társaságába vezetve őt, főczél
levén ebben, hogy Abellino nyakáról lerázza, ki több fiatal dandy
társaságában kivonult ezalatt a kártyázó terembe, az levén
legkellemesebb neme az időtöltésnek, míg Fanny megérkezik.
Már akkor többen ültek a zöld asztalnál, köztük Fennimor is,
kinek láttára hangos, impertinens nevetésre fakadt Abellino.
 – Ah Fennimor, te ma kegyetlenül erős lehetsz a játékban, mert a
másikban ugyan ellenkező poluson áll az iránytűd. Diable, neked ma
sokat kell nyerned, mert ellenemben ezer aranyat veszítél. Haha! Ti
azt hiszitek, hogy ez az estély az én költségemre megy?
Csalatkoztok. Ennek Fennimor adja meg az árát. Adjatok egy kis
helyet az asztalnál, hadd kisértsek én is szerencsét.
Fennimor egy szót sem szólt, ő adott épen bankot. Néhány percz
mulva bankja szét volt ugratva, Abellino nyert bomlottul.
– Ah, ah! barátom, te rajtad rosszul teljesül a példabeszéd:
szerencsétlen a kártyán, szerencsés a szerelemben. Szegény
Fennimor, bizony Isten sajnállak!
Fennimor fölkelt és nem játszott többet. Ha tejfehér arcza még
engedne meg valami nuanceot visszafelé, úgy azon meg kellene
látszani a sápadtságnak, melyet elfojtott dühe okoz.
Vesztett fogadás és mellőztetés, pénzveszteség és a győztes, a
nyerő általi kigúnyoltatás, epével, méreggel tölték el a szívét.
Egynéhányszor közel állt hozzá, hogy egy gyertyatartót tettleges
demonstratiókra használjon. De mégis jobbnak látta felállni és
kimenni a szobából.
Abellino tovább is játszott, tovább is nyert, s kötekedő, kérkedő
modorával vérig bosszantá azokat, a kik vesztettek. Ostoba
szerencséje volt ma. Nem győzött rajta kaczagni.
– Na! szólt elvégre tárczájába seperve az előtte halmozott
bankjegyeket; Fennimor kettős szerencsétlenségével hazudtolta meg
a közmondást, én megyek azt kettős szerencsémmel czáfolni meg.
A legközelebbi teremben épen szemben találkozott egyik inassal,
ki régóta keresi. Mayerné asszonyság vár reá, itt van az
előszobában, nem jöhet be, mert útról jön, s nem ért rá átöltözni.
– Hopp! ez nem jó jel! Abellino sietett rögtön beszélni vele. Azt
mondá, hogy nem találja a leányt, de az bizonyosan el fog jőni, mert
különben nem fogadta volna el a meghívást.
Abellino bosszúsan fogadá e kedves hírt, s ott hagyta Mayernét
az előszobában.
Diable! ha rászedték volna.
Ott pedig nem vala szabad a bosszúságot mutatni, hanem
folytatni kelle az örvendő, kihivó, diadalmaskodó arczot. Inkább
vesztette volna minden pénzét, csak a leány el ne maradna most.
Ezuttal nagyon kellemetlenül esett neki Fennimor fehér arczával
találkozni s gondolkozni kezdett róla, vajjon ne legyen-e nagylelkű és
ne békítse-e ki maga iránt?
Azután ismét kiment Mayernéhoz megkérdezni, hogy nem
mondta-e a leánynak, hogy nőül fogja venni?
– Oh igen, és a leány nagyon látszott rajta örülni.
Ez megint megnyugtató egy kicsinyt, s újra visszament a
társalgási terembe, s mr. Griffard-ot igyekezett mulattatni.
Már a theát kezdték felhordani, s X. grófné már elénekelte a
«casta divát», midőn Abellino inasa urához furakodva fülébe súgja:
– Épen most láttam a hintóból leszállni Mayer Fanny kisasszonyt.
Abellino, a mi kezébe akadt, néhány aranyat nyomott a szolga
markába, s azzal kissé rendbeszedé magát, fölkelt, egy tükör előtt
megnézte magát. Csinos volt, csinos, azt meg kell neki engedni;
hajfodrozata kifogás nélküli, arcza sima, bajusza, szakálla festői,
nyakravalója elragadó, s mellénye magasztos.
«Quanta species!» mondaná rá Aesopus rókája
Most belép a vendégeket jelentő komornyik, kit Abellino csak a
tükörből lát, s saloni díszhangon jelenti az érkezőket francziául:
– Madame Fanny de Kárpáthi, née de Mayer!
 – Patvart! gondolja magában Abellino, ez a leány komolyan
használatba vette a nevemet. No csak tessék neki, ha ez mulattatja.
Ártani nem árt.
– Ah, házasság! kiálta Griffard úr; ön megházasodott?
– Csak balkézre, viszonzá Abellino tréfásan.
A vendégek egy része kiváncsian tódul az érkezők elé, a
házigazda (Kecskerey úr) az ajtóig megy eléjök, a komornyik kitárja
a szárnyajtókat, s belép rajta egy fiatal hölgy egy férfi társaságában.
