by Lewis Hyde
If we pause now to contrast the esemplastic cognition of imagination to the analytic cognition of logos-thought, we will be in a position to see one of the connections between the creative spirit and the bond that a gift establishes. Two brief folk tales will help set up the contrast. There is a group of tales which portray for us the particular kind of thought that destroys a gift. In a tale from Lithuania, for example, riches that the fairies have given to mortals turn to paper as soon as they are measured or counted. The motif is the reverse, really, of one we have already seen: worthless goods—coals, ashes, wood shavings—turning into gold when they are received as gifts. If the increase of gifts is in the erotic bond, then the increase is lost when exchange is treated as a commodity transaction (when, in this case, it is drawn into the part of the mind that reckons value and quantity).
A second example will expand the point. A brief entry in a mid-nineteenth-century collection of English fairy tales tells of a Devonshire man to whom the fairies had given an inexhaustible barrel of ale. Year after year the liquor ran freely. Then one day the man’s maid, curious to know the cause of this extraordinary power, removed the cork from the bung hole and looked into the cask; it was full of cobwebs. When the spigot next was turned, the ale ceased to flow.
The moral is this: the gift is lost in self-consciousness. To count, measure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing is to step outside the circle, to cease being “all of a piece” with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflecting upon another part. We participate in the esemplastic power of a gift by way of a particular kind of unconsciousness, then: unanalytic, undialectical consciousness.
To offer a last illustration that is closer to the concerns of artists, most of us have had the experience of becoming suddenly tongue-tied before an audience or before someone whom we perceive to be judging us. In order to sing in front of other people, for example, the singer cannot step back and listen to his own voice—he can’t, that is, fall into that otherwise useful frame of mind that perceives the singer and the audience as separate things, the one listening to the other. Instead he must enter that illusion (an illusion that becomes a reality if the singer is gifted) that he and the audience are one and the same thing. A friend of mine had a strange experience when she took her first piano lessons. During an early session, to the surprise of both her teacher and herself, she suddenly began to play. “I didn’t know how to play the piano,” she says, “but I could play it.” The teacher was so excited she left the room to find someone else to witness the miracle. As the two of them came back into the practice room, however, my friend’s ability left her as suddenly as it had appeared. Again, the moral seems to be that the gift is lost in self-consciousness. (Thus O’Connor: “In art the self becomes self-forgetful.”) As soon as the musician senses that someone else is watching her, she begins to watch herself. Rather than using her gift, she is reflecting upon it. Cobwebs.
As is the case with any other circulation of gifts, the commerce of art draws each of its participants into a wider self. The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world. In the realized gifts of the gifted we may taste that zoë-life which shall not perish even though each of us, and each generation, shall perish.
Such is the context within which to cite more fully Joseph Conrad’s description of the artist. The artist, Conrad tells us, must descend within himself to find the terms of his appeal:
His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities—like the vulnerable body within a steel armor… The artist appeals… to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity … which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.
In the chapter on the increase of gifts, I pointed out that at a Tsimshian mortuary potlatch a material thing—a broken copper—symbolizes a natural fact: the group survives despite the death of the individual. Should we call this fact biological, social, or spiritual? The distinctions break down. Once we realize that the thread of zoë-life runs beyond the physical body, beyond the individual self, it becomes harder to differentiate the various levels of our being. There is a larger self, a species-essence, which is a general possession of the race. And the symbolizations like those coppers, but, of course, I mean to include all works of art, paintings, songs, the tiles round the chimney-piece—these symbolizations which express and carry the “facts” of zoë-life constitute the speech by which that larger self articulates and renews its spirit. By Whitman’s aesthetic, as we shall see, the artist’s work is a word “en masse,” an expression of Conrad’s “subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity.” The work of art is a copula: a bond, a band, a link by which the several are knit into one. Men and women who dedicate their lives to the realization of their gifts tend the office of that communion by which we are joined to one another, to our times, to our generation, and to the race. Just as the artist’s imagination “has a gift” that brings the work to life, so in the realized gifts of the gifted the spirit of the group “has a gift.” These creations are not “merely” symbolic, they do not “stand for” the larger self; they are its necessary embodiment, a language without which it would have no life at all.
In first introducing these two Greek terms, I said that it is bios-life—individual and embodied—that dies, while zoë-life is the unbroken thread, the spirit that survives the destruction of its vessels. But here we must add that zoë-life may be lost as well when there is wholesale destruction of its vehicles. The spirit of a community or collective can be wiped out, tradition can be destroyed. We tend to think of genocide as the physical destruction of a race or group, but the term may be aptly expanded to include the obliteration of the genius of a group, the killing of its creative spirit through the destruction, debasement, or silencing of its art (I am thinking, for example, of Milan Kundera’s analysis of the “organized forgetting” which has been imposed upon the nations of Eastern Europe). Those parts of our being that extend beyond the individual ego cannot survive unless they can be constantly articulated. And there are individuals—all of us, I would say, but men and women of spiritual and artistic temperament in particular—who cannot survive, either, unless the symbols of zoë-life circulate among us as a commonwealth.
