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Point Loma Nazarene University

The Gift in Stranger than Fiction

PHL490 – Special Studies in Philosophy: Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida

Professor Heather Ross

By Eric Austin Lee
June 1, 2007

     “This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch.  Harold Crick was a man of infinite numbers, endless calculations, and remarkably few words.  And his wristwatch said even less.”  With these words, we are introduced to the life of Harold Crick, a senior agent at the Internal Revenue Service – a life doubly narrated by the movie Stranger than Fiction.  The first narration is performed by the movie itself, and the second, meta-narration (the one with the real power over Harold’s life) is the author Karen Eiffel, famously known for killing off her protagonists.  One day, Harold discovers that his daily activities are being narrated (and with a better vocabulary than his own) by a woman with a British accent, who seems to not only know Harold better than he knows himself, but also, to some extent, controls Harold’s fate—a fate which is revealed to him while resetting his malfunctioning watch with the following third-person omniscient:  “Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.”
     Meanwhile, Harold has been tasked with auditing the previous year’s tax returns of a baker named Ana Pascal, who, from the very first “loathes the core” of Harold’s existence.  Yet, guided by Eiffel’s narration, Harold finds himself in awe of Miss Pascal’s tattooed appearance which is strikingly opposed to his own boorish presentation.  After these initial awkward moments and frustrations between these two characters, the end of the following day presents a scene of the offering of a gift of freshly-baked cookies to Harold by Miss Pascal—a scene upon which this essay will primarily be focusing, taking its cues from the philosophical and theological notion of ‘the gift.’  My interactions will not engage in a one-to-one mapping of this conversation to the entire narrative of Stranger than Fiction in allegorical fashion, but will rather attempt to produce a constructive and creative interplay between the notion of the gift in an effort to draw these phenomenological and theological elements out of the story.  The philosopher primarily considered will be Jacques Derrida, and the main theologian with whom I will be interacting is John Milbank.  The essay will be broken up in two parts, accordingly:  first, I will engage in a treatment of the gift in Stranger than Fiction in light of Derrida’s problematic of the gift, and second, I will attempt a reading of Stranger than Fiction in light of Milbank’s affirmation of gift exchange.  Lastly, while each section will have its own conclusions mainly in the form of questions asked, there will be no “final remarks” regarding both of the sections, as Milbank’s work is largely in response to the Heideggerian/Derridean response to the gift.

Derrida and the Madness of Economic Reason: the gift, ‘if there is any’

