Ah little recks the laborer,

How near his work is holding him to God.

The loving Laborer through space and time.

Whitman, “Song of the Exposition”

In the summer of 1929, after “writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought” and repeated rejections of Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury and even Sanctuary (his “cheap idea… deliberately conceived to make money”), William Faulkner was ready to give up. “You’re damned,” he told himself.
 “You’ll have to work now and then for the rest
 of your life.”

And so Faulkner took a job at the University of Mississippi Power House,

on the night
shift, from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., as a coal passer.
 I shoveled coal from the bunker into a wheel-
barrow and wheeled it in and dumped it where 
the fireman could put it into the boiler. About 11 o’clock the people would be going to bed, and
 so it did not take so much steam. Then we could rest, the fireman and I. He would sit in a chair
 and doze. I had invented a table out of a wheel-
barrow in the coal bunker, just beyond a wall
 from where a dynamo ran. It made a deep, constant humming noise. There was no more work
 to do until about 4 A.M., when we would have
 to clean the fires and get up steam again. On 
these nights, between 12 and 4, I wrote As I
 Lay Dying in six weeks, without changing a
 word. I sent it to Smith and wrote him that by it I would stand or fall.


Scholars have since “disproved in every detail” Faulkner’s claims from the introduction to Sanctuary (from which the above quotes are taken), and by his own admission he “could do a lot of things that could earn what
 little money I needed, thanks to my father’s unfailing kindness which supplied me with bread
 at need despite the outrage to his principles at 
having been of a bum progenitive.
” Before he began his writing career, Faulker had previously been the University’s Postmaster, a position he quit with the following letter of resignation:

As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.

This, sir, is my resignation.

In a 1961 letter to David Markson, William Gaddis found himself “hung up with an operation of international piracy that deals in drugs, writing speeches on the balance of payments deficit but mostly staring out the window, serving the goal that Basil Valentine damned in ‘the people, whose idea of necessity is paying the gas bill’” — in other words, writing press releases for Pfizer after the critical and commercial failure of his debut novel The Recognitions, “sustained by the secret awareness that the secret police, Jack Green and yourself and some others, may expose it all yet.” Gaddis, ever willing to transfigure spite into art, drew on the experience in his fiction, crafting “the embittered character” of Eigen in his second novel J R, who Gaddis “obviously based in part on my own experience with The Recognitions, that it was not a success when it was published and I was obliged to go and work in a pharmaceutical company, which I did not like, but I had a family and had to make a living.” My own experience working in tech support for pharmaceutical companies never offered me much in the way of inspiration.

But Gaddis didn’t suffer alone in his field: in 1908 Franz Kafka began working in the office of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. For anyone who has read a sentence of his writing, the concept of Kafka pursuing a career in law practically forms a parable. But the decision was informed by a few key factors. “At bottom the states of affairs was this,” Max Brod writes in his biography of his friend: “Both of us felt ourselves honestly drawn only to creative art, but that we did not yet admit; furthermore, we had far too high a regard for art to care to connect it with all the sordidness that lay in the words and idea of ‘earning one’s living.’” Brod clarifies the appeal of pursuing law had little to do with the job itself and moreso the conditions of its execution:

What we both strove after with burning ardor was a post with a “single shift” — that is, office from early morning till two or three in the afternoon… Jobs with commercial firms, which meant being in the office mornings and afternoons, didn’t leave any continuous stretch of the day over for literary work, walks, reading, the theater, and so on. And even when one came home after three, by the time one had eaten, recovered a little from the soul-destroying work, and was ready to switch over into the state of freedom one had been looking forward to — there was already very little of the day left. […] I don’t want here to go into the story of all our disappointed hopes of suitable jobs which haunted our conversation at that time. It will suffice to say that Kafka, after a short prelude in the most strenuous of commercial offices… finally achieved the longed-for job in July 1908.

For just four days in the summer of 1975 William T. Vollmann worked as a print-framer for what he called (in his scholarship application to the Telluride House) “a capitalist imperialistic exploitationist outfit” before his firing for incompetence. (Vollmann would later grow considerably more competent while working as a photographer, painter, illustrator and designer of unique “book-objects.”)

