Lewis Hyde describes modern culture much the way Oscar Wilde described a cynic: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Hyde's 1983 book "The Gift," subtitled "Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World," argues that inspiration comes to its creator the same way a gift does. Because of this, both the artist and the resulting work itself become uneasy in a market economy. This gift is most comfortable, instead, when it is kept moving -- offered or traded -- instead of being hoarded or commodified.
Over the years, "The Gift" has developed a cult following among writers and artists who rarely lend their names to anything as potentially sentimental as a book on "creativity" -- David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Geoff Dyer among them. To Jonathan Lethem, it's "a life-changer"; video artist Bill Viola calls it "the best book I have read on what it means to to be an artist in today's economic world."
But when "The Gift" was released in Britain for the first time a year ago, it also drew some scorching reviews. "I have to say," argued Tibor Fischer in London's Sunday Telegraph, "I'm a little suspicious of someone who draws his proofs from fairy tales and the behaviour of tribes in the South Pacific, as Hyde does, since they can be used to argue just about anything."
Now there's a 25th anniversary reprint out, with a new afterword. We spoke to Hyde -- a poet and Thoreau and Ginsberg scholar who lives in Cambridge, Mass., and teaches at Harvard and Kenyon College -- about his thesis, his critics and how his critique of the market economy speaks to us in an age of capitalism triumphant.
I can't think of a succinct way to describe "The Gift." Can you?
The main assumption of the book is that certain spheres of life, which we care about, are not well organized by the marketplace. That includes artistic practice, which is what the book is mostly about, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing and teaching.
This book is about the alternative economy of artistic practice. For most artists, the actual working life of art does not fit well into a market economy, and this book explains why and builds out on the alternative, which is to imagine the commerce of art to be well described by gift exchange.
What made you choose folk tales and fables as the bases for your argument, as opposed to, say, the lives of artists?
