The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [168]
Neruda has commented on this incident several times. “This exchange of gifts—mysterious—settled deep inside me like a sedimentary deposit,” he once remarked in an interview. And he associates the exchange with his poetry. “I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses—that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
“That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all humanity is somehow together … It won’t surprise you then that I have attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood …
“This is the great lesson I learned in my childhood, in the backyard of a lonely house. Maybe it was nothing but a game two boys played who didn’t know each other and wanted to pass to the other some good things of life. Yet maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light.”
* Artists who sell their work commonly take on an agent as a way of organizing this double economy: the artist labors with his gift and his agent works the market.
On Being Good Ancestors
Afterword to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
The Gift was written between 1977 and 1982 and published in 1983. It contains very little topical detail from those years, my hope at the time being to write what might be called a “prophetic essay,” a rather grand way of saying that I intended to describe something that was the case no matter the decade rather than something contingently true. Nor, therefore, is The Gift a very practical book. It describes a problem—the disconnect between the practice of art and common forms of earning a living—but it refrains from exploring a resolution. That restraint is of a piece with the ahistorical impulse, of course, for most solutions are of their time and will vary as the times vary.
All of this notwithstanding, since The Gift appeared I have sometimes been asked to speak to the puzzle of supporting creative work in the present moment. My current response to that question has several parts, the least obvious of which may be this: I’ve come to believe that, when it comes to how we imagine and organize support for creative work, the pivotal event in my lifetime was the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union. To expand on that assertion, it will help to begin by restating two of The Gift’s motivating assumptions.
The first is simply that there are categories of human enterprise that are not well organized or supported by market forces. Family life, religious life, public service, pure science, and of course much artistic practice: none of these operates very well when framed simply in terms of exchange value. The second assumption follows: any community that values these things will find nonmarket ways to organize them. It will develop gift-exchange institutions dedicated to their support.
Take the example of pure science, that is to say, science that puzzles over questions whose answers can have no obvious utility. What is the shape of the planetary orbits? What is the sequence of the inert parts of the human genome? The funding for pure science cannot come simply from those who hope for future income. Sir Isaac Newton answered the question about planetary orbits while supported by Trinity College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow there in 1667, a position that entitled him to wages, a room, and the use of the library. He later became the Lucasian Professor, a sinecure that remained intact even when he moved to London and ceased to teach and lecture. In London, the king eventually extended his patronage, making Newton Warden and then Master of the Mint, a