Lewis Hyde's "Labors of Gratitude" in "Hansel & Gretel" & film (part 1, new series, Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet)
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New multi-week series:
- Lewis Hyde on "The Labor of Gratitude" (in the context of gift economies) in "Hansel & Gretel" & film, and
- Next Week: Characters in Hamlet Transformed by Labors of Gratitude and Regret
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I'd like to take the next few weeks to introduce the idea of characters in Hamlet who are changed by gifts and regret, contrasted with (last week's topic) entitlement and revenge. When we receive life-changing gifts (even if they are mentorship, or opportunities, not material gifts) or when we experience deep regret, we feel we are in another's debt. These experiences of gift/gratitude and regret contrast with entitlement and revenge, in part, because with the latter, we feel others are in our debt.
But in order to talk about characters in Hamlet in this way, I want to take some time to explain the ideas of Lewis Hyde that I will be drawing upon. These are from his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, a book that has been through multiple printings since it first appeared in the 1979, and which has seen some new editions with other subtitles (The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, and The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World).
Hyde begins his book by contrasting gift economies and commerce economies. In gift economies, gifts bind people together in happy ties of friendship and debts of gratitude, and the gifts are often kept moving instead of hoarded. With commerce economies, economic transactions are often anonymous, and people more often hoard gifts and other possessions.
In commerce economies, people have bank accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts, to save their wealth. But in gift economies, gifts that are shared generously with the community or tribe, or with other tribes, are (metaphorically) invested in the community, which responds in gratitude. If you are generous with your gifts in a gift economy, you need not worry if you hit hard times, because as with George Bailey in the Frank Capra film, It's a Wonderful Life," you can always depend on others to help. The community is where you have invested your gifts.
Hyde says that art belongs to the category of gift in some ways better than it does to the world of commerce and personal possessions. And after developing his theory of art as gift in the first half of he book, he takes the second half to apply his ideas to the poetry of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound.
All of this may sound dry and scholarly, but in fact, the book was hard to put down, very illuminating, a pleasure to read.
Lewis Hyde on "The Labor of Gratitude" and Workings of Gifts in the Soul of the Artist:
From my 1979 edition, I'll offer a few key passages.
Hyde speaks of art as a gift, both to the artist in terms of their abilities, and also from the artist to their society.
About artists and their gifts:
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude. The connection between art and gift is the subject of a later part of this book, but it deserves mention here, for it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift. A lively culture will have transformative gifts as a general feature–it will have groups like AA which address specific problems, it will have methods of passing knowledge from old to young, it will have spiritual teachings available at all levels of maturation and for the birth of the spiritual self. And it will have artists whose creations are gifts for the transformation of the race. (47)
He also talks about how truly transformative or potentially life-changing gifts can be accepted or rejected, but when accepted, we feel grateful, and this includes feeling indebted to the giver for the gift: If a child is inspired to play violin or piano or guitar by a role model or teacher, and if grateful for the gift, they may feel indebted and aspire to become like the gift or the giver; in this case, they may aspire to become a good musician. Here's how Hyde explains this dynamic (also from page 47, and all bold passages, emphasis mine):
In each example I have offered of a transformative gift, if the teaching begins to "take," the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude, but we won't feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness. (47)
Lewis Hyde goes on to speak of certain folktales that illustrate the labor of gratitude. These are helpful; I prefer the story of Hansel and Gretel, which we'll come to later, but here's Hyde characterizing these kinds of tales about transformative gifts, and then giving the example of "The Shoemaker and the Elves," with page numbers marked for the excerpts. He says the following of these tales:
Illustration of "The Elves" (The Elves & the Shoemaker) from Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane, illustrated by Walter Crane, first published by Macmillan and Company in 1886. Public Domain. From Wikipedia.
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In each of them a spirit comes to help a mortal and stays, sometimes in actual bondage, until released by the mortal's expression of gratitude.
In a tale with which we are all familiar, "The Shoemaker and the Elves," a shoemaker is down on his luck and has only enough leather to sew a single pair of shoes. He cuts the leather out and goes to bed, planning to sew the shoes in the morning. During the night, two naked elves come and make the shoes. The shoemaker is speechless with astonishment when he finds them. Not a stitch is out of place! The shoes are such a masterpiece that the first customer to appear in the morning pays handsomely for them, and the cobbler has enough money to buy leather for two pairs of shoes. That night he cuts the leather out and goes to bed. Again in the morning the shoes are made, and again they sell for such a price as to afford the leather for four pairs of shoes. In this way the shoemaker soon prospers.
One evening ("not long before Christmas," the tale says), the cobbler suggests to his wife that they stay up and see who has been helping them. They leave a candle burning, hide behind some coats, and, at midnight, see the elves come in and set to work. In the morning the wife says to the shoemaker, "The little men have made us rich and we should show our gratitude for this. They're running about with nothing on and might freeze! I'm going to make them each a shirt, coat, jacket, trousers and a pair of stockings. Why don't you make them each a pair of little shoes." The cobbler willingly agrees, and one night when the clothes are finished he lays them out on the bench in place of the leather. He and his wife hide behind the coats to watch.
The elves are surprised and pleased to find the clothes. They put them on and sing–
"We're sleek, were fine, we're out the door,
We shan't be cobblers any more!"
And they dance around the room and away. They never return, but everything continues to go well with the shoemaker and he prospers at whatever he takes in hand.
The tale is a parable of a gifted person. It describes the time between the initial stirrings of a gift (when it is potentially ours) and the releasing of a gift (when it is actually ours). In this case the gift is the man's talent, carried by the elves. The shoemaker is poor, to begin with. His own worth is not available to him for some reason that is never explained. But then, while he is asleep, it
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begins to come. The process is always a bit mysterious. You work at a task, you work and work and still it won't come right. Then, when you're not even thinking about it, while spading the garden or stepping into the bus, the whole thing pops into your head, the missing grace is bestowed. That's the elves, the "magic touch" by which our tasks take on life. The process does not end there, however, for the elves have need of us, as well. It is a curious detail in the story that these manikins so skilled with the needle and thread are unable to make themselves some clothes, but that seems to be the case. Their outfits arid, above all, their freedom depend on the shoemaker's recognition and gratitude.*
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* That the helpers are in a sort of bondage is clearer in other tales with the same motif. Several examples are cited in the notes at the end of the book.
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My general point here is that a transformative gift cannot be fully received when it is first offered because the person does not yet have the power either to accept the gift or to pass it along. But I should qualify this. Some part of the self is able to apprehend the gift. We can feel the proffered future. I am reminded of the odd phenomenon of the "instant cure" in psychotherapy: sometimes in a very early session a patient will experience a total lifting of his or her neurosis. For a brief period, say a week, he will experience a longed–for freedom. Then normalcy will descend, and then the years of labor to acquire that freedom as a true possession. The gift is not ours yet but the fullness of the gift is felt, and we respond with gratitude and with desire. The shoemaker in this tale is completely asleep when the first gift arrives, so we can't say he's really acquired his talent. But he does feel something being roused in him and he gets to work.
