Pushing Paper

Tags:: amateurs,; ambition,; getting paid,; labor,; office work,; tedium

Off they go, like so many investment bankers reinventing themselves as cheesemakers or syrup sappers in Vermont. They use part of the inheritance to purchase a hundred-acre farm in Calvados, where they settle in for the duration. The duration of what? They’re not quite sure, and pretty soon begin to plant small crops, which fail; raise poultry and livestock, which die; make preserves, which spoil; brew speciality beers, which make them sick. They grow interested in chemistry, then medicine, then geology, then local history, then historical fiction. When the Revolution of 1848 comes, they get caught up in local politics with an enthusiasm matched only by their ignorance. Having failed at politics, they try love; after failing at love, they set out to improve their physiques through gymnastics; after failing at gymnastics, they turn to spiritualism. And so it goes.

The novel’s punchline, repeated over and over again, is that with every setback, the clerks send away for more books and guides to instruct them on how to plant or brew or stretch. The copyists may escape the office, but they can’t escape their nature. Even left to roam free in the countryside, they continue to copy, copy, copy. Flaubert famously boasted in a letter to Edma Roger des Genettes that he had taken notes on over fifteen hundred books in an effort to make his characters’ ignorance more realistic. Six years were spent on Volume 1 alone. Volume 2, never completed, was to consist entirely of the notes made by the characters in the course of their research.

“Idiots—those who think differently from you,” Flaubert wrote in the Dictionary of Received Ideas, a work that substituted for the unfinished Volume 2. The irony, or one of them anyway, is that the idiots in this case were those who resembled him, as he spent his last years copying, copying, copying those fifteen hundred volumes. The irony may not have been lost on Flaubert, but too often it’s lost on us. If Bartleby is a reflection on the shortage of solidarity in the world of paperwork, Bouvard and Pécuchet is an example of this shortage. Even Flaubert seems to be laughing at his characters, rather than with them. He can’t quite bring himself to recognize that his own prose might bear some resemblance to theirs. In the novel we witness writing struggling to rescue itself, its sense of itself, from the shame of more practical, and thus more vulgar forms of literacy.

In a marvelous essay published some years ago in The Threepenny Review, the literary critic Rachel Cohen considered the careers of two great poet-clerks, Fernando Pessoa and Constantine Cavafy. The latter had spent over three decades working as a translator for the British colonial administration in the offices of the Third Circle of Irrigation. Cohen cites an interview with one of his fellow clerks, a man named Ibrahim el Kayar, who described how Cavafy would occasionally lock the door to his office: “Sometimes my colleague and I looked through the keyhole. We saw him lift up his hands like an actor and put on a strange expression as if in ecstasy, then he would bend down to write something. It was the moment of inspiration. Naturally we found it funny and we giggled. How were we to imagine that one day Mr. Cavafy would be famous!”

How indeed? We naturally assume that these dramatic gestures, these ecstatic expressions, represent moments of poetic inspiration. The locked room, the voyeuristic gaze, the clerks’ astonishment provide further evidence in favor of what we already know, what we already think we know, that in this scene the poet-clerk is a poet rather than a clerk. We are witnessing an act of creation, not an act of re-creation. Nobody in their right mind would expend that much effort on mere paperwork.

Except, of course, for all of us who do just that.

Image: Thomas Demand, "Büro / Office," 1995.

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Comments Post a Comment »

The Underwriter's Bedside Book,published by Lloyd's of London Press in 1987 is an anthology of writing given over to the paperwork laden-world of insurance. It contains many contributions from the highly literate whose lives took them into this line of work, eg Conrad, Kafka and James M Cain to name but a few.

Posted by Sam Ignarski on Fri 18 Mar 2011
And the world just keeps getting more and more this way, Kafka, et al, as "[mirrors] of tomorrow. http://learnmeproject.com/

Posted by JRD on Sun 3 Apr 2011
I would prefer not to comment.

Posted by Mike Cope on Mon 4 Apr 2011
Check out Jose Saramago's "All the Names," a quiet novel (in contrast to his tour de force "Blindness") about a bureaucrat who works in the central records office. The building is so massive and full of records that it is almost perpetually being expanded. A great account of paperwork and love. Yep.

@Mike Cope: Ha!

Posted by John Ryan on Mon 4 Apr 2011
"The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself."
-- C. Northcote Parkinson

Posted by The Sanity Inspector on Mon 4 Apr 2011
The Faber Book of Office Life explores more of the nuances of white collar tedium drawing on a wide range of literary sources.

Posted by shane cahill on Mon 4 Apr 2011
Similar misgivings about paperwork can be found in Banjo Patterson's Australian classic poem "Clancy of the Overflow" http://www.the-rathouse.com/ClancyoftheOverflow.html

Posted by Figgles on Mon 4 Apr 2011
Your article reminds me of a Doonesbury strip in which a war veteran writes his memoir of military office work during World War II: "Hell in Triplicate: A Company Clerk Remembers."

The heroes of paperwork are not those who do the work, but those who figure out how to reduce the need for it or, at least, the time needed to finish it. These heroes, perhaps, are guys like David Allen of "Getting Things Done" fame or Timothy Ferriss of "The 4-Hour Workweek". You don't know paperwork reductionists are your heroes until you realize how much time they've saved you.

Posted by Mr. Poet on Tue 5 Apr 2011
Mr. Kafka,

An interesting piece on an ostensibly tedious subject. Another worthy addition to the modest canon you describe is Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat," a long-ish short story worthy of any shortlist of essential Russian literature. Gogol tells the story of a lowly civil servant (a copyist!) and his quest to procure a new overcoat in the harsh Russian winter. Akaky Akakievich's peers at "the department" make cruel sport of him for still being a lowly copyist even after years of service to the Tsar. However, Akaky isn't humiliated. He takes pride in his diligent work and revels in the marvelous letter-shapes he reproduces; something like a mediaeval monk. There's a good deal more to the story; highly recommended.

Posted by Misha D. on Wed 6 Apr 2011