Upton Sinclair, the man who opened up the Chicago stock-yards the way the stockyards opened up Bessie the cow, knew the difference between work as an abstraction and work as work:
“There are learned people who can tell you out of the statistics that beef boners make forty cents an hour, but, perhaps, these people have never looked into a beef boner’s hands,” he wrote in “The Jungle” (1906), his classic novel about abuses in the meat-processing industry.
Those hands, Sinclair informed readers in his highly melodramatic but deeply affecting tale, were apt to be swollen, bleeding, gangrenous or gone, due in large part to greedy, indifferent bosses.
The power of “The Jungle” comes from Sinclair’s precise, sometimes even grotesque descriptions of work. Not work as a symbol. Not work as a metaphor in political debates. This kind of work: Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it.
Lately, though, artists haven’t looked at work the same way. Instead of specific nuances about the kinds of occupations they are depicting, with rich helpings of Dickensian detail, many novelists, filmmakers and TV producers substitute a generic wash of locale called “work.” As Ricky Gervais, star and co-creator of the BBC series “The Office” told a BBC interviewer, “We never went into detail about the paper business because it didn’t really matter.”
The few movies that deal with work, such as “Clockwatchers” (1997) and “Office Space” (1999), play it for laughs; work is an ironic joke. Work is “work” — as in, Yeah, right, I gotta go to `work.’ Few TV shows move beyond the doctor/lawyer/detective trinity of professions. Few pop songs take up the subject of daily labor, as did “Sixteen Tons” (1947) by Merle Travis — I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine/I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine — and few contemporary paintings give as instant and visceral a sense of muscular effort as did the sod-busting, earth-moving murals of Thomas Hart Benton.
These are generalizations, to be sure, and there are political and cultural explanations as well as aesthetic ones. The kind of work we do has changed a great deal in the past century. Workplaces are safer, more efficient venues than they were in Sinclair’s day — thanks in part to reforms initiated after “The Jungle” exposed horrendous conditions. The opportunities for sweeping physical drama in a beige cubicle are somewhat limited. And precious little sod-busting goes on these days.
But most of us still work at something. And the depiction of that work in imaginative creations has changed.
“It’s become unfashionable,” declares author Stuart Dybek, the Chicago native whose books about working-class life include “The Coast of Chicago” (1990). “What made work seem so vital was immigration and a tremendous sense of class.”
Link to class
Authors, that is, often used work as a way to deal with class, since how you earned your living largely determined to which class you belonged. “After World War II,” Dybek says, “there was this huge sea change in the culture. Subsequent generations [of writers] were totally uninterested in work.
“It’s been replaced by issues of personal growth, of raising consciousness. It’s become a literature of middle-class people who are much more interested in their leisure time than in their work time. A lot of American literature today is about attitude.”
A running gag in the sitcom “Friends” involved the occupation of Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry): Just what did he do, exactly? The same joke — that only suckers break a sweat — was at the heart of the musical comedy “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (1961). Work often is depicted not as a life-or-death struggle or a character-building odyssey, but as a fool’s game.
Russell Muirhead, associate professor of government at Harvard University and author of the forthcoming “Just Work” (Harvard University Press), attributes the transformation of work in the arts to larger shifts in the last century.
“Today there is a great emphasis on the private self,” he says. “Work does reflect something about the human spirit and our drive to dignify daily life. But the problem is, actual work recedes. We don’t take actual work seriously enough — the texture, the detail.”
Texture and detail about work are found in abundance in a novel such as Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” (1900). Assailed in its time for sexual frankness — the impecunious title character is eyebrow-raisingly eager to trade virtue for vittles — the book’s real distinction is its blunt presentation of work.
“Her hands began to ache at the wrists and then in the fingers,” Dreiser wrote of Carrie’s first day in the shoe factory, “and towards the last she seemed one mass of dull, complaining muscles … until at last it was absolutely nauseating.”
Few contemporary accounts present work with such pass-the-Vioxx specificity. Why?
“I think a lot of writers have become bored with [depictions of] work,” said Richard Lingeman, author of biographies of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, another American author who cared mightily about his characters’ occupations.
Among the reasons for that lack of interest, of course, is that work itself has changed. Says Muirhead, “Maybe it’s hard to depict work in a post-industrial economy because so much of it is done at computer screens.” Consider the work of Cayce Pollard in William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” (2003) — it’s all glowing PC screens and downloading and midnight text-messaging. No beef-boning in sight.
