Abstract
This article examines a literary tradition that promotes clerkdom as a refuge for sensitive writers and intellectuals. Recent scholarly work on the role of the novel in organization studies often treats the novel as something that might be introduced to employees by well-meaning scholars as a means of generating insight into their circumstances. In contrast, this study positions workplace literature as spontaneously discovered by, and largely produced by, office workers themselves as part of a tradition of office intellectualism. Focusing on the rich interface between the office and literature, this creative process is understood to be ongoing and self-sustaining, morphing alongside technological change into forms such as the blog. The article argues that the intellectual lives of workers deserve greater attention, positing high literature on lowly clerks as a rich soil that nurtures today’s over-educated office denizens.
The writer-clerk tradition
Generally speaking, clerks go unnoticed, people underestimate them. (José Saramago, All the Names)
This article sets out by exploring how literary fiction is regarded in organization studies, highlighting inattention to the relationship between ‘great’ novels and the ongoing production of workplace writing. Drawing on Rose’s (2010) account of working class intellectual life, it argues that a tradition which combines clerkdom and intellectualism might be expected in today’s offices, and deserves greater attention in our field. The ongoing production of workplace fiction, it is argued, is nurtured by a sense of community with the literary clerks of the past, and flourishes in the interstices of the contemporary knowledge workplace.
Employing my own lay reading of various novels and author biographies, I describe a literary mode that romanticizes the role of the sensitive yet insignificant office worker. This literature is often deeply intertwined with the work histories of the authors concerned, some of whom worked briefly in mundane office jobs, while others sustained a lifelong existence as author/clerk. This fabric, it is suggested, legitimizes a particular orientation to mundane employment, celebrating ‘hiding out’ in undemanding organizational roles while diverting workplace resources into one’s own creative and intellectual projects. Today’s workblogs, it is argued, are merely the latest phase of a self-sustaining tradition of irreverent and critical office-based writing.
Literary insider accounts of office life span at least two centuries, and the novels and poems inspired by white-collar existence are some of the milestones of modern literature. Arguably, Dickens’ Circumlocution Office owes its existence to his sojourn as law clerk, and Kafka’s impersonal bureaucracies to his intimate knowledge of the Bohemian insurance industry; even Gogol’s overcoat (from which, Dostoyevsky reputedly argued, all later Russian novels emerged) sprang from his penurious spell in the civil service. The organization studies literature acknowledges the biographical origin of some workplace writing, however, this recognition is restricted to individual biography rather than connected to a rich fabric of intellectual clerkdom. Existing scholarship also recognizes the power of literature to instill critical consciousness and to disrupt and overflow operational goals. However, a prevailing focus on instrumentally using great novels to instill such awareness in management students, means inadequate attention has been paid to an existing tradition of office intellectualism that nurtures literary consumption and production without the need for external intervention.
While recognizing the worth of this scholarship within its own scope, this article theorizes the production of workplace literature as a self-sustaining, dynamic process, that is already located in today’s offices, and anchored in a supportive literary tradition that romanticizes the double life of the lowly office clerk and sensitive reader/writer. Acknowledgement of this tradition, it is argued, can help us to understand the recent blogging phenomenon, which produced a slew of trenchant, witty office fictions from call centres, IT departments and local government offices. This study upholds that these seemingly new phenomena are undergirded by a rich and well-established reading and writing subculture that emerges in an ongoing fashion from within office work itself.
This account deals specifically with ‘high’ literature on lowly clerks that, I argue, offers a way of orienting oneself to the organization that limits commitment and enables the intellect to flourish. The literary artefacts featured in this study are widely available—more often than not, my copies were purchased from independent bookstores, borrowed from friends (possibly forever, as is the way with good novels), or received as gifts. This article has grown out of my own interaction with the work of writers such as Forster, Camus, Walser and Houellebecq, its starting point—in order to capture a particular knowledge worker’s interaction with literature—is my own bookshelf. Before becoming a full-time academic in 2008, I spent over a decade in the IT industry, working as a web designer and project manager. For me, carrying such books to and from work, reading them in the elevator and placing them visibly on my desk, is a badge of separateness that has frequently made cubicle life more tolerable and more intelligible. The writers featured in the article are almost all male yet, as a female employee, I have felt able to inhabit the ideas they represent and map them onto my organizational reality. The bias toward male authors in the article may be a methodological issue related to this reader’s predilection for male writing. However, further research into the gendered characteristics of writer-clerkdom—while beyond the scope of this article—may yield interesting results.
The selection from and reading of these texts is thus introspective in nature, but it is also social, an example of doing research with friends (Brewis, 2011) in that the featured fictional works have been discovered as part of everyday life and social interaction with my peer group outside of academia. The selected authors are those who have been shared, discussed and celebrated over the course of many years with a specific group of family and friends who work in non-literary, non-academic office jobs in fields such as housing, IT and public policy. Several members of this peer group are bloggers and/or aspiring novelists who took part in my PhD research on anonymous workblogging. Among this knowledge worker peer group, these works are shorthand for a countercultural, yet not overly strident, orientation to life: a sensibility that is ambivalent, complex and a little effete, yet resolutely critical. The intention is not to frame such an orientation as the norm but to posit intellectual clerkdom as a rich, legitimizing tradition that is readily available to knowledge workers outside of the literary and scholarly professions. Through the books themselves, I have therefore tried to describe a particular attachment to the lowly clerk in literature and hope that any claim to generality might be located in the detail of that attachment, not in sweeping abstraction (Geertz, 2000: 25).
