The Gift (11 page)

The excitement of commodities is the excitement of possibility, of floating away from the particular to taste the range of available life. There are times when we
want
to be aliens and strangers, to feel how the shape of our lives is not the only shape, to drift before a catalog of possible lives, staring at the glass arcades of shoes that are sensible and shoes for taking a chance, buses leaving town and the gray steam railway depot where men and women hurry by with their bags.

It is not simply luxury the teenagers of Peking and Prague want. All youth wants, once, to be alienated from the bonds that nurture, to be the prodigal son. Sometimes we go to the market to taste estrangement, if only to fantasize what our next attachment might be. This experience is so available in the West, of course, that we are well aware of its shortcomings. The freedom of the free world tends toward the perfect freedom of strangers. When Vietnamese refugees settled in Southern California they found its culture toxic to something they had always taken for granted, their family life. It’s a free country, you can do what you want: get married, get divorced, settle down, leave town, ski, farm, talk on the radio, buy the radio; the problem is to find someone to do it with. In this old lovers’ quarrel between liberty and community, Westerners are those who defend freedom and long for attachment. The tone of country-and-western music must be the American complement to blue-jeans mania in the East. In the typical country song, a man is driving his Studebaker away from a bad marriage, toward the lights of town; or else he’s working in the car factory in Detroit, all alone and pining for his home in the mountains. The truck drivers who figure so largely in these songs are a perfect image of commodity incarnate: free as a bird and lonesome. Given the choice, we choose the road. Those particularly American movie heroes, the cowboy and the private eye, act out for us the drama of
survival in a land where man has no attachments. The cowboy and the detective survive despite lives of complete rootlessness, and they do it by fighting the lawlessness that is the necessary companion to the perfect freedom of strangers.

The conflict between freedom and the bonds that gifts establish is not absolute, of course. To begin with, gifts do not bring us attachment unless they move us. Manners or social pressure may oblige us to those for whom we feel no true affection, but neither obligation nor civility leads to lasting unions. It is when someone’s gifts stir us that we are brought close, and what moves us, beyond the gift itself, is the promise (or the fact) of transformation, friendship, and love.

The issue of bondage and freedom has been well addressed in the literature on organ donors. Early writers on the psychology of organ donation confessed considerable trepidation because they saw that the exchange was inherently unequal, a case of a gift so valuable it could not possibly be reciprocated. “The gift not yet repaid debases the man who accepts it,” Marcel Mauss had written. Might not problems of indebtedness create an inexorable tension? What if the recipient avoided the donor, resenting his subordinate position? What if the donor took advantage of the debt and attempted to exert his will over the recipient? One man who pondered these risks went so far as to suggest a sort of incest taboo prohibiting live organ transplants between close relatives.

Problems between donors and recipients have in fact occurred, but they are rare. Gifts bespeak relationship. As long as the emotional tie is recognized as the point of the gift, both the donor and the recipient will be careful to structure the exchange so that it does not jeopardize their mutual affection. The University of Minnesota study found that kidney donors typically seek to define their gift so as to minimize the recipient’s sense of debt. A young man who gave a kidney to his
mother insisted on referring to it as a return gift for her having borne him in the first place. A man who donated to his brother said, “I don’t make him feel he should pay me back because he doesn’t owe me anything … I don’t want him to feel grateful … He doesn’t owe me a thing.” The point is simply that donors who care about the relationship seek to assure that their gift is
not
perceived in terms of power and debt. They may in fact expect gratitude and be hurt if it is not forthcoming, but nonetheless, those donors who prize their closeness to the recipient are careful to make it clear that the gift is not conditional.

Recipients are likewise aware of their relationship to the donor as it exists over and above this particular gift, and their gratitude is not a response to the gift so much as to the affection it carries. When the affection is missing, so is the gratitude. In one rather striking case in the Minnesota study, a woman who was to receive a kidney from her daughter found the girl saying that she would donate
if
her mother would buy her an expensive coat! Here is the mother’s description of the daughter a year after the transplant:

Asked if the gift had made her uncomfortable, the mother replied, “I’m not uncomfortable. I’ve put up with so much … then she turns around and kicks us in the teeth.” The daughter even saw fit to complain to her mother about postoperative pain. “I said to her, ’I didn’t tell you about my labor pains.′ And that shut her up.”

The story is hardly a model of familial affection, but the reader will note that despite its magnitude, the gift did not render the mother subservient to the daughter. And for a good reason: it wasn’t a gift. As soon as the daughter shifted the category of the exchange and tried to barter, all of her authority drained away. When either the donor or the recipient begins to treat a gift in terms of obligation, it ceases to be a gift, and though many in such a situation will be hurt by the revealed lack of affection, the emotional bond, along with its power, evaporates immediately.

We cannot really become bound to those who give us false gifts. And true gifts constrain us only if we do not pass them along—only, I mean, if we fail to respond with an act or an expression of gratitude. We might here remember the stories of
genius
and of the shoemaker’s elves, for they make it clear that there is a kind of servitude associated with gifts of transformation. We are indentured to our gifts until they come to term. But this is a willing bondage, and the bond is loosened with the maturation of the gift. Our servitude is ended by the act of gratitude which accomplishes the transformation. The elves and the shoemaker are quit of each other then, just as
genius
becomes free spirit. Bondage to our gifts (and to the teachers who wake them) diminishes as we become empowered to pass them along. It is true that when a gift enhances our life, or even saves it, gratitude will bind us to the donor. Until it is expressed, that is. Gratitude, acted upon or simply spoken, releases the gift and lightens the obligations of affection between lovers, family, and comrades. Is it really proper, then, to speak of the ties of affection as a bondage? These are attachments to be desired. When gift exchange achieves a convivial communion of spirits, there is no call for liberty; it is only when our attachments become moribund that we long to break them. Interesting as the subject may be, it is not for a theory of gift exchange to explain why we so often
enter and maintain relationships that have in them no life to offer.