Once a gift has stirred within us it is up to us to develop it. There is a reciprocal labor in the maturation of a talent. The gift will continue to discharge its energy so long as we attend to it in return. The geometrical progression of exchange between shoemaker and elves reaches a sort of critical mass when the man finally decides to stay awake and watch the shop.
[PF note: The Shoemaker's wife plays a key role in the decisions to stay up and watch, and to make clothes and shoes for the elves to show their gratitude. Sometimes artists are too close to their own work and inspiration to be objective about these things, so they need an outside voice, an objective opinion, to help certain things come to fuller consciousness. Hyde continues:]
Of course it's amusing that it takes the shoemaker so long to get around to seeing who's been helping out. We husband our gifts when we cannot do without them, or when they are not fully formed. But once his poverty has been relieved, the cobbler wonders where his riches have come from, and he and his wife stay up to see the elves; at this point we might say he wakes up to his gift.
What can we make of the initial nudity of the elves, the clothes
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they are given, and the result of that gift? To put clothes on a thing is a kind of acknowledgment, like giving it a name. By this act we begin to differentiate what was undifferentiated. Sometimes we are unable to escape from a bad mood, for example, until we have correctly articulated the feeling. Articulation allows a slight gap to open between the feeling and the self, and that gap permits the freedom of both. In this story the clothes realize the gift (that is, they make it real, make it a thing). Note that the shoemaker makes his first pair of shoes (within the tale) in order to dress the elves. It's the last act in his labor of gratitude. Now he's a changed man. Now he has worth that can be communicated. The shoes he makes are a return gift which simultaneously accomplishes his own transformation and frees the elves. This is why I say that the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or its donor. Now the man is a real shoemaker, as were the elves on the first night. (A gift isn't fully realized until it is given away, then. Those who will not acknowledge gratitude or who refuse to labor in its service neither free their gifts nor really come to possess them.)….
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…A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. But we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as an equal. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift. Giving a return gift is the final act in the labor of gratitude, and it is also. therefore, the true acceptance of the original gift. The shoemaker finally gives away some shoes. The twelfth step in AA gives away what was received; the man who wanted to teach so as to "pass it on to the younger men" gives away what he received. In each case there is an interim period during which the person labors to become sufficiently empowered to hold and to give the gift.
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As a parable of a gifted person, "The Shoemaker and the Elves" is also a parable for artists. Most artists early on find themselves in the position of the shoemaker on the first night–a talent has appeared, but it's naked, immature. Ahead lie the years of reciprocal labor which precede the release of an accomplished gift. To take a literary example, George Bernard Shaw underwent a typical period of retreat and maturation before be emerged as a writer. The young Shaw started a career in business and felt the threat not of failure but of success. "I made good in spite of myself, and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting go." He was twenty. "In March, 1876, I broke loose," he says. He left family, friends, business and Ireland. He spent about eight years in absentia, writing constantly (five novels, published only toward the end of his life–and then with a note by Shaw asking the buyer not to read them). Erik Erikson has commented:
Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self–decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature.
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the
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library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
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The above excerpts illustrate some of Hyde's main ideas about how transformative gifts, if suited to the recipient and accepted, inspire gratitude, which can result in labor by which the recipient becomes similar to the gift and/or the giver. His book made me think, Of course I want to be an artist, a poet! I want this gift-dynamic to unfold in me!
But Hyde's example is mostly about individual artists or craftspersons (like the shoemaker) awakening to their gifts, laboring in their service, and blossoming in their art.
I started to wonder: Can these gift-dynamics and "The Labor of Gratitude" also be used to explain some dynamics of character development as characters interact and offer each other gifts, temptations, opportunities, example, mentorship, affection?
For this, I turned to another familiar folktake, "Hansel and Gretel," also by the Brothers Grimm, and I applied Hyde's ideas in my own interpretation of the tale:
Gift Dynamics in "Hansel & Gretel"
Hansel & Gretel, illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1909, public domain. From Wikipedia.
The story of Hansel and Gretel is an interesting one in part because of how it defies certain stereotypical gender-associations: Classical symbols and tropes often associate the capacity for reason or rationality with the predictable movement of the sun, while emotion is associated with the moon and with women's menstrual cycles. So men are stereotypically rational and associated with the sun, and women considered emotional and nurturing, associated with the moon. There are exceptions (with some poetic and figurative language claiming artists incubate their art in some part of themselves as if in a womb), but in ages past, this tended to be the rule. (It was also part of the justification for denying women the vote.)
But that is not the case with the parents of Hansel and Gretel: Their father is a woodcutter, strong physically, with a kind heart, but weak when confronted with his wife's plans. Their mother (or step-mother in later versions) is cold-hearted but full of schemes and plans for her own survival.
In a time of famine, the mother decides that the only way for her and her husband to survive on limited food supplies is to abandon the children in the forest. But by some wonderful twist of fate, the boy, Hansel, seems to have been given both his father's kind heart and his mother's cleverness for planning: He overhears the parents talking about the plan to abandon them, and he prepares by filling his pockets with white pebbles.
Once they are abandoned in the forest, his sister cries, but he does a remarkable thing: Instead of abandoning her like her mother would, he comforts her and takes her hand, telling her everything will be alright, and he leads her home (to the dysfunctional family), following the path of pebbles he dropped, which shine in the moonlight.
This is a good thing, that Hansel shows himself to be both resourceful and kind. Wouldn't it be great if all children internalized only the best of each parent, and avoided all of their least helpful qualities?
But Hansel's best efforts are not enough: He saves his sister, only to bring them back to the dysfunctional family, perhaps like his weak-willed father who was drawn to this clever woman. He is unable to leave the orbit of the family, so dealing with the cruel feminine image in the mother will be left as a task for Gretel to perform later when she is ready.
The parents lead the children into the woods a second time, but this time, they had locked the children in their room the night before so they could not collect stones that shine in the moonlight. The parents give each of the children a loaf of bread, but Hansel, again attempting to be resourceful, leaves crumbs to mark the trail, sacrificing his food in hope to, again, buy their safety. But birds eat the crumbs.
Again Gretel cries, and again, Hansel takes her hand and comforts her. Sometimes our best efforts are not enough, and we need to join those best efforts to those of others, perhaps others who are not yet ready to do their part. Things take time. The internalizing of gifts, and the labor of gratitude before they bloom, takes time. But Gretel has been watching, a witness to her parents and to her brother's efforts and kindness. She has been receiving these gifts, and something is happening, unseen, within her, though it has not yet come to fruition.
They wander in the forest until they come upon a house made of food.
This is the part where a harsh story about difficult choices made in a time of famine becomes more surrealistic, more like a caricature.
If the listener or reader has not paid attention to the cruelty of the mother so far, the house of food and the witch make it more plain: The cruel mother who would abandon her children in the forest is like a witch who lives in a house of food, but she'd rather eat the children than share her house of food. That's what the witch caricature says, like a sort of spiritual commentary on the story so far, in case we haven't caught the drift of things.
