I have always found the world an unpleasantly strange place, and moreover an ever-newly-unpleasantly strange place, meaning that I have not only always found it a place that is not normal according to my own lights but that I have always found it a place in which I am always discovering something new that is not normal according to my own lights. But every so often—say, once every three or four years—I alight on some statelette of affairs that does not merely reinforce my sense that this world is not for me but makes me suspect that this not-for-me world is an entirely different one from (and naturally an altogether worse one than) the one I inhabited only yesterday (or whenever else I last woke up from a longish nap), a statelette of affairs akin in its globally impinging quality to the governing conceit of a certain episode The Twilight Zone (not the original Rod Serling-produced one but its mid-1980s revival) wherein a man discovers upon browsing one of his single-digit-aged child’s picture books that every common noun in the English lexicon is “mapped” to a different referent from the one with which he has always associated it—that, say [for I haven’t seen the dad-blamed episode in nearly forty years] “dinosaur” denotes a fruit he has always known as an “apple,” while “apple” denotes a vehicle he has always known as a “truck,” etc. The most recent such alightment occurred about three weeks ago as of this writing (April 26, 2024) in the context of what has become a sort of local genre of domestic drama, so often does it occur—indeed nearly as often as I experience one of my milder attacks of Weltentfremdung—namely, one of those moments when my mother, knowing as she does of my longstanding Anglophilia yet watching as she does a great deal more British television than I do nowadays, tells me of some entity or mode of behavior that she has just seen for the first time in a British television show and that she therefore cannot help suspecting is quintessentially British, the aim of this impartment of course being to elicit from me a confirmation or denial that I have seen or heard tell of this entity or mode of behavior from some certifiably UK-sited source. Usually these quasi-queries center on some extremely well-defined something whose Britishness I can instantly confirm with a self-satisfied yawn—for example, elevenses or Radio Five Live. Less often they center on something which I have never heard of but my ignorance of which I can shrug off with more or less total complacency because I have ceased to take much of an interest in the British versions of such things as niche-formatted radio stations and arcanely scheduled mealtimes. But this quasi-query was altogether different and different in a way that was deeply unsettling. Its point of reference was a scene in an episode of that 1990s detective show centering on a detective played by the woman who had starred in the execrable 1980s sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. The scene was one in which the detective, a sexagenarian lower-middle-class Northern Englishwoman, and her equally elderly husband were having dinner in their dining room with her teenaged or twenty-something-year-old male Dr. Watson-style business partner-cum-sidekick. My mother said that she had been struck by the fact that throughout the meal all three diners had kept their knives and forks in their hands and their hands in rapid motion. This was a moment like no other such moment because I could in no wise sympathize with my mother’s bemusement—not only because I could not recognize the comportment of the diners as characteristically British but also because I could not recognize it as even vaguely un-American, or to be more precise, not recognize it precisely as uncharacteristic of me or any other American I knew, very much including my mother herself. This is not to say that I did not find the dining-scene conjured up in my mind by her description odd or even semi-barbaric; it is merely to say that I found the antigraphic description—that of a dinner table at which the diners were intermittently and repeatedly laying down their knives and forks and allowing them to sit unused—equally odd (if prospectively more civilized), equally non-bell ringing and by no means apple-pie-esquely American. In my mind’s eye this description did not evoke a distinct mode of dining at all but merely a distinct way of pacing the meal, of incorporating into it time-outs (but how would these time-outs be timed? With an actual timer, perchance an egg-timer brought in from the kitchen?) wherein everybody allowed his digestive system to catch up and stopped chewing the fat in the literal sense to chew it in a figurative one. But that could not have been what my mother had in mind because she was an American—albeit also a Southerner and hence a type thereof known for being exceptions to the rule in point (but of course she was and is also a Floridian and all Floridians are now officially non-Southerners)—and Americans are notorious for wanting to get through everything very much including meals as quickly possible. And so to impart clarity to my conception of this meta-culinary state of affairs, I had no choice but regrettably to break Dr. Johnson’s commandment “Never mention a man in his own presence” (for for various reasons that would take too long to enumerate here I believe his advice applied as categorically to one’s treatment of the present wo-man as to one’s treatment of her wo-less counterpart) and ask her how she personally plied her cutlery at table. She said that while holding her fork in her left hand and her knife in her right, she would cut several bite-sized pieces off the course-eme that required cutting, then lay her knife down, transfer her fork to her right hand, and spear and consume each of the pieces in turn. I found this disclosure at once both quite useful and quite vexing—useful because it immediately put me in mind of three comments on American mensal comportment that I had heard long before; vexing because these comments had always bemused me as much as my mother’s on the table scene from the British TV show had done (and were still doing). The chronologically earliest of these comments dated from nearly a quarter-century ago, from my graduate-school days. Its source was a fellow-graduate student who had spent several years in France for research, and the comment was something to the effect that the French were equal parts amused and revolted by the way Americans handled the knife and fork, the way they would saw away with the knife using the right hand (presumably while using the fork with the left hand to hold the cutlet autc. in place) only to switch the knife to the left hand and the fork to the right when it came time to tuck in in the fullest sense. The chronologically second-earliest of the three dates from much later, probably from about 2018. It hails from my audition of the presumably much-earlier-recorded Desert Island Discs interview of David Byrne, a man whom I have come to despise perhaps more ardently than any other living human being—by this I mean not that I may despise him more than everybody else despises him (although that is not all that improbable) but that I may despise him more than I despise everybody else I despise. I don’t despise him so much only for the comment now in point, but that comment is certainly at the very top of the reasons that I do—or to be more precise, this entire interview definitely includes all the reasons at the top of that