No longer about survival
Bill Savage, an English lecturer at Northwestern University, believes that for most people, work doesn’t figure in their lives as largely as it once did. “For the characters in Steinbeck’s `Grapes of Wrath,’ it was work or die,” he says. Unlike modern times, there was no safety net, in effect, to rescue people who couldn’t or wouldn’t work. Work was all that stood between survival and doom.
“In so many contemporary novels, though, work is the meaningless thing you do. It’s drudgery. McJobs,” Savage adds, citing publications such as “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” (1991) by Douglas Coupland and films such as “Clerks” (1994). And even in the “canonical fiction of the Saul Bellow variety,” he adds, work isn’t paramount. “The protagonist’s internal moral, intellectual and spiritual crises and concerns trump the material concerns of older novels about the life of work because work itself is readily available [today].
Conversely, for the emerging voices of ethnic minorities in the United States, many of whom are forced to labor in low-paying jobs, work still is a viable subject. Sandra Cisneros has stated that she was motivated to write “The House on Mango Street” (1984), her acclaimed tale of a Mexican-American girl growing up in Chicago, after wincing at another writer’s abstract theories: “What was this guy talking about when he mentioned . . . the `house of memory’? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one like ours.”
Tom Wolfe would sympathize. The novelist and social critic has often pointed out the peril of leaving work out of the arts. Lacking a richly detailed sense of how people earn a living, fiction can too easily sink into a trivial exercise in clever wordplay, losing touch with the bricks-and-pavement realities that serve as ballast.
Another novelist and essayist, Cynthia Ozick, makes a similar point in “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” a piece in her 1983 collection “Art and Ardor.” Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” she argues, is as much about how its characters earn their keep — dairy farming — as it is about their moral musings and behavioral tics. “Hardy writes about — well, life,” Ozick notes, adding that he provides “knowledge of something real, something there . . . `Tess’ is thick with knowledge of Cow.”
Naturally, some artworks have concerned themselves with labor since 1891, when “Tess” was published. Some recent novels hone in on workplaces with terrific a-plomb, from the sailor’s life on a WWII-era tramp steamer in Alan Furst’s “Dark Voyage” (2004) back to Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” (1997), a detailed portrait of a glove-making factory in Newark, N.J., and the “wet, smelly, crushing work.”
`Work Ethic’ exhibit
Beginning Sept. 18 and running through Jan. 2, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, will mount an exhibit called “Work Ethic” — an unusual topic for contemporary art, says curator Helen Molesworth, because that community has mostly avoided the question of what constitutes work in a post-industrial world.
The exhibit, which includes pieces by Robert Rauschenberg and Yoko Ono, “doesn’t show images of people working — it’s about a re-evaluation of work,” Molesworth says. “After World War II, the American economy began a massive and profound shift from a manufacturing to a service economy. Now, we’ve gone from a service to an information economy.”
Visual artists, she says, feel the same anxiety as do workers in other fields: What does “work” mean in this new landscape? “The art world moved from painting and sculpture — from creating discrete products — to `happenings,'” Molesworth adds.
But for writers, wouldn’t the historical shift in the way people make their living create more, not fewer, opportunities for great stories?
Maybe too much so, say Dybek and others. The topic of work is so rich that high-quality non-fiction has in many cases taken over fiction’s role. “When fiction writers abandoned some of that,” Dybek believes, “some of the non-fiction writers said, `Hey, we’ll do it!'”
David K. Shipler’s “The Working Poor: Invisible in America” (2004) is as bleak and moving a portrait of struggling families as some of Steinbeck’s early novels in the 1930s and ’40s. “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” (2001) by Barbara Ehrenreich, recently made into a play, is an unvarnished view of minimum-wage lives. And Studs Terkel’s “Working” (1972), with its long interviews with workers in a variety of jobs — spot welders, bus drivers, secretaries — is thick with the accidental poetry of everyday anxieties: When the train begins to move, all you can do is see it move and hope to get on . . .
Art, though, still should concern itself with work, because art is the best intellectual tool we possess for dealing with ambiguity. And work, for all of its straight-ahead obviousness — do this; get paid; come back the next day and do the same — is actually fraught with paradox, as Muirhead notes in his book.
“In a curious way, work does remain at the center of our lives,” he says. “Fifty years ago, good work was associated with security and pay. Now, people bring a different expectation to work. We want a calling — something that we can feel devoted to.”
Freed from the crippling labor that so burdened Jurgis Rudkus in “The Jungle,” freed from what Dreiser called “the underworld of toil” in “Sister Carrie,” we must find something else to make our lives worthwhile. Work, no longer a simple necessity, becomes more necessary than ever.
