On Tuesday during class we were talking some about the character of Howie the narrator and whether he had a weird, abnormal obsession with the details of life (the idea was even tossed out that he is on the autistic spectrum) or whether he is the most normal guy imaginable who is fascinated by the normal things in life because he is so ordinary. You could make the case that he must have some abnormal obsession or else we wouldn't be interested in reading about him, but I think we find him so interesting because he is so very ordinary (or maybe another way to put it would be that he is uncommonly ordinary).
I was thinking about this point, and then other examples of popular stories about ordinary office workers occurred to me, in an improbable variety of styles. First I thought of Dilbert the comic strip, which is about an ordinary office worker and pokes fun at bureaucracy and how inefficient it is, and how pointless a lot of office work seems. I could easily picture Dilbert being Howie's officemate at the Mezzanine and Howie appearing in the comic strip. Like the Mezzanine, Dilbert never mentions exactly what work the office is trying to accomplish, it just mentions meetings and memos and stuff like that.
Moving onto poetry, I thought of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Elliot, a very famous poem we analyzed in sophomore English and then I read again last year. (It was actually mentioned in one of the Woolfe essays we read.)The narrator in that poem J. Alfred Prufrock is a insecure man who is nervous about how he presents himself to other people and as a result is somewhat antisocial. While the poem never explicitly states what Prufrock does, it is strongly implied through the description of his clothes, life, and even his name that he dresses in a suit and does some kind of office work all day. Obviously Howie is not as nervous around women since he has a relationship with L., but we noted in class his at-times antisocial personality and it would not be too much of a stretch for me to see Howie become like Prufrock in a few years if he continued some of behaviors.
In the realm of TV, of course, there is The Office. I have only seen a few episodes and I assume most of you would at least know what it was so I won't go into much detail here, but it is a show about the office of a paper company and pokes fun at the lives of the cubicle workers and the parts of their lives that intersect with the office.
The fact that these four things from very different mediums are popular indicate that there must be something our culture likes about them. Perhaps all the office workers who strongly identify with the workers in Dilbert and The Office like seeing people like them and their problems, just like we all like seeing people we can identify with. However, that does nothing to explain why forty-odd high school kids can (by and large) enjoy a book about random observations regarding offices and paperwork without ever experiencing office life. I think that maybe looking at the lives of exceptionally ordinary people makes our own lives seem more exciting, makes us feel like the seemingly meaningless mundane aspects of our lives are important and significant. The fact that people would spend creative energy creating works in this "genre" of normal office guys helps us appreciate our own lives more. That might be why people enjoy the uselessness of Dilbert's work, the awkwardness of Prufrock, the office shenanigans of Michael Scott, or even the long digressions of Howie.
In the realm of TV, of course, there is The Office. I have only seen a few episodes and I assume most of you would at least know what it was so I won't go into much detail here, but it is a show about the office of a paper company and pokes fun at the lives of the cubicle workers and the parts of their lives that intersect with the office.
The fact that these four things from very different mediums are popular indicate that there must be something our culture likes about them. Perhaps all the office workers who strongly identify with the workers in Dilbert and The Office like seeing people like them and their problems, just like we all like seeing people we can identify with. However, that does nothing to explain why forty-odd high school kids can (by and large) enjoy a book about random observations regarding offices and paperwork without ever experiencing office life. I think that maybe looking at the lives of exceptionally ordinary people makes our own lives seem more exciting, makes us feel like the seemingly meaningless mundane aspects of our lives are important and significant. The fact that people would spend creative energy creating works in this "genre" of normal office guys helps us appreciate our own lives more. That might be why people enjoy the uselessness of Dilbert's work, the awkwardness of Prufrock, the office shenanigans of Michael Scott, or even the long digressions of Howie.
Until I read this blog post I would never have put Michael Scott, Dilbert, and Prufrock in the same sentence. It would have seemed almost absurd!
ReplyDeleteBut now that I read this, it totally makes sense. Maybe there is a genre after all. A genre that fulfills the human desire to be both normal and unique. Normal in the sense that it's ok to have a "boring" office job because there's always a spice to life if you can find it. And unique because of the individual characters that somehow break out of the stereotypical shell of a dull office worker answering phone calls.
All of the individuals in these forms of art (yes, even The Office is a form of art) could be seen as very unique because they either:
a. take time to think their own thoughts and discoveries in a manner that is candid and honest (Prufrock and Howie), or
b. they're just plain crazy (in the case of Michael Scott and Dilbert).
If you like this kind of "genre" I highly suggest completing The Office. It's absolutely hilarious.
I would add to this rough sketch of the "office genre" the classic late-1990s film "Office Space," and maybe the Melville story "Bartleby the Scrivener." Kafka's whole body of work could potentially be read under this category (we'll see an especially alienated traveling salesman in "The Metamorphosis"). In most of these examples, though, there's the sense of a "normal" person being driven insane by office culture (this perspective would be Jim in the American TV series "The Office")--the sense that, to fully immerse in this culture, you'd have to go a little crazy. And with "Prufrock," we get the cornerstone modernist idea that work in the 20th century is alienated and dehumanizing--Prufrock seems like a man who has been emotionally damaged by his life as a (presumed) office clerk.
ReplyDeleteWhere Baker/Howie departs from this paradigm is how basically *happy* he seems in this context. He riffs on the absurdity of office workers "treated like popes" at work, while maintaining sad, lonely lives cooking Ronzoni in their underpants after work, but overall he seems not only content with his job, but fully psyched--"honored" to use the excellent paper-towel dispenser in the corporate restroom, for example. But maybe Howie is the kindred spririt of Jim in "The Office" if we read his wandering mind as the parallel to Jim's practical jokes--a way of making the job fun by doing everything but the job.
Since I came here to mention Office Space I won't repeat it by creating my own comment, but it's a good point about how Howie seems happy in his office job. This is completely opposed to the main character in Office Space, Peter Gibbons, is driven insane in his job at the office. At one point he says, " ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life." In fact, only after his epiphany, or whatever you want to call it, is he able to be happy, and that is only once he stops trying at his job. Isn't it pessimistic that we refer to Peter as the normal one, while Howie, who's able to be happy in his job by marveling at the beauty and ingenuity in the world has been described by us as antisocial and autistic? Shouldn't we praise him for being happy while being to some extent normal, as we've seen by his essentially normal human relationships—we have no evidence to suggest he is antisocial; he just doesn't mention people as often as typical narrators—rather than saying there must be something wrong with him, or diagnosing him with a mental illness because his priorities are different than ours? It's an interesting phenomenon of our culture that the character that is a happy functioning human is that "abnormal" one while the character that (spoilers ahead) is unhappy with his job to the point of not caring, then getting promoted as a result of his not caring about his job, and embezzling from said company just after the promotion, is the "normal" character.
DeleteI know it's been almost 3 years since this discussion took place, but I thought I'd mention this on here just in case either of you get notifications about people commenting on your comments and would happen to see this. I just watched Office Space for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and it was pretty good and definitely fits into the office guy genera this post was discussing. Watching the movie you don't exactly get the sense that Peter Gibbons is the most normal guy, but he definitely seems to fit in better than someone like Howie does. Peter definitely feels like the office is something unnatural and wrong compared to fishing or the rest of the world, while Howie does not really see a big difference between the two. Anyway, when I watched the movie I remembered that you too had brought it up in this post, so I wanted to be able to respond to that.
Delete