So far in the story, although the children and father have been subjected to the schemes of the cruel and selfish mother, Hansel has played a remarkably active role: He has a sense of ownership of his own agency in the story, repeatedly being resourceful and creating opportunities where some may have found none.
So the first thing the witch has to do is imprison him in a cage or closet with bars on the door. This echoes what happened the night before they got lost: She locked the children in their rooms so they could not attempt any tricks. Yet now, even locked safely away as the witch tries to fatten him up for eating, Hansel still proves resourceful: The witch reaches in every few days to see if he is fattening up nicely with the food she feeds him for this purpose, and instead of letting her feel his arm or leg, he extends to her a broomstick or bone. Because the witch is self-centered, she is spiritually and literally short-sighted, somewhat blind, and can't tell the difference. He tricks her and buys more time.
And meanwhile, Gretel is still watching, absorbing, taking it all in. It's terrible and traumatic, but it's the only life she has, and in fact, she is being offered gifts she may use later in what she is still witnessing in her brother Hansel's way of dealing with difficult circumstances.
Eventually, the witch becomes impatient and decides it's time to eat the boy. She wants Gretel to light the oven for her.
Now Gretel has a choice. She could ingratiate herself to the witch: She could harden her heart and think: I have not eaten much for a long time. If she cooks my brother, and if I convince her to share some of the meat with me, at least I could eat. And in so doing, she could become like the witch, like this caricature of her mother, clever and resourceful but selfish and morally blind.
But Gretel makes a different choice. It's a choice that the story needs her to make, and not Hansel, because he is a boy, and she is a girl. She has to decide what sort of woman she will grow up to be, and if she will take the example of her mother at face value, or if she will do something more healthy and complex, like her brother did, integrating the best features of both their father and their mother, and rejecting the worst features.
Now is her time to make this choice, and to return the gifts she has received from her brother Hansel, when he comforted her and took her hand and led her home by the light of the moon shining on the pebbles in the dark of night. Now is the time for her to make her best effort, even if it's not good enough, as when her brother left a trail of breadcrumbs to mark a path home again, but the birds ate them, leaving them lost. Even then, she was the recipient of gifts as a witness to her brother's best efforts against difficult odds, and his failure to save them. At least he tried. Now she must try.
So the witch asks her to light the oven. She knows she might be able to do this. Perhaps she has seen he witch do this already, or perhaps she has seen her own mother (or step-mother) do this at home. But like her brother who offered only a broom-handle when asked to let the witch feel his arm or leg, Gretel has learned that it's OK, even good, to learn to deceive people whose intentions toward us are evil. So she tells a lie and claims she doesn't know how to light the oven and asks the witch to please show her how.
The witch lights the oven. And then Gretel closes the oven door, an even more brave choice, a choice she must make quickly and without a second thought, or she and her brother may both be killed. She makes the right choice, and in so doing, she chooses the kind of woman she would rather be, the kind who would save her brother and return the favor of his gifts, rather than becoming like her mother, or the witch.
To this point in the story, we have seen a number of transformative gifts at work: Hansel has internalized the gift of his father's kind heart, and his mother's scheming resourcefulness, but has integrated both of them well within himself in a way his father and mother could not in their marriage and family life in a time of famine.
Gretel has also received these gifts, though she may be the younger sibling, and it may have taken her more time to internalize the gifts and bring them to their full potential. She has had the advantage of witnessing her brother's success in bringing them home, his later failure to do so with the breadcrumbs, and how his trick with the cage and broomstick bought him some time, but didn't liberate him from the cage. There were many things her brother could do, but these were not enough to save them. There was more to be done, and only Gretel, when ready, could accomplish the rest of what was needed.
This internalizing and blossoming of gifts in Hansel and Gretel had to take place on their own time, at their own pace, when each was ready. There was no standardized test that said they both had to be at a certain level of competence at the same time. Their paths were unique and required patience, as well as responding to different challenges that evolved with the story. So not only did their own maturing with their gifts take place on different time-lines, but those different time-lines brought different challenges each had to face.
Sort of like life.
After defeating the witch, Hansel & Gretel get riches and jewels from the witch's house to mark their successful transformations and blossomings into their gifts, a sort of boon that Hyde says often accompanies the successful completion of labors of gratitude. In that sense, the story is about a spiritual and psychological quest, not about predatory capitalists who kill old ladies and take their treasure.
Appropriately, the next part of the story echoes their tale so far: They come to a body of water they don't remember from their journey in, but they know they must cross it in order to get back home. There seems to be no way to cross. Jung, Freud, and many others might say that the water crossing marks a kind of death and rebirth. They are no longer the children they used to be. They have become new and better selves in light of the gifts they have internalized, and also in light of their cooperation, to save one another, one at a time.
A water bird appears, a goose or swan of some kind. At first, Hansel, being a bit like his intellectually-challenged father, suggests that they should both hop on the bird and ride it across the water.
But Gretel perceives something Hansel does not: If they both ride across at the same time, their weight might harm the bird, and then they could both drown as well as the bird. She has a little more forethought about the process, as well as compassion for the bird. More evidence of her transformation and maturing. So she has a better idea.
Why not take turns riding on the back of the swan across the water? That way, they'd be more likely to avoid hurting the bird, and each might have a greater chance to make it across.
One at a time, following the rhythm of their individual labors of gratitude, their unique transformations and blossoming into their gifts, they'll cross the water.
"Good idea, sister," says an agreeable Hansel. He tried to save her life twice with pebbles and breadcrumbs. Now she has tried to save him twice, first by tricking the witch, and later by protecting their lives and the life of the water-fowl. She has returned his gifts. The labor of gratitude is almost complete.
They cross the water and go home. Their father is overjoyed to see them, having had misgivings about the plan to abandon them from the start.
And by coincidence, it just so happens that, in their absence, their mother has died. Which of course makes a kind of sense, because the caricature of the mother in the person of the witch has also died back in the oven at her house in the woods.
We might also note that the (step-)mother and witch both feel entitled: They feel the children owe them something, and not that they owe the children, or have any moral obligations toward them. The mother feels she is entitled to abandon the children in the woods to save herself, and to convince her husband of the logic of her plan. This, shockingly, goes against the grain of what we might consider natural or normal impulses, for parents, and especially for mothers, to nurture and care for their children.
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So it seems to me that the same sort of gift-economy dynamics Lewis Hyde finds in the tale of "The Shoemaker and the Elves" as a tale about an artist
can also be found in the inter-personal development of characters in a larger tale like "Hansel & Gretel."
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Last week, I wrote about how entitlement and revenge make a person feel that others are in debt to them. We see in "Hansel & Gretel" how the children had debts of gratitude to one another, and perhaps to their parents as well, for the gifts of the father's kind-heartedness and the mother's cleverness or resourceful planning. This indebtedness in the case of the children is a happy debt of mutual gratitude.
In the 2013 film, "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters," many key details from the Grimm Brothers version of the story are changed: The mother was a good witch who left the children in the forest to save them from a bad witch, for starters.
Many Stories Hinge on Gift Dynamics & Labors of Gratitude
Many other stories and films illustrate characters transformed by labors of gratitude.