     In Derrida’s Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, he traces the problematic of the gift along ‘aneconomic’ lines.  The reason this is so is because any offering and receiving of the gift necessarily travels along a circular economy of exchange, which for Derrida, concomitantly and paradoxically annuls the gift.  Therefore, the gift “must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle”  of economy and kept away from “the malaise of being measured.”   Furthermore, the concept of time is necessarily involved both as the duration that transpires during the giving and receiving of the gift, but also within the circular conception of time itself which is implicated in the circulation of economic exchange (Heidegger calls this conception of time ‘vulgar’).  Instead, Derrida argues, “There would be a gift only at the instant when the paradoxical instant (in the sense in which Kierkegaard says of the paradoxical instant of decision that it is madness) tears time apart.  In this sense one would never have the time of a gift.”  In other words, the gift, “if there is any,” would have to arrive at a tangent to time itself.
     Yet, Derrida does not argue for the gift along tangential lines (or any other geometry), but considers that the gift must be argued as the impossibility which gives itself : “These conditions of possibility of the gift (that some ‘one’ gives some ‘thing’ to some ‘one other’) designate simultaneously the conditions of the impossibility of the gift.  And already we could translate this into other terms: these conditions of possibility define or produce the annulment, the annihilation, the destruction of the gift.”  “For there to be a gift,” Derrida continues, “there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt.”  These modes of return and exchange are inevitable for Derrida, so the only way for the gift to disallow the possibility of indebtedness is for the donee to “not recognize the gift as gift.  If he recognizes it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift.”  The gift must not even be perceived, let alone identified as a gift, which would also be its destruction.
     This double bind of the gift—“for there to be gift, it is necessary that the gift not even appear, that it not be perceived or received as gift”—is dealt with by an injunction of absolute and instantaneous forgetfulness.  Gift and forgetfulness become the conditions for each other, much like Heidegger’s discussion of Being and time in On Time and Being.  Neither (gift/forgetfulness, being/time) is subordinated to each other, but both are given as gift in the es gibt [“It gives”] of appropriation [Ereignis].  In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger tells us that this ‘gives’ of the ‘It gives’ “names the essence of Being that is giving, granting its truth.”  
     In what follows, one can think of ‘Time’ in a similar way of ‘Being’, and likewise, Derrida also wants to conceive of the gift and forgetfulness in analogous manner:
To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.  To think Being explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment [aletheia], that is, in favor of the It gives [es gibt].  As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving.  As a gift, Being is not expelled from giving.  Being, presencing is transmuted.  As allowing-to-presence, it belongs to unconcealing; as the gift of unconcealing it is retained in the giving.  Being is not.  There is, It gives Being as the unconcealing; as the gift of unconcealing it is retained in the giving.  Being is not.  There is, It gives Being as the unconcealing of presencing.
This ‘It gives,’ however, must not be thought of as a thing, as for Heidegger, it is nothing (not a being).  This double bind—the very impossibility of the gift qua gift—of this donation, thought “to the limit” for Derrida is thus that “[t]he truth of the gift . . . suffices to annul the gift.”  The similar logic between the gift and the above concerning the es gibt is confirmed when Derrida states,
the structure of this impossible gift is also that of Being—that gives itself to be thought on the condition of being nothing (no present-being, no being-present)—and of time which, even in what is called its ‘vulgar’ determination, from Aristotle to Heidegger, is always defined in the paradoxia or rather the aporia of what is without being, of what is never present or what is only scarcely and dimly.
This ‘never present’ of time and Being itself which only arrives in the “It gives” for Heidegger thus only can arrive in similar manner for Derrida as the impossibility of the gift which is spoken of as the time which one ‘gives.’  Derrida’s work interacts with two main texts (aside from Mauss’ The Gift):  a selection from Charles Baudelaire’s Oeuvres complètes which forms the main part of the study concerning the [fake] ‘gift’ of the counterfeit money to a beggar; and the second text being the short epigraph which reads: “The King takes all my time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give all.”  While Derrida is not explicit about what truly is given as gift, ‘if there is any,’ what he seems to constantly point back to in his study is that what one can truly give at all as gift is one’s time, despite the fact that as an event it is not actually time itself that is given, for one cannot possess that which is not.  “And yet, even though the King takes it all from her, altogether, this time or whatever fills up the time, she has some left, a remainder that is not nothing since it is beyond everything, a remainder that is nothing but that there is since she gives it.”  Time is given, but impossibly and paradoxically; the gift proceeds by aporia.
     With this philosophical trajectory in mind, let us now proceed with an attempt to apply this conversation to what is arguably the key scene of gift-giving in Stranger than Fiction.  The context of the following scene is that Harold has been upstairs in Miss Pascal’s office all day, going through her receipts from the previous year to ensure that twenty-two percent is all that she has not paid on her taxes.  As he walks down the stairs, defeated by a day of frustratingly tedious work, this scene unfolds…

Harold: Well, good night.
Miss Pascal: Want a cookie?
H: Oh, no.
MP: Oh, come on: they’re warm and gooey and fresh out of the oven.
H: No, I don’t like cookies.
MP: You don’t like cookies?  What’s wrong with you?  Everybody likes cookies.
H: No, I know.  
MP: After a really awful, no-good day, didn’t your mama ever make you milk and cookies?
H: No, my mother didn’t bake.  The only cookies I ever had were store-bought.
MP: Okay.  Sit down.  
H: No, I’m –
MP: -- no, sit down.  Now, eat a cookie.
H: I really can’t.  
MP: Mr. Crick, it was a really awful day.  I know: I made sure of it.  So pick up the cookie, dip it in the milk, and eat it.

[Harold follows her instructions, and a look of elation comes over his face as he eats the cookie, followed by a relieved sigh]