“After college,” Vollmann tells the Paris Review, “I went to San Francisco and worked as a secretary in a reinsurance company. That was a pretty dismal job.… I was a very timid person and I really wanted to please, and so the guy would often keep me till late at night and not pay me anything extra — it just seemed like it was my entire life. I hated that office. I worked there until I had enough money to go to Afghanistan.” Vollmann dramatizes each of his early jobs and his trip to Afghanistan in his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels. The chapter titled “An American Virgin” details how “our hero,” the novel’s protagonist Bug, “came into his manhood… [and] worked in an insurance office. He had not yet become the grim expropriationist and world dictator whose remains may now be viewed in the glass case of the Great Mausoleum…” Perhaps tellingly, the chapter opens with an epigraph from a 1984 leaflet distributed by the Communist Party: “Ours is a sick society, and its sickness pervades every aspect of its being.”

After the insurance office, Vollmann spent a year pursuing a Ph.D. at Berkeley before deciding “it wasn’t for me. […] At the time what I needed to do was just go out there and have experiences and express myself. So I dropped out after a year and never went back. I became a door-to-door canvasser, and that lasted for about six months.” Again Vollmann draws on his work experience in You Bright and Risen Angels when Frank Fairless loses his job at a photo lab, much like Vollmann himself being fired as a print-framer:

As hard as Frank tried to do his work, running back and forth all alone from his enlarger to the line of washes, by precisely that degree did he increase Dr. Dodger’s displeasure with him, for all he could produce were stacks of dead prints covered by spider-like blotches…

There was nothing for it, Frank concluded, but to start from the bottom and work his way up to some lofty managerial position where the winds of change blew daily around him and he sat perched on purple peaks of responsibility. He turned to the classified ads. — “Wanted” he read. “Activist. No exper. necy. Opptnty advancement.” Within a week he had had his interview, his reliability dossier had been drawn up, he had received instruction in basic house-to-house technique, a quota of $80.00 a week was assigned him (he got 38.5% of all donations he raised), and he was in a car speeding into the residential suburbs with the mercenary canvassing crew…

Frank soon finds himself “numb and tired… going door to door for hours in the cold” and confronted with the apparent meaninglessness of his employment:

It soon appeared to him that he was not out here to ask for money and signatures, or even to distribute literature; but simply to trudge on through the darkness, going to each door until he was sent away to the next — and this was a necessary sort of cerea flexibilitas; for how could he have remained sane had he faced up to the fact that behind every door was a human consciousness, and that each consciousness felt great hatred for him? So he went on and on. Having forgotten that there were other people in the world, Frank next forgot that there was even such a thing as “inside.” He was too cold to bear to remember that.… So Frank walked across the hard flatness of everything, and went up and down hard flat steps.

In Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker’s narrator Janey finds herself in dire straits:

I didn’t have enough food, so I started working in a hippy bakery.

It was 1977.

Working for money is the omnipresent fact of American life.

I wasn’t allowed to cook or make any decisions.  My job was to hand people the bread or cookies they wanted and take their money. I also made vegetable juices, sliced bialies, dumped spreads made out of tofu and vegetables between the slices.

I am nobody because I work. I have to pretend I like the customers and love giving them cookies no matter how they treat me…

Inevitably, Acker’s Janey finds herself occupying the same position in which Vollmann’s Frank Fairless and innumerable other customer service representatives throughout history have found themselves:

Because I work I am nobody. […] As soon as I dare to take the time to think a thought, to watch a feeling, usually hatred, develop, to rest my aching body, a customer enters.

[…]

I had to work seven days a week. I had no more feelings. I was no longer a real person. If I stopped work for just a second, I would hate. Burst through the wall and hate. Hatred that comes out like that can be a bomb.

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes of working “for many years in a bar that was regularly voted ‘a smoker’s paradise’ in a New York City guidebook,” despite having quit smoking before starting the job.

Anyone to whom I complained at the time said — wisely! — Why don’t you just get a different job? There are hundreds upon hundreds of restaurants and bars in New York City. My therapist — I had taken on yet another choking shift in order to keep seeing her — suggested I help rich kids study for the SAT instead, which made me want to sock her. How could I explain? I had already had a hundred restaurant jobs in New York City, and finally I had found one at which I made more in a week than I would have in an entire semester as an adjunct instructor (the other discernible option). I also thought — a larval Karen Silkwood — if “they” — whoever they are — let me work here, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

“Toxicity is now a question of degree, of acceptable parts per unit,” writes Nelson.

When Janey’s coworker asks her, “Why do you smile at everyone?” Janey’s questions back give a succinct summary of her situation:

“Why shouldn’t I smile?”

“You don’t really like everyone, do you? You shouldn’t act nice if you don’t feel like it.”

“How should I act?”

“Act like you feel. You don’t want to be a hypocrite.”

“I don’t feel anything.” The Lousy Mindless Salesgirl wanted to kill the stupid hippy.