This article explicitly engages with the novels concerned at the level of ‘lay’ reading and is not literary criticism or philosophical interpretation of a particular text. It draws briefly on recent Bartleby scholarship, for example, Beverungen and Dunne (2007), but its goal is to convey how texts such as Bartleby the Scrivener (Melville, 2004) are encountered outside of the realm of academic journals. My reliance on mainstream sources rather than scholarly interpretations has an ethnographic intent, aiming to convey a level of awareness of literary fiction that may be gleaned by a non-specialist from editions available in public libraries and bookstores. For biographical information on the authors, I have relied upon popular biographies, and prefatory essays that are often bundled with novels by way of introduction. I have tried to convey the type of familiarity with these authors that is prevalent among my non-academic peer group, who enjoy these books at a recreational level, while perhaps drawing on the benefits of formal education in literature or modern languages that many of today’s intriguingly overqualified call centre operators and office functionaries can lay claim to.
The article sets out by surveying organization studies scholarship on literature and the workplace, identifying a lack of theoretical analysis of the writer-clerk tradition. It then introduces Rose’s work on working class intellectualism which, by highlighting the literary proclivity among insurance clerks and civil servants of the past, draws our attention to the self-nurturing intellectual community that gave rise to workplace writing in the 19th and early 20th century and provokes us to expect an intellectual tradition in contemporary offices. Looking specifically at enduring representations of the clerk in literature, this tradition is proposed as a self-perpetuating anchor for today’s knowledge workers whose creative self-expression is potentially nurtured by an established cultural ideal of the sensitive lowly clerk.
Fiction as pedagogy, data and disruption
Scholarship on the use of fiction in organization studies advocates the use of workplace literature as data and promotes the use of literary narrative accounts to educate organizational actors. It recognizes that literary accounts often emerge from workplace experience and that these accounts are a powerful tool for stimulating critical reflection among organizational actors. But this scholarship also urges us to move beyond an operational approach to literature and appreciate its overflowing, autonomous nature. Consistent with this trend, this article therefore proposes that this self-nurturing dynamic of literature be more recognized in our discipline and that closer attention be paid to the literary as a rich, already-existing tradition in the knowledge workplace.
The educational power of literature is readily captured by Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux (1994: 1) who advocate the use of ‘good’ novels to educate better managers, and Knights and Willmott, whose Management Lives (1999) prepares the managers of tomorrow by drawing lessons from novels. In a similar vein, Phillips (1995: 636–637) notes that fictional narratives provide a source of vicarious experience for students and a handy way to elicit ‘war-stories’ from workers. Recognising this function in their three-mode typology for the use of fictional narrative, De Cock and Land (2006: 518) suggest, as mode three, that great literature might be used fruitfully to exemplify organizational issues and educate management practitioners. Developing this third mode, Sliwa and Cairns (2007) employ the concept of lay reading of literary fiction as a critical reflection tool for knowledge workers and McJob holders.
Often integral to this interest in the power of workplace literature is recognition that great writers often based their writing on their actual working experiences, bolstering the claim that fiction can be used as data. Regarding fiction as data is a notion that originates in Waldo’s (1968) contention that novels offer vicarious experience or, less acknowledged in our field, in Coser’s (1963: 2) view that novels are social evidence and testimony, ‘the precious record of modes of response to peculiar social and cultural conditions’. Consistent with this view, Phillips (1995: 639) regards such narratives as a window on organizational reality, noting that ‘years of personal experience often underlie fictional representations’. Similarly, Czarniawska-Joerges and Giullet de Monthoux’s (1994) volume takes an interest in the experience-led nature of workplace writing. For example, the chapter by Manoukian (1994) purposefully highlights writing based on the autobiographical experiences of three Italian authors, discussing how these authors richly unpack the subjective relationship between self and organization. Within this literature, interpretation of fiction as data or testimony is not necessarily a prosaic or literal affair. Drawing on Czarniawska (1998, 1999) and De Cock and Land (2006), Munro and Huber’s (2012) analysis of Franz Kafka explores the value to our field of forms of sensemaking that do not map neatly and rationally onto lived experience. Czarniawska’s (2009, 2012) more recent work also promotes a broad interpretation of the relationship between the novel and organization studies that emphasizes interactivity and traverses time and space.
The rich literary insight that derives from organizational experience comes to the fore in this scholarship but literary output is not theorized as a dynamic, self-nourishing tradition. Organization studies values the biographical origins of great fiction but has not theorized the ongoing camaraderie among the writer-clerks of past and present. While specific texts are added to an enlightenment programme that introduces great fiction into the workplace, less explicit attention is paid to the pre-existing cultural fabric that gives rise to, and sustains such fiction.