H: Wow, that’s a really, really good cookie.  When did you decide to become a baker?
MP: In college.
H: Oh, like a cooking college?
MP: I went to Harvard Law, actually.
H: Oh, I’m sorry, I just assumed it was –
MP:  -- no, no it’s fine, I didn’t finish.
H: Something happen?
MP: No, I was barely accepted.  I mean, really: barely.  The only reason they let me come was because of my essay: how I was going to make the world a better place with my degree.  And anyway, we would have to participate in these study sessions – my classmates and I, sometimes all night long – and I would bake, so no one would go hungry while we worked.  Sometimes I would bake all afternoon in the kitchen in the dorm and I would bring my little treats to the study groups and people loved them.  I made oatmeal cookies, peanut butter bars, dark chocolate macadamia nut wedges—everyone would eat and stay happy, study harder and do better on the tests and then more and more people started coming to the study groups and I would bring more snacks and I was always looking for better and better recipes until soon it was ricotta cheese and apricot croissants and mocha bars with an almond glaze and lemon chiffon cake with zesty peach icing.  And at the end of the semester, I had 27 study partners, 8 Mead journals filled with recipes and a ‘D’ average.  So I dropped out.  I just figured that if I were going to make the world a better place I would do it with cookies.  …you like them?
H: I do.
MP: I’m glad.
H: Thank you for forcing me to eat them.
MP: You’re welcome.
H: I should go.  Thank you, for the cookies.
MP: Why don’t you take them home?
H: Oh, no--
MP: --Oh, Come on.
H: No, Really, please.
MP: No, really please.
H: No, really please –
MP: -- I want you to.
H: I would like to, but I can’t.
MP: You can’t?
H: No, no, I mean, ‘cause see, it constitutes ‘a gift.’  Actually, I shouldn’t have even had those other ones, so…
MP: Well, okay, I’m not going to tell anyone.
H: Well, I know, but if you did.
MP: Well I’m not going to –
H: --I know, but if you did.
MP: You think I’m going to call the --
H: --no, I’ll purchase them. I’m happy to purchase them.  How’s that?  Then there are no issues.  [She walks away, dumbstruck.]  What?
MP: No.
H: Please?
MP: Go home.
H: It’s not a big deal.
MP: Go home.
H: Okay.  Did you…?  You baked those cookies for me, didn’t you?  [she gives a look of silent affirmation]  You were just trying to be nice and I totally blew it.  This may sound like gibberish to you, but, uh … I think I’m in a tragedy.
From the very beginning of this event to its closure, I would argue that for Derrida, the gift was never given.  Miss Pascal offers Harold the simplest of ordinary pastries: the cookie.  Yet, it is immediately denied, in typical too-polite fashion.  Not only is the cookie offered, but it is presented in its most desirable form, for those who have a history of being on the receiving-end of a batch of cookies: “warm and gooey and fresh out of the oven.”  We discover that unlike most people, Harold’s mother never gave him the gift of being a mother who bakes, let alone a mother who baked cookies, resorting to the store-bought variety.  What is more, Harold moves from turning down the cookies based on taste (“I don’t like cookies”) to one of necessity (“I really can’t”), as if he were obligated somehow against receiving them due to a prior obligation such as a diet or condition as diabetes.  What we discover is a kind of originary ‘no’ which disallows Harold from ever accepting the gift of a cookie.
     A litany of “no’s” follows from the time Miss Pascal offers Harold a cookie to the time he resigns himself to finally accept her offering: “Oh, no”; “No, I don’t like cookies”; “No, I know”; “No, my mother didn’t bake….”; “No, I’m–”;  “I really can[not].”  Six “no’s” precede the command to eat the cookie, to which Harold later says, “Thank you for forcing me to eat them [emphasis mine],” affirming a perceived lack of freedom involved in the gift.  There is no simple “thank you” which stands alone in pure gratitude, but only a “thank you” for being ‘forced’ to eat them, despite the fact that the act of dipping the cookie in the milk followed by its consumption was not coerced but engaged in freely.  Yet, Harold still feels as if he is forced, even though the opposite is apparent.  Has the gift yet arrived?  The next exchange, according to Derrida’s reading of the gift, is telling.
     Miss Pascal asks Harold, “Why don’t you take [the cookies] home?”  Immediately, he again protests, “Oh, no—” and at Miss Pascal’s prodding, he insistently repeats, “No, really, please.”  And then, Harold invokes prior necessity: “I can’t.”  When Miss Pascal retorts, “You can’t?” Harold declares that the cookie “constitutes ‘a gift.’”  He identifies the gift as gift.  For Derrida, this simple identification immediately destroys the gift.  “At the limit,” remarks Derrida, “the gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to the donee or to the donor.  It cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as gift.”  Thus, when Harold identifies the cookie, that it “constitutes ‘a gift,’” we see the gift destroyed, bound to a violent economy of exchange.  
     Harold is bound to a protocol which destroys the gift in two blows: first, by forming him into a system of exchange where everything must be kept track of for the sake of auditing—he cannot accept a gift because it constitutes that which he is not allowed to receive as dictated by his position as a senior IRS agent; and second, he is bound to that which proclaims the gift ‘a gift’ such that this obvious tautology is something that he cannot receive: because it is precisely a gift it is exactly that which constitutes what Harold cannot have.  The arrival, the event—the truth of the gift—thus signals its non-truth.
     Does Derrida then say that there is no gift?  No: Derrida has said he is misunderstood on this score:
The gift, I would claim, I would argue, as such cannot be known; as soon as you know it, you destroy it.  So the gift as such is impossible.  I insist on the ‘as such.’ . . . I never said that there is no gift.  No.  I said exactly the opposite.  What are the conditions for us to say there is a gift, if we cannot determine it theoretically, phenomenologically?  It is through the experience of the impossibility; that its possibility is possible as impossible.
Defined as such, the gift of the cookies given to Harold is destroyed.  The event which has made the giving of the gift possible in impossibility stays, at the limit, in utter impossibility as in this scene Harold destroys the gift; he never lets it arrive.  
     “Actually, I shouldn’t have even had those other [cookies], so …” continues Harold.  Not only is the currently-offered gift of the cookies refuted—destroyed—and named as ‘gift’, but Harold also annuls the cookies for which he has already enjoyed and offered his (‘forced’) gratitude.  History itself, history of the gift, is further annulled.  If there ever was any gift, then we know see that Harold has precluded its very possibility (which is to be distinguished from the impossible aporia which makes the gift possible for Derrida).  Harold’s “so…”, his trailing off in giving the unnamed reason for why he should have never had the cookies in the first place, signals his fear of the future, just as Miss Pascal assures him that she is “not going to tell anyone.”  If she were going to tell anyone—but she is not—if she were “going to call the—” … who is she going to call?  
     Harold must therefore contain the gift by making it reasonable, removing any further aspect of surprise and making the gift calculable.  He is a “man of infinite numbers, endless calculations,” after all: “no, I’ll purchase them. I’m happy to purchase them.  How’s that?  Then there are no issues.”  The present, the past, and also the future is now annulled from any possible (impossibility) of the gift.  By offering to purchase the cookies, Harold has subsumed the gift within an economy of exchange.  At this point, the past, present and future possibility of the gift has been destroyed; time is now ‘once again’ circular, vulgar.  One can see the perpetuation of this later in the movie when Harold brings Miss Pascal flours:
Harold: Hi.  I’m glad I caught you.

