What
Makes a Good Gift in a Gift Economy[i]?
Thinking about Selfhood and Responsibility in Love in the Chthulucene / Cthulucene
Natalee
Caple
In my last book of poetry, The Semiconducting Dictionary (Our
Strindberg), I wrote a poem in which I imagined being an August Strindberg
imagining being the artist J.W. Turner, writing his will. The poem was loosely based
on Turner's actual will but it was an exploration of what one person sees in
another and, more specifically, what one artist, knowing themselves in all of
their failings, sees in another artist who they admire. Although the point of
view in that poem is nested (Caple as Strindberg as Turner), my favourite lines
of that poem are in first person: "I did not paint the sea I painted /
What the sea painted in me.".
I wondered if it was that feeling of
the chaos inside made visible that I felt looking at Turner's paintings that
might have drawn the notoriously ill-tempered, perpetually embattled Strindberg
to the seemingly generous (but secretive) Turner. In that book I performed a
kind of feminist occupation of the playwright (who I imagined as a woman living
as a man and his famous misogyny as part of the disguise or else self-loathing)
that became
loving but was always attuned to using a character, one that was, in many ways,
performing a life and the experiences of a historical person, but who was
clearly layers of me thinking about that life and the gendered political themes
of the age.
I was both Strindberg and his cruel director. It was me who pinned Strindberg
to Chekhov, Marx, Darwin, and a train. It was me who never gave him a heroic
moment, a cure for his ailments, or even a bathroom break. I may have come to
love a Strindberg, but my love benefitted neither the character nor a lifeform once
named August Strindberg.
When I wrote my last novel, In Calamity's Wake, I did something
similar (but perhaps feeling closer identification) with Calamity Jane and
numerous historical contemporaries. In that book I explored voice and I tried
to restore voice to many, but I also explored the damage that
celebrity and cultural use of a figure do to any chance of locating or fixing a
stable understanding of personhood or selfhood behind a name. Of course, I
wanted to acknowledge that a name can have expansive social meanings the name-haver
has no control over, can become symbolic in ways the embodied does not choose. As
in Our Strindberg, the
character of Calamity Jane is shown to be a vehicle for the fantasies and
concerns of many. I also wanted to restore a sense,
however ephemeral, of a living breathing woman obscured within the twisty
puzzle of mythmaking -- a puzzle that did not provide the literal woman food,
shelter, money, or protection. I wanted to see her life valued, beside
countless unnamed others like her (the working poor), and understood as
precious simply for having been.
With my new book of poetry, Love in the Chthulucene / Cthulucene[ii],
I ruminate publically on
the way I hide myself in every character, in every poem. What I show is never
the real world (the sea) or people as they are, but it
is a world made in me by sharing place and time with others (what the sea
painted in me). I wondered about my ethics in animating long dead figures who
have no chance to protest my politics (though I still love those characters). I
decided to deliberately and consciously explore the productive nature of lively
literary friendships and/or influences and to offer my explorations as gifts
that could be directly accepted or refused. I also decided to speak more
directly and more often as myself. At first, I began this with wholly positive intentions. That book would have been my
love letter to CanLit. I held the concept of community in inestimable esteem
without considering that "communities" also do terrible things.
Many of the poems in the book are still
loving and fun and meant to affirm the receiver in the way that gifts can say, Iin
all of what happens in life I want you to know that I see you, I believe in you.
I am invested in believing that fun poems matter and teasing poems matters.
Happiness is a profound emotion worthy of exploration. However,
because things in my life and various communities complicated
themselves, and that is what happens (the writing of every book is a part of one's life), the resulting content of
the book was affected by the conditions under which it was produced in ways
that I think are more visible because there is no historical draping, no hiding
in costume to say what has happened. These conditions included both personal
joys and tragedies as well as global news in which I heard echoes from the
lives of other women across time, specifically in relationship to the #MeToo
movement, but also to people living, loving, and dying together in complex
relationships. The result was a book of poems I wrote as gifts that externalize
the effects of other people and their work on me and my work as well as
processing my experiences (especially) as a woman prior to and during the
writing of the book.
Several thinkers deeply influenced key
parts of my thinking around the ethics of this project: Donna Haraway's concept
of "tentacular thinking" about finding "kin" in the world,
in animals, and the environment, as well as with each other, to live and die
together profoundly (she says "potently") in an age that is not all
about humanity.[iii]
Haraway follows after Hortense Spillers, who talked about "kinship"
and survival for Black women as early as 1985. Sarah Ahmed's thinking about
feminist living, and Margaret Christakos's term "influency,"
Anthropologists, philosophers, and literary theorists have
considered the gift and gifting at length (Marcel Mauss, for example). For me, thinking about gift processes and how
they might differ from citation illustrated the many ways that citation and
gifting are both part of complex social relationships that rely on fuller
contexts. Citation and gifting are not identical processes with identical
obligations. Neither can ever be neutral processes. Both are entangled in
histories. Both also reflect privilege and have social outcomes. Reading and
writing are themselves privileges as well as social outcomes, with social
implications, and consequences. Citation carries with it responsibilities to
tracing origins in ways that are both necessary for respectful discourse and dangerously
patrilineal (as well as white) in design, given
the ways that origins have historically been traced in Western Eurocentric
culture. In academia, we cite as if we need not ask, and sometimes poor use can
be made of another's voice. Worse, a failure to cite, particularly ideas that
originate outside of recognized genres of publishing, amounts to erasure[iv].