A bámulat elhallgattatja egy perczre a társalgást. A szép nő
tekintetén bámultak-e úgy el? Valóban szép volt! Egyszerű, de
becses csipkeöltöny hullámzott alá pompás termetén, akkori idők
divatja szerint kissé rövidre hagyva, s bámultatni engedve a parányi
domború lábacskákat; gazdag hajtekercsét könnyű kis brüsszeli
csipkefőkötő takarta, két felől hosszan engedve aláomlani az angolos
fürtöket márványsíma vállaira s elragadó szépségű kebelére. És ez
arcz, e halványpiros, istennői tekintet, ez égő fekete szemek, teli
szenvedélylyel, indulattal, ellentétben a gyermeteg ajkkal, mely az
alvó ártatlanságé, de oly összhangzók ismét az arczok és a rózsás áll
szerelemgödröcskéivel, miken elvész az ember lelke, ha őt
mosolyogni látja.
Igy mosolygott most, midőn Kecskerey úr elé lépett, a ki nem
talált mit mondani.
Fanny üdvözlé őt.
– Uram, örömmel fogadtam el ön becses meghivását –
családommal együtt, im férjem, Kárpáthy János úr, szólt a vele jött
férfira mutatva.
Kecskerey nem mondhatott egyebet, mint hogy véghetetlenül
örül, mi alatt a legláthatóbb zavarban látszott szemeivel keresni
Abellinót.
Az, mint Lóth felesége, sóbálványnyá változva állt a tükör előtt.
 Kárpáthy János azonban, – a jó kedvű, a vidám, a ragyogó János
úr, – megszorítva a háziúr kezét, mint régi ismerősét, neje kezét
karja alá fűzé.
– Kivánjon ön nekem szerencsét, tisztelt barátom. Egy kincset,
egy másvilági kincset nyertem ma. Boldog vagyok. Semmi
szükségem sincs a paradicsomra többé; ezen a világon idvezültem.
Azzal nevetve, tündöklő arczczal lépett a társaság közé,
egyenkint bemutogatva nejét a tiszteletre méltó körnek, mely által
üdvkivánatokkal halmoztatott el.
És Abellinonak mind ezt néznie kellett.
Elgondolni, hogy azon leány, kit ő szerelmével oly kitartón
üldözött, nagybátyjához ment férjhez, s ez által örökre
megközelíthetlenné vált rá nézve.
Ha az egekbe vitték volna, vagy a poklok mélységes fenekére, ha
sziklavárban őriznék, vagy égő karddal vigyáznának rá bosszús
arkangyalok, nem volna rá nézve úgy elzárva, mint e név talizmánja
által: «Kárpáthy Jánosné».
Neki Kárpáthy Jánosnéval semmiféle viszonyt sem volt szabad
kezdeni.
Minden szem, mely a szép menyecske bámulásában kifáradt, ő
reá tévedt vissza s minden tekintet gúny és kaczagás volt reá.
A dandy, ki nagybátyja lakodalmát üli!
A kijátszott kérkedő, kinek imádottja ő helyette a nagybátyjának
adta kezét.
Szinte jól esett Abellinonak, hogy látott még a társaságban
valakit, ki ez eseten nagyon meg volt ütődve: mr. Griffard-t. S hogy
még most se tagadja meg gúnyoros természetét, ahhoz fordult
kötekedő szóval, mintha épen csak azt érdekelné a dolog:
– Qu’en dites vous, mr. Griffard? (Mit szól hozzá?)
 – C’est bien fatal!
– Mon cher Abellino, szólalt meg ekkor mellette Fennimor
czérnavékony hangja. Úgy látszik, mintha ön nekem ezer aranynyal
tartoznék. Hahaha!
Abellino dühösen fordult felé, de e pillanatban szemei János
úréival találkoztak, ki épen ő hozzá ért ekkor, karjára fűzött
hitvesével, s a legnyájasabb mosolygással mutatá be őket
egymásnak.
– Kedves nőm! Ez itt kedves öcsém Kárpáthy Béla. Kedves
öcsém, ajánlom önnek atyafiságos indulataiba feleségemet.
Ah! ez volt az a pillanat, melynek úgy örült előre, ez volt az a
kikeresett bosszúállás, mely az üldözött leány szívében született s
mely oly szikrázóvá tette mindazon szelid lények szemeit, kiknek azt
elmondá.
A vadász a veremben! Saját vermében. Megcsalva, megvetve,
megtorolva.
Abellino feszesen meghajtá magát, ajkait összehúzta és fehér
volt, mint a fal.
János úr odább ment, magát mr. Griffard-ral is megismertetendő,
ki rendkívüli örömét fejezé ki a fölött, hogy őt ilyen jó egészségben
tisztelheti.
Abellino pedig, a mint elfordultak tőle, hüvelykét mellénye
szegletébe dugva, dudolva, fölemelt fővel, mint a kinek semmi baja
sincs, lejtett végig a társalgási termen, s nem látszott rá ügyelni,
hogy minden suttogás, minden sziszegés elül, hátul, őt gúnyolja, őt
neveti.
Sietett a kártyázó szobába.
