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The Gift

“Brilliant…. If you care about art buy this book and let it give itself to you.”

—The Boston Globe

“Fascinating and compelling…. Seems to light up everything it touches, including the reader’s mind.”

—The New Republic

“Exhilarating…. Explores its subject in a thoroughly original manner.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Intriguing…. An original and provocative critique of capitalist culture.”

—The Nation

“Wise [and] charming…. A glimpse from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom, it is, like the best gifts, good beyond expectation.”

—The Village Voice

“A source of inspiration and affirmation in my artistic practice for over twenty years. It is the best book I have read on what it means to be an artist in today’s economic world. It has shown me why we still use the word gift to describe artistic talent, and that selflessness, not self-expression, lies at the root of all creative acts.”

—Bill Viola

LEWIS HYDE

The Gift

Lewis Hyde was born in Boston and studied at the universities of Minnesota and Iowa. In addition to The Gift, he is the author of Trickster Makes This World, a portrait of the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. The editor of On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Hyde is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce.

A MacArthur Fellow and former director of creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

www.lewishyde.com

Also by Lewis Hyde

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

FOR MY PARENTS

“What is good is given back.”

Contents

Preface

Introduction

I. A THEORY OF GIFTS

One• Some Food We Could Not Eat

Two• The Bones of the Dead

Three• The Labor of Gratitude

Four• The Bond

Five• The Gift Community

Six• A Female Property

Seven• Usury: A History of Gift Exchange

II. TWO EXPERIMENTS IN GIFT AESTHETICS

Eight • The Commerce of the Creative Spirit

Nine • A Draft of Whitman

Ten • Ezra Pound and the Fate of Vegetable Money

Conclusion

On Being Good Ancestors

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Preface

Book salesmen find it handy to have a ten-second description of each title when they go into a bookstore to pitch the product. Any current list of bestsellers will provide a sample of the genre: “Extraordinary conclusions about the lineage of Christ.” “Newspaper columnist learns life lessons from his neurotic dog.” “How the dead communicate with us.” “Reporter exposes a ring of vampires out to take over Seattle.” “Memoir by the bad-boy golf champion.”

The Gift has always been hard to summarize in such pithy prose. In a way, that is its point: I began writing the book because it seemed to me that my own experience with “the commerce of the creative spirit” was nowhere very well articulated. Some explaining was in order and while perhaps it could have been done in less than three hundred pages, it surely couldn’t be done in a sentence or even a chapter. This meant, however, that when it first came out the book was in fact an embodiment of the problem it addresses. Books that are hard to explain may, one hopes, be more useful in the long run, but they are also the harder to commodify for a ten-second sell.

The original editor for The Gift was Jonathan Galassi and I remember when we first sat and talked about the project he asked me the question all editors must ask, Who is your audience? I didn’t know how to respond. I felt like saying “All thinking humans” but, made shy by my own grandiosity, I settled for “poets.” That’s not what most editors want to hear (many prefer “dog owners