list, and at the moment I can’t recall any of the others with precision (and no, I’m not going to go back and listen to the interview, for thanks to Gerald Murnane I have learned that fact-checking such recollections is the worst thing one can do to them both qua things-in-themselves and as nutriment for thought). I loathe the interview because it is less a presentation of Byrne’s six or seven favorite records than a presentation of the six or seven thousand things he loathes most about America. He would not have more eloquently expressed this loathing if he had filmed himself projecting from his fundament a cannonade of excrement onto a wall-map of the United States (for of course in virtue of its difficulty such a performance would have been much more eloquent than merely defecating onto such a map placed on the floor). Anyway, Byrne started out by making a ginormous fuss about the fact that he had been born in Scotland and spent the first half-dozen (or at most half-dozen-and-a-quarter) years of his life there; he spoke of that country as if he had only just emigrated from it the day before, as if its folkways still struck him as being as natural and civilized as they had the day he left it and the U.S.’s folkways as perverse and barbaric. Of course the very notion of anyone’s thinking of the Scots—the people who invented the fried Mars Bar and Buckfast-binging—as the epitome of a civilized nation is laughable. But anyway, as already implied, prominent among his list of American howlers (and they really did make him howl with bemusement and derision) was the Yanks’ manner of eating—which manner according to his description corresponded quite closely to the description of her own modus edendi that my mother would later disclose to me, the only difference being that according to Byrne, Americans would cut up the entire piece of meat before taking their first bite. At the time of course it was news to me that Americans ever did this, but even if it hadn’t been, I would still have wished Mr. Byrne to go back to Scotland and thereupon to be boiled in his own haggis and buried with a steak of thistle or shortbread in his heart. To be sure, I knew I didn’t cut up cutlets autc. completely before tucking into them, and the idea of doing so struck me as a bit infantile, or rather, auto-paternalistic—in other words, it smacked a bit of acting as a parent towards oneself or treating oneself as a very small child, because of course when toddlers are making the transition from semi-solid pap to fully solid food they have to have their meat cut up completely for them by an adult. “All the same,” I thought, “what difference does it make whether one cuts up one’s food ahead of time or as one goes along inasmuch as, for all the monopolistic proverbiality of the donning of trousers one leg at a time qua touch of nature that makes the whole human world kin, one can don one’s trousers both legs at a time if one is strongly enough determined to do so, whereas if one tried to eat one’s fully solid food more than one bite at a time one would choke to death on it a few toothless gulps into the meal?” Onto my final, most recent, example: it hails from an interview with Monty Python’s John Cleese. I believe I heard the interview very shortly after its recording, which means it probably dates from Cleese’s most recent spate of rather indiscriminate public appearances as a cantankerous octogenarian, which means I probably couldn’t fact-check it even if I wanted to. At some point in it, apropos of nothing I can even vaguely recall, Cleese mentioned that when dining with his fellow-Python member, the American-born-and-raised Terry Gilliam, Gilliam had behaved as Americans do at table by passing his fork from one hand to the other and using it to spear the piece of meat that he had just cut and that a fellow-Brit who had also been present on the occasion had been absolutely outraged by this. So here—and now I am placing myself back in the shoes of myself when these three recollections came rushing back to me immediately after my mother’s revelation of her personal modus edendi—so here was a third piece of evidence in favor of the notion that there was a characteristically American way of wielding cutlery and that quite a lot of foreigners did not approve of this American way. To be sure, inasmuch as Cleese had given no sign that he shared in his fellow-Brit’s outrage, this memory-snippet was also a piece of evidence that not every foreigner in the world was offended by this American way, that this way did not mark the ne plus ultra of ugly-Americanness, but the notion of an American modus edendi was still quite unsettling on its own, and unsettling in particular for me qua American because, get this—and sit down if you’re not already sitting—beyond being pretty sure that I did not cut the meat completely to bits before tucking into it, I could not for the life of me remember a single facet of my own modus edendi: I could not remember in which hand I habitually held the knife and the fork to begin with, or whether or how often I habitually switched either utensil to the other hand, or whether or how often I habitually put down either utensil. In the matter of cutlery- wielding I felt completely dépaysé, as the French say, at least when they aren’t too busy gaping at the dinner-table antics of Americans to talk, and I would have to wait until my next cutlery-exacting meal to find out where the true pays of my modus edendi was situated. Of course the discerning reader is likely to have just caught a scent of rat emanating from the immediately preceding sentence—not because I have given him any reason to suppose that I am partial to the taste of that animal (and for the record, I have not as yet been cursed with the opportunity to find out whether I am or not) but because he presumes that I could not have aimed to suss out my own cutlery-wielding habitus without thereby rendering myself self-conscious of that habitus and therefore incapable of wielding my cutlery as I had customarily been wielding it; he presumes that in next betaking myself to the dinner table, I would be forced either to conform to the supposedly quintessentially American way of cutlery-wielding I had just learned of or to go out of my way to wield my cutlery in some way that bade defiance to that way. But as luck would improbably have it and did have it, my next meal followed the revelatory episode by so many hours, and I was so hungry when it at last ensued, that I was not thinking at all about the episode or about my modus edendi when I tucked in, and as luck perhaps even more improbably would have and did have it, I happened to recollect the revelatory episode well before the end of the meal, such that I actually managed to catch myself in flagrante delicto; I managed, in other words, to observe that I was sawing away at a burrito with a knife in my left hand while holding the bite-sized bit of the burrito downward of the knife impaled in place with the tines of a fork in my right hand, and to realize that I was swallowing a bite that had itself just been part of the burrito and concomitantly subjected to the same treatment with the same knife and fork held in the same hands. And so I could not but conclude that my modus edendi did not correspond in any respect to the modus edendi I had lately been given to re-understand as quintessentially American—that, indeed, to the extent that the British modus edendi consisted in keeping one’s knife and fork in one’s hands and in constant motion, per