A mint benyitott az ajtón, hallá, mint nevetnek, mint kaczagnak
mindannyian, Fennimore éles hangja kitört valamennyi közül. A mint
őt meglátták, rögtön félbeszakadt a nevetés, jó kedv és előadás;
mindenki iparkodott komoly és hallgató képet ölteni.
Lehet-e ennél bosszantóbb valami?
Abellino széket húzott az asztalhoz s közéjük ült.
Miért nem nevetnek? miért nem folytatják a beszédet? Fennimore
mit erőszakolja az arczát, hogy komoly legyen minek fordul el
annyit?
Oszszátok azt a kártyát.
Legalább van az embereknek min nevetni, akár nyer, akár veszt
valaki, kaczagnak. Ez csak ürügy, hogy legyen, min kaczagni.
Most Abellinora kerül a sor, hogy bankot adjon.
El kezd veszteni.
Az asztal túlsó felén ül Fennimore és egyre nyer, néha benn
hagyja az egész tételt kétszer-háromszor, hogy négyszeres,
nyolczszoros húzást tegyen.
Abellino veszteni kezdi hidegvérét s szeleskedik. Nem vigyáz a
tételekre, a nyerőt húzza be, s a vesztőnek fizet. Másutt jár az esze,
s a folytatott tárgyra hárul ingerültsége.
Most ismét egy négyszeres tételt húzott be Fennimor.
– Ah, ah! – Meg nem állhatja, hogy diadalmasan ne nevessen.
Monsieur Kárpáthy, a példabeszéd önön is rosszul teljesül:
szerencsétlen a kártyán és szerencsétlen a szerelemben. Szegény
Abellino, bizony Isten sajnállak. Ezer aranyommal tartozol.
– Én? kérdé Abellino ingerülten.
– Valóban te. Hiszen csak nem állítod még most is, hogy Fannyt
el fogod csábítani; mert hiszen most már gazdagabb mint te vagy,
pénzed el nem bolondítja, ha pedig udvarlót akar magának
választani, akkor választhat mindnyájunk közül, akár engem, akár
Liviust vagy Conrádot. Sőt neked nagy okaid vannak épen attól
őrizkedni, hogy beléd ne szeressen, mert egy ilyen kalandnak az
lehetne a vége, hogy a majorátustól elcseppennél. Ah ez famos!
Abellino fut nagybátyja nejének ölelése elől, egy új József és
Potifárné. Sőt kénytelen vigyázni, hogy a nő valakit mást, derék fiatal
embert meg ne szeressen. Ah, ah, ah! Abellino mint erényőr!
Abellino mint garde des dames! Ez felséges szép. Ez tárgy egy
vaudevillere!
Minden szó mérges fulánk, minden szó a vérig, az elevenig hat.
Abellino sápad és elfagy a dühtől. A mit Fennimor mondott, az igaz.
Neki remegni kell most, hogy e nő szeretni talál! Kárhozat, kárhozat.
És egyre veszt.
Alig látja már, mit raknak? Fennimor újra négyszeres tételt nyert.
Abellino fizet neki, de csak kétszeresen.
– Ohó barátom, tévedsz, kétszer hagytam benn a tételt.
– Én nem vettem észre.

– Ah, ez flibusterie!5) kiált elbizott indignatióval Fennimor.

E megbántó szóra Abellino egyszerre talpraugrik s az egész
tuczat kártyát Fennimor szemei közé vágja.
A fehér arcz egyszerre elkékül, elzöldül, felkapja a széket, melyen
ül, s Kárpáthyra akar rohanni. A társaság közbe veti magát,
Fennimort visszatartják.
– Bocsássatok! bocsássatok reá! ordít egészen elváltozott hangon
a sensitif ifjú, ajka tajtékzik és szava a düh erőködésében rekedt
rikácsolássá válik. Abellino nem szól egy szót is, de melle zihál és
szemeit elfutja a vér. Társainak dolgot ád őt visszatartani.
– Bocsássatok! Adjatok kést! Megölöm, megölöm! rikácsol
Fennimor, s nem szabadíthatva kezeit az őt fogva tartók karjaiból,
bosszúját az ártatlan székeken tölti, azokat rugdalva fel.
A dísztelen zajra egészen alarmirozott képpel rohan be Kecskerey
úr s roppant imposant tekintettel megállva a tülekedők között,
harsányan közbekiált:
– Tiszteljétek házam szentélyét!
Ez interventio magukhoz téríti a feleket. Átlátják, hogy nem itt a
helye hasonló modorú ügyeket elvégezni. Sokakat a ház szentélyérei
hivatkozás épen jó kedvre hangol. Fennimornak és Abellinonak
tanácsolják, hogy menjenek mindketten haza. Reggel elintézendik az
ügyet. El is távoznak azonnal, s a társaság azért nem zavartatik meg.
Néhány pillanat mulva ugyan már mindenki megtudta, hogy
Fennimor és Abellino összevesztek a kártyán, de mindenki úgy tesz,
mintha semmit sem tudna róla. János úr félre hívja a házigazdát, s
nagy titokban megkéri, hogy legyen szíves elfogadni tőle a mai
estély ragyogó elrendezéseért egy ezerforintost és egy óranegyed
mulva az egész társaság tudja, hogy az estély hőse János úr, ki szép
nejét kivánja a finom társaságnak bemutatni; a vigalom éjfél után
két óráig tart, a midőn minden ember egymásba szerelmesedve
oszlik haza; s otthon mindenki a furcsa történeten gondolkodva
hajtja fejét nyugalomra s ha van valaki, a ki nyugtalan álmokat
alszik, az Abellino, Fennimor és monsieur Griffard.
