The office is our Petri dish. Locked in a confined space, we can be observed
like cell cultures, feeding, breeding, living — if you can call it living.
The office, on the face of it, should be the perfect setting for the fiction
writer, a place where he can play the scientist god, watching human
behaviour in controlled conditions.
In fact, writers tend to avoid work as a subject. As Ian McEwan observed to
me last week, novelists prefer characters who seem never to go to work,
dealing with nonwork dramas such as family life, adultery and adventure. He
corrected this with his own Saturday, in which the work of its hero, a brain
surgeon, is integral to the theme and the plot. Joshua Ferris goes even
further with his own formidable first novel, Then We Came to the End, which
the whole of America is talking about. All his characters are entirely
enclosed within the confines of an office in which everything that is not
work comes to seem unreal.
“Our memory in that place,” he writes, “was not unlike that of a goldfish.
Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then
returned in the morning to their bowl.”
Relationships — with people and food — in this bowl are intense and precisely
calibrated. For what else, apart from work, is there to do?
“Most of us liked everyone, a few of ushated specific individuals, one or two
people loved everyone and everything.
Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the
morning.” Ferris’s novel is set in an advertising agency in Chicago. The
time is the beginning of the century, when the dotcom bubble is bursting
and, one by one, the staff are being laid off. The goldfish are in crisis.
They know they are likely to be ejected from the comfort zone of their bowl
at any moment, stripped of their identity. But they doggedly persist with
their routines. Each morning, “We sipped our first cups of coffee and
cleared our voice mails and checked our bookmarked websites”. To be fired
means absolute loss of these petty consolations and a confrontation with the
awful possibility that there is nothing else.
We have, to some extent, been here before. Ricky Gervais’s triumphant freak
show The Office had the same suffocating sense of endless imprisonment in
pettiness and delusion. David Brent, Gervais’s character, is a masterpiece
of crass delusion. Though the boss of this particular office, he persists in
believing he is some kind of rebel.
“I don’t live by ‘the rules’,” he insists. And he tells his staff: “You will
never work in a place like this again. This is brilliant — fact. And you
will never have another boss like me. Someone who’s basically a chilled-out
entertainer.”
In fact, he is locked inside ‘the rules’, pathetically lacking in
self-awareness and utterly deluded about his own significance and
competence. His vanity is a poor camouflage for his sad dependence on the
rigid demands and endless pettiness of the office. Yet our laughter at Brent
is uneasy, and Ferris never lets us stand aside and feel superior to his
prisoners. In both cases, we squirm with recognition. For the truth is that
these offices, these Petri dishes, are mirrors. They reflect our own working
lives, but also our lives as a whole. We are all, all the time, locked in a
delusion that the world we know is the world, a place without
boundaries — that we are, in fact, free. In this sense, the supreme fiction
about work is Franz Kafka’s The Burrow, written in 1923 as that great artist
lay dying. In this, a creature — apparently, a badger — discusses at length,
and without a moment of self-questioning, his work in maintaining and
shoring up his burrow. The horror mounts as we realise this is a description
of ourselves, pursuing ends that, as soon as we step outside their logic,
seem appallingly trivial. All we are doing is wasting time until we die. The
Office is Kafka made for primetime television.
Yet the badger’s work in the burrow at least makes some practical sense. The
point about office work — as opposed to, say, farming, or working on an
assembly line — is that it is at one remove from the real thing. Offices
create, control and audit work, but they don’t seem to do it. By setting his
novel in an advertising agency, Ferris adds another layer of unreality.
The work of an advertising agency is to sell the work of others. Like the
investment banks and brokers of the City, they deal in metaproducts.
The very modern idea of the office is thus intrinsically baffling. In
offices, people all seem to be doing the same sort of things — mainly,
staring at screens — whether they are bankers, lawyers or accountants. They
are doing “office work”, which is the same everywhere. Is it, therefore,
actually necessary? The supremely savage fictional response to this
spectacle was Dickens’s Bleak House, in which the work is worse than
unnecessary — it is cruel. The law exists solely to perpetuate itself, and
remains blind or indifferent to the suffering it causes.
Dickens’s vision dominated the 20th-century view of work. The office became
the image of oppression. In Billy Wilder’s wonderful film The Apartment
(1960), Jack Lem-mon’s CC Baxter is the mid-century embodiment of office man
in his dark suit, white shirt and tie. Eager to please his superiors, he is
reduced to letting them use his flat to conduct their affairs. The
brilliance of the film lies in the way Baxter is not, at the start, any kind
of rebel. He fully accepts the miserable deal and the grim reductionism of
his business.