my mother’s description of the television scene, my modus edendi was decidedly British. But by then I had come to find that at least to some Britain-originating lights this extent was at minimum decidedly limited, for within minutes of describing to me the episode from the sitcom and revealing her modus edendi to me, my mother had in response to my bafflement thereat (which bafflement I had been as powerless to conceal from her as I have since proved to be powerless to conceal it from the world via the opening of this essay) sent me a YouTube video entitled something very close to “British versus American dining etiquette.” Formally speaking, the video consisted of a dialogue between a very young British woman—apparently a specifically English one, to judge by her accent—and a very young American man, a dialogue wherein the woman described the British modus edendi with an air of insufferable superiority, thereby eliciting from the young man a series of gasps of incredulity liberally seasoned with mortification at his own Yankish barbarousness. At least I assume there was a series of such gasps, because I did not get past the first of them, owing to my need to quell the outrage that had accompanied my incredulity in lieu of mortification at the very first article of the girl’s description. That article consisted in her saying with her version of the proverbially perfectly straight face that chez les Brits one always corralled together the smaller bits of food on one’s plate using the back side of the fork—that is to say, with the fork pointing its tines away from oneself and the food rather than with it pointing the tines towards oneself and cupping them around the food. Talk about doing things arsiversi—a.k.a. ass—or arse backwards back in the days when a fork only had two tines and so probably couldn’t be used in such an arsiversi way on either side of the Pond. Anyhow, my first thought on hearing this talk of an arsiversi-orientated fork was that if it reflected an actual pan-British practice it had driven the final nail into the coffin of my Anglophilia—and naturally driven it thereinto with the back of a fork rather than with the front of a hammer. But my second, and almost immediately subsequent, thought held out the prospect of the subsistence of my Anglophilia, and not least because in my mind’s ear it was spoken in the organically skeptical Cockney accent of Bob Hoskins, which I am not going to attempt to replicate here through orthographical libertinage, although I won’t shrink from approximating its vocabulary: “Hang about,” Bob says to me in me mind’s ear just then, “although you’ve never left the continental United States, in your two-and-a-half quid and two bob years in this country you have breakfasted, dined, and supped with people hailing from all six inhabited continents. Granted, in the light of your lifelong lifestyle and culinary preferences, the majority of these commensal episodes (here I parenthetically note that my inner Bob Hoskins has a cussed tendency to transmogrify temporarily into an inner Sir Thomas Browne) have centred on what we Brits call pub food and you Yanks call bar food—i.e., food requiring little or no use of cutlery. Still, that must leave at least a thousand meals in which you and your tablemates were fully engaged with cutlery from soup to nuts, if you’ll pardon me French.” I did pardon his French and did concede that I must have shared at least a thousand cutlery-intense meals with foreigners. “Well, then: out of all those thousand-or-more meals, can you recall one in which you noticed anything peculiar about what any of the foreigners were doing with their knives and forks, or one in which any of them singled you out for piss-taking on account of your way of handling yours?” I had to concede that I could not recall a single meal in which I had noticed the one or any of them had ridiculed me for the other. “Well, then, in the light of this, don’t you think there’s something just a mite suspicious—not ‘suss,’ mind you, ’cos as you know, contrary to the belief of the stinking so-called Millennials who’ve taken command of the Zeitgeist since me untimely death, ‘suss’ is a verb, not an adjective—don’t you think, I say, there’s something a mite suspicious about this whole notion of a peculiarly ‘American culinary etiquette?’” I indeed conceded that there was, especially as ever since my bairnhood (a word, incidentally, that on account of its Scottish provenance I doubtless never would have dared speak in the living Bob Hoskins’s presence) I had and have been criticized for paying too much attention to supposedly trivial constituents of other people’s behavior: I have after all produced a nearly two-hour long essay on certain other people’s pronunciation of the word grocery, an essay in which, moreover, I make plain that I have had a sort of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby-esque time convincing certain other people that this irregular pronunciation is ever pronounced. And I did after all just evince a pang of guilt at my counterfactual use of a Scotticism in the presence of an Englishman who has been dead for more than a decade. To be sure, I am willing to entertain the notion that certain general modes of cutlery-wielding are more common in certain corners of the Occident than in others but only in conjunction with the application of Lord Rochester’s apothegm Man differs more from man than man from beast to this intersection of gustation and geography; in other words, with the concession that on the whole the average Yank plies his knife and fork in a manner that differs more widely from that of the next Yank than from that of the next Englishman, Frenchman, German, aut al. At bottom, I am inclined to think of cutlery-wielding as exhibiting much the same sort of dizzying multifariousness as that which Dr. Johnson ascribed to shaving: “[O]f a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished”—distinguished, for example, by the shaver’s “holding the razor more or less perpendicular; drawing long or short strokes; beginning at the upper part of the face, or the under; at the right side or the left side.” (Life, Friday, 19 September 1777, p. 611 [New {2008} Penguin edition]). And it would indeed be surprising if cutlery-wielding did not exhibit such multifariousness, for like shaving, it entails the application of one’s hands to the second or third most sensitive part of one’s own person through the medium of sharpened metal. One is entitled to wield a razor or a knife and fork just as one sees fit because at least tactilely speaking one does after all know one’s face better than anyone else and because placing these implements on or in the wrong part of it at the wrong time could result in a painful or even fatal injury—a sliced off nose-tip, a gouged-out eye, a severed vein or artery. And because the use of cutlery is additionally associated with ingestion, it perhaps requires even closer and more complicated personal supervision than the use of the razor. One must establish a personal rhythm in one’s knife-and-fork use, lest one choke for want of adequate space between mouthfuls or starve owing to a surplus thereof. This is another reason I cannot accept the notion of a national cutlery-wielding style, for every nation is surely quite heterogeneous in eating habituses, and no particular style is suited to more than one of them. It is impossible to imagine a slow eater like my mother tolerating a style like the one in the British sitcom in which the