“Then don’t smile and be nice to customers.”

“I’m being paid to smile.”

“You’re acting hypocritically, Janey. […] Look at me. I don’t smile when I don’t feel like it and I don’t go out of my way to help anyone.”

Despite having no experience working with computers, in the fall of 1982 Vollmann accepted a job offered to him by fellow Deep Springs alumni Mike Levinthal as a programmer for NCA in Sunnyvale. Vollmann briefly lived with Levinthal in San Francisco while commuting to Sunnyvale, but when the arrangement ended, Vollmann began sleeping in his office. There at night when the building was empty he began furiously typing out the manuscript of You Bright and Risen Angels, a tale of revolutionaries taking up arms against the ever-encroaching forces of industrialization. “I slept in the office quite a bit,” said Vollmann. “I stayed there all week, sleeping under my desk, a wastebasket in front of my head so the janitors wouldn’t discover me, living on candy bars. […] I worked on the book whenever I could, and stored it on computer tapes. I very rarely printed out a hard copy — I think I did it once.”

(“One good thing about having had a job as a programmer,” adds Vollmann, “is that I learned to look at things on the screen. I don’t really need to hold a piece of paper in my hands to see if the thing works or not. When it’s alive and volatile on the screen, that’s just as good for me.”)

“Later,” Vollman writes in “Honesty,” an essay which first appeared in Esquire in 1993, “I began to study the world of San Francisco streetwalkers–this time with my notebook and tape recorder as well as with my penis. There were many things that saddened and appalled me: the dirt, the disease, the hard carapace over the fearful soul, the hatred, the danger, the addiction, the premature death. Any stereotype is partially true. Yet I also remembered the work I’d done in offices, and what I’d witnessed there seemed at least as terrible: the lying, the scheming, the same fear, really: –how could I forget the morning when most of my division got fired? We were ordered to leave the building by noon. Our health insurance terminated at midnight. One of my co-workers began crying. She said she didn’t know how she’d feed her children now. The few who had been kept on avoided us, guilty, afraid of being next. In that office, and in all the others, my constant sensation was of being constricted. I worked for others, not for myself, giving my best to ‘managers’ who used us as prostitutes are used. We lived sealed away in glass buildings, with a mere television understanding of the world!”

Singer-songwriter Terry Callier found work as a programmer as well, for the University of Chicago. Callier took the job to support his daughter after his divorce, but when he finally began to receive his seemingly long-overdue “big break” — winning a United Nations award for his 1998 album Timepeace and touring the UK — Callier was fired from the University. After a career of false starts, Callier’s newfound success overseas came as a pyrrhic victory: “After all that had happened over the years, I wasn’t looking to be a musician again because I had got used to having that pay cheque every two weeks. I’ve been inspired by Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, and I think that Hank Williams was a genius, but those people were never going to do anything but make music and live that life. That’s not me. If I hadn’t lost my job, I wouldn’t be here now.”

Once during my tenure as a chef a waitress warned me if I wasn’t careful I’d “end up” in her book. When I asked what she meant she revealed that for the past twenty years she had kept an obsessively-detailed legend of her daily life, chronicled and amended every evening. She maintained it was not a diary, focusing as it did on the important narrative events of her life without interior thoughts. (Hence the threat against me.) Meticulously recorded in black composition notebooks, the volumes — some two dozen, at least — lived on a dedicated shelf in her garage where I was only once permitted to peruse their leaves.

The server’s non-diary always put me in mind of Henry Darger, the Chicago hospital janitor who over the course of his lifetime wrote and illustrated a 15,145-page fantasy novel titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which Darger only shared toward the end of his life with the photographer Nathan Lerner, his landlord. “I figure that it’s better to be a sucker who makes something than a wise guy who is too cautious to make anything at all,” said Darger. Darger, of course, was not the only janitor to have completed a colossal artwork in total secrecy: for 14 years James Hampton rented a garage on 7th Street in northwest D.C. where he constructed his Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, an enormous monument constructed from lightbulbs, aluminum foil, jam jars and mirror shards tacked and glued to a maroon armchair emblazoned with the words “Fear Not.” Like Darger and my former co-worker, Hampton kept a written record (though the 108-page manuscript remains undeciphered) and like Darger, Hampton’s star only rose posthumously due to the discovery of his art by his landlord, who came to the garage to see why the rent had not been paid.

