Near the end of Christopher Nolan’s stunning, if imperfect, movie adaptation of the Odyssey, Odysseus makes a speech that completely unpicked me. He tells Penelope about how, after ten years of siege, the Greeks turned a gift to the Trojans—the famous horse—into a means of terror and destruction. He says, “We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that is ever sacred between people.” The gift, a signal of friendship, mutual recognition, and hospitality, is used as a means of violence and betrayal. From this violation Odysseus sees a poison spreading across the Greek world, which will ultimately destroy well-established notions of home and relationship.
Why did that speech compel me? Well, partly because I’m a sucker for a big oration, an epic metaphysical take, that seems to reach out from the screen and speak into the present moment. I, like many, feel that something has gone terribly wrong with our world and we’ve screwed up pretty badly. Odysseus’s speech invites me to ask, What is the cause of our malaise? Though perhaps, really, the speech grabbed my attention simply because the idea of gift has been so crucial both for my faith and for my intellectual formation.
Gifts, as Odysseus reminds us, are typically something exchanged between people or peoples; they are tokens of good will, friendship, and love, designed to build up rather than tear down.The best gifts are freely given, with no strings attached. That is the theory, though the philosopher Jacques Derrida argued that there is no such thing as a “clean” gift exchange: It always generates a debt, not least because both parties are aware that what is shared is indeed meant to be a gift. For Derrida, if the exchange is truly to be a gift, the giver would have to be unaware that she is giving it, and the receiver would need to be unaware of the giver’s identity. Anonymity at every point would be required (which rather removes the pleasure of gift-giving). Of course, what makes the Trojan horse especially horrifying is that it masquerades as gift when it is pure trickery.