Although the presence of a literary tradition in the workplace is under-theorized in our field, there is much implicit support for such an analysis in scholarship that unfolds the unconstrained and unruly tendencies of literature. Following Waldo (1968), Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux (1994: 9) recognize that literature captures a subjective dimension of working life, de-emphasizing simple causal relationships and instead richly exploring human motives. Moreover, the open-endedness and complexity of novelistic portrayal counters reductive thinking or hegemonic discourse (Watson, 2011), offering a subversive take on organizational life (Bakhtin, 1984; Phillips, 1995). In this vein, De Cock and Land uphold Iser’s (1993: 13) conviction that fiction critiques social organization by directing our attention to that which is not, helping us to conceive of alternatives that challenge the status quo (De Cock and Land, 2006: 524). They also invoke Barthes’ (1982: 187–188) notion of the novelist as écrivain who, lacking an instrumental goal, gains the power to disturb the world (De Cock and Land, 2006: 525). De Cock and Land (2006), in particular, highlight the overflowing quality of literature—although their typology outlines specific functions of fictional narrative, theirs is also a meditation on the potential for literature to surprise us, to make its own rules and bypass those we prescribe. They call for a less rational, less methodologically constrained engagement between literature and organization studies, disrupting the tendency to look for ways management might profit from literature and instead exploring the relationship in a more adventurous, sensual way.
The potentially subversive, mind-expanding nature of literary workplace narratives is thus readily acknowledged in existing studies, but analysis of how this literature comes into being is too often relegated to individualized biographical detail. Alternatively, close attention is paid to the potential of a pedagogical intervention in reaching contemporary organizational actors and stimulating critical reflection. However, the idea that such workers may already be avid readers, writers and debaters of such novels has not been sufficiently explored within our field. Largely, this is a matter of scope rather than oversight in the existing literature. De Cock and Land (2006: 518) are concerned with theorizing a less instrumental contagion between the fields of organization studies and literature rather than analysing a specific literary tradition. Sliwa and Cairns (2007) acknowledge, drawing on DeVault, that readers base their own assertions about society on fictional accounts they have read, but their intellectual project is concerned with introducing organizational actors to fictional accounts of working life, rather than contemplating those who are already in active dialogue with such texts, or who are actively producing workplace narratives of their own. Similarly, Knights and Willmott (1999) perceive that interesting things happen to managers and workers who are exposed to great literature and implicitly acknowledge that such actors are also key producers of some of the classic accounts of workplace life, yet their focus is, again, on introducing students to literature rather than examining the process through which these accounts continually come into being.
In contrast with the above literature, this article focuses attention on the organizational actor as author. It considers literary workplace narrative and its surrounding cultural fabric as a supportive medium via which current employees may creatively negotiate a writerly organizational identity and in turn produce narratives of their own. A viral metaphor is useful here—in particular, De Cock and Land’s (2006) focus on the literary as interacting with organization studies via fluid and unruly contagion. Borrowing from De Cock and Land’s analysis this study applies the viral concept at a different interface, directing our attention to the free-flowing and self-nurturing contagion between the office and literature.
A key intellectual touchstone in framing office writing as a self-sustaining tradition is Rose’s (2010) historical survey of working class intellectual life. Rose’s work is important to this article in two ways: first, it draws our attention to a dynamic process through which nineteenth and early twentieth century clerks read, wrote and exchanged ideas via lively debate and office exchange, providing a basis for asserting that a similar tradition may be alive and well today. Second it counsels us to abandon the academic conceit that our expertise and intervention is necessary if any kind of authentic intellectual production is to take place. This provides support for the notion that a self-nurturing literary tradition underlies emerging forms of office writing.
This article thus sets out by visiting Rose’s historical contribution to our understanding of the intellectual lives of office workers. It then describes, using a selection of books and authors identified by myself and my non-academic peer group, a literary tradition that romanticizes lowly clerkdom, promoting the role of the literary lowly office worker as an attractive organizational identity. The article then proposes that these writers and their works are part of a broader countercultural fabric that offers intellectual ballast and a potential source of identity for today’s workers. Finally, it argues that this fabric nurtures and incubates a particular orientation to work that might be considered as ‘hiding out’, which potentially fuels the production of critical workplace narrative. As such, it proposes a future research project that might study how office workers actively and creatively engage with the tradition of intellectual clerkdom, as producers and consumers of workplace literature.
Expecting literary office workers: Rose’s contribution
Jonathan Rose’s extensive survey of 19th and early 20th century working class intellectualism predisposes us to expect a literary sensibility among office clerks rather than attaching it to exceptional genius. In a chapter entitled ‘What was Leonard Bast Really Like?’ (a playful reference to the unfortunate autodidact clerk in Forster’s Howard’s End), Rose critiques the modernist conceit that authentic intellectualism and clerkdom are mutually exclusive. He notes that authors such as Woolf and Forster had a ‘corrosive hostility’ toward the class of ‘half-educated’ workers that was emerging via the Board Schools and an expansion in white-collar roles in insurance, civil service and banking. While predominantly male, this group also included female ‘Basts’, whose numbers were boosted by the opportunities that arose during World War I (412). Rose contends that these workers, who read voraciously and dared to try their hands at journalism and novel-writing, were a threat to the intelligentsia who retaliated by denigrating ‘middlebrow’ culture and pursuing a form of literature inaccessible to those outside of university and literary circles.
