The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [162]
This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out—or murdered—when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Yankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915–16. The “outsider” is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well.
* Here we have another reason why Hermes is both the god of trade and of thieves. A commerce in commodities involves the trick of symbolic exchange.
* His repeated call for state sovereignty and his prohibition on foreign money in the homeland both seem tribal to me. (If you begin with such tribal nationalism, however, you soon must have either complete isolation or a double standard for dealing with strangers. With what can only be called the wisdom of Moses, Pound arrives at the latter solution: “A country CAN have one currency for internal use, and another for home and foreign use.”)
* If we ask what’s to keep tricky financiers from getting themselves appointed as price commissioners, Pound replies: “No part or function of government should be under closer surveillance, and in no part or cranny of government should higher moral criteria be ASSURED.” Men of super goodwill will watch the men of goodwill who set the just price.
Pound was very sharp when it came to spotting crooks in the banking business, but he was a little dull when it came to crimes of power, order, and efficiency.
* In formulating a modified permission to practice usury, the reformers revived the Mosaic law, and in that sense they brought the Jew into the Church. That, at any rate, was how Pound saw it; he was of the opinion, for example, that Calvin was really a Jew: “that heretical scoundrel Calvin (the alias of Cauein, or Cohen, philo-usurer).”
* One of Pound’s last pieces of writing was a clarification: “Re USURY. I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE.”
Conclusion
It has been the implication of much of this book that there is an irreconcilable conflict between gift exchange and the market, and that, as a consequence, the artist in the modern world must suffer a constant tension between the gift sphere to which his work pertains and the market society which is his context. Such, at any rate, were my assumptions when I began to write. I not only placed creative life wholly within the gift economy, but I assumed that the artist of enduring gifts would be one who managed to defend himself against all temptations to commercialize his calling.
My position has changed somewhat. I still believe that the primary commerce of art is a gift exchange, that unless the work is the realization of the artist’s gift and unless we, the audience, can feel the gift it carries, there is no art; I still believe that a gift can be destroyed by the marketplace. But I no longer feel the poles of this dichotomy to be so strongly opposed. In working out the details of the chapter on usury, in particular, I came to understand that gift exchange and the market need not be wholly separate spheres. There are ways in which they may be reconciled, and if, like the Jews of the Old Testament, we are a community that deals with strangers, or if, like Ezra Pound, we are artists living in a market society, it is the reconciliation we must seek. One of the lessons of Pound’s life, certainly, is that there is little to be gained by a wholesale attack on the market. We can sometimes limit the scope of its influence, but we cannot change its nature. The market