Avatar (2009)
[Avatar, promotional/cover image, 2009]
In the film, Avatar, the main character, Jake, receives gifts from various sources:
- He has the gift of his twin brother's DNA in the Avatar body;
- the sad/tragic gift (or curse) of the brother's death that allows Jake to walk again (a gift of fate, with good consequences as well as sad ones);
- The gift of meeting the science team and making new friends among scientists;
- The gift of meeting Neytiri, the Na'vi woman (who saves his life--a gift and a life-debt)
- The gift of being welcomed (in the end) into the Na'vi tribe.
Hyde notes that some gifts are better rejected, because they might bind us with debts of gratitude to people whose intentions are not good, such as a gift from a drug dealer who might want us to become addicted so that we become a regular customer.
Along these lines, Jake is offered the chance to get the use of his human legs back as reward on earth if he plays the evil game of genocide, but he refuses that gift in favor of others.
Hyde says the aim of the labor of gratitude is to become more like the gift or giver. How does Jake change, and who does he become more like?
- Jake becomes more like his brother, the scientist, and more like his scientific friends, who like and respect the Na'vi.
- He becomes more like the Na'vi, who are more in harmony with the ecosystems of their planet, instead of like the humans who are predatory capitalists.
Jake gives return gifts by trying to save Grace, his mentor, and also by saving Neytiri, his the Na'vi love-interest with whom he has mated, as well as saving the Na'vi homeworld. He strives to become like his most valued gifts or givers.
The story illustrates how the labor of gratitude and its transformations can create tension between the old self (the human, military grunt, following orders) and his evolving, new self.
Stranger than Fiction
[Stranger than Fiction, 2006 promotional art]
Labors of Gratitude are also illustrated in the 2006 film, Stranger than Fiction: Harold Crick is a tax auditor who hears a voice narrating his life, a kind of gift. But it's narrating a story that will soon end in his premature death. Not so great. He's not ready to die. So he changes his life, but also seeks out the identity of the voice narrating his demise. It turns out that the narrator is author Karen Eiffel, who, in all her books, kills off her main characters. Always. With the help of a local university literature professor, Harold tracks down Karen Eiffel and meets her. The meeting changes both of them, as Karen offers Harold the opportunity to read a draft of her story, his life, and meeting Harold offers Karen the opportunity to rethink her habit of killing her characters. Harold likes the ending Karen has written for his life so much, that he decides he's OK with dying. But in the end, there are a few surprises.
Sports Films Illustrate Labors of Gratitude Galore
Many sports films involve dynamics of athletes who need some gift or example they are missing (and receive it from a mentor or coach). Sometimes the coach or mentor also needs something the athlete/student has to offer to become more whole.
Many labors of gratitude in sports narratives are about hard work and practice, working out, and becoming a better athlete. Many are about getting over ego issues, learning to be a team player,
learning to be a better human being. Both kinds of labors (physical, and ego) are difficult (and sometimes the second kind, transforming the ego, is harder than achieving physical discipline).
The mutual give-and-take between athlete and coach or parent/mentor is similar to the give-and-take dynamics between Harold and Karen in Stranger than Fiction, and also between brother and sister in "Hansel and Gretel."
Examples are endless. These are only the tip of the iceberg.
Labors of Gratitude in Biblical & Catechetical Tradition
In terms of my larger project regarding Hamlet's Bible and biblical allusions and plot echoes, Christian catechism has tended to say faith is a gift. This need not be traditional faith in a grocery list of beliefs, but rather a basic stance regarding our existence. Perhaps that basic stance, that faith, is best understood in the context of a labor of gratitude. Christian liturgy says of its God, "In you we live and move and have our being." We do not make ourselves, at least not in our earliest origins, but receive our lives as if gifts from an unseen giver. Inasmuch as we make our lives a gift to others, we are then in harmony with the gift of our own existence.
Labors of Regret
resemble
Labors of Gratitude
It has also occurred to me that the regret that Hamlet and Laertes feel and finally confess at the end of the play (Hamlet 5.2) is a kind of indebtedness: When we harm another, even if only accidentally, we feel responsible and want to make it right, and until we do so, we may feel in debt to the person we harmed. So for me, the debts of gratitude and regret are similar because in both cases, we are in debt to another, while it seems the opposite is true of entitlement and revenge, where we feel others are in our debt, as I explained in last week's post.
So in upcoming weeks, I hope to explore some gifts and transformations of gratitude, at least in Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and Polonius, starting (next week) with Hamlet.
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NOTE ON THIS SERIES OF POSTS:
Hamlet quotes are taken from the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare at mit.edu.
This is the latest installment in a multi-part series examining how characters interact in Hamlet, offering opportunities, gifts, planting seeds for future inspiration, or for changes of heart & mind. It follows ideas from Lewis Hyde (“The Labor of Gratitude,” a chapter in his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property).
- The more I examine characters in this way, the more I realize how the major characters in Hamlet are dynamic characters who change, becoming better or worse in one way or another. This approach goes against the grain of a great deal of scholarship that seems to reify (or thing-ify) too many characters (as foil, as Oedipal, as Machiavellian, etc.) and view them as more static, rather than as dynamic, fluid, interacting. For an index of previous posts in this series, see below.
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Index of other posts in this series:
Part 1: Gifts & labors of gratitude in Hansel & Gretel - (prep. for Hamlet) - 8/12/19
Part 2: Hamlet's Descent & Arc Toward Mercy: Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet - 8/19/19
Part 3: Polonius' Labor of Regret - 8/26/19
Part 4: Into Dad's Circle of Fear & Flattery: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret, 1.2 - 9/3/19
Part 5: Fear & Hypocrisy; Laertes’ Labors of Gratitude & Regret, Hamlet 1.3 - 9/9/19
Part 6: Fearsome, Flattered, Glimpsing Transformation: Laertes’ Labors of Gratitude & Regret, 4.5 - 9/17/19
Part 7: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret (Toxic Masculinity Distrats While Ophelia Drowns, Hamlet 4.7 - 9/24/19
Part 8: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret (Laertes & Hamlet Fight at Ophelia’s Grave, Hamlet 5.1 - 10/01/19
Part 9: Gertrude as Recipient & Source of Gifts: Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet - 10/8/19
Part 10: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret: Laertes Turns, but Only When Facing Death, 5.2 - 10/15/19
Part 11: Does Hamlet & Ophelia’s Love Change Them? (Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet) - 10/21/19
Part 12: Claudius Resists Gift-Dynamics & Grace (Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet) - 10/29/19
Part 13: Does Fortinbras Benefit from Gratitude or Regret (or is he more a cipher for James VI & I)? - 11/05/19
Part 14: Horatio's Gift-Dynamics & Christ-Figures Shifting Ground in Hamlet 1.1 - 11/19/19
Part 15: Hamlet & Horatio's Friendship: Mutual, Reciprocal, Transformative, Free - 11/26/19
Part 16: WHY GIFT-DYNAMICS MATTER FOR HAMLET & THE BIBLE: Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet - 12/19/19
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MY BOOK PROJECT:
My book project: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2017/05/hamlets-bible-my-book-project-im.html
RETROSPECTIVES:
Retrospectives of popular posts through March 0f 2019: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/03/hamlets-bible-2-year-anniversary.html
New multi-week series:
- Lewis Hyde on "The Labor of Gratitude" (in the context of gift economies) in "Hansel & Gretel" & film, and
- Next Week: Characters in Hamlet Transformed by Labors of Gratitude and Regret
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But in order to talk about characters in Hamlet in this way, I want to take some time to explain the ideas of Lewis Hyde that I will be drawing upon. These are from his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, a book that has been through multiple printings since it first appeared in the 1979, and which has seen some new editions with other subtitles (The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, and The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World).
