An interesting plea for more “workplace literature”:
Without quite grasping the extent of our debt, we rely on writers to help explain the world to us. It’s they who give us a feel for what it’s like to fall in love, who give us words for describing the landscape around us, and who help us interpret the dynamics of our families. Such is their power that we can name whole slices of experience with adjectives built of their names. We speak of encountering, sometimes in the most unlikely settings, dynamics most succinctly described as “Proustian,” “Austenesque,” and “Kafkan.” Writers are our map-makers.
However, many contemporary writers are notably silent about a key area of our lives: our work. If a proverbial alien landed on earth and tried to figure out what human beings did with their time simply on the evidence of the literature sections of a typical bookstore, he or she would come away thinking that we devote ourselves almost exclusively to leading complex relationships, squabbling with our parents, and occasionally murdering people. What is too often missing is what we really get up to outside of catching up on sleep, which is going to work at the office, store, or factory.
Well, yes and no. It’s a terrible misreading of the body of work of Proust, Austen, and Kafka to think that they function as primary sources of knowledge and insight into the workforce, either today or when they were published. Proust is best known for his gauzy sentimentalism and self-reflection; Austen for her obsession with women’s relationship to men and power (and society); and Kafka for his focus on the macabre (Samsa’s employment is incidental to the real story of his acceptance of his transformation into an insect).
The workplace is no longer the object of literary scrutiny, because for the most part it hasn't changed in decades
Other writers come up in that piece—Dickens (who was all about class and society, not necessarily the drudges of the workplace), and others who the writer seems to just misread in pursuit of his point. Indeed, I’m rather surprised he didn’t mention Herman Melville, whose short work Bartelby, the Scrivner: A Story of Wall Street is specifically about workplace, and also one of the most tedious and uninteresting stories ever written.
But even in that, the writer misses the point. The workplace is no longer the object of literary scrutiny, because for the most part it hasn’t changed in decades: people still get up, leave their families for hours a day, usually toil in boredom and annoyance for people they dislike, then return home and try to recover enough to do it again. That basic narrative hasn’t changed since the 19th century, though the continuing rise of telecommuting and cottage industries and creative economies (and other buzzwords) is slowly changing it. But the numbers are small, far too small for a writer to discuss in a way most people can relate to.
Then there are movies, countless numbers of them, all designed to lampoon the workplace. Obviously Mike Judge owns this genre with Office Space, a brilliant movie that remains so despite being beaten to death by Comedy Central. Indeed, the big change in “workplace literature” stems not from a writer’s serious and sober contemplation of what it means to be a worker and how that enriches one’s life, but how the very idea of a workplace has become farce. Anyone who has ever held an office job can relate to Michael Bolton beating up his fax machine, just as most people who have been bored stiff and beaten down by their bosses can relate to Edward Norton going psychotic in Fight Club.
Which brings up, for me, the most troubling aspect of that essay: the Soviet Union deliberately fostered an obsession with the workplace as the center of meaning (along with other Socialist ideals). While that may have made sense for a society in which what one does defined a person, that certainly isn’t the case in the U.S. We may spend a disproportionate amount of time at our jobs, but few would define themselves by what they do (asking the employment question at parties is usually a convenient ice breaker, nothing more). I am much more than my job.
I would say that is the bigger story. People around my age—in their late 20’s—for the most part do not define ourselves by our occupations. The majority of my friends hold their jobs because that is how they can afford their houses, children, vacations, and cars. Their job is their job, and they are quite happy to be done with it at the end of the day. So why would they want to write, or even read, about that?
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