The Gift

The subtitle of my edition of Lewis Hyde's classic is "Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World".  But it seems to me that the one featuring this foreword by Margaret Atwood is more accurate: "How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World".  Because in the end, as Hyde himself admits in the afterword to the 25th anniversary edition, the book really aims to describe something timeless about the attitude we need to maintain towards the production and reception of art if it is to thrive.  The main point has nothing specifically modern about it, and in fact Hyde works out most of his theory by considering 'archaic' stories about gift exchange that appears in myths, folktales, and anthropological sources.  To summarize: the artist needs to approach creativity as a gift rather than a 'willful' action of the individual ego, and to express her gratitude for this gift by giving something of it back to the mysterious source from which it came.  

The Gift is divided into two roughly equal parts.  First, Hyde lays out the logic or structure of the "gift economy" by drawing examples of gifting rituals from a wide variety of sources.  In addition to the myths, etc ... we already mentioned, he describes everything from early Christianity to the scientific community as structures that create solidarity through the continual circulation of gifts.  The structure of the gift economy is then opposed point by point to the more familiar (to us) market economy.  In the second half Hyde applies his analysis of this opposition between the gift and the market to the lives and works of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound.  Basically, he argues that Whitman was able to negotiate some balance between these opposed economies while staying mainly on the gift side, while Pound was more or less driven nuts by their divergence.  Perhaps because I haven't read much of either poet, I found the first half of the book significantly more interesting than the second part.  

Since I was fascinated by the structure of the gift economy described by Hyde, and since it seems very similar to other empty or vortical structures we've seen before, I want to spend a little time collecting and summarizing the main characteristics of the gift outlined in the first half of the book.  1) The most important point is that the gift must always circulate.  Bad things happen when the gift is accumulated or possessed rather than passed on.  The gift doesn't begin with an individual and it can't stop at an individual.  In a gift economy, the individual is always an instrument or conduit for a force that exceeds them.  Thus the natural symbol of the gift is the circle, which Hyde illustrates by discussing the Kula ring, and other closed loops of exchange.  2) Because the gift grows when it circulates, the closed circle is actually a feedback loop.  As long as the gift is passed on in the same spirit in which it is received, it keeps on giving, and its enjoyment does not exhaust but replenishes it.  This means that the circle of the gift takes on "a life" of its own, and constitutes a kind of collective body that encompasses the individuals involved in its transit.  Hyde associates this self-sustaining circle with a spiritual life, and links it to Karl Kerényi's interesting sounding discussion of the way the myth of Dionysus illustrates the Greek (or just Aristotelian?) distinction between βίος (bios) and ζωη (zoe).  In this context, we might say that the gift expresses the essence of the religious impulse that dissolves us in something beyond ourselves.  3) The act of passing on the gift requires something of us, some investment of time and effort, a labor of love.  This means that the individual who is the conduit for the gift's circulation is not merely a static and passive placeholder, but is actually transformed by their role in the passage.  The gifted person must work at elaborating their gift, which results in the simultaneous growth of both the gift and the person.  4) Further, the gift transforms both the giver and the recipient by creating a bond of feeling between them.  The individuals involved are swept up in what Hyde calls an "erotic" commerce that draws them together in some type of intimacy.  5) At a larger level, these feeling bonds created by the passing of the gift are what holds whole communities together.  What appears to be a continual momentum or temporary indebtedness at the individual level becomes becomes a force of solidarity at the group level.  Thus the circulation of the gift creates a sort of public spirit that everyone owns because no one can possess it.  Hyde refers to the gift as "anarchist property" similar to Kropotkin's idea of mutual aid.  6) The gift economy is often (though not always) gendered female.  Much of the transpersonal and community building action of gifting is undertaken by women, and, conversely, many labors that involve some degree of gift, such as a nursing or teaching, are considered female occupations.

This last duality leads us directly to the contrast that Hyde slowly develops alongside his description of the characteristics of the gift.  The gift is not a commodity.  Its exchange is not a market transaction.  If we invert each of Hyde's descriptions we find a precise description of capitalist money.  1) The goal is not to circulate but to accumulate it.  2) The means to do this is to capture the increase that results from circulation as profit.  3) While we may have to work at this capture, it is anything but a 'labor of love', and it certainly doesn't transform us.  We can see this in the purest form of profit -- financial profit -- where it is the money itself that does all the work. 4) Market transactions a specifically designed to keep buyer and seller at arms length and only impersonally related.  5) Instead of creating and being guided by a community feeling, these transactions are governed by a 'blind' contractual law.  6) And need we even remark that the market is male?  Drawing our attention to this contrast is Hyde's ultimate point.  Art, amongst other things, thrives in a gift economy but distorts and withers in a pure market economy.  It seems a rather unremarkable and uncontroversial thesis, yet somehow or society seems endlessly capable of forgetting it.  What Hyde offers is both a reminder of this truism, and a detailed look at the life of the gift.  May we learn to recognize this spiritual economy that is so, "abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going against the flow".