OK, so I was reading this book from the 1890’s, and a dude mentions hanging out with a bunch of Scandinavian libertines. During dinner, one of them exclaims: “Aren’t we alive? Aren’t we eating? Aren’t we drinking? And don’t we have yet another pleasure…”, whereupon he “did that gesture, by which the witch in Faust recognizes Mephisto.”
It is quite clear that the gesture indicates sex – but what might the specific gesture have been?
Reading the referenced scene directly in Faust doesn’t really help – the stage direction only mentions “eine unanständige Gebärde” (“an indecent gesture”), without providing precise details.
Your bets, gentlemen. Was it the forceful bras d’honneur? The time-honoured “wanker”? That thing where you jam your hand into your underpants and then puts a finger through your fly? Or maybe just the good old “forming a circle with the thumb and the index finger of the left hand and then repeatedly poking that hole with the index finger and the middle finger of the right hand”?
(No, I don’t need an answer fast.)
ETA: Could a mod please fix the title? Wanted to italicize Faust, but fucked it up somehow.
I am a bit confused about the text cited by Hellestal (acc. to the site: Rolf Tiedemann: Zu Freuds „Eine Kindheitserinnerung aus Dichtung und Wahrheit", Jahrbuch der Pychoanalyse vol 22, pp. 257 ff).
Goethe’s stage instruction I’d understand as the actor slapping himself on the buttocks - how the author makes the jump to from there to ‘anal fantasies’ I don’t understand; normally when you slap yourself or someone else on the buttocks that would refer to the posterior as a secondary sexual feature not to evacuation, wouldn’t it?
That would make sense, in the context. Nothing in the book I mentioned (not Faust itself but the one that mentions Faust - see the OP for details) indicates that there were female buttocks present at the time of the indecent gesture in question. It seems more likely, then, that the cheeky libertine slapped his own ass.
Well, much like getting “a piece of ass” means (in modern American slang) “having sex”, I guess slapping your own ass could, in another time and culture, mean the very same thing.
Most of the other gestures mentioned seem to function as insults, á la “fuck you”, which isn’t what we’re looking for here. The lusty Dane’s gesture clearly meant “fucking” (the verb), rather than “fuck you” (the insult).
If that were the case, I’d expect something more like the “plunging right index finger into a circle made by the left thumb and forefinger”, but maybe that was too crude and direct. The point of coded gestures was to convey meaning succinctly, often without being so overt. It could be some at-the-time common gesture that wasn’t fossilize for our benefit in written or drawn works of the period, and so is lost to us (As “quoz”, as cited in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds would be to us today, had someone not recorded it.