2008-07-01 wasted value - extract

In a passage just before the midpoint of H.G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, one of the most telling examples of what would come to be called the Condition of England genre,1 George Ponderevo's childhood friend Ewart, a hard-drinking, itinerant artist prone to spouting Nietzschean aphorisms, visits the factory where the narrator and his uncle Edward produce the novel's spurious, eponymous product. Speaking as "one artist to another," Ewart lectures Edward on aesthetic and economic value; indeed, in Ewart's sarcastic rendering, the two forms are inseparable (169). Praising the Ponderevo operation for its "poetry" of production, Ewart goes on to describe the artistry of the entire system of consumer culture that Tono-Bungay embodies: "And it's not your poetry only. It's the poetry of the customer too. Poet answering poet-soul to soul" (168). But if economic concerns have usurped the purportedly disinterested space of art, the notion of economic value itself has undergone a similar revolution. "The old merchant used to tote about commodities; the new one creates values," Ewart asserts. "He takes something that isn't worth anything-or something that isn't particularly worth anything, and he makes it worth something" (169). This ironic commentary by a minor character precisely identifies the major preoccupation of Wells's novel and marks the site of Edwardian anxiety informing the Condition of England novel: the apparent abandonment by "modern commerce" of established determinants of value and waste.