Nine to five

[Dave Monroe]

Nine to five

Melville's sailors, Hemingway's soldiers and Roth's writers - many of
our greatest novels are driven by work. Yet few of us have such
romantic occupations. Joshua Ferris, author of an acclaimed debut
about office life, goes in search of the workaday world in American
literature

Saturday April 21, 2007
The Guardian

The workday proves dull. With a bellyful of Indian buffet, the
Computer Programmer feels acutely the endless hour between three and
four. Somebody has left a copy of Kafka's The Metamorphosis in the
office kitchen, among a still life of plastic forks, newspaper, a
misplaced stapler and a half-eaten crumb cake. The Computer Programmer
refills his coffee and takes the book back to his snug cube and,
glancing around to ensure no one is watching, dives into the dim
nightmare of a man who - how's this? - wakes one day to discover
himself a bug.

The Marketing Consultant finishes dispatching sage advice to company
officials who now jump from their seats to make actionable her Seven
Steps to Greater Market Share. She will oversee their progress, but in
the meantime must use the restroom. The Marketing Consultant pulls
from the shelves of her office a fat anthology of world literature,
which vaguely calls to mind her days as a humanities undergrad. But
she's never read that story by Herman Melville called "Bartleby, the
Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street". She sneaks the book into the
women's, settles herself in a stall, and encounters - come now. A man
who would prefer not to.

[...].

Scenarios like these might not happen every day. In the YouTube era,
these examples of consultants and project managers cutting the day's
dread with fiction might just be a fantasy of novelists. But there
have been few singular achievements in literature more noteworthy,
more time worthy, more universal despite their otherness, than
"Bartleby" and The Metamorphosis. Reasons for their lasting literary
merit are easy enough: invention and comedy, pathos and command of
craft combine in a perfect mix in both novellas, as well as in the
contemporary short stories of Saunders. But another thing all three
have in common, which recommends them to a special place on the office
worker's bookshelf, is this: they concern themselves with the trial
and toil of work itself.

This is rare. The workday proves dull not only to the Computer
Programmer, but to the novelist. When there's war to attend to, and
heartbreak, and class struggle and familial strife and rage against
the dying light, why would one preoccupy oneself, when endeavouring to
write fiction, with the nine-to-five?

Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn't mirror
the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life...

[...]

Work, then - broadly defined - is central to literature. Don Quixote
goes headlong into the windmill - what is the noble fool doing but his
misguided work? Work puts Ishmael on the Pequod. Work brings Esther to
Bleak House and sends Humbert Humbert to the house on Lawn Street.
Work defines the plot and central moral conceit of Ian McEwan's
Saturday. Work as wayward scientific inquiry prompts Tyrone Slothrop's
erections during the Blitz and forces him out into the Zone in Thomas
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, while work as blind loyalty reveals the
trouble with blind loyalty in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.
These examples highlight how vocation in literature is never
happenstance, never half-hearted decision-making, but artfully
premeditated and always purposeful. Work does work in every great book
- even if just to allow the characters enough leisure time to pursue
the main drama.

As strategically and thematically smart as Fitzgerald is when
assigning vocations to his characters - vocations that aid and abet by
professional title the novel's personal drama - he nevertheless keeps
work-related matters topical. It is the nature of the work, not the
work itself, that informs. A different story arises when a writer
chooses to go deeper into work, to turn work into one of literature's
main characters.

What do I mean by work? Can we really define the word so broadly as to
include Don Quixote's satirical delusions of his knight-errantry? Or
how about Marlow's trip down the perilous African river in Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness? Are these characters really working? For
convenience sake, let's call that kind of work way-of-life work.
Conrad's Marlow is getting paid for his African journey, but he is
first and foremost an inveterate seaman, and he's desperate at the
story's outset for a boat to command. Once he signs the company's
contracts, no matter the intimations of nightmares to come, he is on
an inexorable path utterly independent of the need for earthly
recompense.

Way-of-life work catches in its net most of literature's biggest fish,
in part because it offers the most heroic, or romantic, or tragic, or
comic possibilities...

Most of us living in the workaday world aren't soldiers or novelists
or seafaring men, however, and not many women arrange parties any more
as a primary occupation. As the phrase "increasingly globalised
economy" gets pummelled into our psyches, as the service-centred,
technology-driven corporate world continues its ascendancy, as we
shift further from industry to information, those of us in the first
world tend to work, now more than ever, in business-casual, desk-bound
offices, in positions like the Computer Programmer and Project
Manager. This might be called means-to-end work, and it has received,
in relation to the amount of actual time spent in offices, a
disproportionate attention in literature than way-of-life work has.

