Here’s how I got to that question, and it’s not because I’m giving up on the standard English Ph.D. tactic of giving books as birthday presents to everyone I know (which gets more embarrassing every year, really).

I’ve been thinking lately about literature among the arts. I often want to move back and forth between theoretical models of art as such—models that describe things like fields of culture or artworlds or institutional aesthetics—and the specifics of literary history. But those general cultural or aesthetic or artistic theories are often constructed with painting or music as the central example. (I’ve been reading Howard Becker’s Art Worlds, in which Becker’s experience as a musician strongly colors his account of cooperation in artmaking.) And often a natural way of talking about those arts rubs my literary intuitions the wrong way.

Coming down the RSS feed earlier this week was this piece from the New York Review: ‘A Frightening Time in America’: An Interview With David Foster Wallace by Ostap Karmodi. I’m a DFW dunce, having read only a short piece or two by him, though admitting that will probably get me permanently banned from all the best literati clubs / professions. But the interview certainly touched one of my favorite nerves: the problem of aesthetic autonomy. The interviewer wants to know whether Wallace believes in the possibility of pure art, provoking a very interesting and tangled response:

OK: Can pure art free of any commercial or propaganda value exist in your opinion?

DFW: I’m suspicious of the word “pure.” It’s a very, very high standard to attach to a word like “art,” given that the basic situation is a continuum. Let me give you an example: my wife is a fantastic artist and painter but she doesn’t attempt to sell her work for a great deal of money. She hasn’t made any attempts to get a lot of galleries or museums to buy her work. She’s had shows and she can sell stuff when she wants, but mainly she makes them as gifts for people. It’s very interesting for me to watch her work. There’s a whole art world in America, where you develop a name and a reputation and your art becomes more and more valuable, and you can end up very wealthy. She’s afraid of that whole process because she believes it will take something out of the art that will make it less fun for her to do. And for her it’s the most important thing of her life.

So she is for me – I’ve only been married two years – watching her work and then going into the garage where I work, and trying to do my work and trying not to think about, “Oh, what does this reviewer from The New York Times say,” to find myself preoccupied and distracted by all kinds of what are really petty and immature and vain distractions is very educational. It may be that the only way in America to produce pure art would be to remove oneself from the public sphere and produce that art only as gifts, where there’s no money involved and no attempt at publicity or publication involved. The problem is that if everyone does that, then there is no public arts here. So it all becomes really a paradox that I’ve spent a lot of the last years thinking about, and I don’t have an answer.

Karmodi gives Wallace two choices of threats to autonomy to talk about—commerce and propaganda. In the Cold War it was usually “propaganda” that was cited as the opposite of pure art, and one that still has a particular savor in the context of a Russian interview of an American author. Nonetheless Wallace is concerned mainly with the threat from commerce—or rather from publicness more generally. (Ah, publicness! How we have discussed thee on Arcade!) For Wallace’s wife Karen Green, as he tells it, to enter the competition for a public reputation—and for money—is to risk the purity as well as the “fun” of artistic creation.

The alternative, surprisingly, is not an entirely private, personal art for the artist herself, but a gift economy of art. The gift still counts as private, presumably because its circulation is confined to friends and other intimates worthy of gifts. Of course, thinking of artistic production as a gift looks backwards towards some very long-lived social formations for art: coterie circulation, aristocratic patronage (in which the artwork is “presented” to a patron), even the artistic craft of precommercial society. The archaic quality of this idea is probably what troubles Wallace as he comments on the paradox that “if everyone does that, then there [are] no public arts”: the artwork-as-gift is blatantly inappropriate, not to say outrageously elitist, for a world of mass publics in which only some people possess the leisure, materials, skills, and institutional and social support networks to produce art—to paraphrase Becker’s criteria for what makes up an art world. (And, by the way, I learn from that enemy of privacy, the Google search, that Karen Green is not presently a completely private artist: you can see reproductions of some of her very interesting work on her website, Beautiful Crap: The Works of Karen Green.)

Perhaps this need for a public affects a would-be gift-literature most among the arts. Could Wallace have told this story about himself instead of his wife? Isn’t there something more outrageous about imagining a writer wanting “to remove oneself from the public sphere and produce that art only as gifts” than about imagining the same about a painter or a sculptor? Partly this is because we think of paintings and sculptures as objects, hence giftable, whereas the literary work is a template for producing many copies. A writer, especially a famous one like Wallace, might give a manuscript as a gift (though I imagine UT Austin comes by Wallace’s archive on not quite such privately-pure terms), but the work itself? Given that we inhabitants of print culture think of literary works as things for publication? Of course this is the special outrageousness, as both Natalia Cecire and Howard Becker remind me, of Emily Dickinson—it’s no accident that this “maverick” (to use Becker’s term) stayed in manuscript, or treated MS as a special kind of publication (depending on how you see it). But Dickinson seems a bit like the exception that proves the 19th-20th-21st-century rule, to me, and perhaps she also indicates that the novel even more than poetry is resistant to the private world of gift exchange. Related resistances emerge in the performing arts, to be sure, but literature still seems closer to the limit case to me. Maybe this is why Wallace immediately resists Karmodi’s interest in “pure” art in favor of a “continuum.”

On that continuum we’d find, I think, that concerns about audiences, reputation, even sales are compatible with (and perhaps necessary for) relative purity…but that’s a story for another day. Meanwhile, here! Happy unbirthday! Have a blog post.