cutlery must be kept in constant motion, or an impatient eater like the present writer tolerating a style like the one affected by my mother and disdained by David Byrne, the one in which the food has to be completely apportioned before one eats a single bite of it. So whence in the devil’s dungeon has this notion that there is an American style of cutlery-wielding, a British style of cutlery-wielding, and so on arisen? I conjecture that it arises from two causes of two different Aristotelean types. The efficient cause of it, the cause of it in the sense that one billiard ball is the cause of the movement of another billiard ball that it bumps into (to employ Hume’s famous efficient causality-problematizing example perversely enough), would seem to be the generalizing complement of the phenomenon whereby people assign—or affect to assign—the authorship of ancient commonplaces like “Look before you leap” and “A stitch in time saves nine” to their parents and grandparents or the provenance of pan-Anglosopheric phatic endearments like “Hon” and “Love” to their native town. In other words, I suspect that in these causal terms it has arisen from certain Brits’, Yanks’, Frenchmen’s, aut al. observing that they themselves serve themselves at table in a certain way, then observing two or three of their fellow-Brits, Yanks, Frenchmen, serving themselves thereat in that selfsame way, and therefrom inferring that all Brits, Yanks, Frenchmen, aut al. serve themselves thereat in that way and that no Swede, Italian, Dutchman, aut al. ever serves himself thereat in that way and always serves himself in a completely different way that is peculiar to the nationality of which he is a member or polity of which he is a citizen. Such inferences are so readily refuted by experience that I cannot but suspect that they are in most cases not actually inferred and only feigned to be inferred because the pretended inferrer takes his interlocutor or audience for a chump. As to the final cause of the notion, otherwise knowable as its aim or motive, I dare say the reader supposes I have already revealed it in exposing the efficient cause—in other words, that people are inclined to take their own modi edendi for those of their native country en bloc because they wish to drum up touristic interest in that country and to take the modus edendi of every foreigner they meet for the modus edendi of his country because they wish to discourage tourists from visiting that country. And I dare say that is part of the final cause and perhaps even the nearer-to-hand part thereof or at least the part thereof that most of the takers are more likely to be conscious of. Nevertheless, I suspect that something much broader in scope and much more sinister in purport is ultimately being aimed at. I suspect this on considering the resemblance I remarked between modes of shaving and modes of cutlery-wielding and the inclusion of “Etiquette” in the title of the British YouTube video. For it seems odd to apply the principle of etiquette to such activities, activities that in their manifest diversity would seem to have proved themselves impervious to regulation by any sort of rulebook, activities that seem, to put it rather more bluntly, to have proved to be the gosh-damn business of nobody but the person engaging in them. “Ah,” the reader is doubtless just now demurring, “but shaving differs quite materially from eating in that it is an activity engaged in in solitude and therefore the shaver’s own business in a much fuller sense than eating can ever be an eater’s.” But it seems to me that this objection is easily dispatched. For while a man certainly shaves in solitude by default, he will shave without fuss or embarrassment if he can’t manage to be on his own when it comes time to shave, and it is hard to imagine many things more absurd than a man suddenly switching from upward razor strokes to downward ones when his downward-stroke favoring best pal walks into the room. And it is equally absurd to imagine anyone’s suddenly switching his entire mode of wielding his knife and fork in the middle of a meal on encountering a disapproving gaze from a commensalist who he only then notices is wielding them in a different manner from his own. The happy truth is that in the entire Western world there are really only two rules of etiquette in the robust sense that apply to the act of dining in company itself: don’t chew with your mouth open and use some form of cutlery on food that has not officially been designated as “finger food.” Every other prescription pertaining to that act is pure tosh with mere arriviste pretensions to rule-dom. Even the much-ballyhooed and decried requirement to distinguish between the salad fork and the main-course fork is basically a server-side only requirement: while it is just—if only just—conceivable that an Occidental host or hostess would incur opprobrium by failing to provide both types of fork to his or her guests, it is virtually impossible to conceive of any Occidental eater’s receiving a serious tongue-lashing from his fellow guests for using the salad fork on the main course or vice-versa. The truth is that at table everyone is too gosh-damned interested in gratifying his own appetite to pay much attention to anything that doesn’t tend to spoil that appetite by the most direct and visceral assault—and yes, I do think the sight of someone grabbing fistfuls of spaghetti with his bare hands and then forcing his neighbors to watch the pasta’s masticative transformation into farina in his pie-hole counts as such an assault; and, no, I don’t think the sight of someone switching any sort of fork or knife from one hand to the other counts thereas. And basically in the modern Occident, in Europe and America of the past five hundred years, all etiquette in the robust sense, in other words, all etiquette that is of a sort more or less exactly synonymous with good manners or good breeding, has concerned itself with the corporeal comportment of the individual only to the extent that it impinges on the immediate well-being of his fellow-individuals. The sort of etiquette that by contrast concerns itself with the individual’s regulation of his own body in intrinsic terms–with placing one’s left foot in exactly such-and-such a place exactly at a such-and-such a distance from one’s right foot, with standing up perfectly straight and perfectly perpendicular to the ground, with perfectly vertically bisecting one’s person with one’s column of shirt buttons—this sort of etiquette has been largely confined to the military. Of course, though, the YouTube video now in point is not the first attempt by certain of our fellow-Occidentals to persuade us that the hyper-personal military-style of etiquette is the most important sort of etiquette and perhaps indeed that hyper-personal self-regulation is what etiquette is really all about—that anyone who is not fully schooled in some real or imagined list of rules about such behavior is a boor at best and probably a full-blown lout. But I don’t think these attempts at hoodwinking us into mistaking military-style etiquette for etiquette tout court have been being made for all that long. Indeed, the earliest one that occurs to me dates from no further back than the first year of this century. I am thinking here of Gosford Park, the film directed by the professional Hollywood maverick Robert Altman and written by the professional British toff Julian Fellowes. Wikipedia describes it as “a satirical black comedy mystery film,” but