Traumatized by Capitalism? Novels of Bored Workers

As Zadie Smith suggests in her recent essay collection Intimations (2020), the containment of pandemic quarantine revealed our need to find "something to do" — anything to pass the time.((Zadie Smith, "Something to Do," in Intimations (New York: Penguin, 2020), 19.)) Driven by the experience of an ongoing quarantine, her essays showcased the existential struggle that was there all along: when faced with boredom at home, many of us confronted the seething pit of interiority anew.

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips provides a similar observation: when we are bored, we lack "something to do." We also lack something to want: we experience ourselves as "losing . . . something to do at the moment in which nothing is inviting."((Adam Phillips, "On Being Bored," in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 72.)) In this particular lassitude, this indirectness, the existential plight emerges: how should I spend my time? In leisure, Phillips says, the solution is to "wait for [one]self," for one's "real desire" to "crystallize."((Phillips, "On Being Bored," 69.)) In the contemporary novels of information work that I have studied, though, there is limited time or space for open-ended, self-oriented waiting or exploration; information workers have tasks that are mentally engaging (even at a minimal level), preventing excessive mind-wandering, and their open-plan, shared offices cultivate a culture of surveillance about staying on task. As a result, characters lack the freedom to become fully themselves. This recent group of bored protagonists live their empty lives seeming traumatized, paralyzed, and uncertain — suggesting that, as Phillips writes, their boredom is connected to a deeper injury or lack.

Making a similar argument in The Pale King (2011), David Foster Wallace associates boredom with a "deeper type of pain." In this novel, following IRS tax examiners and their endurance of the tedium of accounting work, boredom is associated with existential anguish:

For Wallace, boring work is horrible because it forces us to face the silence in which we recognize "that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back."((Wallace, Pale King, 145.)) But boredom has a flip side: if you sit with this boredom until it "just about kill[s] you" you will, on the other side, find "bliss — a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious."((Wallace, Pale King, 548.)) Here, Wallace echoes Sigfried Kracauer's statement in The Mass Ornament that, if one maintains one's boredom for long enough and "has the patience," "then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly."((Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, translated and edited by Thomas Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 334.)) For Kracauer, though, this must be the boredom of leisure, because those bored at work are kept busy and thus prevented from "awaken[ing] to new life."((Kracauer, Ornament, 331.)) A further difference is that Kracauer sees "radical boredom" as having the potential for social change, whereas the most that Wallace's neoliberal subjects can hope for is the endurance of further boredom (possibly accompanied by gratitude for simply being alive). In this limited way, Wallace's tax examiners — people who do the dullest work he can imagine — are able to find happiness. And the best tax examiners, Wallace suggests, are "those with some kind of trauma or abandonment in their past,"((Wallace, The Pale King, 545.)) so damaged that they value the negation of their subjectivity, becoming purely laborers to the point that their boss considers them better than machines.

As a Wallace scholar, I started thinking about boredom through Wallace's ideas about work, but I saw the topic emerging across much of contemporary fiction: for instance, Hilary Leichter's Temporary (2020), Halle Butler's The New Me (2019), Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), Stuart Bateman's Grind 2121 (2014), Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End (2007), Michael Bracewell's Perfect Tense (2001), and Michel Houllebecq's Whatever (1994). Across this corpus I found a consistent idea: that for bored workers, boredom is less about the tedium of the work and more about the psychic disorder that is revealed when tedious work ceases to distract: the crisis of self that lies just underneath boredom. Many of these protagonists loathe themselves, are unable to find fulfillment, and their work lives offer little comfort, interest, or meaning. But it's not just that their work lacks a sense of purpose; these jobs seem further to prevent characters from finding purpose. In being so inhibited, these characters are effectively traumatized — not just by an existential lack, but by postindustrial labor, and more broadly, postindustrial capitalism.