Miss Pascal: Oh yeah, why?

H: Because I wanted to bring these to you.

MP: Really?  So, you can’t accept gifts, but you can give them?  That seems a little inconsistent, doesn’t it, Mr. Crick?

H: Very inconsistent, yes.

MP: I’ll tell you what: I’ll purchase them.  No no no really, I’d like to purchase them.
True, Miss Pascal is joking when she offers to purchase the flours from “Mr. Crick,” but her jest belies the fact that even this gift is caught up within a (/an originally) violent exchange; the truth of the gift is its non-truth.  Before she even knows that the flours are flours, before she even is able to receive the play on words (“flours” / “flowers”), she would rather return Harold’s own offer of purchasing her own gift.  What is returned is not an offer so much as it is a denial, annulment, and destruction of the gift, thus paradoxically returning non-truth for non-truth.  The circle—of exchange, of give and take, of credit and debt—is complete.  Even in Harold’s own asymmetrical attempt to overcome his previous lack of receptivity of the gift, even in his acknowledgement of his ostensible inconsistency, the economy remains.
     Before concluding, it is to be not insignificantly noted that, in light of Derrida’s phenomenology of the gift which travels within the Heideggerian trajectory of Being, time, and the “It gives” which gives these both as the condition of the other—that one of the major characters in this story is Harold’s watch.  By and large, the watch has very little on-screen time, but we are told from the very beginning, “This is a story about a man named Harold Crick, and his wristwatch.”  But, the watch is given no billing in the credits.  There is a minor attempt at personality (“His wristwatch thought the single Windsor made his neck look fat, but said nothing”), but arguably the only two other instances where the wristwatch “plays a part” in the narration itself is when the resetting of the watch “would result in his imminent death” and in final scenes when we learn that a shard of the watch embedded itself into his arm, paradoxically (ironically?) saving his life after getting hit by the bus.  
     Is the wristwatch a character, or is it time itself which ‘plays a part’?  The wristwatch is there to order Harold’s life, ‘telling’ him the time.  “But,” Heidegger tells us, “time cannot be found anywhere in the watch that indicates time, neither on the dial nor in the mechanism.”  Yet, we are told that time is still not nothing, but it does not seem like it is exactly something (a being), either.  
     Would Derrida want to correct the introduction of Harold’s wristwatch as a major character to that of time itself?  Or more precisely, would Derrida indicate the es gibt, which gives both the gift of time and Being in reciprocal determination, as the gift proper which is finally ‘given’?   How can a movie be ‘about’ a man and his wristwatch when the wristwatch, as a being apart from Da-sein, never possesses the time about which it purports to point, which is not a being (and yet not nothing)?  Therefore, as a final question that Derrida might pose: is the movie about Harold Crick and his wristwatch; or rather is it about Harold Crick and the impossibility of the gift of time?