On his return from combat in Korea, Gene Wolfe worked as an engineer, helping to refine the machine to cook Pringles dough. “I developed it. I did not invent it,” Wolfe clarifies. “That was done by a German gentleman whose name I’ve forgotten… And they almost put him in a mental hospital. He took his job very seriously and he just about flipped out.” Wolfe also edited the trade magazine Plant Engineering, where he “wore many hats. We had a staff of 24, and all of us had several jobs. It seemed to me that I had more than most. I was the robot editor; I was the screws editor, the glue editor, the welding editor. I was in charge of power transmission belts, and gears, and bearings, and shafts, and all sorts of stuff like that…. I was the letters-to-the-editor editor. I was even the cartoon editor…. It was meaningful to me. I enjoyed it.” Wolfe always looked fondly at his time as editor, eventually publishing a collection titled Plan(e)t Engineering which was distributed at Boskone XXI. (“Basically I had a real good job.”) In those days, Wolfe “would write for about an hour before work on workdays, and then I would write on Saturdays and Sundays. That left my afternoons and evenings free to play with my kids or read to them. And then in those days — and believe me, I no longer do this — anytime I woke up after 4:00 a.m., I stayed up and I wrote. I stopped writing when Rosemary called down to me that breakfast was ready.”

During a recent Q&A at the Oxford Writers’ House, George R. R. Martin brought up the Chicago writing group he joined with Wolfe in the 1970s.

The thing I always envied about Gene was a very practical thing. Gene — as great as he was — was a part-time writer. He had a full-time job as an editor for a technical magazine, Plant Engineering. And they paid him a nice salary to be editor of Plant Engineering, and with that salary he bought his home and he sent his kids through college and he supported his family. And then on weekends and nights he wrote his books. And he wrote all four books of the Torturer series before he showed one to anyone. He didn’t submit them to an editor… He didn’t get a contract and a deadline. He finished all four books… and only when all four were finished did Gene submit the book and the series was bought and published.

And I don’t think I was alone in this: I kind of envied him the freedom to do that, but I knew even then I was not the editor of Plant Engineering Magazine. I had no other salary. I lived entirely on the money that my stories and books earned… I mean to write four books took him, like, six years or something. I couldn’t take six years off with no income. … I would have wound up homeless or something like that.

But there is something very liberating from an artistic point of view if you don’t have to worry, you know, if you happen to inherit a huge trust fund or a castle or something like that and you can write your entire series without having to sell it, without having to worry about deadlines.

Let’s leave aside Martin’s implication that working full-time is at all akin to coming into a trust fund or a castle, as if employment alone offered the worker a Woolfian room of one’s own. A charitable reading of Martin’s comments casts him as a journeyman writer with no choice but to submit his manuscripts as soon as he has them completed. Less generously, Martin reveals his jealousy of a writer who spent his life simply doing more work: clocking in at his 9-to-5 (something Martin admits he never had to do), raising his children (Martin remains childless), and all the while completing an ambitious multi-novel series, which Martin’s fans have waited for him to accomplish for nearly thirty years. Martin first published A Game of Thrones in 1996, though he began writing it in 1991 — a span of time only one year off from Wolfe’s writing the entire Book of the New Sun tetralogy — and nearly three decades later the series remains notoriously unfinished, its last installment, the fifth in the series, released in 2011, twenty years after the first book appeared. For a writer with no other job, one who could not afford to spend six years laboring over a series, who “lived entirely on the money that my stories and books earned,” who “would have wound up homeless or something like that” had he gone to the effort of completing his own work, Martin has certainly taken his time. By comparison, after the publication of the four Torturer novels Gene Wolfe would go on to write a fifth book — The Urth of the New Sun — as a coda to the series before returning to it again with an additional seven volumes. Those twelve novels — three more than Martin has written in his career as a writer with “no other salary” living “entirely on the money that my stories and books earned” — account for less than a third of Wolfe’s published work, not even including his sixteen short story collections. Certainly his employment was not the factor allowing Wolfe to work at such a prolific rate: “when I left off editing,” he says, “I increased the time I spent writing by a factor of three.”

But what did that work which Martin so envies Wolfe do to Wolfe himself? What effect does a life spent in relentless pursuit of artistic satisfaction with no promise, no hint of success have on the soul of the laborer? Kim Stanley Robinson interviewed Wolfe about his earliest days writing for the introduction to the collection Wolfe at the Door:

In the 1950s, married and supporting a new family, he began writing stories in the hope of making some extra money. Happily married, with young children, he wrote in the early hours before work, and at night, in the hopes of earning some money to buy furniture. But no sales, not a single sale — not for nine years! […]

“What did that do to you?” I asked.

