Book without a reader

From Anton Steinpilz's "First-Person Corporate," in The New Inquiry:

It might be, however, that Tretyakov’s biography of the object was an idea whose time had not yet come and may now only be just arriving. Specifically needed was development in the direction of what has come to be termed “post-Fordist” relations of production, in which value inheres no longer in goods primarily but in information and services. Within such relations, labor becomes immaterial, and Tretyakov’s conveyor belt doesn’t so much disappear as attenuate and ramify, becoming more a mediating trope than a real mechanism. In the novel Personal Days (2008), author Ed Park offers a spirited send-up of postmillennial, post-Fordist office drudgery. The final section consists of an enormous e-mail composed on a laptop by a character named Jonah while he is trapped in an elevator. The correspondence, addressed to a former colleague of Jonah’s named Pru, ends with this arresting observation:

You said yourself, once, waiting for stuff by the asthmatic printer, that the office generates at least one book, no, one novel every day, in the form of correspondence and memos and reports, all the reams of numbers, hundreds of sentences, thousands of words, but no one has the mind to understand it, no one has the eyes to take it all in, all these potential epics, War and Peace lying in between the lines [...]

Here Park manages to articulate a narrative point of view you might call first-person corporate — which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to great effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. The resonances with Tretyakov’s biography of the object are obvious; but whereas Tretyakov points toward overcoming workers’ alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with 21st-century work life. Tretyakov imagines a novel without a hero. Park imagines one without a reader.

Heyyy—I'll take it!™

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(One interesting note: toward the end, Steinpilz writes: "Social media simply consolidate and lend greater force to the anxiety felt by the characters of Personal Days. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter are the treadmills that fuel this anxiety." One thing that pins PD to a certain point in time is the fact that FB and Twitter aren't mentioned—I wasn't on either network while writing the book. I'll update it in the next version.)

Nonmimesis

Genres often classifed as both nonmimetic and non-SF are actually varieties of science fiction that correspond mimetically to specific types of cognitively estranging referents....Slipstream—a relatively young subgenre that has emerged over the past several decades, with prominent examples including Don DeLillo's 1985 White Noise, the 1998 film The Truman Show, and Ed Park's 2008 novel Personal Days—is a type of science-fictional mimesis whose cognitively estranging referent is the partially virtual reality of living in a mainstream hypermediated and rendered half-surreal by technology. —Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science Fictional Theory of Reputation

White Noise? Heyyy—I'll take it!™

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Chu's book is pretty fascinating! (Where else could you read about Joe Haldeman and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha?) I don't know that anyone else has called Personal Days "slipstream"—but it makes sense. One of my first published stories was in Trampoline, edited by Kelly Link, a/k/a the Queen of the Slipstream:



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Now I'm thinking that titling my SF column "Astral Weeks" was also a way of saying I would cover "slipstream," given the first line of the song...



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I like this bit in the epilogue:

"As these allusions to the many 'chapters that might have been' are meant to imply, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Reputation is a fragment of a much larger hypothetical book containing an infinite number of chapters that correspond to an infinite number of cognitively estranging objects and phenomena."

"Take This Job and Write It"

From the upcoming New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Schuessler on work novels:

With the arrival of postwar prosperity, the literature of working-class struggle gave way to the literature of middle-­class disillusion. In novels like Sloan Wilson’s “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road,” work isn’t a tool of social redemption but a graveyard of individual dreams — often, as in the case of Yates’s Frank Wheeler, the dream of being an artist. It’s a theme the literary novel hasn’t been able to shake. Blue-collar misery has continued to inspire powerful fiction, whether Raymond Carver’s stories about laconically depressed waitresses and mechanics or Russell Banks’s portraits of violently self-destructive millworkers and snowplow drivers. But these days, it seems, the really unhappy people are working in offices.

Take, for example, the characters in Joshua Ferris’s dark satire “Then We Came to the End” (2007), set in a Chicago advertising agency caught in the throes of layoffs and water-cooler paranoia, and Ed Park’s “Personal Days” (2008), which unfolds in a similarly depopulating Manhattan cubicle farm. In reality, these satires of late-capitalist office life have less to say about actual work than about the bureaucratic rituals and distractions surrounding it: the joke PowerPoint presentations, the endless forwarding of stupid YouTube videos, the proliferation of Orwellian corporate jargon. In this vision, a job may provide a kind of grim life-boat camaraderie, along with a paycheck, but the work itself is meaningless unto mendacious: a metaphor for the lies and illusions that underlie our economy, if not our civilization. In Ferris’s novel, the agency’s big last-minute assignment — to create a humorous campaign for a shadowy breast-cancer awareness group — is itself a joke. In Park’s novel, the company’s actual business isn’t worth specifying at all.

Heyyy—I'll take it!™

"As personal as ever!"

...so says Leland de la Durantaye, of this common misspelling of yrs truly's name! (I am straining my eyes a bit but this looks to be a PD sighting at the Harvard Book Store...a "staff recommendation"...Heyyy, I'll take it!)



In other "Ed Parks" news, someone recently wrote a really sweet (I mean that in an "awww!" sense and also a kind of frat-boy "suh-weet" sense) review of PD on Amazon, concluding: "Well done, Mr. Parks. I hope this is the first of many novels for you!"

Again: Heyyy, I'll take it!