IN GEORGE SAUNDERS' STORIES, the corrosion of language that the Clintonian sentence represents is zoomed in on and amplified to construct an entire world. Saunders imagines a workplace where language has broken down, with disastrous effects. Not broken down, mind you, in the grand tradition, running from Chekhov through the Tractatus and Eliot's exasperated "It is impossible to say just what I mean!" to Raymond Carver's impoverished "incommunicability," but broken down and tearing apart on its way somewhere. Saunders' chief villains are those whose sentences are so tangled they are barely comprehensible, whose metaphors drift into senselessness, who are not merely reflecting but actively constructing what Saunders has called the "looming stupidity." Thus, in his new collection, Pastoralia, a self-help guru conducting a seminar on defending your desires (as those desires are represented by a nice warm bowl of oatmeal):
Concept Number Two: crap. Don't worry, folks, I don't use actual  crap up here. Only imaginary crap. You'll have to supply the crap, using  your mind. Now, if someone came up and crapped in your nice warm oatmeal, what would you say? Would you say: 'Wow, super, thanks, please continue crapping in my oatmeal'? Am I being silly? I'm being a little silly. But guess what, in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time  -- friends, co-workers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids! -- and that's exactly what you do. You say, 'thanks so much!' You say,  'Crap away!' You say, and here my metaphor breaks down a bit, 'Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal?'”
Metaphors are always collapsing (not to say crapping) in Saunders, hilariously, because the people deploying them couldn't care less – finding their words inadequate, they refuse to make them strain for meaning. Articulation itself is frowned upon: In the title story, the narrator's coworker Janet is considered incompetent because, though she is a theme park cavewoman, she refuses to abide by the no-speaking rule: "Janet's speaking English to me more and more," says the nameless narrator, "which is partly why I feel so, you know, crummy." The higher-ups, meanwhile, crouch behind verbally bankrupt memos of the sort one can imagine receiving at the White House. This one arrives to counteract rumored layoffs:
“In summary, we simply ask you to ask yourself, upon hearing a rumor: Does this rumor cast the organization in a negative light? If so, that rumor is false, please disregard. If positive, super, thank you very much for caring so deeply about your organization that you knelt with your ear to the track, and also, please spread the truth far and wide, that is,  get down on all fours and put your own lips to the tracks. Tell your friends. Tell friends who are thinking of buying stock. Do you have friends who are journalists? Put your lips to their tracks.”
The extension of the "ear-to-tracks" metaphor here borders on the absurd, and, since it's being mobilized for false ends (the rumors, after all, are  true), it takes on a sinister quality. Like the self-help guru's aggressively mediocre mantra -- "Now Is the Time for Me to Win!" -- it need not make sense, because it is sponsored by force. In Saunders' world the syntactic muddle arrives, like Stalin's collectivization, from above.


