(the) American (Novel of)

CHAPTER TWELVE
Branded from the Start
The Paradox of (the) American
(Novel of ) Manners
HILDEGARD HOELLER
mericans have always had a problem with manners, n’est
ce pas? Since I am here mimicking the voice of a Euro-
Apean you might think that I mean that Americans famously
don’t have manners. But, actually, I do not mean any such thing. On
the contrary, I mean that the problem with Americans is not that they
do or don’t have manners—both statements are inevitably true—but
that they want to have manners. Wanting to have manners is in itself
always a neurotic position since it implies that you both desire them
and lack them; thus, in both meanings, wanting manners signifies the
belief that one does not have them and should have them. Americans,
as a nation, have found themselves always in this neurotic and paradoxical
spot. What aggravates the neurosis is yet another dilemma: wanting
manners itself (that is, desiring them and recognizing a lack) goes
against everything America stands for. It is in itself a breach of manners,
if one takes manners to be an action that is silently in tune with a
minute emblematic observance of the dominant system and its ideology.
Manners, in a European sense (and for everyone else, Westerners
seem to have invented the terms “customs” or “rituals”) are, after all, a
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