慶応文学部英語解説９８年度 The world is becoming more and more homogeneous for many complex reasons but chiefly because of increased communications and machine-driven standardization. (1)We have to look hard for manners that will shock us these days, not only because we have seen or heard of most of them already, but because there are fewer and fewer varieties to view. It is common knowledge that our own ancestors used to have very different ―― and much cruder ―― table manners from (a)those we practise today. We have “come on,” in other words; we have “progressed.” The simplest historical novel or movie can make an exotic effect by presenting a scene in which dinner guests gnaw meat straight off bones gripped in their greasy fists, then hurl the remains into the corners of the room. These were the manners of the past, before we became modern and civilized. Manners have indeed changed. They were not invented on the spot, but developed into the system to which we now conform. Since manners are rituals and therefore conservative, they change slowly if at all, and useally in the face of long and widespread un willingness. Even when a new way of doing things has been adopted by a powerful elite group ―― using forks instead of fingers, for example ―― (2)it may take decades, even centuries, for people generally to decide to follow suit. Forks had not only to be seen in use and their advantages successfully argued; they had also to be made and sold, then produced in versions which more and more people could afford, as they slowly ceased being merely unnecessary and became the mark of civilized behaviour. After the eleventh- century date of the first extant document describing (with wonder) the sight of someone using one, the fork took eight centuries to become a utensil employed universally in the West. Naturally enough, historians interest themselves in why such a change ―― from eating with our hands to using a metal mediating instrument instead ―― took place at all. In our more thoughtful moments, we no longer allow ourselves to feel, simply and happily, that what has happened is “progress,” that the eight centuries were an apprenticeship, a preparation for the attainment of our present enlightened state. Our own culture, as it happens, provides us with a means of tracing his development, through the survival of books on etiquette that have appeared through the ages. These humble, mostly dully written little pamphlets can be studied and compared, so as to document shifts in table manners and etiquette in general.