 XVI. A TALÁLKOZÁS.
Griffard úr másnap mindjárt visszautazott Párisba, a nélkül, hogy
Abellino után tudakozódott volna.
***
A Kecskerey estélyén történt affront következtében találkozásuk
lőn Abellino és Fennimornak.
Igy hívják finomabb társalgási nyelven a párbajt.
A segédek kardot határoztak kiegyenlítési eszközül.
Különös, hogy minden rabiatus ügynél inkább választják a párbaji
birák a gyengébb, mint az erősebb eszközt.
Ennek természetes indoka van.
A párbaj se nem törvényes, se nem helyeselhető, de mégis
használt és bevett intézmény. Vannak sérelmek, vannak
megtámadások, mik ellen a törvény ótalmat nem nyújt, a
közhatóságok nem biztosítanak.
Ha egy jellemkérdésben gyöngének állítanak valakit.
Ha egy nem kedvelt viszonynak útját kell állani.
Ha egy titokban terjesztett álhírnek egy csapással véget kell
vetni.
Ha egy politikai vitában valaki prostituálva érzi magát.
Egy szóval, mikor a felek nem vérjszomjból, nem dühből keresik
a párbajt, hanem kénytelenek azt előidézni, hogy szívök erejét,
véleményök tartósságát a halál kapuja előtt is bevallják: rendesen
ilyenkor szoktak a párbajsegédek pisztolyt adni a vívók kezébe. Azok
hidegvérrel fognak eszmélni, mindegyik el van határozva magát
kitenni a lövésnek, de ellenfelére nem lőni. A párbaj végződik
nemesen, férfiasan. Az illem kivánatainak elég van téve, a sérelmes
kérdés eltemettetik, s azt többé előhozni nem szabad.
De mikor tettleges sérelmek okozzák a párbajt, mikor a felek
kártyán, insultatiókon vesznek össze, mikor összeverekedtek,
egymást meggyalázták: olyankor a tanuk féltik a saját bőrüket s
inkább olyan fegyvert adnak a felek kezébe, melylyel azok hirtelen ki
ne végezhessék egymást.
Négyen voltak a tanúk, kettő Fennimoré: Livius és Kalácsi (az
excellentiás családból eredendett ifjú), Abellinoé Conrad és
Kecskerey.
A felek eleinte hallani sem akartak a kardról, hanem a tanúk
(különösen Conrad) határozottan kijelenték, hogy ők pisztolyra nem
engedik őket menni, s ebben meg kellett nyugodniok.
Fennimor még egy kicsit hánykolódott, hogy hát adjanak neki
egyenes kardot, mert ő ahhoz van szokva. Francziaországban noble
emberek nem is vívnak mással. Hanem e kivánatának sem tettek
eleget; csak vívjanak görbe kardokkal.
Viadalhelyül kibérlének egy nagy tágas termet a «Zöldfa»
vendéglőben, a holott is bezárkózva, megismertették a feleket a
kölcsönösen megállapított egyezményekkel és megszorításokkal.
Kibékítésről, megkövetésről szó sem volt.
Vérnek okvetlen kelle folyni.
Ha öt percz alatt meg nem tudják egymást vágni, a párbaj
bevégzettnek tekintetik.
A felek feltűrt ingújjal vívnak.
 Kivétetnek a fej- és hasvágások. Arczot, kart, mellet és lábat
vágni szabad. Cselvágások a kivett részekre tiltva vannak. Szúrni
egyáltalában tiltva van.
Mindkét vívó mellett kétfelől állnak a segédek, s a melyik e
szabályok ellen vét, annak kardját leütik.
– Ah uraim, hisz ez így csak tréfa! dühönge szokatlan
rikácsolásával Fennimor. Hisz önök csak játszani hívtak bennünket
ide. Hisz ez nem párbaj, hanem gyermektréfa. Ennél jobb lesz, hogy
hivassanak önök egy borbélyt, s a melyikünk feketét húz,
vágassanak rajta eret.
– Hiába minden beszéd, monda Conrad, ebben mi így egyeztünk
meg, ha nem tetszik, tessék egyedül itt maradni.
– Csak hadd legyenek egyszer azok a kardok kézben, monda
tompa hangon Abellino, majd beszélhetünk azután.
Erre Fennimor is elhallgatott. Ő is azt gondolta, a mit Abellino.
Csak egyszer szemközt álljanak, s legyenek a kardok kézben, a
többit majd elvégzik ők.
A tanúk gyanítani kezdék a két vívó szándokát, s ismét
összesúgtak, mielőtt a kardokat átadnák nekik. Elébb magukat
helyezék el: ketten kétfelől, kivont karddal. Azzal összemérték a
vívókardokat, s egyenlőnek találva, átnyújtják mind a kettőnek.
Egy, kettő, három. En garde.