To offer a single example that strikes both the collective and individual levels of this issue, in her autobiography the writer and actress Maya Angelou recalls her graduation from an all-black junior high school. The assembled students and teachers had fallen silent, momentarily shamed by a casually racist speech given by a white administrator, when one of Angelou’s classmates began to sing a song they all knew as “the Negro national anthem,” its words written by a black man, its music by a black woman. “Oh, Black known and unknown poets,” Angelou writes, “how often have your auctioned pains sustained us …? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (including preachers, musicians and blues singers).” The elders who passed the Sacred Pipe of the Sioux to Black Elk warned him that “if the people have no center they will perish.” Just as a circulation of ceremonial gifts among tribal peoples preserves the vitality of th
e tribe, so the art of any people, if it is a true emanation of their spirit, will stand surety for the lives of the citizenry.
In the last chapter I spoke of ancient usury as the conversion of unreckoned gift-increase into reckoned market interest. We are now in a position to connect this idea to two others. First, if we define use value as the value we sense in things as we use them and make them a part of ourselves, and if exchange value is the value we assign to things as we compare them or alienate them from ourselves, then there is something akin to ancient usury in the conversion of use values to exchange values. Second, there is a psychological parallel as well: something related to the spirit of usury lies in the removal of energy from the esemplastic powers and its reinvestment in the analytic or reflective powers.
I do not mean to pretend that these three things are one and the same; I am working with two groups of associated ideas and trying to describe a particular relationship between them. We have, on the one hand, imagination, synthetic thought, gift exchange, use value, and gift-increase, all of which are linked by a common element of eros, or relationship, bonding, “shaping into one.” And we have, on the other hand, analytic or dialectical thought, self-reflection, logic, market exchange, exchange value, and interest on loans, all of which share a touch of logos, of differentiating into parts.
Neither of these poles, the joining or the splitting, is more important or more powerful than its opposite. Each has its sphere and time of ascendancy, and it is not impossible to strike a balance between the two. But that harmony is easily lost. There is such a thing as modern usury; there are times when the inordinate extension of exchange value destroys all use value. The hegemony of the market can undermine the possibility of gift exchange, the esemplastic powers can be destroyed by an overvaluation of analytic cognition, song can be silenced by self-consciousness, and the plenitude of the imagination can be lost to the scarcity of logic. And if we understand all of these to be modern avatars of the spirit of usury we shall be in a position to understand—when we come to it—Ezra Pound’s preoccupation with that spirit. Pound’s initial complaint against usury is best connected to his coeval complaint against the interjection into art of overly analytic or abstract thought. If we say, as Marx suggested, that “logic is the money of the mind,” then we might add as a corollary that the imagination is its gift. And there will be times when an otherwise useful application of logos wounds the imagination, times when the money of the mind destroys the gift of the mind (or, to transfer the argument to society, times when the spirit of the market destroys that gift which cultures have in their works of art).
A full description of the consequences of the commercialization of art lies beyond the scope of this chapter. And yet that commercialization is the constant background to the ideas being developed here, some of which will be thrown into greater relief if we pause to illuminate what lies behind them. Two news items addressing themselves to art and the marketplace will provide a kind of counterpoint. The first (reproduced verbatim from the New York Times) tells us a great deal about how drama is currently produced for commercial television:
“The irony,” Robert Thompson, producer of “The Paper Chase” on CBS-TV, says, is that “other producers write me letters saying that my program is the best show on the air.”
If praise could be translated into audience-popularity rating points, “The Paper Chase” would not be stuck in the swampy lowlands of the Nielsen list with an average 19 percent of the audience.
In an attempt to give “The Paper Chase” a transfusion of rating points, CBS will move the program away from the blockbuster opposition of “Happy Days” and “Lav-erne and Shirley” for five weeks. It will be shown Friday night at 10 P.M. against the weaker competition of a “Dean Martin Roast” on NBC and a movie about teenage suicide on ABC …
“If ever there existed a series too good to succeed on television …” was the melancholy lament of most of the country’s television critics when the program went on the air last September. The critics were not only referring to the style and literacy of the show, which deals with a group of first-year law students and their tyrannical professor …, but they were also wincing at the fact that CBS had scheduled “The Paper Chase” at 8 P.M. Tuesdays, opposite the two major ABC hits.