“It made me mean,” he said instantly. “I’m like a dog on a chain. If you’re outside the length of the chain, you’ll be okay. Come inside that length, and you might get bit.”

Before he began his literary career writing stories for Black Mask, Raymond Chandler “arrived in California in 1919 with a beautiful wardrobe, a public school accent, and had a pretty hard time trying to make a living,” he wrote in a 1950 letter to Hamish Hamilton.

Once I worked on an apricot ranch ten hours a day, twenty cents an hour. Another time I worked for a sporting goods house, stringing tennis rackets for $12.50 a week, 54 hours a week. I taught myself book-keeping and from there on my rise was as rapid as the growth of a sequoia. I detested business life, but in spite of that I finally became an officer or director of half a dozen independent oil corporations.

“They were small companies,” Chandler writes in another letter, this time to Helga Greene, “but very rich. I had the best office staff in Los Angeles and I paid them higher salaries than they could have got anywhere else and they knew it. My office door was never closed, everyone called me by my Christian name, and there was never any dissension, because I made it my business to see that there was no cause for it.” But Chandler harbored no love for his work. “Business is very tough and I hate it. But whatever you set out to do, you have to do as well as you know how…”

Whatever you set out to do casts a wide net. Backwoodz Studioz producer James Bond “always built stuff, painted, did construction, worked on bikes etc. etc. Making beats was just like building a little house for someone to rap in. Like painting a backdrop for a play. I did take it seriously, though I really never expected anything from it.” Terry Savastano of Grief “cut paper for a living, working with dickheads, breaking your balls. I never made a lot of money. I probably never will make a lot of money. It’s a fucking horror show.”

Kevin Jerome Everson’s documentary Park Lanes takes the form of an eight-hour real-time record of one day at the Mechanicsville, VA factory of QubicaAMF, the world’s largest manufacturer of bowling balls. The film’s extreme length calls into question the very nature not just of so-called “long” films but the concept of the workday itself: if eight hours sounds entirely too long to spend in front of a screen (I envy you), what takes place onscreen both requires entirely more endurance than merely watching and is also completed in full five times a week by millions of people. Committed to film by Everson, the very idea of the workday becomes utterly incomprehensible; most audiences aren’t likely to be convinced to sit through the film even once, let alone five days a week for forty years. “I’m trying to frame it up so it’s clear to me,” says Everson. “I don’t care about the viewer, but it’s clear to me. I make films for the subject matter and me. In fact, I always think I’m hostile to the viewer because I’m making them sit eight hours… I just can’t imagine a viewership, it’s too abstract for me… so I make it internal. It’s self-referential.”

I just remember growing up, my folks looked differently on Friday than they did on Monday. They worked all week… that shit wears you down. My mom was a bank teller, my dad was a mechanic. But then they’d be recharged by Monday and going back at it again, and even when I worked in factories… I realized your labor changes you. 

I painted plastic GM car parts at the press line plant for a summer, and I think the following summer … I was working on the [factory] line. And then after that, I worked in museums as a guard. And that’s it, [plus] teaching. That’s the only jobs I ever had. But I saw my professors that were teaching… they had time. For me — I was never a big money guy — it’s all about time. Still is. It’s just time to do shit. That’s why I got into film; it was like the sculpture, [but it] had time … it was about the backstory. It was a re-representation of something that was already there.

Throughout its eight hours Park Lanes offers plenty of coverage to the mechanical processes of manufacturing bowling balls. But more than the end results of production — the commodities themselves, inasmuch as any such thing could be said to have a self — Everson devotes his eye to the laborers as people. Consider as a counterexample the series How It’s Made or Unwrapped, in which faceless machines seemingly self-possessed by some mysterious animating force slickly produce and package the unending myriad of articles demanded by late capitalism. “All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force,” said Marx at the 1856 anniversary of the Chartist People’s Paper. “In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.” Everson’s massive agglomeration of footage resembles certain genres which have formed this millennium — slow TV, livestreaming, or “oddly satisfying” videos — with the key difference in Everson’s case his foregrounding not just of the relationship between film and spectator but of machines and their operators. It’s a relationship which cinema has explored and exposed quite literally from its inception: in 1895 Louis Lumière filmed La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon, arguably the first motion picture ever recorded (a position supplanted only perhaps by Louis Le Prince’s 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene), which for 46 seconds captures 800 frames of the titular employees of the Lumière as they clock out for the day.