Egyszerre, mintha összebeszéltek volna, oly közel rohant
egymáshoz mindkét vívó, hogy ily közelségből nem is lehetett mást,
mint életveszélyes vágásokat osztaniok. A kardok szikráztak és a
szemek még jobban.
Egy percz mulva mind a négy segéd kardja keresztben állt
közöttük.
 – Urak, ez nem szabad. A viadal nem megy életre-halálra: mi
szükség ti nektek ilyen közel rohanni egymáshoz? tartsatok
distantiát! Úgy vívtok, mint két mészároslegény.
Ezt Conrad mondta, ki jobban félt, hogy valamelyik elesik, mint
ők maguk.
A vívók újra szemközt állíttattak, s most már szép óvatosan
mérték össze kardjaikat; nem sokat zörögtek, nem vesztegettek erőt
a vágásokhoz, inkább csak cselvágásokkal iparkodtak ellenfeleiken
kifogni. Mindkettő gyakorlott vívó volt. Mindkettő főtörekvésül tűzé ki
magának ellenfele arczát megpiszkolhatni, orrát vagy szemét
bélyegezni meg. Egyiknek sem sikerült, szemeik merően néztek
egymás szemébe, kifeszített karjaikban csak a vékony villogó aczél
forgott, alig-alig adva egy-egy hideg bántó hangot, minő a köszörült
kardok csesszenése, s mely nagyon különbözik az összevert szinpadi
kardok csattogásaitól.
Sokáig vívtak így, egyik sem bírva a másikat megsérteni,
Fennimor gyöngülni érzé karját, s e miatt hátrálni kezde. Abellino
nyomban utána; e fölötti bosszújában, szégyenében ismét azon vevé
észre magát Fennimor, hogy egyszerre egy egészséges csapást mért
Abellino fejének, melyet az csak nagy bajjal bírt elhárítani, s azon
perczben visszaadott.
– Verjétek le kardjaikat! ordítá Conrad. Le és fel!
S azzal mind a négy kard közbe szaladt, kardjaikat le- és
felcsapták, s ismét szétválaszták őket.
Már ekkor Fennimor dühe nem ismert határt.
– Mit akartok hát velünk? Minek hoztatok hát ide, komédiát
játszani? Adtatok volna vítőrt, ezóta régen vége volna mindennek.
Én a szívébe akarok szúrni, a szíve közepébe. Én látni akarom halva.
– Csendesen, barátom, csendesen. Lármával semmire sem
megyünk, legfeljebb kihallik az utczára, s elfognak bennünket.

Ú
 Úgy kell vívnotok, a hogy mi határoztuk. Ha romantice akartok
vívni, menjetek Amerikába, ott zárkózzatok be egy sötét szobába,
vegyetek egy kardot meg egy pisztolyt; ki a sötétben jobb helyre
talál, az a győztes, de a míg Európában éltek, addig
alkalmazkodnotok kell az itteni szokásokhoz.
Fennimor mégis azt gondolá, hogy az sokáig tartana, míg
Amerikába mennének, s jobbnak találta csak itt helyben végezni el a
dolgot.
Még egyszer szemközt állíták őket.
Már akkor Fennimor reszketett a dühtől. Nagy erőpazarlással veté
magát Abellinora és sűrű, de ügyetlen, kiszámítatlan csapásokkal
iparkodott azt kifárasztani; nem is gondolt már magával, szinte
belefutott ellenfele kardjába s elvégre dühének tetőpontján, nem
törődve szabályokkal és segédekkel, egyenesen nekidöfött
ellenfelének.
– Ah! Le azzal a karddal, verjétek ki a kezéből!
Egyszerre mind a négy segéd ellene támadt.
– Ön háromszor megszegte a párbaj szabályait, szólt Conrad, ön
meg van fosztva azon jogától, hogy ellenfelével tovább vívjon. Az
ügy elintézettnek tekintetik s mi ki fogjuk nyilatkoztatni, hogy
Abellino eleget tett lovagi kötelességének.
– A vívók tegyék le a kardot, szólt Kecskerey határozottan.
Fennimor e felszólításra oly állásba tette magát, mintha egyszerre
mind az öttel meg akarna vívni, a mi annál különösebb volt, mert ő
nem birt valami különös testi erővel, mondhatni: igen gyenge
testalkatú volt.
– No jó. Abellino le fogja tenni a kardot, s azzal a párbajnak
vége.
 A segédek ezzel Abellinót fogták körül, rábeszélve, hogy tegye le
a kardot.
Abellino már hajlandó volt szavaiknak engedni, s megfordult,
hogy a kezében levő kardot tokjába visszadugja.
E perczben senki sem állt közte és Fennimor között.
Csak a düh legmagasabb foka, a háromszori különválasztás teszi
megfoghatóvá, hogy Fennimor e pillanatot használva, annyira
elfeledkezhetett magáról és minden lovagiasságról, hogy háttal álló
ellenfelére rohanjon, s kardjával hátulról megszúrja.
A szúrás Abellino lapoczkájában akadt meg, különben keresztül
megy rajta.
– Ah! orgyilkos! kiálta fel Kárpáthy a döfés fájdalmára, s
egyszerre visszafordulva, a még kezében levő kardot kinyújtá ellene.