John Milbank and the content of the gift exchange: yes, a gift can be given

     In this final section, I will explore John Milbank’s writings on the gift that engages the work of Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion.  Before engaging his commentary, however, it is important to note that Milbank’s theological project is one that gives primacy to theology over philosophy.  To be properly theological, one always engages in some sort of philosophy (metaphysics), but one must always do so theologically that submits philosophy to theology, and not vice versa; likewise, all philosophy must have a theological end for it to truly be philosophy.  In Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, he critiques, in genealogical fashion, the notion of ‘the secular’, arguing that it the secular is not only devoid of any claims of neutrality, but most importantly, actually operates under disguised theological claims and, what is more, its false humility to even admit that it is operating under such claims.  This critique of the secular shows that there is no such neutral space and that finally, nothing is outside of theological critique in service to the Church: critiques and praises are given, for instance, for Marx, Hegel, Žižek, Plato, Aristotle, Marion, et. al.  Thus, while the movie Stranger than Fiction has no overt theological claims, a theological discussion of the gift in light of Milbank’s work will find itself to be entirely appropriate.  
     In Milbank’s 1995 essay, “Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian metaphysic,” he provides a critique of the different projects of Derrida and Marion on the gift, while simultaneously attempting to trace out a constructive history and theology of gift exchange which proclaims that indeed, a gift can be given.  He establishes this not primarily with a focus on the pure gift itself, but on pure gift exchange, which will be considered below through the facets of delay and non-identical repetition and in his later works, Milbank establishes gift as overcoming the ‘mark’ of reaction as well as highlighting the very content of the gift itself.  
     Initially, in “Can a Gift Be Given?” Milbank points out that for modern gift exchange, the focus is placed upon the sharp distinction between a contract and a gift, which, to be a gift, must be given with the right intention, without expectation of any return (‘unilateralist’), and is thereby “in complete indifference to the content of the gift.”  This distinction between contract and gift also betrays a sharp distinction between public and private, but this does not “so easily hold,” as the distinction begins to break down once one considers that for Christians, the command to love is both a gift and a commandment.  According to the modern notion of the unilateralist gift, however, particular aspects of Christian dogmatics become foolish, such that, in the case of random acts of charity and especially that of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, “God’s original creative donation is a kind of throwing away, or pointless excess,” because it is not properly a gift ‘to’ anyone.
     In his consideration of Derrida, Milbank argues that Derrida works within an ontological framework which presupposes an original contract (in Derrida’s words, economy, exchange).  As “any notion of gift is self-refuting” for Derrida, Milbank states the following:
for there to be a pure free gift, there would have to be no donating subject, no receiving subject, and no gift-object transferred.  A true gift would be from no-one, to no-one and of nothing.  But this gift cannot be given, since subject and object exhaust the whole of ontological reality.  Furthermore, the idea of a gift only arises at all as an intention of a subject, so that not only must a gift be without subject or object—which is impossible—but even the conceptual horizon of this impossibility is contradictory, since it rises out of a ground—the subject—which simultaneously negates it.  A gift both requires, and seeks to escape from, a giver.  Therefore there is no gift and not even a meaning for ‘gift’.
Written before Derrida clarified that he never said that there was ‘no gift’, Milbank rightly says,
“But this does not at all mean, for Derrida, that it is pointless to talk about gifts and giving.  On the contrary, he now talks of little else, since he contends that it is all there is to talk of.  This is not precisely because gift operates as a regulative horizon for ontological statements … Rather, if the notion of gift is in some fashion regulative, it is as a kind of unmeaning which must guide all our (ontological) meaning.”
Milbank correctly gauges that Derrida proceeds by an aporetics which is indebted to the Heideggerian es gibt such that “Giving becomes as real and unreal as being, since it is identical with the ‘passing away’ of time Heidegger).”  Milbank sums up his analysis of Derrida thus:
for Derrida the pure gift must be only of time, since only time . . . fulfils the necessary conditions of purity.  The true gift of time is a non-identical repetition which can never actually occur, since with its occurrence would arise a definable donor and donee, locked out of time in a ‘present’ exchange within the spatial agora.  Here, in order ‘to be’, past and future are contractually traded off against each other.
Milbank, then asks, is it possible contra Derrida “to defend exchange, and so the reality of the gift?”
     Milbank argues that gift exchange can be defended as delay and non-identical repetition only if it is exhumed of all of its original violence.  Christian agape, then, is not a focus upon the ‘pure gift’, but on the contrary, a focus on purified gift-exchange which
remains within the bounds of the ontological, which is to say the metaphysical.  Just as Christianity transforms but does not suppress our ‘given’ social nature which is exchangist, so also Christian theology transforms, utterly appropriates to itself the ontological task, but does not abandon it in suspension, by elevating itself about it . . . in the name of a purely unilateral (and univocal) gift prior to that circular reciprocity which is, indeed, consequent upon esse.