“They certainly put us in Death Alley,” says Sy Salkowitz, president of 20th Century-Fox Television, producers of “The Paper Chase …”
The current economics of television make “The Paper Chase’s” survival—even this long—more than unusual. “If ‘M*A*S*H’ were to start its career this year and get its original low ratings,” Mr. Salkowitz … adds, “it would be canceled at mid-season. The people running television have hardened because the economics have changed. At one time everybody lived or died on the cost-per-thousand viewers. If a show’s audience dwindled, the cost-per-thousand went up. Now cost-per-thousand doesn’t matter.
“With a great deal of trepidation several years ago, the networks raised the cost-per-thousand by raising their per minute advertising prices; and they discovered that the advertisers didn’t make too much fuss. At about the same time, television became a seller’s market, the most desirable advertising medium for certain products—for cars, beer, mass-produced foods, and soap.”
Now, advertisers pay $45,000 for a 30-second commercial on an average show and $90,000 for the same spot on a very successful show. “So a single Nielsen rating point on a single program over the course of a year has become worth $2.8 million,” according to Mr. Salkowitz. “The stakes are so much bigger that it’s like a World Series ball-game. In an ordinary game, you might replace your pitcher once. In a World Series game, you’ll replace your pitcher three or four times.”
In fact, CBS has already tried several other pitchers against the ABC comedies—with harrowing results. “The Fitzpatricks,” “Shields and Yarnell,” “Challenge of the Sexes,” “Young Dan’l Boone” and “Sam” have all ended as bleached bones. “Sam,” a half-hour series about a police dog, had a considerably higher rating than “The Paper Chase.”
A second news item strikes some of the same chords in terms of an individual artist:
With his business affairs in disarray, his health failing and his hands trembling so badly that he can no longer affix a reliable signature to a piece of paper, Salvador Dali is trying to put some order into the chaos that his life has become …
The artist’s 11th-hour attempt to carve out an autonomous and vaguely organized financial situation threatens, however, to disrupt a global network of makeshift contracts and shadowy companies that have converted Salvador Dali into a highly lucrative, multimillion-dollar industry …
Dali has made his own contributions to this anarchic state of affairs. According to a large number of highly reliable informants in several nations, Dali for years signed blank sheets of paper and, in happier times, joked merrily about what easy, profitable work it was. On May 3, 1973, a Paris huissier de justice, a kind of notary, signed an official document affirming that Dali had signed 4,000 sheets, weighing 346 kilograms (about 760 pounds), in the Hotel Meurice.
In 1974, French customs police halted a small truck on its way into Andorra loaded with 40,000 blank pieces of paper signed by Dali …
The implications for the value of existing Dali lithographs of this uncounted stock of empty pieces of paper signed by the Surrealist draftsman are enormous, highlighted by the recent surfacing of purportedly false Dali lithographs in California, Canada and Italy. One former associate of the painter recounted that “on a good day” Dali was capable of signing 1,800 sheets in an hour, aided by three attendants who briskly moved the papers as the master dashed off his signature …
A prominent figure in the French art world who has acquired [a reproduction of a painting] … described it as a color photograph, bearing a Dali signature and sprinkled with gold flake to give it the appearance of value. It sells in Paris for 750 francs, or about $153.
I do not want to overreach the bounds of my a
rgument here. The destruction of the spirit of the gift is nothing new or particular to capitalism. All cultures and all artists have felt the tension between gift exchange and the market, between the self-forgetfulness of art and the self-aggrandizement of the merchant, and how that tension is to be resolved has been a subject of debate since before Aristotle.
And yet some aspects of the problem are modern. Eros and logos have a distinctly new relationship in a mass society. The remarkable analysis of commodities with which Marx opens Das Kapital appears in the nineteenth century, not any earlier. And the exploitation of the arts which we find in the twentieth century is without precedent. The particular manner in which radio, television, the movies, and the recording industry have commercialized song and drama is wholly new, for example, and their “high finance” produces an atmosphere that all the sister arts must breathe. “The Paper Chase” may be the best show that ever came to television, but it belongs to a class of creations which will not live unless they are constantly fed large sums of money. The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The true commerce of art is a gift exchange, and where that commerce can proceed on its own terms we shall be heirs to the fruits of gift exchange: in this case, to a creative spirit whose fertility is not exhausted in use, to the sense of plenitude which is the mark of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse of works that can serve as agents of transformation, and to a sense of an inhabitable world—an awareness, that is, of our solidarity with whatever we take to be the source of our gifts, be it the community or the race, nature, or the gods. But none of these fruits will come to us where we have converted our arts to pure commercial enterprises. The Nielsen ratings will not lead us toward a civilization in which the realized gifts of the gifted stand surety for the life of the citizenry. Sprinkles of gold flake will not free the genius of our race.