Hyde begins his book by contrasting gift economies and commerce economies. In gift economies, gifts bind people together in happy ties of friendship and debts of gratitude, and the gifts are often kept moving instead of hoarded. With commerce economies, economic transactions are often anonymous, and people more often hoard gifts and other possessions.
In commerce economies, people have bank accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts, to save their wealth. But in gift economies, gifts that are shared generously with the community or tribe, or with other tribes, are (metaphorically) invested in the community, which responds in gratitude. If you are generous with your gifts in a gift economy, you need not worry if you hit hard times, because as with George Bailey in the Frank Capra film, It's a Wonderful Life," you can always depend on others to help. The community is where you have invested your gifts.
Hyde says that art belongs to the category of gift in some ways better than it does to the world of commerce and personal possessions. And after developing his theory of art as gift in the first half of he book, he takes the second half to apply his ideas to the poetry of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound.
All of this may sound dry and scholarly, but in fact, the book was hard to put down, very illuminating, a pleasure to read.
Lewis Hyde on "The Labor of Gratitude" and Workings of Gifts in the Soul of the Artist:
From my 1979 edition, I'll offer a few key passages.
Hyde speaks of art as a gift, both to the artist in terms of their abilities, and also from the artist to their society.
About artists and their gifts:
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude. The connection between art and gift is the subject of a later part of this book, but it deserves mention here, for it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift. A lively culture will have transformative gifts as a general feature–it will have groups like AA which address specific problems, it will have methods of passing knowledge from old to young, it will have spiritual teachings available at all levels of maturation and for the birth of the spiritual self. And it will have artists whose creations are gifts for the transformation of the race. (47)
He also talks about how truly transformative or potentially life-changing gifts can be accepted or rejected, but when accepted, we feel grateful, and this includes feeling indebted to the giver for the gift: If a child is inspired to play violin or piano or guitar by a role model or teacher, and if grateful for the gift, they may feel indebted and aspire to become like the gift or the giver; in this case, they may aspire to become a good musician. Here's how Hyde explains this dynamic (also from page 47, and all bold passages, emphasis mine):
In each example I have offered of a transformative gift, if the teaching begins to "take," the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude, but we won't feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness. (47)
Lewis Hyde goes on to speak of certain folktales that illustrate the labor of gratitude. These are helpful; I prefer the story of Hansel and Gretel, which we'll come to later, but here's Hyde characterizing these kinds of tales about transformative gifts, and then giving the example of "The Shoemaker and the Elves," with page numbers marked for the excerpts. He says the following of these tales:
Illustration of "The Elves" (The Elves & the Shoemaker) from Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane, illustrated by Walter Crane, first published by Macmillan and Company in 1886. Public Domain. From Wikipedia.
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In each of them a spirit comes to help a mortal and stays, sometimes in actual bondage, until released by the mortal's expression of gratitude.
In a tale with which we are all familiar, "The Shoemaker and the Elves," a shoemaker is down on his luck and has only enough leather to sew a single pair of shoes. He cuts the leather out and goes to bed, planning to sew the shoes in the morning. During the night, two naked elves come and make the shoes. The shoemaker is speechless with astonishment when he finds them. Not a stitch is out of place! The shoes are such a masterpiece that the first customer to appear in the morning pays handsomely for them, and the cobbler has enough money to buy leather for two pairs of shoes. That night he cuts the leather out and goes to bed. Again in the morning the shoes are made, and again they sell for such a price as to afford the leather for four pairs of shoes. In this way the shoemaker soon prospers.
One evening ("not long before Christmas," the tale says), the cobbler suggests to his wife that they stay up and see who has been helping them. They leave a candle burning, hide behind some coats, and, at midnight, see the elves come in and set to work. In the morning the wife says to the shoemaker, "The little men have made us rich and we should show our gratitude for this. They're running about with nothing on and might freeze! I'm going to make them each a shirt, coat, jacket, trousers and a pair of stockings. Why don't you make them each a pair of little shoes." The cobbler willingly agrees, and one night when the clothes are finished he lays them out on the bench in place of the leather. He and his wife hide behind the coats to watch.
The elves are surprised and pleased to find the clothes. They put them on and sing–
"We're sleek, were fine, we're out the door,
We shan't be cobblers any more!"
And they dance around the room and away. They never return, but everything continues to go well with the shoemaker and he prospers at whatever he takes in hand.
The tale is a parable of a gifted person. It describes the time between the initial stirrings of a gift (when it is potentially ours) and the releasing of a gift (when it is actually ours). In this case the gift is the man's talent, carried by the elves. The shoemaker is poor, to begin with. His own worth is not available to him for some reason that is never explained. But then, while he is asleep, it
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begins to come. The process is always a bit mysterious. You work at a task, you work and work and still it won't come right. Then, when you're not even thinking about it, while spading the garden or stepping into the bus, the whole thing pops into your head, the missing grace is bestowed. That's the elves, the "magic touch" by which our tasks take on life. The process does not end there, however, for the elves have need of us, as well. It is a curious detail in the story that these manikins so skilled with the needle and thread are unable to make themselves some clothes, but that seems to be the case. Their outfits arid, above all, their freedom depend on the shoemaker's recognition and gratitude.*
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* That the helpers are in a sort of bondage is clearer in other tales with the same motif. Several examples are cited in the notes at the end of the book.
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My general point here is that a transformative gift cannot be fully received when it is first offered because the person does not yet have the power either to accept the gift or to pass it along. But I should qualify this. Some part of the self is able to apprehend the gift. We can feel the proffered future. I am reminded of the odd phenomenon of the "instant cure" in psychotherapy: sometimes in a very early session a patient will experience a total lifting of his or her neurosis. For a brief period, say a week, he will experience a longed–for freedom. Then normalcy will descend, and then the years of labor to acquire that freedom as a true possession. The gift is not ours yet but the fullness of the gift is felt, and we respond with gratitude and with desire. The shoemaker in this tale is completely asleep when the first gift arrives, so we can't say he's really acquired his talent. But he does feel something being roused in him and he gets to work.
Once a gift has stirred within us it is up to us to develop it. There is a reciprocal labor in the maturation of a talent. The gift will continue to discharge its energy so long as we attend to it in return. The geometrical progression of exchange between shoemaker and elves reaches a sort of critical mass when the man finally decides to stay awake and watch the shop.