Fennimor nem látott többé semmit, még egy döfést akart neki adni.
Kardja elcsúszott Abellino válla felett, ő pedig vakon, eszeveszetten,
visszatarthatlanul belerohant annak kinyújtott kardjába. Ott állt meg
a markolatnál. – A kard egészen keresztül ment rajta, s úgy nézett
egy ideig egymás szeme közé a két ellenfél mereven: egyiknek arcza
oly fehér, oly halott, szemei fénytelen golyóján, ajka merev nyílásán
a halál, a rögtöni halál; csak a szívén keresztülütött kard tartja még
egyenesen állva… Azután összerogy mindakettő.

A kik a legközelebb lefolyt (40-es) években a műveltebb körök

történetének évlapjait figyelemmel kisérték, tudni fogják, hogy ily
párbaj nem költői agyrém.
 Fennimor abban a pillanatban egy sóhaj, egy rándulás, egy
fájdalmas arczmozdulat nélkül halva volt. Abellino feküdt egy
hónapig kapott sebében. Felüdültével figyelmeztetést kapott
jóakaróitól, hogy míg a dolog híre kissé elcsendesül, jó lesz
kiszellőztetni magát valahol a külföldön. Még pedig akkor sem valami
művelt birodalomban, mert ott hamar megkapnak olyan embert,
kinek sok hitelezője van, és szeret zajt csinálni, hanem valami szép
keleti tartományban.
El is indult néhány nap mulva a szent sírhoz Palæstinába; mint a
tréfás közvélemény mondá, bűneiért vezekleni.
Oda nem követjük, ha visszajön, úgy is ki fogja adni jegyzeteit.
Kárpáthy János pedig a boldog, a túlboldog Nábob szép
feleségével elutazott Kárpátfalvára.
Nemsokára látjuk őket, vagy hallunk felőlök.
 XVII. EGY HAZAI INTÉZMÉNY.
Szétoszlottak a tekintetes karok és rendek, vége volt az
országgyűlésnek, a juratusok fekete atilláikkal és csörömpölő
kardjaikkal, a honatyák aranyzsinóros, hattyúprémes mentéikkel, az
úri előfogatok divatos delnőikkel egyszerre eltüntek a népes
utczákról; a házak ajtain kiadó szállások szomorú hirdetményei lőnek
olvashatók, a kereskedők visszarendelék nagyreményre készült
divatkelméiket, a kávéházak kongtak az ürességtől, úgy látszván
meg bennök azon néhány benszülött és benvénült törzsvendég, mint
mikor falevél hulltával ott maradt a fákon a mindig zöld fagyöngy;
csendes volt már a város, bátran ki lehetett jönni az utczára, nem
kellett félni az embernek, hogy ott valami hintó elgázolja, vagy a
járókelők a sárba taszítják; éjjel nem verte fel a jámbor alvókat a
nyughatatlan fiatalság danája, kik tizen, huszan széltében
karonfogva mentek végig az utczán, elfogva azt az egyik szélétől a
másikig s valamennyi háznál sorba mind meghúzták a csengetyűket,
megverték az ablakokat; nem kellett többé annyit ügyelni a fiatal
leányokra, hogy ne üljenek mindig az ablakban; nem kellett többé
remegni, hogy valami fáklyászene alkalmával feltalálják gyújtani a
várost; egy szóval: Pozsony ismét visszavette szokott csendes,
békességes alakját, s a lyceumi és akadémiai ifjak kezdtek ismét
háttérbe szorított reputaciójokhoz jutni.
Kárpáthy János is hazament nejével. Megemlegették utoljára a
pozsonyi boltosok. Megemlegették először azért: mert a mi szemnek
és szívnek tetsző dolog, kelme, pipere, ékszer találtatott boltjaikban,
abból a legszebbet mind összevásárolta János úr szép neje számára,
kit soha el nem hagyott magától, hanem vele parádézott, mint mikor
a gyermek új ruhát kap, még aludni is abban szeretne;
megemlegették másodszor azért, mert neki egyik elve volt az, hogy
nem a vásáros született az eladó kedvéért, hanem a kereskedőt
teremté Isten a vevők szolgálatára; tehát ha ő vásárolni megy
valahova a maga pénzeért, nem az ő kötelessége az eladó nyelvét
megtanulni, hanem az eladó dolga érteni, a mit ő beszél. Ilyenkor
tehát, mikor őt látták a bolt előtt hintajából kilépni – s ki ne ismerte
volna őt, a leggazdagabb férfit s a legszebb asszony férjét fél
Magyarországon? – már akkor nagy agiója volt egy-egy
boltosinasnak, a ki ötölve-hatolva tudott valamit beszélni a
generosus Nábob saját nyelvén s legalább annyit a főfőkereskedő is
megtanult, hogy Kárpáthy úrnak egy «aláz’ szolgáját» köszönjön, a
mi egyébiránt szokatlan fülek előtt olyformán hangzott, mintha azt
mondaná: «alle sollen geigen». Ilyen formán nyakra-főre minden
boltos férfi iparkodott felfedezni magában némi sejtelmeket a
magyar nyelv felől, s voltak előre gondoskodó atyák, kik elgondolák,
hogy gyermekeiknek mily előnye lesz abban, ha majd Kárpáthy úr
gyermekei szintén feljőnek az országgyűlésre, s keresni fogják, ki
beszél magyarul és annál vásárolnak; minélfogva siettek
nagyreményű fiaikat és leányaikat tisztességes házakhoz kiadni
cserébe Komáromba vagy Somorjába, mely igen egyszerű és
legkevesebb költséggel járó neme a mester nélküli nyelvtanulásnak.