That Saunders chooses to aim his satire not at some real or invented corporate jargon but at the destruction of metaphor is especially shrewd because metaphor moves outside utilitarian denotation to connect concepts from different fields of knowledge.  Where conspiracy theorists like DeLillo and Pynchon have erected entire  fictional edifices by insisting on connections where none are apparent,  Saunders begins to describe a place where metaphor -- except, that is, the ruling metaphor of consumption -- is hounded from the earth.
Saunders is DeLillo's mirror image in another regard, too, because White Noise was in many ways the pinnacle of the consumer novel. If the nineteenth-century novel featured a superior protagonist faced with an inferior world, the late-twentieth-century novel often described a protagonist-consumer bombarded by endless pitches, trying to clear a human  space inside a stream of "white noise" so thick that a baby's first word can be "Corolla." But Saunders writes about workers who are at least partially implicated in the bombardment, and so it often feels like he is rewriting White Noise from within, from the point of view of the SIMUVAC workers dispatched by the government to monitor emergency situations with magic computers.
And Saunders, like DeLillo, wants to know how much of our humanity we get to keep. Not much, as it turns out. Marx warned that, in a capitalist system, "the worker becomes a commodity, and indeed, the most despised of commodities." Saunders' correction is that the worker becomes an advertisement, and, indeed, the most wretchedly inarticulate of advertisements, and the writer undertakes the task of steering their verbal cars toward every logical cliff. "It can safely be said about this writer that his every sentence drives the... language into a semantic dead end" – thus Joseph Brodsky on Andrei Platonov. And, with all due apprehension about saddling Saunders with comparison to yet another Big Name (to go with Twain, Pynchon, Melville, Eggers), he shares a large base of concerns with  the Soviet utopian/anti-utopian whose primary topic was the collision of spoken Russian with ideologized Sovietese. For Platonov, the ideology was both a dream in which he wished, childlike, to believe, and a thin mask  for unconscionable cruelty. In "Four Institutional Monologues," published  thus far only in McSweeney's #4, Saunders explicitly links the increasing euphemization of workplace language to murder. The story consists of four corporate memoranda, ranging from the strictly clinical to the jocularly threatening, but with all of them, we eventually  realize,  quite possibly referring to the destruction of human bodies. For the cover  of his little booklet (the magazine published each of the major pieces in  separate booklets and asked the authors to choose their own cover  illustrations), Saunders all too appropriately chose one of the seven  Gotham-like skyscrapers erected by Stalin in Moscow in the years before  his (and Platonov's) death. These buildings continue to represent, in their inhumane enormity on the Moscow skyline, the breadth of Stalin's monstrosity. "The first casualty of any discourse about utopia," writes  the endlessly epigrammatic Brodsky, "is grammar." And the next several million casualties, as Platonov knew firsthand and as Saunders isbeginning to  insist, are people.