Rose shows that, in spite of Forster’s wish-fulfilling attempt to crush aspirational clerks under heavy bookcases, intellectual life flourished in the lower ranks of many large organizations. Memoirs of Edwardian clerks, he argues, show how unlike they were from the alienated Bast: ‘they depict themselves as part of a large and lively community of philosopher-accountants’ (2010: 407). These clerks celebrated their ability to multi-task, using part of the brain for work tasks while leaving room for intellectual discussion; and many were able to complete work tasks quickly in order to free up hours for surreptitious reading. The civil service, in particular, was seen as a refuge for sensitive souls such as poet Richard Church who found great camaraderie with other would-be artists in the Customs House canteen (2010: 415). Of course, this particular duality of lowly clerkdom and rich intellectual life was produced by specific conditions of class and social mobility, which are particular to the period. However, Rose’s analysis makes current developments in graduate employment particularly intriguing—during an economic recession where humanities graduates increasingly wind up in call centres and customer service jobs (Davis, 2012; Snowdon, 2010), might we anticipate a contemporary critical mass of well-read functionaries who carve out an organizational identity that is part clerk, part novelist or poet? With this in mind, the following section is an encounter with the literary clerks of the past and near present—a communication from a lay-reading perspective of a way of being, in relation to the organization, that has continuing relevance and potential appeal to literary types who hide out, whether by design or by necessity, in knowledge organizations. It is an appeal—via an enduring tradition of sensitive lowly clerkdom—to consider what today’s Leonard Basts might really be like, and to pay greater attention to the rich literary soil that humdrum work represents.
The sensitive and brilliant lowly clerk
The idea of pursuing one’s art clandestinely as a lowly clerk, or of being a future superman in the temporary guise of clerk, is a persistent literary theme that provides a potential source of identity and romantic attachment for today’s office workers. In sharp contrast to De Balzac, who dismissed clerks’ thoughts as ‘strictly confined to a monotonous round’ (1963: 184), Melville’s short novel Bartleby the Scrivener announces in its opening lines that office clerks are more intriguing than they might initially appear. The narrator remarks on his fascination with scriveners as, ‘what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written’ (2004: 1). Following Melville’s lead rather than Balzac’s, portrayals of office clerks resound with intellectual curiosity and quiet rebellion, of an often ridiculous yet intriguing quality.
Although frequently imbued with a tragic-comic and even sociopathic character, the lowly clerks of literature are imaginative and quirkily recalcitrant. Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (2005) attempt to leave the office behind via a sequence of harebrained schemes, exhibiting—albeit in a continually infuriated and mocking fashion (Flaubert viewed his copyists with contempt)—the creative potential and imaginative power of the clerk. With less buffoonery, Dostoyevsky’s early works, The Double (1846) and Poor Folk (1846), chart the romantic inner lives of impoverished civil servants, and in Notes From Underground (1972), an embittered civil servant holes himself up in a St Petersburg basement to write out his manifesto against men of action. Aware of his inner turmoil and pent-up intellectual energy, he warns: ‘I am certain that underground people like me must be kept in check. Though we may be capable of sitting underground for forty years without saying a word, if we do come out into the world and burst out, we will talk and talk and talk … ’ (p. 43).
While some accounts celebrate inertia and lack of ambition, others portray the clerk as a coiled spring, storing up potential ready for a brilliant debut. In this vein, De Maupassant’s Bel-Ami is advised that if he wishes to make it as in society circles, he is better off remaining as an inconspicuous civil servant than taking a position as a riding master that would permanently mark his relative social status: ‘In your clerk’s job at least you’re out of sight, no one knows who you are, you can get out of it if you’re determined enough and still make your mark’ (1975: 31). Similarly, while employed as a bank clerk, Walser’s Simon Tanner exalts in his unrecognized potential: ‘How little those around me seem to suspect I might be capable of quite different things’ (2009: 51).
This unrecognized potential is sometimes unleashed within the workplace, with disruptive consequences. In Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) the over-educated medievalist Ignatius J Reilly wreaks havoc from his post as a clerk in a dilapidated pants factory. In taking the job, Ignatius reassures himself that ‘being actively engaged in the system which I criticize’ (Toole, 1980: 46), will be an interesting irony, and dedicates a loose leaf folder to a new journal entitled, ‘Diary of a Working Boy, or, Up From Sloth’ (86) in which he enthusiastically records his observations of the working world. In other cases, clerkdom harbours a pure and more malevolent disenchantment: Camus’ Meursault in The Stranger (1989), moves dangerously in an existential void, something that is brought up to date in Michel Houellebecq’s recent novel Whatever (1999), which portrays the violently empty existence of a corporate IT worker. Whatever’s protagonist, protests the pointless and menacing nature of his work life: ‘The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data … It has no meaning’ (Houellebecq, 1999: 82).