Park Lanes recalls other filmic documents of labor in action, such as Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break (an 80-minute tracking shot across the Bath Iron Works in Maine during the titular repast) and Exit (five takes over five days during which employees clock out of the same factory), Ernie Gehr’s Workers Leaving the Factory (After Lumière) (a 12-minute New York subway commute), or Ben Russell’s Workers Leaving the Factory (Dubai) (“This time around our factory is a job site, a construction site peopled by thousands of Southeast Asian laborers, a neo-Fordist architectural production site that manufactures skyscrapers like so many cars.”), all of which play off Lumière’s film. Everson himself riffed on the Lumières with Workers Leaving the Job Site, and even Lumière made three versions of his film. “I don’t want to go to work every day, so I get on my bike and go to school. It’s a whole different thing. I’m learning too,” says Everson. “That’s all important too, to talk about what these people do for a living, so they know that they can make art. How to negotiate, to keep your practice going.”

Christopher Woodall’s novel November chronicles in exhaustive detail two-and-a-half hours in the lives of fourteen men working the night shift at a plastics factory in southeast France in 1976. For much of the novel, Woodall focuses on personalizing the workers’ experiences of labor, detailing how each individuals’ mental and physical participation colors their perceptions. November shares with Everson’s film an obvious fixation on the mechanical processes of industrial labor, but stripped of the camera’s apparent objectivity, Woodall explicitly filters each machine through the attitudes and experiences, physical and mental, of the individuals handling the machines, until Book Three of the novel, when the process of labor is broken down into its purest components: “Worker turns to face machine, press opens and product (plastic, red) falls from mould (steel, shiny)…” The work is dehumanized even further through quotations from a handbook on injection molding, which only after detailing the “three basic operations” mentions, as if in a footnote, “To operate the plant efficiently, people are needed.” It’s a process of abstraction through the hardening of fact, diminishing the human element only to further illustrate its centrality to the whole.

But unlike Park Lanes’ locked-off workday chronology, Woodall’s disembodied narration floats freely across time and between the minds of a cast of a hundred or so characters as their lives intersect and allowing the reader insight into the workers’ richly-detailed interior — or exterior to the workplace — lives: the first character introduced, Tomec, is a sculptor who whiles away his hours at work plotting a large piece detailing Virgil’s journey through Brundisium; his coworker Alphonse dreams of a career as an actor; their foreman Mathieu is a jazz trumpeter. Woodall makes central to the novel the assumed divide separating art and labor as supposedly distinct realms. As Woodall has it,

On the one hand, there is what you call the “making and fashioning… by artists” and, on the other, there is brute, alienated [my words and emphasis], “labour.” What role, you ask, does the former play in a novel about the latter? […]

Answered simply: it is the very same people, the same individuals who — depending on circumstances — can be involved in either domain and are sometimes, as in November, involved, simultaneously or consecutively, in both. Moreover, in some happy cases, it might even be possible to conceive of the two categories overlapping (Tomec does at least manage to sketch at work…)…

The idea art-work can not merely coexist but actually overlap with “real”-work, occupying the same timeframe, sounds almost too good to be true, and in a way it is. Contrast this outlook with Kafka and Brod, who “had far too high a regard for art to care to connect it with all the sordidness that lay in the words and idea of “earning one’s living.’” As evinced by Faulkner shirking his coal-shoveling duties to write As I Lay Dying or Vollmann hiding out in the office all night to write on the company computer, artistic productivity in the workplace can only be stolen away from alienated labor, a shadow or, as Bataille would have it, an accursed share of productivity towards nothing. I am not a working artist. I am an artist who works. (It is pertinent to note, for whatever it may be worth, that I wrote this post on my computer at work.) Woodall again: “Imagine Mathieu actually getting paid to play his trumpet; or Alphonse landing an acting role that brings in serious money; or Tomec finding a wealthy patron or lucrative market; or even, the ‘storyteller’ or author… no, I’d better block that thought…”

But despite their lack of personal successes, Woodall is quick to point out the conditions of labor in November are “anything but miserabilist” for the factory team. 

The workers at “Ets Boucan” in 1976 have decent wages, live in a well-functioning welfare state, enjoy medium-term job security, are mostly unionised, pursue economic or social class-exit routes (Luigi, Salvatore, Alphonse) or have second jobs (Bobrán, Jacques, Rachid, Marcel and, again, Luigi). What is more, in stark contrast to the morning and afternoon shift workers, the workers in November, just as long as their machines work smoothly, enjoy the informal (and provisional) freedom to walk away from their machines, read, associate, play cards, reflect on their lives, etc.: in other words, how they direct their conscious attention is largely up to them.