its comedy is of an insipidly sallow hue, and whatever mystery may nominally lie at the center of its plot (whose nominal particulars I own I have completely forgotten) is but a MacGuffin for its real goal and purpose—namely the mystification of the minefield of comportmental minutiae that must be traversed by every servant and guest at the stately English manor house that forms its setting. Dramaturgically the film is dominated by Tarkovsky-length shots in which some old salt-cum-big shot of the household staff reads some new hire the riot act about not only his own duties but also the titles of other servants and the gadgets and gewgaws handled thereby—about the difference between a tweeny and a topsy and a snuffer, a snaffle, and a snifter, and so forth; or almost more than figuratively sends a guest packing for showing up for a meal a half a minute early or late, or asking with Oliver Twist-worthy diffidence for some super-recherché requisite of dining or toiletry like a salt-cellar or hand-towel. And of course the aim and object of all this spectacular badgering is to inculcate in plebs on both sides of the Pond that each of these titles, folkways, and articles is a precious and inalienable appenage of the English aristocracy handed down as gingerly as gelignite in airtight glass cases from generation after blueblood generation extending all the way back to William the Conqueror’s time, if not King Arthur’s. Of course even the most casual student of English history—or, to be more precise, English literarily mediated history, the history of English customs and institutions as revealed in novels, plays, diaries, and the like written by Englishmen and Englishwomen (and to a lesser extent by non-English Britons—i.e., Scotspeople and Welshpeople)—knows, the Byzantine domestic rigmarole depicted in Gosford Park was invented almost out of whole cloth in the mid-nineteenth century, during the early ascendancy of Victorian England’s counterparts to America’s robber barons, newly knighted or enobled former office clerks and small-goods merchants whose millions amassed through shrewd investment in heavy industry enabled them to purchase the distressed estates of decayed aristocrats or build gargantuan manor houses of their own and subsequently encouraged them to fill these houses with servants bound to take advantage of their masters’ arrivistic ignorance in devising ever-more ingenious means of bossing them and each other about. (For tedium-forestallment’s sake, I shall tender but one example in evidence of the recentness of the rigmarole and pluck that example from the very center of the English literary canon—Stefano in Shakespeare’s Tempest. From the dramatis personae and a snatch of dialogue we learn that he is the King of Naples’ butler, but his demeanor could not be more unlike that of the sternly impassive and sober bearing of the stereotypical butler of twentieth and twenty-first century cinema and television—for he is loudmouthed, hot-tempered, and perpetually inebriated. But one ceases to find this characterization incongruous once one learns that in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, a butler was exclusively the keeper of a household’s wine cellar. Accordingly, a dramatist of those times must have found a drunken butler as irresistibly plausible as a chubby, gluttonous cook. For an example in Shakespeare of a character with a butleresque social habitus we must turn to an entirely different title and function, that of the steward as exemplified by Twelfth Night’s quasi-Puritanical cross-gartered Malvolio. And yet the butler of twentieth and twentieth-first century cinema and television—in other words, the dramaturgical representation of the butler of Victorian England—is not simply the Elizabethan and Jacobean steward by another name; for the steward was the administrator of an entire estate including its grounds and tenancies, whereas the Victorian butler was merely the administrator of an estate’s household staff; rather, the Victorian butler is simply a more evolved version of the Elizabethan and Jacobean butler, a butler who with the changing times was required to sober up and assume a broader range of duties. Presumably with the burgeoning of the fine-wine industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became ever more necessary for a household’s guardian of wines to keep closer track of their whereabouts and to know more about particular vintages, varietals, terroirs, and the like, and therefore to spend less time hitting the bottle himself; and the butler’s resultant gravitas and competence in the matter of wines presumably led to his being entrusted with keeping track of the whereabouts of other entities—notably his fellow servants and the commodities employed and consumed by them.) I suppose that that quasi-digression in referencing two Shakespeare characters involved two examples not one, but I shan’t apologize for mentioning Malvolio alongside Stefano, because the Malvolio-ization of the butler coincided with and participated in another phenomenon that must be understood if one is to appreciate the dashed bounderishness of the attempted redefinition of etiquette through which we are living—namely, the development and propagation of etiquette in the abovementioned wholesome, broad, robust sense. Not long before Shakespeare’s day, the aristocracy began to be polite to each other in a wholesome, broad, and robust way, and over time, roughly between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, this new form of politeness spread from the aristocracy to all the lower orders of society apart from the peasantry. It spread partly because of course the members of the lower orders wished to be thought posher than they actually were but also because it made life easier for everyone by not keeping everybody constantly on tenterhooks about whether he was being sufficiently deferential to someone who just might be his social superior as measured by some criterion or other of which he was unaware. Samuel Johnson lauded this all-purpose version of politeness as “artificial benevolence.” One sees evidence of its spread in the complete dislodgment of “thee” “thou” and “thy” from everyday speech. Now one tends to think of these words as hyper-formal because of their use in addresses to the Deity in the King James Version of the Bible, but they were in fact familiar forms like their counterparts in the continental languages—du, dein, tu, toi, etc. In everyday speech they were used only in addressing one’s social inferiors or equals—family members, friends, and servants (yes, even if one oneself was a servant, provided the addressee was a servant of inferior function). The last gasp of conversational thee and thou occurs in early eighteenth-century plays and novels, where it is employed exclusively by hotheaded young male aristocrats evincing their itch for a duel-challenge by presuming to “thee” and “thou” fellow bucks of equal or higher social status. Anyway, this pan-societal propagation of good manners was already complete by the time the abovementioned ex-office clerks and small-goods merchants took possession of their McManors en avant la lettre, which meant that these newly minted McLords of the McManor were already in possession of manners as polished as anyone would need for everyday non-sexual intercourse with people of any social stratum. At the same time, jumped-up ex-office clerks and small-goods merchants that they were, they could not but feel a bit insecure around established