Narratives of lowly clerkdom maintain a poetic tension between storing up energy and talent for the debut or exalting in and perpetuating the mundane. In keeping with this tension, some accounts celebrate the art of dabbling in then moving on from office jobs while others imbue lifelong clerkdom with poetic status. Some, such as Walser’s The Tanners (2009), manage to do both. Simon Tanner oscillates between the comfort and connectedness of organizational attachment and disgust at the deadening office routine. Quitting one of a string of clerkships, he tells his employer, ‘I don’t care a whit about enjoying the benefits associated with receiving a fixed monthly income. While receiving it, I degenerate, becoming addlepated and lily-livered’ (2009: 70). Yet at other times he relishes the rhythm of the working day, exalting in the intense emotion he feels after a day of writing out addresses at the Copyists Office for the Unemployed, ‘To feel much, so very much on a gift of an evening such as this! To see the evening as a gift, for this is what it is to those who sacrifice their days to work’ (Walser, 2009: 294).
The artistic ideal of lowly clerkdom as a sustainable way of life is perhaps best captured by assistant bookkeeper-cum-writer Bernardo Soares, in Fernando de Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (2002). Idealizing the humdrum nature of his position, Soares’ ‘aesthetics to wasting time’ (Pessoa, 2002: 266) consist of carefully managed monotony that renders small events thrilling and frees the mind to dream. Intrinsic to his philosophy is the notion that dissatisfaction is innate to the writer and that actual achievement of ambitions destroys the infinite pleasure that derives from unfulfilled dreams. Soares advocates instead—perhaps echoing Dostoyevsky’s underground man here—‘a code of inertia for superior souls in modern societies’ (Pessoa, 2002: 265). Resolutely opposed to advancement that would awaken him from this thrillingly monotonous existence, he longs to remain in the lower ranks of the organization: ‘I think that I shall always be an assistant bookkeeper in a fabric warehouse. I hope, with absolute sincerity, never to be promoted to head bookkeeper’ (Pessoa, 2002: 314). Relishing his clerkdom as a sublime realm of the possible, Soares admits that movement toward his goal would mean closure and a narrowing of existence: My days at the office, where I always do the same dull and useless work, are punctuated by visions of me escaping, by dreamed remnants of faraway islands, by feasts in the promenades of parks from other eras, by other landscapes, another I. But I realize, between two ledger entries, that if I had all this, none of it would be mine. (Pessoa, 2002: 154)
Flowing out of this literary foundation, the identity of sensitive office worker conveys lineage or pedigree. In a dialogue between biography and fiction, Vila-Matas’ recent work Bartleby & Co. (2004), written from the perspective of a malingering Barcelona office worker, proffers, ‘when one copies something, one belongs to the line of Bouvard and Pécuchet (Flaubert’s characters) or of Simon Tanner (with his creator Walser in the shadows) or of Kafka’s anonymous court officials. To be a copyist is also to have the honour of belonging to the constellation of Bartleby’ (Vila-Matas, 2004: 9). Vila-Matas’ protagonist takes an interest in writers who serve as copyists, quoting Robert Calasso’s remark that ‘in such beings who have the appearance of ordinary and discreet men there is, however, to be found an alarming tendency to negate the world’ (Vila-Matas, 2004: 4).
As Beverungen and Dunne (2007) have recently argued, it is important not to conflate such negation with rebellion or political commitment, yet this article upholds that fictionalized lowly clerkdom is a refuge where playful rebelliousness may be nurtured, albeit in a slippery and indeterminate fashion (Deleuze, 1998). Without tying the sensitive clerk to positive negation and overcoming of capitalism (Hardt and Negri, 2001) or to a revolutionary and violent moment that infuriates the capitalist enterprise (Žižek, 2006), the reading and writing of such fiction nevertheless constitutes an empowering dialogue between workers and literature. Borrowing from Vila-Matas: Bartleby (Melville), Meursault (Camus), Soares (Pessoa) and company are an organization to which one, as a web designer or call centre operator, can become attached, with which one can converse, adding one’s own narrative to the literary pot. This idea becomes more compelling when one reflects on the ways in which ‘great’ worker-authors combined, whether temporarily or permanently, office jobs and literary output, as explored in the following section. When considered as a tradition, a company, to which one can belong, intellectual clerkdom takes on a romantic appeal that blends organizational reality and ontological security with literary aspiration and critical insight in a way that resonates throughout today’s knowledge workplaces.
Lifers and sojourners: writer-clerks of the early 20th century
Taking the worker-authors of the early 20th century as an example, it is evident that some insider authors maintain a lifelong office job to support their writing while others sojourn as office drones en route to a literary career. In the former category, Kafka’s sustained office life provides useful insight into the way in which artistic output can be combined with a non-literary occupation. Kafka, who worked from 1908 until his death in 1924 as an insurance clerk/executive in Prague, portrays dehumanized bureaucracy, in which men suffocate in offices. When The Trial’s Josef K almost faints while visiting a government office, a bystander comments, ‘I’ve hit on the truth. It’s only here the gentleman feels unwell, not in other places’ (Kafka, 1999).
