Moving Targets by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2005-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

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MASTERPIECE THEATRE

TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD: MISCHIEF, MYTH AND ART

THE GIFT: IMAGINATION AND THE EROTIC LIFE OF PROPERTY

BY LEWIS HYDE

TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD: MISCHIEF, MYTH AND ART is Lewis Hyde’s second masterpiece of — well, of what? Of wondering, of pertinent storytelling, pondering. Of making connections that seem both absolutely true and absolutely obvious once Hyde has made them but which we’ve somehow never noticed before. He’s one of those quirky, eccentric Wise Children the United States sometimes throws up — a sort of Thoreau-cum-anthropologist-cum-seer, an asker of naive questions that turn out to be the reverse of naive, fascinated by why we behave the way we do, and why our right hand is often so blind to what our left hand is up to, and why it matters, especially to that elusive entity we’ve named the soul. Robert Bly calls Hyde a mythologist, which sort of fits, but perhaps he could also be called an illuminationist. In short, he casts light.

It’s hard to discuss Trickster Makes This World apart from Hyde’s first such syncretic masterpiece, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. The classification on The Gift’s back cover reads “Literary Criticism/Sociology,” but I expect many distraught bookstore workers have attempted to jam it also into “Anthropology,” “Economics,” “Theology,” or “Philosophy.” The Gift was first published in 1979 and has been in print ever since. It passes from hand to hand, primarily the hands of those in any way connected with the arts but also the hands of all who are interested in the sometimes arbitrary values placed on the material goods of this world. The primary question it poses is simple: Why is a poet, in our society, unlikely ever to be rich? Or, in another form: What is it about a series of romance novels designed entirely through market research that leads us to believe none of them will ever be a work of art? Or else: What is Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” worth in dollar terms? In the course of explaining why the answer is both “nothing” and “it’s priceless,” Hyde stitches together not only folk tale and impressive erudition but biographical anecdote, personal observation, and anything else he finds useful, and on this flying patchwork he covers an immense amount of essential human ground.

By the pressures of the market economy we live in, he says, we’ve been fooled into believing that there is only one way in which things are exchanged: through money transactions, or buying and selling. Yet on some level we know there’s another economy at work in human societies: the gift economy, which has quite different rules and consequences. It’s the relation between the two economies that The Gift explores. In the course of reading it, we discover how “Indian givers” got their undeserved name, why usury developed the way it did, why you don’t normally charge for donating a kidney to your brother, why women were traditionally “given” in marriage and sons were “given” by mothers in war, and why the Welsh passed free meals over the coffins of their dead.

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