To welcome the other, to be as hospitable as possible, still involves remaining master of one’s house. When I love the good of the other, I am doing what I love—and I will not brook interference. It is never a question of simply stepping outside the circle, but of keeping the circle as loose as possible so as to let the impossible come.
Giving means giving the other some slack, with more and more hospitality. Uninterrupted narcissism, on the other hand, draws the circle of the self ever tighter, turning the gift to poison.
──John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida Explicating how Ulysses has laid bare the calculative dimension of gift exchange, this paper does not mean to claim that the concept of the gift should be annulled on the ground that in some cases gift-giving simply serves the giver’s purpose of accruing mercantile profits. Nor will I radically conclude that Joyce has dismissed reciprocity by comparing gift-giving to spiritual usury as he finds how gifts necessarily put the recipient in debt. Even though gift-giving is inevitably invested with the donor’s desire, it is not tantamount to usurious calculation of advantage. Reducing the differences between generosity and calculation, I suggest that we question the polarization between pure charity and economic exchange without thereby conflating them as completely homogeneous. The reason why this paper has managed to
“contaminate” pure gifts is primarily because, as Mary Douglas suggests, if we
“persist in thinking that gifts ought to be free and pure, we will always fail to recognize our own grand cycles of exchanges, which categories get to be included and which get to be excluded from our hospitality” (xv). In this light, the way to retain generosity, paradoxically, is to destabilize gift-giving first. In fact, even Derrida, endeavoring to show how the gift is logically impossible, does not mean to demolish the gift economy. He suggests that we should
[k]now still what giving wants to say, know how to give, know what you want and want to say when you give, know what you intend to give, know how the gift annuls itself, commit yourself even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift, give economy its chance. (30)
To put it simply, if we do not want to lump gift exchange and economic exploitation together, what we have to do is not embrace the concept of reciprocity unconditionally or disavow the calculative aspect involved in giving.
Rather, as Caputo succinctly states, we need to know the trap that giving sets lest we walk into it straightaway (171). It is in this sense that Joyce’s portrayal still makes Bloom’s acts of giving appear more beneficent than usurious. That Bloom’s gifts are more or less loaded with his interest and desire should not
invalidate the assertion that he is willing to offer gifts to the needy and his generosity is not hypocritical. On the contrary, given that in a number of examples Bloom commits himself to giving even though he knows well the gift will not necessarily reach its destination, he “opens a universe of sympathy to challenge a chaos of self-interest” (qtd. in Hamalian 28).
Actually, even in his spiritual communion with Stephen, Bloom is reminded that what is reflected in the “mirrors of the reciprocal flesh” is
“theirhisnothis fellowfaces” (U 17.1183-84). As the term “theirhisnothis”
indicates, reciprocation is after all incomplete if not totally failed. Osteen contends that “the reciprocal gaze affirms that other’s face is at once ‘theirhis’
(both) and ‘nothis’ (neither)” (1995: 406). James McMichael further sees in this compound the irreducible differences between self and other:
“No,” it is not an image of my own face I am seeing in the other: and though it is more his than mine, it is not so much “his” as “this,” this one face in front of me, a face that neither atones with my concepts nor opposes them but rather disrupts what would otherwise be the sovereignty of my thoughts. [. . .] He is always other than the person my thoughts would have caught up with. I am left with only my interest in him, an interest that directs me to do the catching up he keeps reminding me I cannot.
(135; italics mine)
Instead of annulling the gift altogether, the awareness of the impossibility of penetrating the donee’s desire is the key factor that opens up the possibility of the active gift of love: frustrated by the futile attempt to hook the donee in the economy of his desire, the giver may eventually recognize the Lacanian active gift of love as what enables him to transcend the impasse of this endless pursuit.
The active gift of love “directed at the other” (Lacan 1991: 276), as Kaja Silverman glosses it, “implies both idealizing beyond the parameters of the
‘self,’ and doing so with a full understanding of one’s own creative participation with respect to the end result. It means to confer ideality, not to find it” (78).17
17 As Silverman states, the active gift of love, designated in Seminar I, is never fully theorized by Lacan.
But as some of Lacan’s later Seminars “specify some of the parameters within which such a theorization should take place” (73), in Silverman’s extended interpretation she links the active gift of love to Lacan’s concept of sublimation and distinguishes it from passive idealization, which involves misrecognizing the ideality one has conferred upon the other as the other’s essence: the active gift of love somehow “prevents the congealing of ideality into an intrinsic quality of the beloved. [. . .] He
That is, instead of tricking us into searching for someone who deserves our gift, the active gift of love prompts us to sublimate our beloved and content ourselves with the fact that our feelings and desire can never be completely reciprocated.
Accepting that the other is actually “deprived of that which he gives” (Lacan 1982: 85), the giver will be less likely to obsess about taking back from the recipient some sort of symbolic counter-gift to recoup his losses. Moreover, the giver may acknowledge that if he is rewarded with reciprocation of affections, it is all thanks to his active gift of love rather than the recipient’s counter-gift. Given that Bloom confers ideality upon Stephen as his symbolic son but does not thus obsessively pigeonhole him or deny the limitation of their reciprocal relation, Bloom can be lauded, at least in terms of his gift exchange with Stephen, for hospitably “giving the other some slack” (Caputo 161).
Concerning the concept of generosity, what Joyce teaches us through his depiction of Bloom is how we, while facing up to the fact that it is impossible for generosity to be uncontaminated, can still strive to be alert to all kinds of pitfalls inherent in giving.
[Lacan] thereby encourages us to think of the luster which the subject confers upon an other through the active gift of love as something which does not seamlessly adhere to the other, but—unlike that which illuminates the ideal-ego or ego-ideal—retains a borrowed and provisional quality” (77).