Predatory Giving
Generosity as violence.
In the conflict between cautious moral reformers and sweeping moral reformers, my sympathies have long rested with Team Sweeping. The sharp pain of ripping a band-aid clean off may be too much for all but the most pathologically afflicted among us; but it is a necessary condition for proper healing, or in this case for imposing change with as few opportunities for reversal as possible. If the Second Vatican Council had been less ceremonial and issued fewer majestic declarations we may only now be crawling out from under some Chestertonian cottagecore nightmare and into something resembling actual life. But for my part the sweeping approach seemed most suited toward everyday etiquette, and none more so than the manners surrounding gift-giving.
It was hard to find anything like a middle ground in the effort to upend mandatory or strongly encouraged generosity. Even a single modest gift acquired from some Etsy artisan would never entirely wipe away the Pavlovian effects of receiving. Curing a recipient of the desire to possess many things comes at the price of their over-sentimentalizing the few things they have, which at least feels worse. Nothing short of total refusal would do.
Granted, no resistance is easier than simply not doing something. And surely no resistance is easier to misread. Coming empty-handed to birthday parties for nieces and nephews could be seen as indifference to their well-being. Ignoring a baby registry suggests little excitement in perpetuation of the species just as ignoring a wedding registry indicates below average fondness for enduring domestic harmony. But there is a severity inherent in miserliness that must be wielded without compromise if it is to be effective. And really, if you’re not alienating people who’ve wronged you in no way beyond this very crucial disagreement, then it’s mostly just for show. So there’s nothing more awkward than when it dawns on you very, very slowly that there is, in fact, a better and more incremental way.
As with all customs, gift-giving is dependent upon seemingly intractable assumptions: (1) that generosity is always benevolent and (2) that the recipient of generosity is at least grateful even when it is neither expected nor desired. Sweeping moral reform merely reasserts these assumptions while accident may call them into question for a very brief period. It takes nothing short of a malicious imagination to render generosity as a malicious act. Fair enough, but sometimes direct experience will drive it in that direction.
Exiting the train station one Sunday afternoon, I came upon a $100 bill laying just outside the door. With no one else outside to claim it, I was left with an awkward moral dilemma. I could keep the money for myself, something ingrained in me from my days in college cleaning out movie theaters. One summer I collected as much as $60 of abandoned lucre, earning from my coworkers the envious moniker of “Monopoly Morgan.”1 Or I could deposit it into the collection basket for the Mass I was just about to attend, therefore absolving me of any pretensions to greed. Ultimately I did neither of these things, creating as if by some supernatural intervention a third option. I walked immediately back into the station, honing in on the first person I saw, in this case someone in the ticket booth line who I’m not entirely sure spoke English as a first language, handing the money to him as if I could have sworn I saw him drop it, and hastily leaving him in silent bafflement.
On the surface this gesture would take the random act of kindness to new extremes. Certainly if I worded the encounter with less precision I could give it that appearance. But that would be untrue to how I felt. First I was relieved in unburdening myself of my sudden wealth. It was an act of total convenience, as if I was passing on a curse. Relief soon gave way to thrill once I realized the violent proportions of what I had done. Yes, I’d given a guy a lot of money, like an inappropriate amount in any context, suggesting at best that I had gone completely insane or was under the sway of demons. I had weaponized the money, and in so doing felt like I was the catalyst in someone else’s horror story. Indeed, as the officiating priest gave his homily later that day, I fell into a revery of this man sitting on the train in a most unsettled state, my C-note burning a hole through his wallet. I never felt more powerful. More malevolently charitable.
Obviously this was an experience I wanted to relive. Yet I could not replicate it exactly. Even as abundant boomer affluence would engender greater cash-carelessness, regifting lost money lacks both in subtlety and in personal touch. What alternative means, I wondered, could deepen the wounding capacity of my generosity? I need only have looked to my immediate right and see all the books I could let go of like right that instant. Of course! Even as literacy itself seems to be on the wane, it has had little impact on the gravity of book-giving. No one needs to read a book to feel the import of being given one. And I do mean given, for book lending is the great myth of our age.2 So with that reality readily accepted, I could carry on with my reform project, now craftier and more intricate.
Book-giving comes with its own trove of assumptions. Because literature, by its very existence, is uplifting and enables personal improvement, all gifting of books is imbued in that spirit, even when we don’t want the books. Successions of men pushing Infinite Jest on you, a literate woman, without your solicitation or even after asking if you’ve already read it, may be presumptuous, unimaginative, and self-regarding, but it is not necessarily malicious. Of course if literature’s function went only one way, we would hardly think about it. The excitement of receiving or discovering a new literary work would be diluted. As such there are some works of literature that have no intention to enlighten, inspire, ennoble, or uplift anyone who reads them. And even if some broadly do, my project can render them otherwise with some very careful distribution.
The desire to do harm through book-giving is nothing without a honed capacity. It requires taking an inventory of your web of familiars, identifying those to whom you want to do violence, and applying a psychological analysis of such precision that no college course can, or will, be able to teach you all to matchmake them to the most appropriate title.
For my present purposes I will speak only in broad terms. Consider The Mezzanine. Plot-light, style-heavy, and very short, it should be the book of my dreams, and yet I’ve struggled with it for years. It is as if Nicholson Baker’s novel is doing battle with another, more interesting version of it in my own head, very much unlike Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, which easily bested any self-made competing version. Clearly, though, The Mezzanine would be of better use to someone who has no interesting thoughts of their own, and can do to have their mind filled with the thoughts of Baker’s mildly amusing office drone. It can sharpen their dating app profile if nothing else.
As this is being written during Pride Month, I look at my volumes of Ronald Firbank. This baffling stylist suffered dearly in his lifetime from secretive admirers like Virginia Woolf, dismissive critics like E.M. Forster, and shameless imitators like Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, but today may benefit from some careful giving. Probably not an LGTBQetc person, but the puppyish hetero ally in your life, with a working knowledge of gay culture that goes no higher than the Hairspray musical, who by your icy generosity may be left with a sense of their own triviality and lack of refinement.
Put the most annoying Hibernophile in their place with Castle Rackrent. What’s this? 1982, Janine? Back issues of ANSWER Me! and Gun Fag Manifesto? Surely there’s someone out there whose anti-book-banning threshold is in need of stress-testing. But if you want to do real damage, perhaps against someone you’ve fallen out with, nothing says “I don’t forgive you and you’re dead to me” like any book with Timothy Snyder’s or Tom Nichols’s name anywhere near it. I’d add An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting for a variety of potential victims, but that would be a bit on the nose.
One thing that is absolutely essential to the predatory giver is patience. Tempting as it may be, you want to avoid causing the desired effects to register immediately or even overtly upon your victim. This is a protracted violence, but nothing like the common mode of torture. Your victim, upon receiving their book, may not register much interest but they will feel validated by the stock you put in their intelligence. So much so that they might actually be moved to read what you give them. And if they engage with the text and really think about it, the demoralizing powers of literature will work their magic. They’ll discover in themselves things long concealed and resistant to workaday practices like psychotherapy and basic self-reflection. They will be made new, and worse, and you, like any murderer, will watch from afar and relive the thrill of the crime over a much longer period and free of the inconveniences of logistics and decomposition. And while being prolific is hardly a requirement, with enough books you may acquire double the amount of victims that Dahmer or even Bundy had.
I was not called this.
You’re telling me that a borrower of your private library had honored their word? Bullshit.