[PF note: The Shoemaker's wife plays a key role in the decisions to stay up and watch, and to make clothes and shoes for the elves to show their gratitude. Sometimes artists are too close to their own work and inspiration to be objective about these things, so they need an outside voice, an objective opinion, to help certain things come to fuller consciousness. Hyde continues:]
Of course it's amusing that it takes the shoemaker so long to get around to seeing who's been helping out. We husband our gifts when we cannot do without them, or when they are not fully formed. But once his poverty has been relieved, the cobbler wonders where his riches have come from, and he and his wife stay up to see the elves; at this point we might say he wakes up to his gift.
What can we make of the initial nudity of the elves, the clothes
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they are given, and the result of that gift? To put clothes on a thing is a kind of acknowledgment, like giving it a name. By this act we begin to differentiate what was undifferentiated. Sometimes we are unable to escape from a bad mood, for example, until we have correctly articulated the feeling. Articulation allows a slight gap to open between the feeling and the self, and that gap permits the freedom of both. In this story the clothes realize the gift (that is, they make it real, make it a thing). Note that the shoemaker makes his first pair of shoes (within the tale) in order to dress the elves. It's the last act in his labor of gratitude. Now he's a changed man. Now he has worth that can be communicated. The shoes he makes are a return gift which simultaneously accomplishes his own transformation and frees the elves. This is why I say that the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or its donor. Now the man is a real shoemaker, as were the elves on the first night. (A gift isn't fully realized until it is given away, then. Those who will not acknowledge gratitude or who refuse to labor in its service neither free their gifts nor really come to possess them.)….
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…A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. But we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as an equal. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift. Giving a return gift is the final act in the labor of gratitude, and it is also. therefore, the true acceptance of the original gift. The shoemaker finally gives away some shoes. The twelfth step in AA gives away what was received; the man who wanted to teach so as to "pass it on to the younger men" gives away what he received. In each case there is an interim period during which the person labors to become sufficiently empowered to hold and to give the gift.
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As a parable of a gifted person, "The Shoemaker and the Elves" is also a parable for artists. Most artists early on find themselves in the position of the shoemaker on the first night–a talent has appeared, but it's naked, immature. Ahead lie the years of reciprocal labor which precede the release of an accomplished gift. To take a literary example, George Bernard Shaw underwent a typical period of retreat and maturation before be emerged as a writer. The young Shaw started a career in business and felt the threat not of failure but of success. "I made good in spite of myself, and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting go." He was twenty. "In March, 1876, I broke loose," he says. He left family, friends, business and Ireland. He spent about eight years in absentia, writing constantly (five novels, published only toward the end of his life–and then with a note by Shaw asking the buyer not to read them). Erik Erikson has commented:
Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self–decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature.
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the
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library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
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The above excerpts illustrate some of Hyde's main ideas about how transformative gifts, if suited to the recipient and accepted, inspire gratitude, which can result in labor by which the recipient becomes similar to the gift and/or the giver. His book made me think, Of course I want to be an artist, a poet! I want this gift-dynamic to unfold in me!
But Hyde's example is mostly about individual artists or craftspersons (like the shoemaker) awakening to their gifts, laboring in their service, and blossoming in their art.
I started to wonder: Can these gift-dynamics and "The Labor of Gratitude" also be used to explain some dynamics of character development as characters interact and offer each other gifts, temptations, opportunities, example, mentorship, affection?
For this, I turned to another familiar folktake, "Hansel and Gretel," also by the Brothers Grimm, and I applied Hyde's ideas in my own interpretation of the tale:
Gift Dynamics in "Hansel & Gretel"
Hansel & Gretel, illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1909, public domain. From Wikipedia.
The story of Hansel and Gretel is an interesting one in part because of how it defies certain stereotypical gender-associations: Classical symbols and tropes often associate the capacity for reason or rationality with the predictable movement of the sun, while emotion is associated with the moon and with women's menstrual cycles. So men are stereotypically rational and associated with the sun, and women considered emotional and nurturing, associated with the moon. There are exceptions (with some poetic and figurative language claiming artists incubate their art in some part of themselves as if in a womb), but in ages past, this tended to be the rule. (It was also part of the justification for denying women the vote.)
But that is not the case with the parents of Hansel and Gretel: Their father is a woodcutter, strong physically, with a kind heart, but weak when confronted with his wife's plans. Their mother (or step-mother in later versions) is cold-hearted but full of schemes and plans for her own survival.
In a time of famine, the mother decides that the only way for her and her husband to survive on limited food supplies is to abandon the children in the forest. But by some wonderful twist of fate, the boy, Hansel, seems to have been given both his father's kind heart and his mother's cleverness for planning: He overhears the parents talking about the plan to abandon them, and he prepares by filling his pockets with white pebbles.
Once they are abandoned in the forest, his sister cries, but he does a remarkable thing: Instead of abandoning her like her mother would, he comforts her and takes her hand, telling her everything will be alright, and he leads her home (to the dysfunctional family), following the path of pebbles he dropped, which shine in the moonlight.
This is a good thing, that Hansel shows himself to be both resourceful and kind. Wouldn't it be great if all children internalized only the best of each parent, and avoided all of their least helpful qualities?
But Hansel's best efforts are not enough: He saves his sister, only to bring them back to the dysfunctional family, perhaps like his weak-willed father who was drawn to this clever woman. He is unable to leave the orbit of the family, so dealing with the cruel feminine image in the mother will be left as a task for Gretel to perform later when she is ready.
The parents lead the children into the woods a second time, but this time, they had locked the children in their room the night before so they could not collect stones that shine in the moonlight. The parents give each of the children a loaf of bread, but Hansel, again attempting to be resourceful, leaves crumbs to mark the trail, sacrificing his food in hope to, again, buy their safety. But birds eat the crumbs.
Again Gretel cries, and again, Hansel takes her hand and comforts her. Sometimes our best efforts are not enough, and we need to join those best efforts to those of others, perhaps others who are not yet ready to do their part. Things take time. The internalizing of gifts, and the labor of gratitude before they bloom, takes time. But Gretel has been watching, a witness to her parents and to her brother's efforts and kindness. She has been receiving these gifts, and something is happening, unseen, within her, though it has not yet come to fruition.
They wander in the forest until they come upon a house made of food.
This is the part where a harsh story about difficult choices made in a time of famine becomes more surrealistic, more like a caricature.
If the listener or reader has not paid attention to the cruelty of the mother so far, the house of food and the witch make it more plain: The cruel mother who would abandon her children in the forest is like a witch who lives in a house of food, but she'd rather eat the children than share her house of food. That's what the witch caricature says, like a sort of spiritual commentary on the story so far, in case we haven't caught the drift of things.
So far in the story, although the children and father have been subjected to the schemes of the cruel and selfish mother, Hansel has played a remarkably active role: He has a sense of ownership of his own agency in the story, repeatedly being resourceful and creating opportunities where some may have found none.