E hatás következtében feltevé magában János úr, hogy a
legközelebbi országgyűlés alkalmával egy társulat életbeléptetését
fogja indítványozni, melynek tagjai különösen kötelezik magukat:
soha senkivel, a kitől valamit vesznek, semmiféle idegen nyelven
nem beszélni, ilyenformán kényszerítve azokat az erőteljes magyar
nyelvvel megismerkedni; magunk között aztán odahaza beszélhetünk
diákul és németül, mint a mely két idioma volt a legszokásosabb az
akkori társalgásokban; és az erélyesség sokkal több czélt fog elérni,
mint holmi eredménytelen decretumok, hogy a horvátok tanuljanak
magyarul.
Ez üdvös szándékot tehát eltéve jövőre, mint már említők,
szeretett nejével visszautazék Kárpátfalvára.
Fanny elhagyá rokonait s midőn elvált tőlök, azt látszék érezni,
hogy örökre elhagyja őket. Látta maga előtt búsan, leverten állani a
két derék, jólelkű lényt: gyámját és nagynénjét. Hidegen, szótlanul
iparkodtak tőle megválni, pedig úgy szeretett volna sírni mindakettő,
de az nem illett. Most örülni kellett volna. – A leány nagy szerencsét
csinált.
Fanny szíve elfacsarodott. Nyakába veté magát nagynénjének és
alig birta e szót elrebegni:
– Szeressen engemet.
– Mindig szerettelek, mondá Teréz, és szemei égni látszottak,
hogy könyet nem engedett jönni beléjök. Nem lehetett. A nagy úr
ott állt közel, mit gondolhatott volna?
– No Boltay mester, mondá a Nábob, megrázva az érdemes férfiu
kezét, remélem, látjuk egymást. Ön tartozik nekem egy látogatással.
Én már voltam az ön jószágán odakinn, most már majd önnek is
meg kell látogatni engem Kárpátfalván.
A kézműves elvörösödött. A Nábob nem tudta, hogy ennek a
munkától izmos embernek is van saját büszkesége.
– Köszönöm uram, felele. Én innen alig mozdulhatok dolgaim
miatt.
– Eh patvart, hisz van önnek derék legénye, beszéltem vele, okos
fiu az, arra rábízhat mindent. Hogy is híják csak?
Boltaynak szinte torkán akadt a szó, midőn ki kelle mondani:
– Barna Sándor.
És akkor akarata ellen két nagy könycsepp jelent meg szemében
s csendesen végig gördült erős napbarnította orczáján. A mire aztán
Teréz szemeiben is megeredt a sírás s Fanny halványabb lett a falnál.
– Hát majd egyszer télen, jó Boltay, folytatá Kárpáthy. Ha tetszik
feljövök magam és elviszem magammal. Szeret-e vadászni?
– Nem, uram. Sajnálom az állatokat.
 – No de kegyed, jó Teréz, csak óhajtani fogja meglátni
unokahúgát? Csak eljön megnézni, nem érte-e valami baj? hogy van
megelégedve sorsával? Egy kicsit ő is hadd panaszkodja ki magát,
legalább könnyebben fog engemet tűrhetni.
Ez féltréfa akart lenni János úr részéről, de Teréz nem felelt rá
semmit, s Fanny oly kínos helyzetben érzé magát, hogy szinte
nagyot lélekzett, midőn az utolsó búcsúszóval a készen álló
utihintóba ültek s Pál gazda becsapva az üveges ajtót, parancsot
adott a kocsisnak s a hintó kerekei robogtak végig a kövezeten.
Alig mult egy hét, midőn Teréz már levelet kapott Fannytól.
A fiatal nő jó kedvvel iparkodott irni, szeretet, jó szív látszott
minden sorban, leirta azokat a mulatságos embereket, kikkel János
úr körül van véve; a furfangos Horhi Miskát, ki mindenféle bohót
csinál magából, hogy őt megnevettesse, Kis Miskát, a szilajkedvű jó
fiut, ki mindennap négy mérföldet nyargal lóháton, hogy őt láthassa,
az öreg czopfos jószágigazgatót, ki őt a gazdálkodás mindenféle
ágazataival a legkitartóbb fáradsággal iparkodik megismertetni, a
vén hajdút és a vén bohóczot, s valamennyi között a
legmulatságosabb alakot, magát János urat, kik mind arra látszanak
összeesküdve lenni, hogy a fiatal menyecskét mulattassák, neki jó
kedvet, örömet, szórakozást szerezzenek, a mi meglehetősen sikerül
is nekik.
(Jó kedv, öröm, szórakozás…
Szerelemről, boldogságról egy szó sincs a levélben).