Kafka resented the ‘swampy time’ of the work day (Pawel, 1984: 177), hated ‘the monster bureaucracy to which he felt indentured’ being often reviled by the impersonal workings of the insurance apparatus (Pawel, 1984: 175). He wrote that balancing his writing with his job was a ‘horrible double life, from which madness probably offers the only way out’ (Pawel, 1984: 190). Yet, the job offered the highly-strung Kafka much-needed collegiality, structure and interest. He was fascinated by the insurance business and sent copies of the company’s annual report to his friends, with his own contributions underlined. He was popular and good at his job: one of his colleagues referred to him as ‘our office baby’ (Pawel, 1984: 188), while his boss thought him an ‘eminently hardworking employee endowed with exceptional talent and devotion to duty’ (Pawel, 1984: 186). Although the insurance work meant loss of writing time it allowed him to avoid the ‘debasement of literary creativity’ (Pawel, 1984: 174) that comes from being a paid writer in a field such as journalism, enabling a pure separation that Kafka was insistent upon.
Kafka was simultaneously tormented and troubled by his job and satisfied and calmed by it. It both got in the way of his writing and created the conditions that enabled it, giving rise to critical organizational fiction alongside Kafka’s successful insurance career. His double life is reminiscent of the organizational ‘tightrope walk’ of contemporary knowledge workers who are somewhat repelled by corporate culture and pressured by time scarcity yet simultaneously find deep satisfaction in their job and fail to attach to a solid counterculture (Kunda, 1992; Willmott, 1993). Yet Kafka’s narrative on bureaucracy and his portrayal of work can also be conceived as powerfully subversive; his success in organizing his life in a way that left time for literary creativity can be understood as a form of refusal (Marcuse, 1991) that simultaneously critiques and is enabled by the organization.
Like Kafka, Fernando Pessoa lived in relative obscurity as a writer, supporting himself financially during his lifetime by working as a translator for commercial firms in Lisbon, a somewhat comfortable position that afforded a degree of flexibility in working hours. Pessoa’s autobiographical ‘semi-heteronym’, the assistant bookkeeper Bernard Soares (one of a labyrinth of personas he invented) was a ‘mere mutilation’ of Pessoa’s own (Pessoa, 2002). Pessoa’s writings, many of which were composed on scraps of office stationery from the places he worked, were discovered after his death in 1935 and published posthumously.
While Kafka and Pessoa were ‘lifers’ as worker-authors, T.S. Eliot’s office life was an instructive episode en route to a literary career, which he referred to as ‘sojourning among the termites’ (Gordon, 2000: 167). Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound frowned on his choice of career but the poet reveled in his humble disguise and, like Kafka, derived a sense of creative freedom from his office job: Eliot was invisible as a man of destiny: superman in the guise of a clerk. Pound and others thought it pitiful to spend his days at a bank, but it left his imagination free, and he relished the completeness of his disguise, for he excelled as a clerk. (p. 165)
The exigencies of work sharpened his literary imagination: during his snatched lunch break, he watched the old-time fishermen along the banks of the Thames and marveled at how they ‘spat time out’ (Gordon, 2000: 164), an acute contrast to the deadening routine captured in The Waste Land.
Such heightened sensibility is also attributable to Robert Walser, whose varied career included work as accountant and secretary to an inventor, bank clerk, waiter in a Silesian castle, and copyist at the Zurich Copyists’ Bureau for the Unemployed. Relishing the obscurity afforded by such jobs, Walser commented, ‘only in the lower regions am I able to breathe’ (Vila-Matas, 2004: 19); as in the case of Eliot, the avoidance of writerly prestige permitted him a certain freedom and lightness while providing rich artistic fodder. His partly autobiographical novels The Assistant (2007) and, in particular, The Tanners (2009) chart the author’s ambivalent relationship to work and relationships. Simon Tanner’s disposition, seemingly too flighty and sensitive for ‘normal’ society is—at least in part—a reflection of Walser’s own; some time after the publication of these works Walser’s mental state declined and he spent the last decades in his life in mental institutions (Walser, 2009).
Henry Miller offers a more vitriolic version of the organizational sojourn, based on his 1920–1924 job at Western Union, where he was responsible for hiring and firing messengers in a chaotic office. He worked hard but, along with his colleagues, also exploited any opportunity for a prank or a sexual encounter: ‘We were a merry crew, united in our desire to fuck the company at all costs’ (Miller, 1993: 30). Such pranks extended, in Miller’s case, to organizational satire: asked by the VP to write a Horatio Alger style story about the messengers he responded by writing Clipped Wings, a story about twelve messengers, ‘gentle souls, insulted and injured, who run amok or suffer violence; the stories are full of bitterness and horror, ending in murder or suicide, usually both’ (Wickes, 1974: 170–192).