“On November 1, 1959,” he announces, “the population of New York City was
8,042,783... I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company
— Consolidated Life of New York. We’re one of the top five companies in the
country. Our home office has 31,259 employees, which is more than the entire
population of, uhh... Natchez, Missis-sippi. I work on the 19th floor.
Ordinary policy department, premium accounting division, section W, desk
number 861.”
Baxter is saved from his numerical hell, however, by the love of Shirley
MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik. Similarly, in The Rebel (1961), the office is seen
as something from which Tony Hancock must be redeemed, in his case by
becoming an artist. Precisely because the work of the office seems so
unreal, authenticity can only be attained outside.
As the idea of the malign political and economic system took hold in the
1960s and 1970s, office films became less funny and drew bleaker
conclusions. The office became an analogue of the oppressive system. In
David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Alec Baldwin’s Blake tells his
team of salesmen: “Only one thing counts in this world: get them to sign
onthe line which is dotted.” And in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987),
Michael Douglas’s Gor-don Gekko defined the 1980s by insisting that “greed
is good” and “lunch is for wimps”. In both cases, the demands and values of
work have conquered and annexed all aspects of life.
Behind all this, as Baxter’s robotic recitation of numbers shows, the office
is consistently seen as the place where all human life is reduced to cold
calculus. Baxter works in an insurance company, dealing in matters of life
and death. For the company, though, all such matters are figures; their
business is conducted in the same way Baxter’s bosses conduct their affairs,
as icy conspiracies against their wives and girlfriends.
Translated into the future, this becomes an all-encompassing dystopia. Work
in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a tool of political oppression,
and in Andrew Niccol’s film Gattaca (1997), the numerical drudgery of the
office is the correlative of the way this future society has reduced
everybody to the simple metric of their DNA.
These visions are not so fantastic. We have already gone farther down this
road than we like to admit. Certain firms, notably lawyers, now stipulate
that every hour spent in the office should be charged to a client account.
It is the work in the abstract that is being accounted for, irrespective of
anything achieved. By this device, the office professionals insulate
themselves from risk, from the real world. Work has been disconnected from
reality in ways that would have horrified, though probably not surprised,
Kafka and Dickens.
On the brighter side, however, the office is also seen as a theatre of
struggle in which oppression is overcome. In Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001),
the affair with the bad boss is a stepping stone to the authentic love of
Mark Darcy. And, in both Nine to Five (1980) and Working Girl (1988), the
defeat of the bad boss by good subordinate women suggests that the workplace
is not bad in itself, but bad only when it reinforces oppressive sexual
mores. Office work is thus capable of reform.
It is also capable of redemption. At first sight a classic noir thriller,
Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), for me one of the greatest films ever
made, is in fact a story of office work. Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff works,
like Baxter, in insurance; and, deranged with lust for Barbara Stanwyck, he
devises an insurance scam involving murder. But his boss — Edward G
Robinson’s Barton Keyes — is not a malign oppressor, like Baxter’s
superiors, but a truth-teller and, in the end, a saviour. The genius of the
film resides in this office relationship, which is, ultimately, one of love.
“I love you too,” says Neff, ironically, to Keyes. And then, on voiceover: “I
really did, too, you old crab.”
Love, in the end, also redeems Ferris’s characters. They may be stuck in
their Petri dish, but that does not make their feelings any less real. This
is consoling. We all have workplaces, even if they are at home, and most of
us spend most of our time there. If we are to be redeemed, then it must, at
least in part, happen here, amid the screens, staplers, phones, copying
machines, desks and chairs of our pathetic but meaningful little burrows.
To order Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (Viking £14.99) at the
Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 (inc p&p), call 0870 165
8585 www.bryanappleyard.com
Then We Came to the End
“Titles meant everything. You could be a creveep (creative executive
vice-president) or ackveep (account services executive vice-president), but
both species hoped to be invited into partnership.
The point was, we took this shit very seriously. They had taken away our
flowers, our sunny days, and our bonuses, we were on a wage freeze and a
hiring freeze, and people were flying out the door like so many dismantled
dummies. We had one thing still going for us: the prospect of promotion. A
new title: true, it came with no money, the power was almost always
illusionary, the bestowal of a cheap shrewd device to keep us from mutiny,
but when word circulated that one of us had jumped up an acronym, that
person was just a little quieter that day, took a longer lunch than usual,
came back with shopping bags, spent the afternoon speaking softly into the
telephone, and left whenever they wanted that night, while the rest of us
sent e-mails flying back and forth on the lofty topics of injustice and
uncertainty.”
This is an edited extract from Then We Came to the End