But if citation carries certain perils and limits, so too does gifting. The
good gift in a gift economy relies on complex listening and consent, ongoing
relationship, and a willingness to accept that
what was a good gift in concept may not be a good gift in fact.
Much more important to the good gift than the intentions of
the giver, is what actually does happen, or could happen as a result of the
gift, as well as the context and mode of gift giving. For example, a private
gift is a very different thing from a public dedication with permission. To ask
permission of a much more famous person, or a
stranger for a dedication, might ask for or pressure endorsement for my own
book (whereas citation carries no obligation of acknowledgment). To ask
permission for public dedication of a very close friend for a poem that is
about #MeToo or grief or cancer or orgasm may have other emotional pressures
attached. The receiver may be made vulnerable by such a gift. And there are
good reasons why accurate citation or elision are better practices for some
works in terms of authorial freedoms. For example, if one chooses to write
about current events using the names of public figures, or to write back to
writers one disagrees with, then the freedom to be critical in print or to
participate in public discourse without asking permission to disagree is
important as well. Agreement has little value where disagreement is not
allowed. Or, perhaps one wishes to speak frankly of one's own experiences and
not violate the rights of others by naming them. One may choose elision over
citation at times for practical reasons, for example if one does not want to be
sued over a poem.
In the case of most of the poems in Love in the Chthulucene / Cthulucene I gifted poems to people as
they were written, and then, in advance of publication, I asked for permission
for public dedication. In some cases, across the process, I wrote poems that
people said they did not want and those poems were deleted from my hard drive –
they will never exist in any form because that is not a good gift. A giver must
consider the impact and implications of their gift and people must be able to
refuse for any reason or none. This is particularly true when thinking about
privilege in a world where historically some "gifts" have had
devastating consequences.
An unanticipated part of the process was that I had to
consider that I
did not think as well in new forms about my ethics and I had to adapt. When I
first began drawing or making prints of people, such as the ones that appear in
the book, I did not always ask for permission or think about the ethics of reproducing
a face because I thought it was only for myself, a way to cope with deep depression
and loneliness by conjuring beloveds on paper when I did not feel capable of
bringing myself to their persons. Not being a visual artist, I did not give the
thought to drawing that I would give to writing about a living person. Later, when I saw a connection
between the poems and pictures I asked permission for dedication, showing each
person the context in which their likeness would appear in the project. Now I
ask permission before drawing anyone and understand better the responsibility
of the visual artist to consider what constitutes acceptable use of their own
vision (as a literal sense as well as a metaphor).
In a very few cases, (for example,
Leonard Cohen and Taliesin) I knew from the beginning that I would be unable to
obtain permission for my work without a time machine and it should be
considered that those poems exist without permission (for now). I'm not
I tried with Love in
the Chthulucene / Cthulucene to think critically about how we make each
other, how to be together ethically, as writers and as people and on the planet.
This will be an ongoing practice. There were many influences I was unable to
adequately capture. I didn't come up with a plan for the world's future. I used
reading and writing to learn about selfhood, to learn how to speak as myself
and to recognize my privilege, and to explore new forms and ideas and push back
and participate, and all of those are lively processes that change. I am not a
model reader or even a particularly good person (I know myself in such
excruciating detail). But I did and do experience thinking on and with others' work
as a gift for which I am grateful in my marrow. In the light of that gift, I go
on. I go forward thinking about myself as one of some, and considering my enmeshed
obligations as a friend, a person, a writer, a professor to make and keep space
for others past present and future.
Natalee Caple is the author of nine books of poetry
and fiction. Her latest book of poetry, Love
in the Chthulucene/Cthulhucene (from which these poems come) will be out with
Wolsak and Wynn in Spring 2019, and her chapbook Love/Wildness appeared earlier this month with above/ground press.
Natalee is an associate professor at Brock University.
[i] Gifts and Gift economies have been
widely studied and theorized in anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism
and elsewhere (by Marcel Mauss and many others).
This essay is a personal essay about my own recent experience and thinking on
that experience and does not claim to have discovered anything for the first
time.
[ii] Haraway explicitly distances her
concept of the Chthulucene from the literary monster Cthulu. It seems very
likely she would not approve of my own letter reversal that lets the monster
back in. I say this to note that it is me who let the monster in and could not
leave off thinking about an age of monsters and/or monsters as expressions of
human and/or authorial guilt, even as I knew that is not what Haraway wanted or
meant when she coined the term Chthulucene.
[iii] I feel ambivalent about my privilege
when attempting to think outside of humanity, or even outside of oneself, in
that, though I do believe it is necessary thinking for our planetary survival,
I also think that it is not a privilege that all people are in an equal
position to consider.
[iv] It's worth noting that I have performed
such an erasure as I mention here by skipping to my personal essay instead of
setting up my use of "The Gift" or "gift economies" within
the scaffolding of broad citation.
Ahmed,
Sarah. Living a
Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 2017.
Haraway,
Donna. Staying
With the Trouble:
Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 2016..
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and
Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Eastford,
CT: Martino Fine Books, 2011. (reprint of 1954
American edition)
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