lords and ladies with mile-long pedigrees and family trees with semi-fossilized roots (not to mention untitled gentry with league-length pedigrees and family trees with fully fossilized roots). And at the same time prime, they could not but feel both inclined and obliged to entertain as guests these selfsame established lords and ladies qua their neighbors and official social equals. Consequently, in presenting themselves to these aristos and gentros at home they could not but feel inclined to risk erring on the side of propriety, to risk seeming to adhere to too many rules of comportment for fear of adhering to too few of them; sub-consequently they all too readily acquiesced in being assimilated to the pedantic comportmental machinery of their servants—i.e., the abovementioned new-school po-faced, jurisprudentially sober butlers and their equally po-faced underlings. Although nominally these pedants’ masters, they allowed themselves to be bossed about by them regarding their each and every movement (yes, yes, yes, including that sort of movement) and thereby—while doubtless occasioning much behind-the-glove sniggering among the ultra-poshies themselves—to give their merely upper-middle-crusty visitors the impression that this was the way all people of quality had always behaved. So here, more than a hundred-and-fifty years ago, within the confines of the manor house itself, we already had the pattern or archetype of the YouTube lecture on the correct way to hold and use a knife and fork. Why, then, have the rest of us only been beaten over the head about such minutiae since the dawn of the present century? (“Since the dawn of the present century indeed?” the reader or listener is perhaps now belatedly interjecting, “What about that massive cudgel of a twentieth-century etiquette-guide, Emily Post’s?” But Emily Post’s guide was in spirit and substance the antithesis of the YouTube lecture, aiming as it did to facilitate the adaptation of the old-school near-universal etiquette to the widest possible range of social settings, to make it possible for people of the most widely divergent means to offer and receive hospitality to and from one another with grace and tact—to allow, for example, a servantless host or hostess to receive guests used to being waited on hand and foot and allow such guests to accommodate themselves to finding their hands and feet unattended.) To answer this question in full and in depth—or as much fullness or depth as it appears to admit—would require the regurgitation of a shelf or two of treatises classifiable under a handful or two of academic subject-headings, but it is as easy as pease-porridge pie to answer it to the extent that it can be answered by a description of the most historically proximate social phenomenon that is most readily abetted by the supervention of the over-the-head-beating—namely a convergence of the material interests of parties that in principle have nothing in common with each other or may even be ferociously opposed to each other, à la the famous coalition of bootleggers and Baptists in the Deep South during the Prohibition years. In the present case there are at least three such parties: that of the peasantry, that of the aggregate of pedants, the exponents-cum-fetishists of pedantry, whom we may with remarkable prosodic felicitousness christen the pedantry, and that of the aggregate of people unduly concerned with their personal health and well-being, whom we must, alas, refer to with remarkable prosodic wretchedness as the collectivity of valetudinarians. Evidences of the increasing prestige and power of the peasantry over the course of the second half of the twentieth century are too numerous (and politically scabrous) even to begin enumerating. Suffice it to say, the attribute of the peasantry most in point here is their utterly unregenerate slatternliness or slovenliness, their utterly unapologetic lack of attention to their mode of self-presentation. As for the pedantry, we are all used to hearing of their relatively recent ascent to ascendancy under the auspices of panegyrics and philippics on technocrats or experts. And the valetudinarians have quite recently come to the forefront of Occidental society’s collective consciousness via the innumerable accommodations of them in public life—from emotional support animals to triple-boldface warnings of the presence of humdrum food ingredients to mandatory masking during the event that cannot be named. The valetudinarians resemble the peasantry in their passion for the removal of impediments to their immediate somatic well-being and in their lack of shame or guilt at the suffering the indulgence of their passion may occasion their immediate neighbors. “I do not know,” quoth Dr. Johnson, “a more disagreeable character than a valetudinarian, who thinks he may do any thing that is for his ease, and indulges himself in the grossest freedoms: Sir, he brings himself to the state of being a hog in a sty.” Actually that is just the old-school G-rated version, so to speak, of Johnson’s remark, the version that made it into Boswell’s biography of him (Life, Tuesday, 16 September 1777, p. 604). In the passage in Boswell’s diary on which it is based, one sees that among the “grossest freedoms” indulged in by valetudinarians, Johnson specifically numbered “farting in one’s presence” (or something very close to that; regrettably the volume of the journal is not one that I own or can any longer readily maintain; at any rate, I am quite sure he used the word “fart”). Of course then as now, breaking wind unreservedly in company is something for which peasants are even more notorious than valetudinarians. The reason Johnson did not see fit to fulminate against the brazen flatulence of the peasantry is presumably that although he was far from wealthy, as an educated city-dweller of his time he could be more or less certain that he would never have to share a dinner table with any peasants—although admittedly his social standing did not prevent his being occasionally committed to debtor’s prison, where he may very well have had to break bread with members of the peasantry’s urban counterpart, the lumpen proletariat. Of course, we nice, normal would-be-law-abiding citizens of the early twenty-first century are not so fortunate as Dr. Johnson, for on pain of a fate far worse than debtor’s prison we are required to share dinner tables and articles of furniture exacting even greater intimacy with both valetudinarians and peasants without emitting the faintest whimper of a complaint. But equally of course, now that I have conjured this image of valetudinarians sitting more than figuratively cheek by jowl with peasants, the reader or listener is starting to wonder just how all this commensality, co-row-of-plane-seats-ality, and so forth is supposed to work in practical terms given that while the valetudinarian feels no guilt or shame at venting his own bodily exudations, he is as desperate as can be to avoid contact with the bodily exudations of others, and in particular with the types of bodily exudations that are most typically exuded by peasants and that I refuse to be enough of a lexical peasant or valetudinarian to specify. That is quite a reasonable object of wonderment, but as I said before, we are dealing here with a coalition of parties with incommensurable agendas, which more or less necessarily means (as I own I have not yet said) that we are dealing with a coalition of people who are allied with each other only by way of being largely