To clarify, let me say what I mean by "trauma" by way of what it does. For the psychoanalyst Dominique Scarfone, trauma disrupts the processes of the subject, preventing the emergence of "subjectality," a feeling of agency and autonomy whereby one could be a "center of action."((Dominique Scarfone, "Trauma, Subjectivity and Subjectality," American Journal of Psychoanalysis 81, no. 2 (2021): 227.)) That is, trauma disrupts agency. In Scarfone's account, trauma varies in magnitude: less disruptive traumas allow the self to keep going, processing the trauma through a natural repetition compulsion. Repetition "represents the struggle of the psyche for survival," becoming pathological only when the repetition "inhibit[s] the finer and more complex process that produce meaning."((Scarfone, "Trauma," 218.)) The psyche, that is, returns to traumatic experiences in order to (eventually) integrate them into its production of meaning; but when the psyche is unable to produce meaning, it becomes stuck in repetition, and stuck in boredom.

This description — a subject unable to produce meaning, locked into an injured, repetitious loop — characterizes the interior life of the office workers in these novels. Millie, the protagonist of Butler's The New Me, is an exemplar: fired from her previous successful job, Millie struggles through one temp position after another, hating day after day, slowly spiraling into alcoholism and self-loathing. Similarly, Adam of Bateman's Grind and the unnamed protagonist of Houellebecq's Whatever barely cope with their dull, repetitious, and meaningless office work by abusing alcohol. Some protagonists are otherwise traumatized by specific events — Wallace creates grotesques who have endured all kinds of sexual and psychological trauma, and the young women of Moshfegh's and Ma's novels cannot seem to process lost parents or romantic relationships. These characters are damaged already, yes, but they continue to be damaged by their daily work, which both blocks out their pain but also perpetuates it. 

We might ask: are these characters traumatized by capitalism or more generally by the existential challenge of being? Probably both, but prominently, these novels emphasize the former. With their emphasis on an inhuman labor market and its meaningless, alienated labor, being in these novels is essentially being-in-capitalism, in relations of labor and capital that reduce the self to a machine enduring the contemporary world of information overload and financial abstraction. As Millie describes, "Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money."((Halle Butler, The New Me (New York, Penguin: 2019), 59.)) Trauma places the psyche in "survival mode" psychologically, but the need to exist in survival mode economically, by working a meaningless job to make ends meet, further traumatizes Millie by interrupting her sense of agency and self-creation: the repetition is not only (as for Scarfone) a symptom of trauma; it is also a further traumatic reality. 

To be treated as an object — either contingent or machinelike — is another way that being-in-capitalism traumatizes these characters. Viz, Scarfone: "the central feature of trauma indeed consists in reducing the subject to the state of a 'thing' or an 'instrument,' promptly dismissing the subject as the center of its own actions."((Scarfone, "Trauma," 226.)) Such instrumentalization takes place in these novels' depictions of alienated labor. Despite being information workers—in advertising, insurance, publishing, etc. — these workers can easily be fired or made "redundant" (Bracewell), and the menace of austerity-cuts hangs over the office workplace in Bracewell, Ma, Bateman, Ferris, and Butler.

Further, the information work these drones do makes them doubly alienated: from both the means of production but also from the meaning of production. The workers in these jobs are being asked to produce meaning, or at least to work with signs and symbols that mark the site of meaning, but this meaning means nothing to them. Bracewell's Perfect Tense accordingly evokes Baudrillard's simulacrum, with the "rhetoric of retail" turning everything "into an idea of itself, where life no longer had an inner life."((Michael Bracewell, Perfect Tense (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 8.)) In Ferris's advertising office, characters "all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose"((Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).)); even in productive meetings, they produce ads only to destroy them, for products that no one wants. The most grotesque example is Severance's morbid twist, in which the protagonist Candace manages the production of Bibles whose manufacture actually kills workers at the end of the supply chain in Shenzen, China, because the decorative gems adorning the edition cause fatal lung disease. The production of the Bible — an ideal meaningful object for its consumers — is cruelly fatal for its producers.

That fatality is an exemplary difference between these novels and their midcentury precursors, e.g. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Revolutionary Road (1961). While both sets of novels investigate the psychological damage of boring, white-collar information labor, the earlier novels entertain the possibility of an "outside" of exploitative, boring labor where existential authenticity might be found, as Tom in Flannel Suit opts out of the rat race, or as Frank and April in Revolutionary Road consider moving to Paris. By contrast, today's novels see stultifying labor as fundamentally unavoidable, and even — in the case of Leichter's Temporary — existentially necessary. Their awareness of globalization reinforces the idea that there is no "outside" to escape to: if my work is boring, at least it isn't fatal like for Severance's gem-miners, right? Further, for midcentury novels of white-collor work, the desire to escape is also registered as a masculine anxiety about male virility amid shifting labor conditions. By contrast, in the contemporary novels figured here, with their many female protagonists, the threat to masculinity is displaced by the struggle (for both sexes) to find any permanent romantic partnership or friendship that isn't fundamentally alienated and objectifying (i.e. that doesn't mirror their status as workers).

