V. Is the office anti-American? It is, of course, completely American, as much a product of late-phase capitalist degeneracy as Baywatch, Dick Cheney, and your mom’s apple pie. But might there be something in contemporary office culture that goes against the American grain, against the American character as it was formed amid the primal intuitions of this great nation? Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, set in a Chicago advertising agency, would seem to suggest that there is. Deep within this excellent novel, which is narrated by an office group-mind (“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.”), there is a radical luminous hymn to the individual and his powers. Unfortunately, the singer of this hymn is the most loony character in the book — just-divorced and about-to-be-shitcanned Tom Mota, with a barbed-wire tattoo around his bicep and a “rippling succession of necks,” who is known around the office to be “responsible for many things, including changing everyone’s radio stations, making pornographic screensavers, and leaving his seed on the floor of the men’s rooms on sixty and sixty-one.” Tom is drastically un-PC, and prone to lunging, aberrant insights. He talks a lot about Ralph Waldo Emerson. “The problem with reading this guy,” he says, waving a copy of Emerson’s complete essays and poems at a co-worker, “is the same problem you have reading Walt Whitman. You read him at all? Those two fucks wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in this place.”
VI. My first piece of published prose was about an office. For about 10 days in 1991, I had a job analyzing transport statistics in an office in Hammersmith, West London. I applied certain equations to the record of traffic flow through various rotaries and junctions, performing my tasks with reasonable efficiency until a sequence of howling panic attacks drove me from the building. I later wrote up the experience, skimpily fictionalized, for a small literary magazine. “Never before had I masturbated with such ferocity and desperation” is the only line I can remember. My parents, in the company of two of my siblings, read the piece silently over dinner in a Thai restaurant. My father reached the end, put the magazine down, and sighed. “Well,” he said, “at least he’s getting it out of his system.”
VII. Production is all: to survive, to persist in the office, you must either produce or diligently manufacture the illusion thereof. Much can be got away with if you’re careful with your PR. “Give a man a reputation as an early riser,” said Mark Twain, “and he can sleep until noon every day.” But what if you don’t feel like playing the game — or if you just won’t? The great parable of corporate non-performance is Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” in which a lawyer’s assistant, a pale transcriber of documents, engineers a sort of one-man economic slowdown. With the immortal words “I would prefer not to,” Bartleby phlegmatically declines to do first this thing, then that, and then the other, until finally he is doing nothing at all. Crucially, though, he refuses to leave the office: he remains there, silent and ghostly in aspect, like a supernatural reproach to his colleagues — and to work itself. His employer is confounded: “Say now,” he pleads after a few weeks of this, “that you will begin to examine papers tomorrow or the next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable: — say so, Bartleby.” “At present,” comes the reply, “I would prefer not to be a little reasonable.” Enervated by such “passive resistance,” the lawyer finds he is morally unable to have Bartleby ejected from the premises: instead he moves his whole office, leaving Bartleby behind. Bartleby is taken at last to prison, where — clinging with grim fidelity, like a mystic, to his principle of doing bugger-all — he declines to eat, and so wastes away. “Ah Bartleby!” laments his employer. “Ah humanity!” “Bartleby the Scrivener” was written in 1853, while the unborn spirits of Kafka, Borges, Barry, Ferris, and Park looked on with deep interest.
