commodities, gifts, and beauty

My ideal for the blog is to keep returning to earlier posts in the light of later ones, and, in a manner analogous with digging compost into soil, improve the old patch of ground with new material. Today I'll go back to 'The River God' with yesterday's post on fishing tackle in mind. There I mentioned that fishing equipment is the object both of economic exchange and of aesthetic judgement, its status as a locus of wise conduct interacting with these other two characterisations in fairly complex ways.

This complex of material is relevant to reading 'The River God'. Early in the story, the narrator describes his younger self, out on a summer walk or picnic, curious about the fishing rod that his future uncle has brought with him: 'To the fisherman born there is nothing so provoking of curiosity as a fishing rod in a case.' His uncle-to-be lets him look and his response is strongly aesthetic:

I opened the flap, which contained a small grass spear in a wee pocket, and, pulling down the case a little, I admired the beauties of the cork butt, with its gun-metal ferrule and reel rings and the exquisite frail slenderness of the top two joints. 
'It's got two top-joints - two!' I exclaimed ecstatically.
'Of course,' said he. 'All good trout rods have two.'
I marvelled in silence at what seemed to me then a combination of extravagance and excellent precaution.

As they assemble the rod, the description is strongly sensual - the narrator remembers the 'faint, clear pop' made by the cork stoppers and the way the young man 'rubbed the ferrules against the side of his nose' to stop them sticking. The boy looks down the 'tunnel of sneck rings to the eyelet at the end', impressed, it is implied, by the precision of the alignment. Sight, touch, sound - the workmanship of the rod appeals directly to the senses. It is 'a lovely thing', 'a thing alive', 'a sceptre'.

Having recalled the beauty of the rod, however, the narrator turns to its status as an object of exchange. Surely such a beautiful piece of work must be expensive? 'Couple of guineas,' is the response of the uncle-to-be. 'A couple of guineas! And we were poor folk and the future was more rodless than ever.' The boy begins to work out how long it will take to save two guineas out of pocket-money paid at twopence a week: 'Two hundred and forty pennies to the pound, multiplied by two - four hundred and eighty - and then another twenty-four pennies - five hundred and four. Why it would take a lifetime.'

An alternative form of exchange becomes important at this point - that of gift-giving. The young uncle-to-be promises the boy a rod for his birthday but, when it arrives, it is no match for the two-guinea beauty - a 'tough and stringy' rod with a wooden reel that had 'neither check nor brake'. He tries to will it into something better than it is, telling everyone that it cost two guineas, a claim that elicits reverence from his mother, scepticism from his father, and open derision from one of the employees of the Welsh hotel, who insists that 'five shillings would be too much' to pay for it.

But, after the adventure with the salmon in which the Colonel helps the boy to land the beast that has broken his rod, the older man allows the boy to choose a new rod from his own collection: '[R]ummage among those. Take your time and see if you can find anything to suit you.' It's interesting that there is considerable variety in the equipment that the Colonel has with him: '"Now, here's a handy piece by Hardy - a light and useful tool - or if you fancy greenheart in preference to split bamboo -"'. In his introduction to coarse fishing, Paul Duffield notes that it used to be easier to make recommendations to beginners because there was simply less choice. But, it seems, at least from the Colonel's wooden tackle-box, that choice has long been available if you could pay for it. As Duffield implies, what has made this choice more widely available now is the affordability of the modern materials used in manufacturing equipment.

The fact that the rod is a gift transforms it in some subtle sense: 'I have the rod to this day, and I count it among my dearest treasures.' It is more than an expensive commodity - something rendered vital through its contact with the 'god'. And it is not the only thing that the old man bequeathed to the younger one - the connection extends to the gestures that constitute his very claim to be an angler: 'I have a flick of the wrist,' says the narrator, 'that was his [the Colonel's] legacy'.

This relates more to the comments on knots in the last post on 'The River God': 'There is a pride, in knots, of which the laity knows nothing'.