Because gifts do have the power to join people together, there are many gifts that must be refused. On the simplest level, we are wary of gifts in any situation that calls for reckoning and discrimination. If I am to negotiate a contract, I do well to pause when the man who wants my signature offers a three-course meal with wine. For, if I am a man of goodwill, I may subsequently feel my generosity rise as the time comes to put my name on the line. A gift, no matter how well intentioned, deflects objective judgment. Persons whose position in society demands that they maintain their objectivity—I am thinking now of policemen, politicians, judges—are expected, even required, to refrain from gift exchange. A judge should embody the law’s impartiality. We want to feel he can separate himself from the particulars of his class, race, and religion; we certainly want to feel he has no tie to either the prosecution or the defense. Similarly, we would be suspicious of a congressman who accepted secret contributions from the liquor industry, or a doctor who took gifts from pharmaceutical companies. We want the doctor to be concerned about our health, and not feel a convivial communion with some proprietary drug.
*

Despite my earlier caveat about fees for service, there are times when it would be inappropriate for a psychotherapeutic relationship to be a gift relationship. All healers risk contamination
from their patients. In psychotherapy the doctor and the patient may both feel the need for a kind of distance between them. There are patients who can’t begin to work until they sense that their illness won’t destroy the person to whom it is revealed. They are not seeking an erotic attachment. In the Catholic Church the risk of contamination from confession is addressed by the architecture of the confessional itself: a grille or cloth stands between penitent and priest. Though it has other functions, the anonymity of the confessional shields the priest so that he may speak of sin without being drawn into it. The fee in psychotherapy may be a modern equivalent to the screen in the confessional, making it clear that the therapist is distinct from the client (as we now say). The fee states clearly that the therapist is not a friend or lover or parent. Freudian analysts maintain further that the fee is an aid in the resolution of the transference. The patient’s unconscious emotions are expected to be transferred to the analyst in the beginning, but in the end they are to be withdrawn, and it will help if the relationship is a market relationship in which therapist and client are, as Marx says of commodities, “reciprocally independent enterprises.”
*

Gift exchange must also be refused when there is a real threat in the connections that it offers. In ancient tales the hero who must pass through hell is warned that charity is dangerous in the underworld; if he wishes to return to the land of the living, he should lend a hand to no one, nor accept the food offered by the dead.

An Irish fairy tale offers a similar warning. In return for an act of charity the Queen of the Fairies invites a midwife to festivities at Fairy Knoll. The man who comes to lead the midwife to the fairies says that he himself is not a fairy, but a human who lies under their spell. He gives her instructions so that she may avoid his fate and return to her home. “I will come for you when your time is out,” he concludes, “and then the fairies will gather about you, and each one of them will offer you something to take with you as a gift. You may take anything they will give you, except gold or silver.”

Some days later the man returns to guide the midwife home. As he foretold, the fairies gather around with gifts. She takes everything but the gold and silver. Then, as she rides off with her guide, he tells her to throw one of the fairy gifts away. As soon as it strikes the ground it explodes like a bomb, burning the bushes around it. The midwife throws each gift away, and each one burns as it hits. “Now,” says the guide, “had you kept those things until you went home, they would have set the house on fire and burnt all that was in it, including yourself.”

The tale says there are powers in the fairy world which cannot be contained in the human. In speaking of increase in the last chapter I mentioned tales in which a spirit gift grows in worth when the mortal arrives at his doorstep. Here the increase seems too huge. The tale smells like a warning about psychosis.
*
Had the midwife tried to bring the gifts into the house, she would have been like a young person who gets involved with psychedelic drugs before the ego is strong enough to contain the experience. There are powers so great that if we were to try to live with them they would consume our dwelling place. The fairy gifts must be abandoned.

Gifts from evil people must also be refused lest we be bound to evil. In folk tales the hero is well advised to refuse the food and drink offered him by a witch. Folk wisdom similarly advises silence before evil. Conversation is a commerce, and when we give speech we become a part of what we speak with. A bewitched princess in one of the Grimms’ tales says to the man who wants to save her, “Tonight twelve black men, draped with chains, will be coming; they’ll ask you what you’re doing here. Keep silent, however, and don’t answer them.” She says they will beat him and torture him and finally kill him, but if he does not utter “a single solitary word,” she will be freed and will revive him with the Water of Life. Were he to speak with the black men, he would enter their bewitchment, just as the midwife would have fallen under the spell of the fairies if she had accepted their gold and silver.

It is because gift exchange
is
an erotic form that so many gifts must be refused. The issue commonly arises in public life. Should a university accept an endowment from a notorious dictator? Should a writer or a scientist accept a grant from a government waging an immoral war? We often refuse relationship, either from the simple desire to remain unentangled, or because we sense that the proffered connection is tainted, dangerous, or frankly evil. And when we refuse relationship, we must refuse gift exchange as well.