重劃疆界：從喬伊斯小說中的贈予行為看禮物經濟與慾望經濟之糾葛

Redrawing the Boundaries: From the Suspicious Acts of Giving in
James Joyce’s Texts to the Intricate Relation between the Gift
Economy and the Economy of Desire The motif of generosity appears at various points in James Joyce’s
texts but is not always dealt with in a laudatory way. Gabriel Conroy in
“The Dead,” for instance, patronizingly tips the servant a gold coin after their
skirmish to confirm his social status. The narrator of “Araby,” likewise,
intends to find a gift for Mangan’s sister in the bazaar so as to prove his
devotion to her. Instead of celebrating generosity, Joyce seems to enjoy
poking fun at the concept of generosity by laying bare the self-serving
function of the gift. On the other hand, in Ulysses, Joyce depicts Leopold
Bloom as one who is willing to help the needy, one who generously spends
the majority of his money on gifts during the Bloomsday. Does Joyce’s
different presentations of gift-giving betray his self-contradiction? Or it is
precisely through these different presentations that we can grasp the intricate
relation between the gift economy and the economy of desire?
My recent study has been focusing on the gift economy in Ulysses to
investigate Joyce’s concepts of calculation and generosity. I find that
Joyce’s presentation of the gift economy not so much frustrates our
expectation of genuine generosity as enables us to recognize the reason why
gifts can hardly be disinterested: it is because the gift is invested with the
donor’s desire, specifically the desire to redraw the boundaries between the
recipient and himself, that the act of giving is not immune from calculation.
If in selecting and giving a gift, as Mark Osteen suggests, the giver
necessarily projects both his sense of the recipient and his self-image onto
the gift, then gift-giving can be considered a symbolic act which allows the
giver to (re)define his relationship with the recipient and thereby to establish
their identities as well.
Taking the Joycean gift economy as a point of departure, this
research project explores thoroughly the relation between the gift economy
and the economy of desire. I suggest that if we investigate the incentives
which drive the subject to put the gift economy in motion, we will realize
that the act of giving is motivated, most of the time, by the giver’s attempt to
redraw the boundaries between the self and the other. The obscene gift
book Bloom obtains for Molly, for example, is encoded with his idea of her
as a purchasable commodity and his own image as a cuckolded husband
desiring for sexual gratification. The gift of garters for his servant Mary,
likewise, is employed to express Bloom’s ineffable desire to redefine their
relationship as more than one between the master and the servant.