The ‘given’ social nature is not derived as much through any means of natural theology as much as it is properly located, for Milbank, in the imago Dei, which is given as “the divine created gift, which realizes an inexorable return, [which] is itself grounded in an intra-divine love which is relation and exchange as much as it is gift.”
     This is precisely the point which Robyn Horner misses, seeming to miss the distinctly theological nature of Milbank’s assertion of this Trinitarian and thus perichoretic grounding:
A pragmatic response such as Milbank’s is in many sense appealing, particularly because it seems to make sense of the human condition: we may not always give with the best of intentions now, but growth in the Christian life can purify our motives and thereby undercut the negative aspects of exchange. . . . Milbank has no apparent problem with the type of obligation a ‘purified’ exchange system still necessarily involves, and in fact, he embraces it.  But I cannot believe in a god who obliges my belief, and similarly, a god who constantly places me in debt seems not particularly loving.
Horner does indeed cite Milbank’s emphasis on the “trinitarian exchange,” but seems to completely miss his point, siding with the assumptions of the originally violent problematic of the gift as espoused by Derrida.  It is not that Milbank looks primarily first at human nature (although his analysis does contain this, but only secondarily), but that Milbank prioritizes the life of the Trinity, affirming that in perichoresis, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit mutually co-inhere and co-indwell one another in mutual exchange and original gift.  Siding with Derrida’s phenomenological assumptions, however, Horner fails to finally critique Milbank on theological grounds and remains within the purely philosophical.  Furthermore, it is not that God is “constantly placing me in debt”; rather, in thankfulness and love to God we return the love of God as revealed in the gift of Christ to others, because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).
     While I do not consider Milbank’s specific critique of Marion here, it must be noted that it is in his constructive response to Marion which we find that Milbank points to the explicit content of the gift, which is primarily theological.  He says,
Most remarkably, Luke’s birth narrative insists that a free reception of Christ was a condition of this gift being given from the very outset.  Hence, not only does Christ cancel sin in us, he arrives to us, and can only arrive at all by immediately cancelling sin in us.  Mary’s praise already cancels sin since it is able to speak the logos into being.  Of course this is all under grace, and Mary’s fiat is from that perspective inexorable, but nevertheless creation is restored, given back to us, in the same manner that it was first given to us in a gift that is (inexorably) our free reception and infinite return of the gift. . . . Without this reception, without this ‘reciprocity’, the gift would be so thwarted that it could not even begin to be this gift—the incarnate God.  The gift could be offered (to Mary) but not given, and a gift offered is not yet a gift, just as ‘a place at a university’ only becomes a ‘something’ when this offer is taken up and exercised.  And while a bicycle given might remain in a sense a gift if it lay around unused, one could only give ‘cycling’ if the gift was taken up.  But ‘use’ is really intended by every giving of every gift.  Hence reception and reciprocity is a condition of the gift as much as vice-versa.
One wonders, therefore, if one “cannot believe in a god who obliges my belief,” just what one would do with this scene from Luke, let alone 1 John 4:7-20 which reminds us of the simultaneous commandment and gift of the love of God and love of neighbour.  
     In Milbank’s conclusion, he states that “To be a Christian . . . is to repeat differently, in order to repeat, exactly, the content of Christ’s life, and to wait, by a necessary delay, the answering repetition of the other that will fold temporal linearity back into the eternal [perichoretic] circle of the triune life.”  This non-identical repetition assumes a kind of continual exchange which occurs within the economy of “[t]he coincidence, in God, of Being and beings (or esse and essential) as absolute relation.”  Finally, he contrasts the philosophical story with his Christian ontology:
Paradoxically, where the end of giving is to be, even though it might not have been, and so is an absolute free, univocal gift, then, indeed, a self-enclosed, unyielding and impersonal Being lies at the conclusion of the philosophical story.  By contrast, where Being is already assumed, where Being is what there is to give, even though it is now, for a Christian ontology, seen to be only in this giving, then gift is ‘further’ to Being, and Being itself, as bound in the reciprocal relation of give-and-take, is for-giving, a giving that is in turn, in the Holy Spirit, the gift of relation.
This is all predicated, as mentioned earlier, on “the one given condition of the gift, that we love because God first loved us.  It being given that God is love.”
     In his later work, Milbank has continued to address the notion of the gift and has traced out further constructive moves regarding delay, non-identical repetition, and the explicit content of the gift.  Already in “Can a Gift Be Given?” Milbank specifies that it is specifically the Spirit, given by God, which is “the gift, yet it is the relationship between Father and Son in which the Father, in fully giving himself to the Son also fully consigns himself, as giver, to this infinite form, shape or image of his donation.”  When Milbank comes toward the conclusion of his essay “Can Morality Be Christian?”, remaining within the pneumatological, he says, “To the abstract generality of the law, Paul opposes the specificity of divine gift which always takes the form of particular gifts in the sense of specific talents or charismata: these are ‘different gifts according to the gift given to us’ (Rom. 12:6).”  And, in his more recent Being Reconciled, Milbank “argues[s] that the content of a gift alone determines whether it is an appropriate gift, and therefore a gift at all.”