unaware of each other and who therefore cooperate with each other only indirectly, by directing their ire and aggression at a third party whom they both happen to regard as their enemy. In the abovementioned example of the coalition of bootleggers and Baptists, the common enemy of the two B’s was the ordinary moderate drinker who would have been content to down a beer or shot or two at Martini’s Bar a few times a week after work, and in the coalition now in point, the coalition of the peasantry and the valetudinarians, the common enemy is the ordinary exponent of old-fashioned good manners who simply wishes to cause and be caused as little discomfort to and by his tablemates, row-of-seat-mates, et al., with the minimum amount of fuss. The following parable of sorts will perhaps clarify how the conspiratorial magic trick works. Picture to yourself a three-seated airplane seat-row in the middle of which sits a nice, normal person flanked by a valetudinarian and a peasant. I suppose you will want to know which of the two, the valetudinarian or the peasant, is sitting by the window and which by the aisle. That is an interesting if ultimately immaterial question. One assumes that the valetudinarian will have strongly preferred to be sitting on (or against? or along?) the aisle for faster access to the toilet, but on reflection one dares not assume that he is actually sitting there because the peasant, although doubtless shameless enough to void his bladder or bowels in situ, is doubtless also aware that the airline’s rules are not yet so lax as to allow passengers that luxury, and so he will likely likewise have preferred the aisle seat as affording him the next best thing thereto; moreover being shamelessly pushy by nature, he will not unlikely-ly have insisted with a peremptory jerk of the chin or thumb on the valetudinarian’s making room for him should he have found him in the aisle seat before him. In any case, there the three of them—the valetudinarian, the nice person, and the peasant—are sitting, and the valetudinarian and the peasant, each of them actuated by his own type-characteristic motive, break wind loudly and almost but not quite simultaneously and therefore in such a way and at such a time as both not to mistake the other’s fart for his own and to identify it as the other’s. The nice person utters not a word of reproach to either of them and does not even dare raise his hand to his face to ward off the noxious vapors attacking his olfactory bulbs from both sides, but he cannot forbear from betraying a faint trace of aversion in the form of the slightest suspicion of a grimace. The valetudinarian and the peasant both notice the grimace, and each of them thereupon simultaneously interprets the aversion specifically as an aversion to his own pet obsession and interpellates the other peteur as a fixator on the same obsession—the valetudinarian on an obsession with doing what is immediately best for one’s own health, the peasant with gratifying one’s immediate somatic impulse. Thus, in that selfsame instant the two of them silently form a sturdy if unfounded bond of solidarity with each other and of hostility toward the nice person, now understood by the peasant as an abominably uptight spoilsport and by the valetudinarian as an abominably “unempathetic” non-carer about the survival of other people. And subsequently-cum-consequently, however inconspicuously the nice person may comport himself throughout the remainder of the flight, each of his slightest stirrings will be resented by each of his row-mates as a violation of the row-mate’s signature habitus. If, for example, he should find himself unable to refrain from sneezing, the valetudinarian will thereupon contract a homicidal loathing of him for having exposed him or her, the valetudinarian, to what he or she, the valetudinarian, will ineluctably regard as the cluster of viruses or bacteria that is or are bound to nullify his or her years of painstakingly implemented prophylactic measures and carry him or her to his or her grave within days if not hours of his or her egress from the plane; and the peasant will just as fiercely hate the sneezer qua disturber of his or her aural tranquility, qua interrupter of, say, his or her non-headphoned audition of the yobbos’ war chant over the loudspeaker of his or her personal telephone—for although the peasant venerates the removal of all curbs to somatic gratification, he or she attaches no importance whatsoever to the somatic comfort of others as an end in itself. As to the role played by the pedant in this abominable spectacle-cum-ordeal, it is roughly that of what the pop-psychologists would call an enabler, albeit only an enabler in absentia, which is why it will not quite do to call him a director or a conductor and why in introducing him back into the discussion I shall regretfully have to leave behind my parable. But of course even before launching properly back into the discursive mode I really must apologize for availing myself of the term enabler at all in the light of its just-mentioned pop-psychological provenance given that pop-psychologists figure among the most prolific and the most prolifically execrable of pedants—i.e., the pedants whose terminology is typically most tin-eared and wide of the mark. At this moment, though, it seems to me that enabler is exceptionally both succulently fleshy-eared and bull’s eye apple-hitting, for as I understand it an enabler is specifically a person who encourages people to engage in certain types of bad behavior whether he has any intention to do so or not. This is not to say that I am saying that the pedant is knowingly and passionately opposed to the bad behavior typically engaged in by the valetudinarian and the peasant; to the quasi-contrary, in virtue of his utter lack of finesse, of savoir vivre, of any affinity with or appreciation for the overall effect of personal comportment in a practicable social setting, the valetudinarian and the peasant could not find a warmer friend or a more loyal ally (to name an entity craved with especial ardor by today’s peasants and valetudinarians) in the pedant; I am simply saying that although a goodly proportion of the pedantry are also valetudinarians (although not peasants, for reasons that I shall refrain from explaining not out of fear or coyness but out of deference to the gratuitousness of explaining them [but to sum them up in a kind of proverb lest you think I am being disingenuous: The biggest nerds tend to be the biggest snifflers and vice-versa]), the pedant qua pedant has no specific interest in health or comfort as ends in themselves. Qua pedant he is solely interested in inculcating the miniscule pseudo-letter of his pseudo-law, and if the valetudinarian and the peasant can keep indulging in the grossest freedoms like hogs in sties while he goes about his inculcating rounds, that’s no skin off his skyward-orientated snout. “B-b-b-but,” the reader or listener is now doubtless stammering or spluttering in incomprehension or outrage, “isn’t there not only a social but a logical contradiction between modes of behavior like peasantism and valetudinarianism that involve letting it rip, letting it all hang out, and so on, and the militaristically pedantic approach to etiquette that involves the hyper-regimentation of the movement of each and every muscle at each and every microsecond?” Indeed there is such a contradiction (I rejoin), but don’t you see: in an age such as ours in which peasants and valetudinarians call