Most azonban egy új tárgy kezd érdeket önteni János úr életébe.
Mióta az országgyűlésen járt, de legkivált azon válságos nap
gyötrelmei után, melyet unokaöcscse okozott neki, fejébe vette,
hogy ő a hazának, a közügyeknek használni akar.
Alapítványokat tesz a köziskolákban, – sokszor eljár a szomszéd
Szentirmay grófhoz, ki valami nagyon különös ember lehet, mert
mindenki által igen komolyan magasztaltatik, s örökké furcsaságokon
töri a fejét, minő a jobbágyok felszabadítása az úrbér alól,
örökváltság útján, s más magához hasonló urakkal gőzhajókon,
gyárakon, Tisza-rendezésen, töltéseken, tudós társaságon,
szinházon, lóversenyen töri a fejét, az esztendő nagyobb részét
Pesten tölti s biztatja a többi főurakat is, hogy töltsék ott a telet.
János urat már rá is vette, hogy egy nagyszerű palotát építtessen a
fővárosban. Ha nem akar is benne lakni, legalább szépíti, emeli a
várost. Az ő nála összejövő urak csaknem mindegyike tud egy-egy új
indítványt, egy új vállalatot napfényre hozni: többek között
emlegetnek valami ismeretes nevű grófot, a ki azt ajánlotta, hogy
egy magyar akadémia létrejövetelére kész egy egész évi jövedelmét,
a mi 60 ezer forint, áldozatul hozni, s mikor kérdezték tőle, hogy hát
maga ezalatt miből él? azt felelte rá, majd csak elélődöm egyik vagy
másik barátomnál egy évig. E különös társaságokat látogatja János
úr s azóta gyakorta figyelmezteti Varga uramat, hogy pontosan
számadoltassa a tiszteket, mert sok pénzre van szükség a közügyek
számára. Most végtére ő is akadt egy indítványra, melyet mindazok,
a kikkel közlötte, oly közérdekűnek találtak, hogy e fölötti örömében
János úr minden fogalmat fölülhaladó mértékre kezd növekedni
szeretetreméltóságban.
Ez egy agarász-egylet létrehozatala.
Persze Fanny nem érti, hogy mi érdek van ebben? épen oly
kevéssé, mint a többi indítványokban és közintézményekben,
gőzhajókban, töltésekben, akadémiában és lóversenyen egyéb, mint
hogy némelyiket ezek közől mulatság látni; hanem azt veszi észre,
hogy mindazok, kik az eszméről beszélnek, rendkívül lelkesülve
vannak, s úgy látszik, hogy az agarakra boldogabb jövő és fényes
hivatás kezd felderülni; a jövő hónapra van hirdetve a közgyűlés a
kárpátfalvi kastélyba, hol a társulat megalakultnak nyilvánítandja
magát, alapszabályokat irnak, s nagyszerű mulatságokkal végzendik
az egészet.
Végül minden jeleivel szeretetének s férje részérőli legszívesebb
üdvözleteknek alig várja a perczet Fanny, melyben kedves rokonait
ölelhesse s ezzel bezárja a levelet.
 Szívről, szívvilágról egy szó sincs abban. Szegény asszony! Nincs
senkije, a ki előtt azt elmondhassa.
Fanny megérkeztével Kárpátfalvára, semmit sem talált már ott a
hajdani bohóságok közől.
János úr még Pozsonyból írt haza Varga Péter uramnak, hogy
asszonyt visz a házhoz, szép, fiatal, szemérmes asszonyt, tehát
intézkedjék úgy, hogy a menyecske semmi megbotránkozni valót ne
találjon, mire nézve teljesen felszabadítja Varga uramat, hogy tegye
az ő nevében a mit jónak és üdvösségesnek lát.
A derék ősz férfiu, a mint a felhatalmazó levelet kapta, attól
számítva egy hét alatt úgy keresztül-kasul reformált minden
intézményt, mely János urat oly hírnevessé tette, hogy rá nem lehet
Kárpátfalvára ismerni.
A nagyon meghatározhatlan szolgálatokat tevő paraszt leányok
hazaküldettek, ki hová való volt, a maga falujába.
Káromkodásukról, mosdatlan szájukról ismeretes cselédek
kiutasíttattak a gulyára meg a ménesre. Ott produkálják magukat.
A tisztviselőknek meghagyatott, hogy a legnagyobb illendőséggel
fogadják az úrhölgyet és maguknak többé semmi kivételes
szabadságot a kastélyban ne vegyenek.
A fiscalisnak három napi határidő engedtetett, mely idő alatt
arczát és kezét tisztességesen megmosni tartozik, egyuttal az is
tudtára adatván, hogy ha egyszer foghagymát-evett állapotban fog
találtatni, menten nyugdíjaztatik.
Marczi feleségestül berendeltetett a kastélyba, ő maga a
nagyságos asszony kocsisává, neje pedig komornájává igtattatván; a
legszelidebb szürkék közől kiválasztott előfogatul, egyet-egyet
mindenféle színből hátas paripának, s rábízta Marczira, hogy az mind
olyan jámbor legyen, mint a bárány, mert asszonyt fog emelni, szép,
fiatal, szemérmes hölgyet.

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