For Miller, the life of the writer-clerk was ultimately untenable. The desk job increasingly symbolized an inertia that he had to escape in order to become an artist. In Sexus, he later expressed the colonization of the self and the foreclosure of reflection that his Western Union job entailed: ‘I hardly know myself, living the way I do. I’m engulfed … I wish I could have days, weeks, months, just to think’ (Miller, 1965: 189). Miller’s contention that such thinking space would allow him to upset everything, mirrors Marcuse’s idea that radical change becomes possible wherever people have ‘free available energy which is not expended in superimposed material and intellectual labor’ (Marcuse, 1991: 242). For some authors, like Kafka, this space to write was sustained through a steady office job, while for sojourners such as Miller, a break was needed before literary production could flourish. Fueled by his literary exploration, Miller broke radically with the nine-to-five, but his sojourn of office life gave him rich artistic fodder that formed some of the most original passages of his work and his most vivid condemnation of American society.
The writer-clerk tradition promotes an aesthetic of time-wasting, artistic endeavour and ambivalence that negates the existing system and agitates by provoking dreams of the alternative. Kafka, Eliot, Miller and Pessoa would be a very sorry and ill-chosen organizing committee for progressive politics. Kafka could not even eat in company due to his neurotic attachment to Horace Fletcher’s mastication guidelines (Pawel, 1984); Eliot was prone to nervous breakdowns and anti-semitism (Gordon, 2000) and was a modernist snob who reviled autodidacts (Rose, 2010); Miller’s repugnant sexism and malice are anathema to progressive ideals and Pessoa writes that humanitarians make him sick to the pit of his stomach (2002). Yet, as icons of an oppositional, countercultural and subversive tradition these writers are linked by a current of discontent that resonates through their fiction. Most importantly, the persistence of their work in the mainstream and the manner in which they reconciled office work and writing are a provocative and fertile source of identity for contemporary workers, who exist in continual dialogue with the lowly clerk tradition.
Positing an enduring tradition of intellectual clerkdom
The tradition of workplace fiction detailed above presents an organizational identity that is creative and contrary in nature, yet not oriented to action or to an explicit political manifesto. It is a way of being that resonates, albeit in a different setting, with Roy’s (1960) portrayal of the interstitial freedom located in factory work; it is an orientation to work theorized by De Certeau (2002) as bricolage, yet the texture of this terrain remains largely unexplored. The implications of such writing in terms of social programmes or organized social change are indeterminate but the region that is carved out is one of possibility rather than resignation.
The literary fiction highlighted above—it is suggested—is a brotherhood to which today’s over-educated knowledge workers may aspire to belong. Understanding how the tradition of intellectual clerkdom percolates today’s organizations is beyond the scope of this article but is a potentially rich vein of academic enquiry. The case for such an enquiry is bolstered when one considers non-fiction texts that are explicitly marketed to workers who wish to limit their organizational attachment and pursue their own creative projects on company time. Complementing the tradition set down by Walser, Pessoa and their ilk, the possibility for diverting one’s energies away from intense knowledge work is also celebrated in recent best-selling texts that take cues from the literary clerks of the past. In particular, the appeal of hiding out in an unglamorous organizational role is captured recently in Corinne Maier’s French and UK bestseller, Bonjour Laziness: Jumping off the Corporate Ladder (2005), which counsels office workers to ‘… seek out the most useless positions’, maximizing their free time on the job by pursuing roles with vague goals and indeterminate output. Maier also advises workers to resist being promoted: ‘Never, under any circumstances, accept a position of responsibility’ (2005: 135), arguing that it is better to exist in lowly obscurity where one is most free to dream and to pursue one’s own spontaneous creativity than to become an overburdened company drone. Maier claims that taking refuge in the nooks and crannies of a large corporation is a French national pastime, commenting wryly, ‘So who works in business? Let’s not kid ourselves: not that many people …’ (2005: 122).
Maier’s book, which can be interpreted as a contemporary treatment of Bernardo Soares’ work ethic, resonates with the lowly clerk tradition. In a similar vein, Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle (2005), which was a top ten bestselling book in the UK, draws inspiration from writers such as Oscar Wilde and G. K. Chesterton, celebrating a strategic avoidance of work and countering the total commitment work culture. Hodgkinson is also the founder and editor of The Idler (http://www.idler.co.uk), a magazine that celebrates idle reflection and promotes lifestyles based on shorter working hours. Hodgkinson’s follow-up book How To Be Free (2007) criticizes our ‘tragically limited’ attachment to continuous labour and urges people to muck about more, freeing up time wherever possible for writing, gardening and other creative or playful pursuits (p. 314).