So the first thing the witch has to do is imprison him in a cage or closet with bars on the door. This echoes what happened the night before they got lost: She locked the children in their rooms so they could not attempt any tricks. Yet now, even locked safely away as the witch tries to fatten him up for eating, Hansel still proves resourceful: The witch reaches in every few days to see if he is fattening up nicely with the food she feeds him for this purpose, and instead of letting her feel his arm or leg, he extends to her a broomstick or bone. Because the witch is self-centered, she is spiritually and literally short-sighted, somewhat blind, and can't tell the difference. He tricks her and buys more time.
And meanwhile, Gretel is still watching, absorbing, taking it all in. It's terrible and traumatic, but it's the only life she has, and in fact, she is being offered gifts she may use later in what she is still witnessing in her brother Hansel's way of dealing with difficult circumstances.
Eventually, the witch becomes impatient and decides it's time to eat the boy. She wants Gretel to light the oven for her.
Now Gretel has a choice. She could ingratiate herself to the witch: She could harden her heart and think: I have not eaten much for a long time. If she cooks my brother, and if I convince her to share some of the meat with me, at least I could eat. And in so doing, she could become like the witch, like this caricature of her mother, clever and resourceful but selfish and morally blind.
But Gretel makes a different choice. It's a choice that the story needs her to make, and not Hansel, because he is a boy, and she is a girl. She has to decide what sort of woman she will grow up to be, and if she will take the example of her mother at face value, or if she will do something more healthy and complex, like her brother did, integrating the best features of both their father and their mother, and rejecting the worst features.
Now is her time to make this choice, and to return the gifts she has received from her brother Hansel, when he comforted her and took her hand and led her home by the light of the moon shining on the pebbles in the dark of night. Now is the time for her to make her best effort, even if it's not good enough, as when her brother left a trail of breadcrumbs to mark a path home again, but the birds ate them, leaving them lost. Even then, she was the recipient of gifts as a witness to her brother's best efforts against difficult odds, and his failure to save them. At least he tried. Now she must try.
So the witch asks her to light the oven. She knows she might be able to do this. Perhaps she has seen he witch do this already, or perhaps she has seen her own mother (or step-mother) do this at home. But like her brother who offered only a broom-handle when asked to let the witch feel his arm or leg, Gretel has learned that it's OK, even good, to learn to deceive people whose intentions toward us are evil. So she tells a lie and claims she doesn't know how to light the oven and asks the witch to please show her how.
The witch lights the oven. And then Gretel closes the oven door, an even more brave choice, a choice she must make quickly and without a second thought, or she and her brother may both be killed. She makes the right choice, and in so doing, she chooses the kind of woman she would rather be, the kind who would save her brother and return the favor of his gifts, rather than becoming like her mother, or the witch.
To this point in the story, we have seen a number of transformative gifts at work: Hansel has internalized the gift of his father's kind heart, and his mother's scheming resourcefulness, but has integrated both of them well within himself in a way his father and mother could not in their marriage and family life in a time of famine.
Gretel has also received these gifts, though she may be the younger sibling, and it may have taken her more time to internalize the gifts and bring them to their full potential. She has had the advantage of witnessing her brother's success in bringing them home, his later failure to do so with the breadcrumbs, and how his trick with the cage and broomstick bought him some time, but didn't liberate him from the cage. There were many things her brother could do, but these were not enough to save them. There was more to be done, and only Gretel, when ready, could accomplish the rest of what was needed.
This internalizing and blossoming of gifts in Hansel and Gretel had to take place on their own time, at their own pace, when each was ready. There was no standardized test that said they both had to be at a certain level of competence at the same time. Their paths were unique and required patience, as well as responding to different challenges that evolved with the story. So not only did their own maturing with their gifts take place on different time-lines, but those different time-lines brought different challenges each had to face.
Sort of like life.
After defeating the witch, Hansel & Gretel get riches and jewels from the witch's house to mark their successful transformations and blossomings into their gifts, a sort of boon that Hyde says often accompanies the successful completion of labors of gratitude. In that sense, the story is about a spiritual and psychological quest, not about predatory capitalists who kill old ladies and take their treasure.
Appropriately, the next part of the story echoes their tale so far: They come to a body of water they don't remember from their journey in, but they know they must cross it in order to get back home. There seems to be no way to cross. Jung, Freud, and many others might say that the water crossing marks a kind of death and rebirth. They are no longer the children they used to be. They have become new and better selves in light of the gifts they have internalized, and also in light of their cooperation, to save one another, one at a time.
A water bird appears, a goose or swan of some kind. At first, Hansel, being a bit like his intellectually-challenged father, suggests that they should both hop on the bird and ride it across the water.
But Gretel perceives something Hansel does not: If they both ride across at the same time, their weight might harm the bird, and then they could both drown as well as the bird. She has a little more forethought about the process, as well as compassion for the bird. More evidence of her transformation and maturing. So she has a better idea.
Why not take turns riding on the back of the swan across the water? That way, they'd be more likely to avoid hurting the bird, and each might have a greater chance to make it across.
One at a time, following the rhythm of their individual labors of gratitude, their unique transformations and blossoming into their gifts, they'll cross the water.
"Good idea, sister," says an agreeable Hansel. He tried to save her life twice with pebbles and breadcrumbs. Now she has tried to save him twice, first by tricking the witch, and later by protecting their lives and the life of the water-fowl. She has returned his gifts. The labor of gratitude is almost complete.
They cross the water and go home. Their father is overjoyed to see them, having had misgivings about the plan to abandon them from the start.
And by coincidence, it just so happens that, in their absence, their mother has died. Which of course makes a kind of sense, because the caricature of the mother in the person of the witch has also died back in the oven at her house in the woods.
We might also note that the (step-)mother and witch both feel entitled: They feel the children owe them something, and not that they owe the children, or have any moral obligations toward them. The mother feels she is entitled to abandon the children in the woods to save herself, and to convince her husband of the logic of her plan. This, shockingly, goes against the grain of what we might consider natural or normal impulses, for parents, and especially for mothers, to nurture and care for their children.
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So it seems to me that the same sort of gift-economy dynamics Lewis Hyde finds in the tale of "The Shoemaker and the Elves" as a tale about an artist
can also be found in the inter-personal development of characters in a larger tale like "Hansel & Gretel."
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Last week, I wrote about how entitlement and revenge make a person feel that others are in debt to them. We see in "Hansel & Gretel" how the children had debts of gratitude to one another, and perhaps to their parents as well, for the gifts of the father's kind-heartedness and the mother's cleverness or resourceful planning. This indebtedness in the case of the children is a happy debt of mutual gratitude.
In the 2013 film, "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters," many key details from the Grimm Brothers version of the story are changed: The mother was a good witch who left the children in the forest to save them from a bad witch, for starters.
Many Stories Hinge on Gift Dynamics & Labors of Gratitude
Many other stories and films illustrate characters transformed by labors of gratitude.