And so November’s cast of employees occupy “an unusual zone of relative ease and liberty within the industrial landscape. And, seizing the opportunity, the individuals portrayed within that blessed zone do what individuals always will do when stupefying, or even merely dull, work abates: they enter the field of ‘culture,’ spurred by an arguably universal aesthetic impulse to consume and if at all possible to create artefacts.” As Patrick Dahl writes of Park Lanes, “These are the ‘good jobs’ on perpetual offer during campaign visits at tile-floored diners in swing districts.” But all is not so bright in factory employment:

…union membership in manufacturing has been halved since 2000 and automation continues to devour these positions with no end in sight. Without interviews or editorial intervention, Everson’s approach has no place for this context, and thus captures a nearly utopian vision of a dignified workforce toiling in the construction of useful, recognizable products. […] But these jobs do indeed appear to the untrained eye as “good” ones, the type that engage the body and the mind toward legible ends without degrading either too devastatingly. The type of jobs that good liberals want for their “community” but not for their own children. There’s no sign of hurry or surveillance or curtailed breaks or mandatory overtime, though we can’t be sure these men and women are free from such hazards. One of the horrible pleasures of the film is imagining Jeff Bezos as one’s seatmate, writhing in audible discomfort at the inefficiencies of the factory’s process. These workers are of course alienated from their labor, but such is the barbarism of the advancing state of American work that we consider them infinitely better off than the Uber driver, Tyson meat packer, or Amazon fulfilment associate.

“In common with the majority of 1970s sentient creatures,” Woodall says of his novel, “the narration/’storyteller’ certainly assumes that material circumstances and relations are of primary and determinant importance in all lives and that infinite human potential is on all sides spectacularly squandered. I guess that might qualify the text as Marxist.”

To be more forthcoming: somewhere at the back of the author’s mind lingers a text by the indelibly romantic young Marx who, railing against capitalist alienation and the division of labour, yearns for a society in which it is “possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” (from The German Ideology, 1845-6).

Before directing Moonlight and while working on his debut feature Medicine for Melancholy, Barry Jenkins “was the shipment supervisor at the largest Banana Republic in the world, which meant rising at 4:30am to be at work for a 5:30am job. We unloaded a truck every morning and unpacked the new product across long, rectangular tables.” The job proved “more or less essential to getting [Medicine for Melancholy] done. … They were very understanding about me taking time off to make the film; in fact, several people I worked with there are in the film, another shot the still that became the poster. To stay afloat, I even picked up a few shifts while we were in production.”

Unlike William Gaddis’s pharmaceutical hell, Jenkins even found working outside his chosen creative field a greater source of inspiration: “My previous job had been as an assistant in LA, and working around non-film people every morning [at Banana Republic], getting the muscles going, having a dialogue with real people and not about ‘projects’ was a great way to start the day, open up the brain and get some positive energy going. I’d be up and engaged to start the day, then I’d get off work around noon and ride to a cafe and write. Rather than being an assistant and working on someone else’s material — and being creative in the service of someone else — that part of my mind was kept fresh and preserved for my own material.”

“Years (decades?) ago,” when B.R. Yeager “used to bartend at a greyhound track,”

I spent a lot of time hanging out with the kitchen staff. They were into all kinds of art (not to mention that cooking is, itself, an artform). They were reading Palahniuk, Bukowski, and Pynchon. I discovered Gaspar Noe through one of them. In contrast, I’ve primarily worked in offices over the past decade, and barely anyone I’ve encountered in those settings has had any interest in art, let alone literature. It’s all sports and home improvement.

“The fact that [Banana Republic] was totally unrelated to filmmaking was a definite plus, something that took me by surprise,” says Jenkins. “The people I worked with at Banana were so diverse across class, ethnic, educational backgrounds, going into that place was always a chance to connect to an experience totally unrelated to my own. It made me a better listener, which is one of the most essential skills to cultivate for a filmmaker.”

The Scarlet Letter opens with a lengthy autobiographical introduction detailing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s day job as Surveyor of Revenue at the Custom-House in his native Salem, a job he even fictitiously credits with inspiring the novel. At the time he started the job, Hawthorne had recently left “the dreamy brethren of Brook Farm,” the experimental utopian commune he had (somewhat reluctantly) helped found with George and Sophia Ripley alongside other key Transcendentalists. “After living for three years within the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson’s; after those wild, free days on the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden; after growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard’s culture; after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow’s hearthstone — it was time, at length, that I should exercise other faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite. Even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott.” Hawthorne viewed his surveyor job “as an evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities, and never murmur at the change.” Like Jenkins and Yeager, even Hawthorne’s coworkers offered him balance and inspiration:

It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of my life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more fulness and variety than during my continuance in office.