Why? Perhaps because the Computer Programmer and his colleagues often
come equipped with packages of safety not unlike the one possessed by
Rodge Janney, Don DeLillo's elevated everyman in the opening pages of
Mao II: "He's got a degree . . . and a tax attorney and a cardiologist
and a mutual fund and whole life and major medical." Unless in the
service of a character's demise, such privilege is not usually the
fiction writer's best bet for capitalising on dramatic or romantic
opportunity....

George Saunders shows us the alternative. Following one of Nabokov's
first rules laid down in his Lectures on Literature - "the work of art
is invariably the creation of a new world" - Saunders has, from his
first story collection (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), taken the dull
raw material of corporate reality and thrown it into the forge of a
highly idiosyncratic imagination, so that what is all too real about
work is renewed through the endless possibilities of art. And he has
done so, in stories like "The 400-Pound CEO", "Commcomm" and
especially "Pastoralia", without abandoning his commitment to a
serious study of the workaday world.

Historically in American fiction, tackling work has fallen
overwhelmingly to the realist novelist. Fancy and imaginative play
don't enter business, the earnest writer concludes. Why, then, should
they inform a literature about business? ...

[...]

The tide was turning. As American literature entered the extravagant
and vacuous 1980s, exemplified in novels like Wolfe's The Bonfire of
the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho - which updates
the Babbitt myth by turning him into a homicidal sociopath - the
pinched lives of those doing means-to-end work best exemplified by
Babbitt and Frank Wheeler became de rigueur: of course we all work
deadening jobs, of course conformity carries the day. Now let's stop
complaining about it and make some money! ...

So what makes for a lasting work literature? If the rise-and-fall
paradigm of the commercial novel tends to highlight the moneyed elite,
if the novels of social commentary tend to age poorly even when
displaying a high degree of prescience, if arch realism about dead-end
jobs results in either hopelessness or pat reassurances, and if satire
merely lampoons the capitalist enterprise and the characters caught up
in it, what sticks?

[...]

Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of The Metamorphosis, also has an
exhausting job. The heavy burden of caring for his helpless family is
overwhelming, equal only to his sense of obligation to them. He can't
quit; he can only take solace in falling back to sleep for a few
minutes - hitting snooze just one more time, so to speak - before the
alarm clock forces him up. At the beginning of Kafka's story, Gregor
should have arisen at four but has overslept, and now the clock reads
half past six and is "getting on toward a quarter to seven".

[...]

When the Marketing Consultant reads "Bartleby, the Scrivener",
published in 1853, she finds that Melville captures most of the
essential facts of office life still prevalent 150 years later.
There's unbridled snacking ("my two scriveners were fain to moisten
their mouths very often with Spitzenbergs"), temperamental colleagues,
fights with office furniture ("Nippers could never get this table to
suit him"), unsatisfying views "deficient in what landscape painters
call 'life'", disaffection with work ("a very dull, wearisome, and
lethargic affair"), and a supervisor's "natural expectancy of instant
compliance".

What distinguishes it, however, is not the verisimilitude, but the
beguiling title character, hired by Melville's nameless narrator to
copy law papers. Over the course of the story, Bartleby systematically
reduces his workload by responding to the narrator's every demand with
the simple rejoinder "I would prefer not to". If his objection is
based on principle, or driven by some dark event in his past, or the
result of a lunacy, it is impossible to know. The point is only his
refusal. Bartleby may be the first character in the history of
literature who is required to do means-to-end work with the
expectation that he consider it as meaningful as way-of-life work. He
fails utterly. What he does do, however, is leave the realm of
realism, despite Melville's attention to authentic office life, and
enter into a mystery as elusive and intriguing as that which traps
Gregor in a bug's life. When Bartleby prefers not to, he does more
than throw off the balance of a Wall Street office...

[...]

Melville, Kafka and Saunders stand out because they don't yield to the
familiar or the real. They create highly singular characters who play
out idiosyncratic storylines that defy predictability and eschew the
burden of Representative Man. Yet they don't fail to look means-to-end
work squarely in the eye. There's just no preaching here, no dire
warning, no condemnation or historical document. They don't give us
merely something to nod along with; they give us something to marvel
at. What they offer is invention, cruelty, humour, compassion,
artfulness, rebuke, delight - the whole rounded ball of the world, set
into orbit by the mechanics of the nine-to-five. Their labour is our
reward.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2061320,00.html