Avatar (2009)
[Avatar, promotional/cover image, 2009]
In the film, Avatar, the main character, Jake, receives gifts from various sources:
- He has the gift of his twin brother's DNA in the Avatar body;
- the sad/tragic gift (or curse) of the brother's death that allows Jake to walk again (a gift of fate, with good consequences as well as sad ones);
- The gift of meeting the science team and making new friends among scientists;
- The gift of meeting Neytiri, the Na'vi woman (who saves his life--a gift and a life-debt)
- The gift of being welcomed (in the end) into the Na'vi tribe.
Hyde notes that some gifts are better rejected, because they might bind us with debts of gratitude to people whose intentions are not good, such as a gift from a drug dealer who might want us to become addicted so that we become a regular customer.
Along these lines, Jake is offered the chance to get the use of his human legs back as reward on earth if he plays the evil game of genocide, but he refuses that gift in favor of others.
Hyde says the aim of the labor of gratitude is to become more like the gift or giver. How does Jake change, and who does he become more like?
- Jake becomes more like his brother, the scientist, and more like his scientific friends, who like and respect the Na'vi.
- He becomes more like the Na'vi, who are more in harmony with the ecosystems of their planet, instead of like the humans who are predatory capitalists.
Jake gives return gifts by trying to save Grace, his mentor, and also by saving Neytiri, his the Na'vi love-interest with whom he has mated, as well as saving the Na'vi homeworld. He strives to become like his most valued gifts or givers.
The story illustrates how the labor of gratitude and its transformations can create tension between the old self (the human, military grunt, following orders) and his evolving, new self.
Stranger than Fiction
[Stranger than Fiction, 2006 promotional art]
Labors of Gratitude are also illustrated in the 2006 film, Stranger than Fiction: Harold Crick is a tax auditor who hears a voice narrating his life, a kind of gift. But it's narrating a story that will soon end in his premature death. Not so great. He's not ready to die. So he changes his life, but also seeks out the identity of the voice narrating his demise. It turns out that the narrator is author Karen Eiffel, who, in all her books, kills off her main characters. Always. With the help of a local university literature professor, Harold tracks down Karen Eiffel and meets her. The meeting changes both of them, as Karen offers Harold the opportunity to read a draft of her story, his life, and meeting Harold offers Karen the opportunity to rethink her habit of killing her characters. Harold likes the ending Karen has written for his life so much, that he decides he's OK with dying. But in the end, there are a few surprises.
Sports Films Illustrate Labors of Gratitude Galore
Many sports films involve dynamics of athletes who need some gift or example they are missing (and receive it from a mentor or coach). Sometimes the coach or mentor also needs something the athlete/student has to offer to become more whole.
Many labors of gratitude in sports narratives are about hard work and practice, working out, and becoming a better athlete. Many are about getting over ego issues, learning to be a team player,
learning to be a better human being. Both kinds of labors (physical, and ego) are difficult (and sometimes the second kind, transforming the ego, is harder than achieving physical discipline).
The mutual give-and-take between athlete and coach or parent/mentor is similar to the give-and-take dynamics between Harold and Karen in Stranger than Fiction, and also between brother and sister in "Hansel and Gretel."
Examples are endless. These are only the tip of the iceberg.
Labors of Gratitude in Biblical & Catechetical Tradition
In terms of my larger project regarding Hamlet's Bible and biblical allusions and plot echoes, Christian catechism has tended to say faith is a gift. This need not be traditional faith in a grocery list of beliefs, but rather a basic stance regarding our existence. Perhaps that basic stance, that faith, is best understood in the context of a labor of gratitude. Christian liturgy says of its God, "In you we live and move and have our being." We do not make ourselves, at least not in our earliest origins, but receive our lives as if gifts from an unseen giver. Inasmuch as we make our lives a gift to others, we are then in harmony with the gift of our own existence.
Labors of Regret
resemble
Labors of Gratitude
It has also occurred to me that the regret that Hamlet and Laertes feel and finally confess at the end of the play (Hamlet 5.2) is a kind of indebtedness: When we harm another, even if only accidentally, we feel responsible and want to make it right, and until we do so, we may feel in debt to the person we harmed. So for me, the debts of gratitude and regret are similar because in both cases, we are in debt to another, while it seems the opposite is true of entitlement and revenge, where we feel others are in our debt, as I explained in last week's post.
So in upcoming weeks, I hope to explore some gifts and transformations of gratitude, at least in Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and Polonius, starting (next week) with Hamlet.
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NOTE ON THIS SERIES OF POSTS:
Hamlet quotes are taken from the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare at mit.edu.
This is the latest installment in a multi-part series examining how characters interact in Hamlet, offering opportunities, gifts, planting seeds for future inspiration, or for changes of heart & mind. It follows ideas from Lewis Hyde (“The Labor of Gratitude,” a chapter in his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property).
- The more I examine characters in this way, the more I realize how the major characters in Hamlet are dynamic characters who change, becoming better or worse in one way or another. This approach goes against the grain of a great deal of scholarship that seems to reify (or thing-ify) too many characters (as foil, as Oedipal, as Machiavellian, etc.) and view them as more static, rather than as dynamic, fluid, interacting. For an index of previous posts in this series, see below.
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Index of other posts in this series:
Part 1: Gifts & labors of gratitude in Hansel & Gretel - (prep. for Hamlet) - 8/12/19
Part 2: Hamlet's Descent & Arc Toward Mercy: Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet - 8/19/19
Part 3: Polonius' Labor of Regret - 8/26/19
Part 4: Into Dad's Circle of Fear & Flattery: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret, 1.2 - 9/3/19
Part 5: Fear & Hypocrisy; Laertes’ Labors of Gratitude & Regret, Hamlet 1.3 - 9/9/19
Part 6: Fearsome, Flattered, Glimpsing Transformation: Laertes’ Labors of Gratitude & Regret, 4.5 - 9/17/19
Part 7: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret (Toxic Masculinity Distrats While Ophelia Drowns, Hamlet 4.7 - 9/24/19
Part 8: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret (Laertes & Hamlet Fight at Ophelia’s Grave, Hamlet 5.1 - 10/01/19
Part 9: Gertrude as Recipient & Source of Gifts: Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet - 10/8/19
Part 10: Laertes' Labors of Gratitude & Regret: Laertes Turns, but Only When Facing Death, 5.2 - 10/15/19
Part 11: Does Hamlet & Ophelia’s Love Change Them? (Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet) - 10/21/19
Part 12: Claudius Resists Gift-Dynamics & Grace (Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet) - 10/29/19
Part 13: Does Fortinbras Benefit from Gratitude or Regret (or is he more a cipher for James VI & I)? - 11/05/19
Part 14: Horatio's Gift-Dynamics & Christ-Figures Shifting Ground in Hamlet 1.1 - 11/19/19
Part 15: Hamlet & Horatio's Friendship: Mutual, Reciprocal, Transformative, Free - 11/26/19
Part 16: WHY GIFT-DYNAMICS MATTER FOR HAMLET & THE BIBLE: Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet - 12/19/19
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MY BOOK PROJECT:
My book project: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2017/05/hamlets-bible-my-book-project-im.html
RETROSPECTIVES:
Retrospectives of popular posts through March 0f 2019: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/03/hamlets-bible-2-year-anniversary.html
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