Poetry from the factory: “On the Line,” by Joseph Ponthus

Entering the factory

Of course I was ready for

The stench

The cold

The shifting of heavy loads

The harshness of it all

The conditions

The production line

The modern slavery

I wasn’t there to report on it

Nor was I readying myself for the revolution

No

The factory means I get to earn a buck

Put food on the table

As the saying goes

Because my wife is sick of seeing me lounge around

on the couch waiting for a job in my field

So it’s

The agro-industrial plant for me

Food processing

The agro industry

As they say

(p. 1)

The opening verses of the book of poetry À la ligne: Feuillets d’usine (On the Line) first published in France in 2019 well convey the author’s contrasting feelings associated with work, swinging between necessity and repulsion, which permeate the entire book.

Translated into many languages, such as English, Spanish, Italian, and Norwegian, On the Line is a unique work of art that vividly depicts the modern slavery conditions of individuals laboring in the agro-industrial sector in Brittany. The book was written by Baptiste Cornet, under the pseudonym of “Joseph Ponthus,” who had an intense, turbulent life, including a background as anarchist-communist campaigner. After completing 2 years of literature courses in a selective French school, attended thanks to a scholarship, he became a special educational needs teacher in banlieue schools, working in the municipality of Nanterre. Later, following his wife Krystel, he moved to Brittany and, to “put food on the table,” he worked as a temporary worker first at a fish cannery and then in a slaughterhouse. It is precisely these work experiences that he put into verse.

The stark contrast between poetry and the filthy reality the author experienced in his everyday (and night) work clearly appears on every page of the book. On the Line is written in free verse with an irregular meter oftentimes verging on prose. Punctuation is completely absent, imposing a rapid pace on the reader. As the author explained in an interview, ¹ this rhythmic style is not intended to reproduce that of the assembly line, but rather the speed of the thoughts chasing each other at work, attempting to overcome and overwhelm the work rhythm.

Writing comes as an immediate need and a direct consequence of work for Ponthus:

I write like I work

On the production line

Return

New line

(p. 4)

The text’s potent evocative power is firmly anchored in its profound dialectical structure. In the factory, “There is as much happiness as there is back pain and exhaustion” (p. 241). On one hand, work is presented as a central part of the author’s life, so much that the text sometimes stigmatizes “slackers” and laggard co-workers. On the other, when the workload and working conditions are the hardest, the author dreams “Of a world with no factories / Of a morning with no nights” (p. 185).

Ponthus is “The part-time anarchist” who has “chosen work” (p. 228). “Fucking strike” and “fucking day of strikes” is reiterated (pp. 156–159 and p. 164) as, being a temporary agency worker, he could not participate any more in the protests, but had on the contrary to work overtime to maintain production targets. At the same time, Ponthus invokes “Saint Karl [Marx]” for forgiveness, “not [to] be condemned on the altar of the industrial revolution” (p. 159). In various pages of the book, “bosses” are despised for imposing on workers insane work rhythms and controlling them. Nevertheless, bosses can become allies to confront the illogical requests of “sales reps” (p. 168), and admiration is expressed for “. . .one of the bosses [who] set fire to [the factory] deliberately / Twice” (p. 9).

In line with research on “dirty work” contexts (Slutskaya et al., 2016), relations with co-workers are not idealized. Both episodes of vulgarity, racism, and sexism are reported and instances of comradery in the face of extreme working conditions. The author publicly declared that he continued meeting many former colleagues after leaving the factory.¹ Ponthus also declared that he had avoided exposing certain factory issues and scandals not to leave his friends unemployed.

Next to friendship, Ponthus also expresses love for his wife, his mother, and literature. In response to a workmate who asks “why [. . .] the factory,” Ponthus writes:

I answer him as I answer everyone with the simple and

magnificent truth

Left everything to marry the woman I love

Got married

The joy of being here

And the factory well everybody’s gotta work

(p. 31)

It is love in all its forms (Tasselli, 2019) that helps Ponthus escape from “the automaton gestures” (p. 12) and all those “insane things you have to do every night” (p. 41). It is for love that Ponthus bears the work-related diseases and bodily pain caused by the factory, and he feels “ready to haul dead animals” (p. 121), enduring the blood, the “stench,” and the horrifying sounds and sights of the slaughterhouse.

Furthermore, the passion for literature and culture allows Ponthus to tolerate the dystopic work rhythms and environment. The book is riddled with quotations, from Apollinaire (whose letters from the front are quoted in epigraph to the two main sections, making the analogy evident between factory work and trench warfare) to Zola, Dumas, Rabelais, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Hugo, Beckett, Arendt, Marx of course, Greek classics, Charles Trenet and even Carla Bruni and Vanessa Paradis. These diverse cultural references not only help the author withstand the oppressive nature of factory work but also provide a means of escape, allowing Ponthus to “Dreaming of Ithaca / Notwithstanding the shit” (p. 90).

On the Line is a complex, elaborated, and extremely vivid narrative that does not permit a one-sided interpretation of work. Instead, it expresses the messiness and intricacy of everyday life and work. Ponthus takes a sociological perspective on the working-class condition in an advanced capitalist society like France. More specifically, On the Line offers a portrait of the violent Breton agro-industrial sector, which disregards the psychophysical repercussions on its silenced workers, contributing to Brittany having the highest suicide rate in France (Legendre, 2023). ² Ponthus’ masterpiece resonates with many topics of interest to critical organization and management scholars, such as alienation, managerial control, and resistance (Watson, 2020), dirty work (e.g., Baran et al., 2016; Slutskaya et al., 2016), and love (Tasselli, 2019). Therefore, we contend that the book can be of great value for both research and teaching purposes.

Since its publication, On the Line has rapidly become a literary sensation in France and beyond. It received an enthusiastic critical reception, accompanied by several important literary awards (e.g. the Grand Prix RTL-Lire in 2019), as well as endorsements from well-known French writers such as Daniel Pennac and Pierre Michon. The book is considered part of a literary movement called “working-class literature,” which involves emerging writers in different countries addressing work-related matters (see Coles and Zandy, 2006; Nilsson and Lennon, 2017). As part of this movement, literary festivals have been organized across Europe, including the Working-Class Writers Festival held in Bristol in 2021 and the Festival di Letteratura Working Class held in the occupied former-GKN plant in Florence in 2023.

In conclusion, we believe that the book’s style and content have the power to engage readers both on an intellectual and emotional level, prompting profound reflections on the atomized working-class consciousness in contemporary times. Some readers might argue that the extended use of quotations makes the text overly intellectual and ideological and that the references to Marx, Foucault, and Chaplin’s Modern Times are somewhat predictable. Yet, we maintain that we need more verse expressing every-day experiences of underpaid manual and service labor unfolding today, to show that the personal is political and that not much has changed in factory work since the times of Taylor and Ford. Unfortunately, Joseph Ponthus untimely died in 2021. Someone else will have to carry on his much telling work on the line.