INSOFAR AS SAUNDERS is a dystopian writer, the utopia for his scorn is the  New Global Economy -- the only utopia, after all, that we still have. It is utopian not only because, like the raviolis in Campanella's imaginary world, money is falling out of the sky (though always on others), but also because it promises literally to abolish the physical space our bodies inhabit, and with it pain, and loss, and all the thousand deaths that flesh is heir to. While Saunders raises a linguistic protest against this blithe optimism, the more conventional forces of what we might call (to save space) Good are trying to burst the bullish global bubble with the pinprick reality of physical labor.
This insistence on the materiality of work was a motivating force behind Studs Terkel's classic 1974 book of interviews, Working. The first sentence of the introduction put Terkel's cards in full view: "This book, being about work, is, by its very nature,  about violence -- to the spirit as well as to the body." Is this also, then,  the purpose of Gig, the remarkable sequel to Working by our crosstown rivals at Word? Not according to the editors; they disavow such claims, or any claims at all. In pointed contrast to Terkel, Marisa Bowe's introduction insists that "we have no overarching thesis, no political agenda to advance."
And for two books that are essentially the same, these two are very different indeed. Like Working, Gig is a series of interviews -- 126 in all.  But its  editors are far more aggressive in practicing the art, which Eliot once ascribed to the poet, of disappearing. Due probably to his interest in the scars of work, Terkel provided more physical descriptions of his characters in Working than in his other books. He also inserted stage directions if the interviewee stood up or coughed or lit a cigarette. In Gig, these are pared down to the ubiquitous "[laughs]" and one instance of "[makes jack-off motion with hand]." Terkel tried to interview people from the same factory or family. Gig does not do this, and the effect, overall, is  of a series that refuses to add up. There is something undeniably real about these interviews, a wonderful textual documentation of our current speech patterns, a nifty Christmas gift for the uncle who's building a time capsule in his backyard. But by choosing the individual voice over an attempt at narrative cohesion, this book totters on the very brink of atomization that Saunders diagnoses in the collapse of metaphor -- a functional scattering that only people in sales, whose job it is to make friends, seem prepared to overcome.
And yet the testimonies are incredible, as much for what they reveal about  storytelling as about work; as a result of the careful and spontaneous details accreting throughout each interview, almost everyone here is a character, simultaneously a product of a historical and economic situation and an irreducible individual who has made certain decisions and  speaks in a certain way. So though I must admit that the introduction's political  demurral put me in a contrarian state of mind -- and seems to have seriously confused Salon's reviewer, who claims that all is well in the workplace despite quoting people who work very unwell hours -- neither can I agree with Susan Faludi's declaration in the Village Voice that this book has clear political lessons and that the introduction is merely a symptom of "the emphatic apoliticism so de rigueur in New Media circles." The introduction indicates, rather, a strange reverence for the power of the tape recorder. Information, Bowe wishes us to believe, will organize itself just fine, thank you. And she is right. For a long time now, narrative journalists have been encroaching upon novelistic territory, but with Gig, the fictional gig is truly up, for the book amply and repeatedly demonstrates that a tape recorder and some judicious editing can carve one beautiful story after another.
So good are the interviews in Gig that it's a little baffling: Studs Terkel is a great man, and his book, collected at a moment when unions were strong and technology promised to cut the working week in half, retains historical interest -- "How do you feel about Ralph Nader?" Terkel asks a car salesman. "We could do without him," the salesman growls. "He's taken away the choice from the people. He doesn't give them the choice of having ... emission control systems." -- but the majority of Terkel's subjects, though they had more physical and spiritual injury to complain about than Gig's characters, were subdued, their criticisms diffuse, and the actual job descriptions vague and general. Gig's interviews, on the other hand, have real narrative force and an impressive flourishing, throughout, of anger.
Because these people are really pissed off. And not so much, it turns out,  at their foremen and managers and Uncle Sam, as at each other. This book repeatedly answers one of the deepest questions our society puts to us: What do the people serving me coffee, manning the phones, and working the cash register... think of me? The answer is just what we feared: they despise us. "Lots of times," Kim K., a casino  surveillance officer, admits, "we just sit there and laugh at the fat people,  the bad hairdos, the weirdo stuff. People are pretty funny when they don't  know they're being watched. And if we catch something really funny, we'll rewind the tape and watch it over  and over. It gets funnier sometimes." And it gets worse. A telemarketing supervisor, whose job it is, essentially, to keep the callers from sinking into a depressive  funk from the abuse they receive, has true knowledge of the depths: "The customers, basically, are assholes." And he maintains an almost religious apprehension of the customereal  They: "My problems are all with the customers. The people out there. It's like, haven't any of them had to work for a living?"