Quasi-technical books, written in a light or irreverent vein, also highlight the opportunity for intellectual multi-tasking that abounds in the contemporary knowledge workplace. As Mark Saltzman writes in White Collar Slacker’s Handbook: Tech Tricks to Fool Your Boss: Technology might have created a 24/7 work culture, but a handful of savvy white-collar cubicle dwellers are standing up to ‘the man’ and using these very same (de)vices—the PC, World Wide Web, email, and portable gadgets—to make it look like they’re working when and where they’re not. (2005: 2)
Saltzman’s book is a step-by-step tech handbook that guides workers through techniques such as using remote access software to circumvent company restrictions on Internet use; faking corrupted documents and software installations and making use of panic buttons such as the infamous ‘Alt+Tab’ keystroke that quickly conceals non-work activity from the eyes of a passing supervisor. In a similar vein, Chris Morran’s Hardly Working: The Overachieving Underperformer’s Guide to Doing as Little as Possible in the Office (2004), directly addresses the need to appear to ‘go the extra mile’ in today’s workplace, presenting strategies that employees can use to make it look as if they are putting in long hours while in fact freeing up time to work on a novel or screenplay on company time. Morran emphasizes the ‘revolutionary’ role of the ‘Overachieving Underperforming Employee’ (2004: 101), who cleverly sabotages productivity and sows discontent among his colleagues while making sure he does not get labeled as inefficient or disruptive.
Supported by, and in turn contributing to, this rich cultural fabric we may expect to find a tradition of intellectual clerkdom flourishing in today’s knowledge workplaces. Richard Church, remembering the Civil Service in the 1930s, wrote that his workplace ‘was recognized as a shelter for younger sons, cranks, eccentrics, misfits, and persons with a vocation; members incapable of holding their own, and unwilling to compete, in an increasingly commercial and industrial world’ (Rose, 2010: 415). In the same way that office workers in Rose’s study located interstitial opportunities for literary pursuits and were uplifted by intellectual office banter and endless debate, today’s internet-enabled knowledge workplaces, arguably, offer broad and far-reaching opportunities for workers to combine an unassuming office position with literary, critical output. Considering today’s anonymous workblogs (Ellis and Richards, 2009; Richards, 2008; Schoneboom, 2007) as a continuation, whether conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit, of a writing tradition, can help us to appreciate these phenomena as part of an enduring critical response. A greater appreciation of the intellectual office tradition in which such forms are embedded, permits us to theorize the ephemeral nature of particular technological forms or modes of censorship, while understanding that such an intellectual tradition endures even when less publicly visible.
While office workblogging appears to be a relatively transient phenomenon, (Schoneboom, 2011), workers remain enmeshed in a supporting fabric of workplace narrative with which they continue to interact. The audience for literary fiction certainly extends to those graduates of modern languages or literature who are gainfully employed as consumer advisors, telesales assistants or receptionists. It also extends to those workers at all levels of the organizational pecking order who spend their lunch hour browsing the Penguin and New Directions titles in Waterstones, or who count themselves as denizens of independent bookstores.
Books such as Robert Walser’s The Tanners are prominently available in high street bookstores. The Tanners, in a bold yellow 2009 edition including a prefatory essay on Walser’s life, was Time Out New York’s Top Summer Fiction Pick and was selected by the Village Voice as contender for Funniest Book of the Year. The cover notes of current editions of such texts prominently emphasize their quietly subversive contents. For example, the recent Penguin Classics edition of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, offers as a back cover sales pitch: ‘In a time which celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience and noise, here is the perfect antidote, a hymn of praise to obscurity, failure, intelligence, difficulty and silence’ (2002).
This article encourages us to recognize more fully that these books, with their antidotal, subversive power, flow out of the bookstores and into the hands of clerks as well as university scholars. It has outlined a tradition of organizational fiction that is intertwined with the lives of office workers and which romanticizes the existence of the sensitive, writerly clerk. The practice of engaging with and producing narrative accounts of work is perceived as a dynamic, ongoing dialogue between workers and literature that thrives without the need for an explicit enlightenment project. Rather, a rich cultural fabric celebrating the intellectual clerk’s contribution and talents is theorized as a self-nurturing, dynamic phenomenon. The workblog is acknowledged to be an intriguing contemporary manifestation of the process through which workers are inspired to continue the tradition. However, viewing the blog as part of the intellectual clerk tradition prevents us from equating the demise of workblogging (or variations in the literary quality of blogs) to the end of contemporary workplace fiction. Rather, the writer-clerk tradition is alive and well, as represented by an enduring interest in the work of writers such as Miller and Kafka, recent ‘rediscovery’ of the work of Walser and Pessoa and the emergence of more recent portrayals of office work, such as Houellebecq’s interpretation of Camus. This nurturing fabric is further strengthened by a wider ‘self-help’ literature that promotes the diversion of time and resources away from one’s work duties and into creative projects, celebrating obscurity and resisting promotion. An attempt to assert direct causality between, for example, a penchant for Pessoa and the work ethic of a particular knowledge worker, would be misguided but the sense that novels are part of a cultural tradition that percolates the organization is worthy of study. In particular, further research on contemporary forms such as the workblog might aim to appreciate the influence of an intellectual tradition that, by association, imbues new workplace writing with gravitas and social significance. Also intriguing would be an enquiry into the gendered character of writer-clerkdom, and how this is intertwined with the status of contemporary men and women both in the organizations they inhabit and in the literary canon. Against the existing academic literature on the novel in organization studies, a greater acknowledgement of the already-existing fabric of worker-intellectualism is needed—a recognition that, in all their ambivalence and irreducible complexity, clerks have nevertheless been greatly underestimated.