     In Milbank’s final analysis, he locates this content of the gift as repeated non-identically in the Eucharist, where “we see the only possible paradigm for gift and forgiveness, and therefore for ethics, not as one-way sacrifice, but as total surrender for renewed reception.”
     Can the cookies in Stranger than Fiction, then, be reconfigured theologically?  Perhaps by turning to the preface in Milbank’s Being Reconciled, one can find further assistance for this task.  For he says,
for theology there are no ‘givens’, only ‘gifts’.  Normally, in our secular society, one can say ‘Oh, there’s a box’, an inert ‘given’, and then maybe in addition one can say, ‘yes, it was a gift’.  But in Creation there are only givens in so far as they are also gifts: if one sees only objects, then one mis-apprehends and fails to recognize true natures. Here something can only be at all as a gift, and furthermore never ceases to be constantly given; in this case the act of giving is never something that reverts to the past tense.
Only then can a look at the cookies and flours (and music, and more) be properly seen, analogically, as a gift in Stranger than Fiction.  All of these are, within the context of the film, properly gifts not because they are in any sense ‘pure’.  We have already seen that based on phenomenological assumptions, the cookies and the flours are highly problematic in this film; however, if argued on a gift-exchange basis within the context of what I have outlined above, I will argue that the movie, even though not properly ‘theological’ in its subject matter, can be reconfigured in a more forgiving light.  Furthermore, I think it can also be argued that Harold Crick, before the reception of the cookies, exists along the trajectory of Derrida’s problematic of the gift that I sketched out in the first section.
     When Harold descends from the stairs and is offered a cookie by Miss Pascal, he initially rejects it.  Yet, even though ‘forced’ to eat the submerged-in-milk cookie, his delight causes him to inquire about the origin of this gift.  Miss Pascal obliges his inquiry by retelling her own enjoyment in baking pastries during study session at Harvard Law—so much so that she dropped out of her higher education to “make the world a better place” with cookies.  Perhaps wondering if Harold—in her effort toward making a difference—had himself become a part of her intended change, she asks him if she likes the cookie.
     “I do.”
     “I’m glad.”
     In the moment of acknowledging the gift in gift exchange with her classmates and in the interaction presently considered, Harold accepts the exchange, and Miss Pascal, in turn, takes joy in his delight at his reception of her offering.  It is only when she offers to give him cookies to take home that Harold is reminded that he cannot accept that which “constitutes ‘a gift.’”  When he offers to purchase them in order to make the gift reasonable and thus complete with a receipt of transaction, Miss Pascal shows Harold that he is not being hospitable himself by refusing his request.  He even says, “It’s not a big deal” in regard to purchasing the cookies, but that is exactly what he has made out of the cookies themselves: a deal, and a big one at that.
     It is in Harold’s crestfallenness that he finally realizes that her gift was not a general one that was just another product in her store, but was itself especially baked for him to be given to him as a gift.  Unfortunately, Harold has spent the entirety of his day weighing the events in order to determine whether his life is being narrated within a tragedy or a comedy, finally remarking, “I think I’m in a tragedy.”
     At this point, I would argue that it was this offering of the gift of the cookies to Harold which becomes the turning point for his life in the movie.  Prior to this, he was operating purely within the existence of “auditor, auditee, protocol,” counting everything: brush strokes, steps, and accounting for people’s lives through their tax returns.  It is only after Miss Pascal’s gift breaks into his world of pure exchange that he can be fully receptive to taking vacation time, learning to play the guitar, failing to wear a tie in a single Windsor knot, and forgetting to count brush strokes.  Yet, as is obvious, despite even Harold’s inability to step outside of his own narration and do nothing, the story continues in time (Professor Hilbert quickly concludes, “You do not control your own fate”).
     It is this in-breaking of the gift in Harold’s life which is also finally able to call him to give a gift back to Miss Pascal.  She initially sees his offering of the flours as an inconsistency, but she is only correct according to the ‘world’ in which Harold was previously inhabiting; now, she is wrong to offer to purchase them (as this would annul his gift), but she soon realizes that Harold is serious, and does accept them.  It is in the exchange of the give and the taking, which does not have to remain pure (Harold forgets one of the names of the flours he gives her), that Miss Pascal is in turn able to not only accept Harold’s gift, but the person of Harold in his own awkward initiation of a relationship (“I want you . . . in no uncertain terms”).  It is here that one can see that the following statement by Milbank could quite appropriately and in analogical fashion be applied to the progression—in time—of the relationship between Harold and Miss Pascal: “Hence the divine answer to the original human refusal of his gift is not to demand sacrifice – of which he has no need – but to go on giving in and through our refusals of the gift, to the point where these refusals are overcome.”  It is also of significance that the content of the cookies and the flours is important for each of the recipients: Harold, whose mother did not bake, and Miss Pascal, who uses flour on a daily basis to sell her pastries and make living “making the world a better place.”  It is thus precisely the content of these gifts which has made them appropriate and made them a gift at all.
