TWO COMMUNICATIONS
MANNERS AND VALUES
The only trouble with the subject of Mr. William Barrett's
recent discussion
*
is that, properly speaking, it is not discussable. To
discuss the concept of value at all, one is forced to isolate it from
the living tissue of meaning which surrounds it in life and provides
it with nourishment; and the moment one does this, one becomes
guilty of good intentions and irresponsible surgery. Value isolated is at
best a strained metaphorical term intended to stand for a great body
of historical and philosophical truth which had better not be left to
metaphor. At worst it is an exploitative term condemned to the service
of what Harry Levin has so admirably called the "paid moralists" of
our literature, those little men who struggle to make a virtue out of
not knowing what virtue is. Our task is, therefore, of a double nature:
we must reverse surgical procedure and put value back where we
found it; and then, with what is left of the metaphor, we must tie
off its potency as a moralizing agent.
To put value back where we found it is to do nothing more
than put it where we always find it whenever we function as novelists
and critics and not as surgeons. As novelists and critics we are aware
of value only to the extent that we are able to discover it in the form
it most characteristically takes in society; and that is in the form of
social manners. Manners are the organized public manifestations of
those dogmas, codes, myths, and moral idiosyncrasies which compose
the value system of a culture. Manners stand to values precisely as
religion stands to personal belief in God; and just as the question for
the religionist is not whether we have beliefs but whether we believe,
so the question for the literary mind is not whether we have values
but whether we have manners. It is through manners, particularly as
they take the form of what Lionel Trilling calls "a conscious realiza–
tion of social class," that dramatic vitality and conflict have tradition–
ally entered the world of fiction. Manners have been responsible for
the presence in the great European novel of that prime virtue of Mr.
*
"American Fiction and American Values" (PR, November-December, 1951)
