Sharing The Gift

Lewis Hyde’s classic manifesto
gets a timely re-release

by JULIET WATERS

I once went to a reading by Margaret Atwood where someone asked her advice for young writers. She recommended The Gift by Lewis Hyde as the best book she’d ever read about what it is to be a artist in our society. I’ve always kept an eye out for this book, but never had any luck finding it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, a friend mentioned reading a feature about Hyde in The New York Times Magazine.

Though it’s never been out of print since its 1983 release, The Gift—as I can attest—has never been easy to come by. It still isn’t, even though it’s just been re-released in a 25th anniversary edition. I couldn’t find a Canadian bookseller who has it; but because U.S. book prices are still significantly lower than ours, it wasn’t much of an indulgence to splurge on the shipping fee from Amazon.com.

Atwood isn’t alone in recommending this book. There’s a blurb that appears on the front cover, “no one who is invested in any kind of art can read The Gift and remain unchanged,” written by David Foster Wallace, obviously well before his suicide. Jonathan Lethem not only recommends it on the back cover, but quotes it on his Web site as the foundation for his own theories about “open source” writing.

Be forewarned, however, this is not a book on how to use free writing to unlock the artist within, or about any other way to hone one’s creative process. The Gift is essentially economic theory written for artists. It’s dense with anthropology, psychology and history that document the increasing alienation of artists from a market economy. But it resonates with all the good reasons artists risk the struggle with financial poverty.

The book is notorious for being impossible to summarize, but once one starts reading, it’s obvious why it’s remained so influential. Lethem calls it “epiphany, in sculpted prose.” I wouldn’t go that far. Hyde is clearly writing here as a public intellectual, not a poet, and there are some passages that smell a little musty. But there’s also much of this book that feels eerily relevant, especially now as the Internet revolutionizes creative labour, and the market economy is crashing.

At the risk of simplifying his argument, Hyde starts this book with the theory that what we call art has evolved essentially from early forms of civilization that were more grounded in “gift economy.” In earlier cultures, status was defined not by how much someone had, but how much someone gave. Objects in these cultures accumulated value, not by remaining in people’s possession, but by being passed around, and eventually passed outside the tribe as it grew in influence and power.

Enter the market economy and its focus on ownership, personal wealth, usury and, increasingly, exploitation. As capitalist forms of exchange took hold, the results of creative labour became increasingly compromised, and artists’ lives with them.

When Hyde first started the book, he writes, he operated on the assumption that artists needed, and should aim to work solely within, the gift economy. “My position,” he writes, “has changed somewhat. I still believe that the primary commerce of art is a gift exchange…. 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.” Hyde believes that artists need to understand their roots, and need always to ground their work in the gift economy, but they still have to negotiate the realities of the market economy.

What this book conveys, however, more than almost any other book I’ve read, is the sense of abundance artists develop from grounding their sense of self in something other than money or “stuff.” At this time, perhaps more than any other, this book will also speak to readers who don’t necessarily consider themselves artists.

THE GIFT: CREATIVITY AND THE ARTIST
IN THE MODERN WORLD BY LEWIS
HYDE, VINTAGE, PB, 434 PP, $21