Last week, Ruchira featured an article by Matthew Crawford about the redemptive value of manual labor. My comment begins, "Crawford is full of it." Read the comment if you care to know why I think so. Now, thanks to Ron Silliman's blog, I see another "philosophically" styled column by Alain de Botton in the Boston Globe about a purported dearth of novels in recent years dealing with work life. (The scare quotes respect Wikipedia's report that de Botton is a writer with a philosophical style, i.e., not a working philosopher. Certainly the column consists mostly of leisurely musing, nothing remotely philosophical in an academic sense.)
De Botton evidently would like to see more literature about all kinds of work contexts, including the corporate offices shunned by Crawford in favor of a motorcycle repair shop. But his advocacy for such literature stems from a sense that the work can indeed be mind-numbing and alienating. It would be literature's job to depict in modern work life "new varieties of sensory deprivation, melancholy, boredom, passion, eroticism, vindictiveness, charity, triviality, and seriousness." Novels about website optimization and telephone company management would assist readers to see the richness of these enterprises.
I wonder whether there is in fact a void of recent literature about work. De Botton points to recent Booker Prize winners, a sample that is surely skewed. But how would one search for novels about work, anyway? You could search your local library for books with a subject like Work -- Fiction, but there are drawbacks to such an approach. For one, that particular Library of Congress heading is intended for children's books. More significantly, there are obviously many work related topics that would not be described as fiction about "work," "labor," "employment," i.e., the general theme of de Botton's piece. There are also books about blue collar workers, working women, and so forth, as well as about particular jobs and professions. Searching Berkeley Public Library's collection for works with the keywords "corporate" and "fiction" produces 41 results, many recent, and many of which would seem meaningful to de Botton. Admittedly, he probably wouldn't enjoy Personal Days by Ed Parks, which is perhaps not in the tradition of Balzac and Dickens.
Nevertheless, I don't think de Botton has really done his homework. By focusing on a narrow, elite arena of literature he precludes, in a sense by definition, works that would satisfy his desideratum. But this move serves him well, because it permits him to claim as his own (rather than any mere Booker Prize recipient's) the observation that seemingly dull work can be interesting. In this respect he shares with Crawford a view, either naive or condescending, that the appreciation of work requires a special kind of philosophical or literary insight.
"In this respect he shares with Crawford a view...that the appreciation of work requires a special kind of philosophical or literary insight."
They're annoying. These guys should be pursuing anthropology, not literature. "Let's observe the brutish, yet noble, farm-hand as he toils, quite happily, in his natural environment."
Apply this format to management, excecutives, and they'll be thrilled. Writers of the world. Please. Validate their elitism.
Posted by: M | June 04, 2009 at 07:01 AM