The subject of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and its relation to the novel of manners. I explained why “manners” in this sense means more than simply “good manners” or “good taste.” Instead, it signifies the system of customs, mores, and codes that bind a social group together — a group like the Old New York society that Wharton depicts in her novel. One of the abiding subjects of Wharton’s novel is the way in which Old New York shares characteristics with the kind of tribal societies that ethnographers were beginning to study when Wharton was writing.
One of the quotes that I use to establish this idea comes from Lionel Trilling’s study The Liberal Imagination (1950):
What I understand by manners, then, is a culture’s hum and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration, sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special meaning. They are the things that separate them from the people of another culture. They make the part of a culture which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture. It is modified by them; it generates them. In this part of culture assumption rules, which is often so much stronger than reason.
The quote is useful because it gets at the idea of manners as system that works through very subtle codes that have been internalized by its subjects, who use them almost unconsciously. “Good manners” are one of the tools used by the larger system of manners: having good manners identifies a person as an insider, someone who know the proper codes of behavior withina social group.
I like the idea that manners are an “evanescent” part of culture: that they belong to a system that is not “art, or religion, or morals, or politics,” but that is linked reciprocally to all of them.
But what I noticed today was the word “departments.” In referring to art, religion, morals, and politics as “departments of culture,” Trilling suggests that the study of manners offers ways of understanding that elude — but perhaps complete — them. And I can’t help thinking that he is therefore making an argument — by implication as it were — of the importance of literature, because it seems to have a special purchase on the regime of manners: it can dramatize the ways in which manners produce and regulate social subjects. And I wonder whether Trilling is also implicitly making an argument about the importance of literary study, which may enable students to understand things that other academic departments — call them “art,” “religion,” “philosophy,” or “politics” — can’t. The chapter from which the quote is taken, after all, is called “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.”
The Liberal Imagination has recently been reprinted by the New York Review of Books with an introduction by Louis Menand.
[For an additional perspective on today's lecture, see this post at patell.org.]
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