"THE PEOPLE OUT THERE” and the people in here: these are the two sides ranged against one another across a river of bile. The combative strain in Gig shouldn't be surprising, but it is, especially when compared to  the far more soft-spoken radicalism of Working. It seems that the language of protest has become so much a medium of exchange that people, regardless of their political inclinations, are familiar with the accoutrements of outrage. "The drones," Terkel had  announced in his introduction, "are no longer invisible nor mute." But neither were they articulate in their anger. The new drone is different, possessing a remarkable facility, for example, with the word fuck.  While many of these people claim to "love" their jobs, they all seem to have hated their previous jobs. And everyone hates the customers.
Indeed, the only people in Gig who lack an edge of anger are the successful drones up top, the ones most ready to genuflect to the language of their chosen fields. The most vapid characters in the book are supermodel Heidi  Klum, film producer Jerry Bruckheimer, television guest coordinator for the execrable Change of Heart ("Everyone I work with on the staff are really fun people. We all like to have a good time. Even the guy at the top, the creator of the show, he's a very funny guy. He wears these dirty shorts, flip-flops, and a dirty T-shirt."), and the CEO of American General Corporation, whose pronouncement of his own regular-guyness achieves an arrogance so insipid, it's awesome: "You know, as I always say -- when I get up in the morning I put my pants on the same way as the guy that's going to the factory. You can't forget that." But you can certainly forget, if you're going to be successful, about family: "The only reason I'm even home right now," says a newly successful businessman (a crime-scene cleaner), one of the many interviewees happily working more than sixty hours a week, "is because I'm waiting for the movers to come. My wife can't take my lifestyle, so today, I'm out of here. I'm leaving her." And then there are the people who begin to parrot their sales pitches: "I truly believe National is the best company out there in the adhesives business," Traci Jensen tells us. "Our whole package is better. Because we don't just sell glue..."
One can comfortably despise these Babbitts, and with reason, but sometimes it's not so easy. Perhaps the most successful and surprising interview in the whole collection is with the adhesives sales rep, a very sweet Midwestern girl who happens to be remarkably good at sales, in part because she's so darn sweet. She recounts her successes for a good, dull stretch. And toward the end of the interview, one of the longest in the book, we learn that she's been offered a big promotion, for which she'd have to leave Kansas City (a city she likes, and where she has a boyfriend, "for once") and move to Bridgewater, New Jersey. She's not certain she wants to accept, so she keeps talking, enumerating the promotion's advantages: "I'll get a big raise. It's a big promotion... I'll be setting prices," et cetera, et cetera. Yet as the list seems to reach a critical mass, the words as they are finally spoken congeal into sense for the salesgirl, and she decides: "I don't see how I can say no," she says. "And I'm not gonna say no. This is a huge step for me.... It's a no-brainer. But still," she continues, nostalgic now, moving, before our very eyes in the course of this interview, just by talking to someone, into the future, "I'm gonna miss sales. I'll definitely miss it. Because, I mean, so many things -- it's fun,  I love it, I love the people, the hands-on stuff, you know? And because, well, just because I kicked ass."
Gig may not impose its political significance, but the tape recorder draws its own conclusions. One of the few things we can definitively say about the book is that, as in Saunders, the people furthest from the centers of power are the ones whose language is least contaminated. For Saunders, this is where hope and resistance reside. I "Pastoralia," another corporate memo laments the fact that the theme-park employees, whose caves lack plumbing and who therefore have to pay for the removal of their excrement, have developed a nickname for what "we call, and ask  that you call, the Disposal Debit, but which you people insist on calling the Shit Fee." Memo number three in  "Four Institutional Monologues," labeled "A Friendly Reminder," demands that workers in "Sorting," in what seems to be a slaughterhouse, cease inventing nicknames for the various body parts that the "Knuckles" people pass on to them: "[S]o in the future," they advise, "use the correct names  (Fat Scrap and Bone Scrap and Misc. Scrap) for these boxes if you feel like you have to talk at all while working although also we in Knuckles suggest you just shut up and just work."
But "just work" is what, hopefully, we will never agree to do. At times, resistance will not be on a linguistic plane -- often it is enough merely to  remain human by refusing to play along. Thus in "Sea Oak," the narrator is  a waiter at Joysticks, the male counterpart to the successful Hooters chain. He wears a special outfit to enhance his appearance, but the only way to garner truly great tips is to show the joystick itself -- which is strictly forbidden, for some reason, by the Board of Health. Our hero doesn't object, because, like most of Saunders' protagonists, he's an easygoing, law-abiding guy. It's only when his kindhearted aunt returns from the grave as a cynical sorceress that he receives some useful career advice; and when the aunt begins to decompose (it is not so easy to return from the grave), she imparts upon her nephew the wisdom of the dead: "Look, show your cock," she tells him. "It's the shortest line between two points. The world ain't giving away nice lives. You got a trust fund? You a genius? Show your cock."
“Show your cock" -- in an economy of multimillion-dollar chance, this could be a worthy slogan to place alongside a cynical Arbeit macht reich.  So it is that Saunders' stories speak, wonderfully, for themselves, but since the introduction to Gig leaves both Susan Faludi and me unsatisfied, I humbly propose a different one, for when this book resurfaces, bedecked in praise, between soft covers.
"You have before you a book that reads like the best party you could ever attend, where the hostess, like a writing teacher, encourages people to talk what they know, to talk shop. As the editors of this volume, we wish there were something general we could say about work in America, about the brutality of staying afloat in the New Economy. Because we here at Word are no dummies; we know about shrinking benefits, declining wages, and the 60-hour week. Look, we read the Village Voice, same as you. But having listened to everyone in this book, we're having trouble pronouncing our prepared remarks. Like George Saunders, whose stories fill us with joy, we think that even the most ridiculous job can be meaningful. And that the most glamorous job -- indeed, very often the most glamorous job -- can be an abyss of idiocy, especially if you're sort of an idiot to begin with. Remember Primo Levi's story about the bricklayer who saved his life by bringing him extra rations at Auschwitz, but who also, when the Nazis told him to build a wall, did so with the utmost care? The machine,  it seems, will suggest its own form of resistance. And if that's not political enough, if you need statistics and categories, sorry, that's not what we're about here in the New Media. If the price for ridding ourselves of the arrogant dogma of work-as-an-evil was losing, also, our political imagination, it was a high price indeed. But, I don't know. Maybe we had it coming."