the shots this contradiction has proved an infallible recipe for success for the hyper-pedantic etiquette consultants. For once people have been convinced that etiquette at its core and foundation is so complicated and involves such an inordinate degree of self-regulation that it cannot possibly be mastered by any human being, they will almost inevitably conclude that it is not worth devoting the slightest scintilla of attention to their manner of presenting themselves to their short-term neighbors—that they might as well go to the supermarket in their pajamas, curse like sailors if not paratroopers in front of children, eat soup and porridge “doggie-style,” etc. And indeed it is the drawing of this very conclusion that has been strenuously inculcated at least with the full cooperation of the etiquette pedants via Gosford Park’s unofficial sequel, the BBC “drama” series (and fellow Fellowes-vehicle) Downton Abbey. In the first season of the series, everybody in the eponymous monastery-turned-manor house, from his Lordship himself to his favorite mastiff, is as dour and foul-mooded as a dyspeptic high-Church warden’s widow, crushed as they all supposedly are under the weight of centuries of baronial ceremony. Some of this ceremony takes the form of the sorts of factitious house rules that we have already discussed, but a good bit of it hails from the decorum common to all decent society of the very early twentieth century—for example, the custom of “dressing for dinner,” which one finds being as religiously observed by the parvenu American publicity agent J. Ward Moorehouse in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, whose first volume was published just under a century ago. Anyway, about midway through the third season of DA, there is a prominent addition to the dramatis personae—some female cousin, a crapulous uncorseted septuagenarian American, a sort of extremely late-blooming flapper still reeking from bathtub gin consumed before the start of her transatlantic voyage, who immediately proceeds to let loose, or rather looser, in all sorts of objectionable ways. (Of course, I shall take the very American liberty of parenthetically remarking, no social portraitist on either side of the Pond has ever “punched right-Pondward” in presenting an interloping boor; one never sees movies in which a well-bred American household is barged in on by a lager-guzzling yob from Chatham or the old East End, the closest approach to such a presentation being the bestowal of a very slightly sub-posh Manchester accent on Frasier’s Daphne Moon.) Her example soon infects the entire family: his lordship and ladyship’s eldest daughter elopes with the coachman; his lordship, riven with despair not so much at his daughter’s misalliance as at his own inability to part with his hereditary uptightness, blows his brains out, thus rendering the coachman the new his lordship and leaving his daughter (a.k.a. the new her ladyship) no scandalous option left but to embark on a series of amours with her husband’s prize stallions. And all of this is implied to be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very good indeed with all the subtlety and understatement of the string of adverbs I have just employed. I exaggerate a bit, but not by much, at least to the best of my patchy recollection of the show, of which I never went out of my way to watch a single second—which meant that what with its being broadcast in Chuck Close-dimensioned high definition video and stadium-PA-system surround sound over every television in every building I entered in the course of its run, I ended up watching a thousand or so hours of it. Anyhow, at the end of this mini-rant I suppose the reader or listener is now much inclined dyspeptically to interject, “However aesthetically objectionable you may find Downton Abbey, how could even a single flake of skin be desquamated from your skyward-oriented snout by its wild popularity? Must everything that is wildly popular meet your exacting aesthetic standards? Wasn’t Downton Abbey just another example of good-old-fashioned wholesome escapism? You are sounding exactly like those po-faced church-ladies who fulminated against the corrupting influence of so-called gangster rap in the 1990s.” And of course I am sounding exactly like those po-faced church-ladies of yore, because while no, not everything that is wildly popular has to meet my exacting aesthetic standards, I would dearly like to live in a semblance of a civilization in which no television show that is wildly popular enthusiastically inculcates vice, because as the history of the reception of so-called gangster rap has shown, people do actually tend to imitate the behavior exhibited or described in the so-called media they consume. Downton Abbey may be wholly chimerical as a depiction of the British aristocracy of the early twentieth century, but as a primer on what one might term Grisham’s law of social contagion it could not be more spot-on. For considering that all other things being equal, all of us, not just valetudinarians and peasants, would constantly give vent to our grossest animal impulses and are checked from doing so only by constant reminders of the benefits of self-restraint, over the long run we cannot help being only as well-behaved as the worst- behaved person in whose company we are habitually present–whether immediately and factually, as in potentially tactile in-person encounters, mediately and factually, as in telephone calls and video conferences, or mediately and fictionally, as in movie and television-viewing sessions. And as we are after all already within figurative spitting distance of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Gosford Park and the fifteenth anniversary of the premiere of Downton Abbey, we cannot but already also be within literal spitting distance of an entire generation of young Anglophone adults who have never known any models of decorum superior to the ones supplied by the Gosford Park-Downton Abbey televisual-cum-cinematic industrial complex. Whence, presumably, the recent surfacing on YouTube of po-faced young Brits insisting on my keeping a carpal- tunnel grip on my cutlery throughout a meal and eating my soup with the back of my fork. Fortunately, at least if there be any truth in rumor and damned statistics, today’s very young adults and oldest pre-adults, the younger tranche of the so-called Zoomers, attach no importance whatsoever to watching the latest Netflix releases or the current offerings at the local luxury multiplex, such that however degenerate the etiquette on display in these productions inevitably becomes, all hope is not lost of educating the rising generation in good etiquette by algorithmically forcing on them a steady viewing diet of, say, The Bob Newhart Show and The Sandbaggers, but however successful this virtual finishing school proves to be, until its charter class graduates, we are doubtless in for a bumpy ride. And just how bumpy a ride are we doubtless in for? Let’s just say that I would not be surprised, should fortune grace me with a long enough life and a large enough bank balance, to find myself before the end of this decade being thrown out of a three-star Michelin restaurant with a shirt-optional dress code and no no-farting section by a headwaiter attired in nothing but a so-called nut-hammock—and all for committing the by then-unpardonable social infraction of setting down my cutlery for half a second or rounding up my peas with the front side of my fork.
THE END