     Harold and Miss Pascal, despite their awkwardness and clear disparity between his lumbering stature and her petite rebelliousness, have only begun to give each other gifts; amidst their prior refusals, their persistence has come has a surprise to one another.  The giving and receiving of gifts, if I may take a chance that did not seem possible at the beginning of essay with all of the aporias of the gift, has now become transformative.
     This gift of the cookies, given by Miss Pascal to Harold, has in turn given rise to Harold giving Miss Pascal flours, which provided the giving and receiving of dinner later that night, which also provided the further giving and receiving of the gift of music in Harold singing Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World.”  Yet, at this point, Harold is still expecting is “imminent death,” for Karen Eiffel has found out a way to kill off her protagonist.
     “Like anything worth writing it came inexplicably and without method,” Eiffel tells her assistant, Penny Escher.  For Eiffel, the ‘gift’ of the climax of her novel—that which makes her a genius in the eyes of Professor Hilbert—can only arrive unilaterally.  She will throw Harold Crick in front of a bus, killing him in order to save the life of a child.  Satisfied with her ending, Karen Eiffel herself is about to be surprised to find out that her main character is in fact real.  Harold finds her to tell her that he is real and to not kill him off, and she has to come to terms with his reality.  Later, when Harold reads the untyped outline of Eiffel’s conclusion to her manuscript, he mistakenly resigns to his fate, convinced by Professor Hilbert’s affirmation of art above the good of human life itself: “look, I read it and I loved it, and there’s only one way that it can end.  I mean, I, uh, don’t have much background in literary anything, but it seems simple enough.  I love your book, and I think you should finish it.”
     Karen Eiffel does finish typing her manuscript.  She finishes it as Harold’s scene of heroism unfolds, but Eiffel has a surprise in store for both Professor Hilbert and for Harold: he does not die.  No, he does not die from his act of fateful heroism, but is instead severely injured, only being saved by a shard of his wristwatch which somehow blocks the flow of too much blood from leaving his body.  Eiffel’s rewritten conclusion does not proceed inexplicably, however, for as she explains, “Because it’s a book about a man who doesn’t know he is about to die, and then dies, but if the man does know he’s going to die and dies anyway – and dies willingly – knowing he could stop it then … I mean, isn’t that the type of man you want to keep alive?”  In a sense, because Harold has given himself over to his narrator, she has given him his life back.  It is not without imperfections, as his body is horribly and nearly hyperbolically injured, judging by the amount of casts and suspension pulleys that support his fractured frame in the final scene.  
     True, Karen’s rewritten ending is not perfect.  According to strict literary standards and purity of story, Harold’s giving of his life is no longer unilateralist, as he manages to survive the collision.  It is no longer unilateralist because Karen Eiffel, despite looking for death and “those who aren’t going to make it” for inspiration for the authorship of her own uncreative act, has returned something back to Harold: his life.  
     So close to death, covered in casts and bandages, Harold has also been returned to Miss Pascal, who continues to offer the gift of herself and her baking, which Eiffel narrates not as a given, but as a gift:
As Harold took a bite of Bavarian sugar cookie he finally felt as if everything was going to be okay.  Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine, and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies, and fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies, we can find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind a loving gesture, or a subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort,

not to mention --

hospital gurneys, and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, and soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe, and the occasional piece of fiction.  And we must remember, that all these things – the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days are in fact here for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives.  I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true.
The hospital gurneys, nose plugs, loving embraces and gestures of comfort do not remain as givens as they had prior to these moments in the movie.  Through the mutual exchange of gifts over time, these reassurances and objects have been reconfigured by the movie’s end.  These are strange, indeed, as Eiffel says, and they do not abide by protocol, and they may still not appease the Professor Hilberts of the world who remain aloof from a false objectivity, nor, I would add, is there a one-to-one allegorical signification between Stranger than Fiction and a distinct theology of forgiveness or the divine feast as seen in Les Misérables and Babette’s Feast; but, the gift that is given in love, perseverance, and hope—like the story of Harold, Miss Pascal, and yes, even his wristwatch—may just surprise us.

Bibliography

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