Keith Gessen is a contributing editor at FEED.

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Studs Terkel is a great man
(From an interview with Harvey Blume)

TERKEL: Anecdote: it's a have/have-not neighborhood. I'm talking to myself and waiting for the bus. This couple, Neiman Marcus clothes. She's got the latest Vanity Fair in her hand, and the guy's got the Wall Street Journal, naturally, and a three piece suit. I can't make conversation with them. They ignore me. The bus is late in coming.

I say, "Labor Day is coming up." That's all I need. Labor Day. He turns away. The bus is still late. "Oh, we used to walk down State Street, banners flying, solidarity forever. UAW, CIO, signs up high."

He turns to me and says, "We despise unions."

I say to myself, "I got a pigeon here."

HB: You're enjoying it.

ST: I'm the Ancient Mariner. I fix him with the glittering eye. "How many hours a day do you work?"

He says, "Eight."

I say, "You know why you work eight and not eighteen?"

Meantime, the bus is not coming, he's taking a step back, the girl's a little tremulous now. "Cause four guys got hanged in Haymarket back in 1886. They were fighting for an eight hour day for you." I got him pinned against the mailbox, he can't get away.

"How many hours a week do you work?" He says, "Forty." He's scared now. I say, "You know why you work forty, not eighty hours a week? Cause a lot of guys got their heads busted back in the thirties." She drops the Vanity Fair. I pick it up and give it to her with a little bow. The bus comes.

There's no sense of history. What have they been told about unions? They know nothing about the thirties, the New Deal, nothing about the past. That's why the UPS victory was so telling.

HB: That's what you talk to yourself about? Unions, the CIO, the UPS strike?

ST: Sure, and about Mozart.

work for a living
And worse: The initial interviewee is a retired schoolteacher now working as a greeter at Wal-Mart. It's not bad, he says, except sometimes people can be mean. "You have some that come in, and it's like I always say, they're too cheap to go to the psychiatrist. They're mad when they walk in. They might call you a dirty name or something." The next interviewee is a UPS driver: "Zippy Printers are the worst fucking account in the world," he laments. "These people, they pretend they're your friend, but then they're on the phone calling in major complaints against you. It's bullshit." An auto mechanic: "A lot of the customers think they're getting fleeced. Most are just angry people. Paranoids, you know." A Kinko's worker: "And then, you know, customers come in very occasionally and they're wackadoo because it's the middle of the night." And on and on it goes (Wackadoo?). A New York street vendor: "The worst thing is the customers, almost all of whom are appallingly hateful, horrible people. I mostly work Wall Street, and the worst class of people are in the tan raincoats and business suits. The stockbrokers who work in the offices are just horrendous." One of the best interviews is with a big-time bookie. "It's hard to have a lot of sympathy for guys who don't pay their debts," he says. "I've probably seen the worst side of man." But there, if the bookie won't mind my saying so, he's mistaken: It's the telemarketers who've seen the worst side of man.


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