Even the relative anonymity of entering the workforce was a boon to Hawthorne after his heady time at Brook Farm:

My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom–House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

Like William Gaddis, John Franklin Bardin worked in advertising, and like Gene Wolfe he edited a trade publication, the American Medical Association’s Today’s Health. But before finding his career Bardin took on a variety of odd jobs, including working in a Coney Island cafeteria, a position in which he employed his amnesiac protagonist in his novel The Deadly Percheron:

During the next month, the sultry, crowded days of August, I worked at the cafeteria six nights a week, slept or sat on the beach and read in the daytime, existed. I would be lying to say that this was an unhappy period. Indeed, I might say the opposite. I had no desire to do anything else. The books I read were adventure stories and the like. I did not dream of my former life, or of an impossibly satisfying one to come. I made no friends or enemies. Yet — if a form of contentment that was not unlike a drug-induced stupor can be called happiness — I was happy.

But after a comfortable if not auspicious start, the Custom-House began to wear on Hawthorne, who soon found “literature, its exertions and objects… of little moment in my regard. I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.” His apathy even began to extend beyond his old love of literature: even “nature — except it were human nature — the nature that is developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative delight wherewith it had been spiritualized passed away out of my mind. A gift, a faculty, if it had not been departed, was suspended and inanimate within me.” By his own account, Hawthorne kept in high spirits only so long as he could keep in mind his once-vibrant creative life and the idea his employment would one day end:

There would have been something sad, unutterably dreary, in all this, had I not been conscious that it lay at my own option to recall whatever was valuable in the past. It might be true, indeed, that this was a life which could not, with impunity, be lived too long; else, it might make me permanently other than I had been, without transforming me into any shape which it would be worth my while to take. But I never considered it as other than a transitory life. There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in my ear, that within no long period, and whenever a new change of custom should be essential to my good, change would come.

Even the hope his gift had not departed but merely “was suspended and inanimate within” him soon evaporated as Hawthorne began to resign himself to the greater waning of his creativity. The promise of employment as nothing “other than a transitory life” could no longer inspire in Hawthorne the dream he could ever return to his former intellectual aspirations:

At the Instant, I was only conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favourable to the mode of life in question.…

My reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension… that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend — to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade? A dreary look-forward, this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities. But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.

In a letter to Longfellow, Hawthorne wrote: “I am trying to resume my pen… Whenever I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming about stories, as of old; but these forenoons in the Custom House undo all that the afternoons and evenings have done. I should be happier if I could write.” Despite working only mornings at the Custom-House — unlike Janey of Blood and Guts in High School, who “had to work seven days a week… had no more feelings… [and] was no longer a real person” — Hawthorne came to share an outlook with Kathy Acker, who during the workday “hated most that I didn’t have any more dreams or visions. It’s not that the vision-world, the world of passion and wildness, no longer existed. It always is. But awake I was disconnected from dreams. I was psychotic.” Hawthorne soon discovered

My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. “What have you to do with us?” that expression seemed to say. “The little power you might have once possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone. You have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go then, and earn your wages.” In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.

The melancholy instilled in Hawthorne by his day job soon proved inescapable even in his off-hours:

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched numbness held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles into the country, whenever — which was seldom and reluctantly — I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes…

If even a three and a half hour share is enough to fill Hawthorne with “this wretched numbness” which refuses to release its grip even in his hours away from work, what is to be made of the eight hours demanded not just by watching Park Lanes, but experience the conditions of labor for eight continuous hours as demanded around the world, every day, for millions of people?

I had to work seven days a week, Janey says. I had no more feelings. I was no longer a real person. If I stopped work for just a second, I would hate. Burst through the wall and hate. Hatred that comes out like that can be a bomb.

“At every moment,” Hawthorne says, “the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance.”

Because I work I am nobody. As soon as I dare to take the time to think a thought, to watch a feeling, usually hatred, develop, to rest my aching body, a customer enters.

Work allows Hawthorne only the space to recognize the “folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter.”

I hated most that I didn’t have any more dreams or visions. It’s not that the vision-world, the world of passion and wildness, no longer existed. It always is. But awake I was disconnected from dreams. I was psychotic.

“These perceptions had come too late” for Hawthorne, though. “Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.”

Happy Labor Day!