Gifting "The Gift"

This holiday, in between shopping for presents, I began reading an amazing book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. It is, in part, about the cultural meaning of gift exchange, and though my timing in reading it during Christmas was coincidental, the resonances were very welcome. By day, I would buy gifts and experience a familiar twinned pleasure and guilt at all the consumption. By night, I would read The Gift and find myself getting to the source of that dual emotion.

Hyde's book distinguishes the gift from the commodity, and gift exchange from market transactions. A gift is that which carries with it a value, an excess, a surplus to its recipient. You receive an object--say, a book--but you also receive the spirit of the gift, the intention and love that animates the book and makes it a directional arrow into the life of its recipient. A commodity, by contrast, is something that has no excess, because its value has been perfectly expressed by its price. A market transaction can only occur when both seller and buyer agree that the trade is equal and fair, when the scale is balanced.

Hyde's genius is to apply this clarifying analysis of two different systems of value to the work of an artist--and he means "work" both in the sense of the artist's labor and her product. Both are gifts. Put far too simply, an artist can create when she is "gifted" by inspiration, and her art becomes a gift because it conveys to its audience the same plenitude of spirit. Hyde's book becomes a lyric, hopeful meditation on how an artist can "survive in a society in which works of art are treated not as gifts but as commodities."

As soon as I started reading The Gift, I instantly knew I wanted to give it to my brother, but I just as instantly knew that I couldn't.

My brother is a writer like me and I could imagine him dancing in his seat with excitement as he read the same pages I'd been underlining for days. But my brother hasn't given me a gift in years. I unfailingly send him birthday and Christmas gifts, but he stopped reciprocating several years ago. I realized that if I sent him The Gift, especially right before Christmas, he'd take it as a rebuke. Surely that's not what Hyde means by a surplus which animates the gift. I felt horrible that I couldn't act on my good intention, and confused as to why this gift had suddenly grown so fraught.

Fortunately, the very gift itself promised to untangle my dilemma. Through his reading of folk tales and tribal practices, Hyde has discerned several rules of gift-giving, and they are not necessarily intuitive ones. His central insight is that the gift must keep moving. He does not mean that we cannot keep our Christmas presents. Rather, the recipient must place the spirit of the gift back into circulation, passing the largesse on to someone else, and the wider the gift-giving circle, the livelier the community that results.

And so the Monday after Christmas, I called up my local bookstore and ordered a copy of The Gift for my brother. The Tuesday after Christmas, a package arrived at my door. It was from my brother, a box of gifts for my whole family. He had gotten each one of us a perfectly aimed book.

Amy Reading

True to her last name, Amy Reading makes a living reading, freelance editing, and writing. She has recently completed a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and is working on a book that grows out of her dissertation, a history of American con artistry. Books reviewed by Amy at BookBrowse.