Unable to find any available "outside" of their labor situation, the protagonists of these novels feel even more traumatically trapped in their circumstances: they need the money, their coworkers are being laid off, and as they see it, having a bad job is better than no job. With no freedom available in the outside world, they turn inward, often lying to themselves, cultivating boredom into a purposeful detachment to hide their anguish. This "detachment," according to Bracewell's narrator, is "required if you are going to reach the office without being led off the autobahn of benign routine and sucked into the gridlock of impotent rage."((Bracewell, Perfect Tense, 41.)) But even detachment does not always soothe; Millie thinks, "I wonder if it's a misunderstanding of life to look for purpose,"((Butler, The New Me, 46.)) a realization that does not help her, as she continues to hate everything and everyone, down to her own body: "bitter, my whole body, my whole insides [...] bitter for having to live in my shitty body, and my body dittoing the sentiment back to its master."((Butler, The New Me, 68.)) 

The body is another problem for these bored information workers: it is a grotesque burden, an object they have to carry around — another trap that cannot be escaped. No one is bored and horny; instead, they are mostly chaste or look back grimly on failed relationships. The female protagonists see themselves as ugly and frequently struggle with bad hygiene, described as sweaty, smelly, and unkempt. Disgusted by themselves, they lack motivation to improve, and they express boredom through depressive self-neglect, a withdrawal from the social world and from life itself. Even Houellebecq's male chauvinist protagonist feels contempt for sexuality, seeing a dancing girl as simply "absurd"((Michel Houellebecq, Whatever [Extension du domaine de la lute], translated by Paul Hammond. (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998 [1994]), 3.)) and showing disgust with the bodily fact of life, as his broader lack of desire for the world extends to sexual desire too. Rather than capturing his un-crystallized desire, sexuality shows up as yet another grotesque imposition.

The boredom in these characters thus manifests as a dual collapse of relation: a distaste with oneself that, projected outward, becomes also a hatred for others. The narrative problem, though, is that readers desire a character who changes, and these damaged characters have a lot of difficulty changing — or their changes are narratively forced and unmotivated, as in The New Me: at the novel's end, Millie's self-loathing and paralysis are inexplicably transformed, suddenly and without explanation, into her "new me." The gap between her old and new selves is too great for readers to bridge; this move reduces Millie's boredom and dysfunction to mere bad behavior, rather than a deeper inability to craft a meaningful self-narrative into the future.

While none of the other novels end like Butler's, a lack of future projection is a structural challenge for them all, impacting their endings. In Houellebecq's Whatever, it seems the only way out is toward murder or violence; the novel's initial moves in this direction feel right, echoing American Psycho. But Houellebecq instead chooses an irrealist Beckettian ending, having his character ride a bicycle into the forest, entering "the heart of the abyss" at "two in the afternoon."((Houellebecq, Whatever, 155.)) Where else could he go? From the tedium of the day-to-day, the only imaginable narrative future for these characters is an undefined leap into emptiness, rather than a projection into a specific new potential. They lack a project, a newly adopted goal to structure their lives, beyond a rejection of their previous world.

A similar problem confronts Candace in Severance, a novel that specifically dramatizes the struggle to build a world beyond a severed present. In a New York destroyed by zombie pandemic, Candace initially falls back on photography, her abandoned passion, to create meaning. But when she is kidnapped by survivors seeking to rebuild, her only project is to escape: once again she can only react rather than act. In the novel's end, driving into the outskirts of Chicago, literally pregnant with the future of humanity, all she seeks is some place away from the imprisonment of Bob and his collective. Like Whatever, Severance ends with Candace driving into the sunset and then getting out of the car and walking, with an ambiguous lens-flare in the narrative eye.

Whereas the solution to Candace's boredom was initially the productivity of art, the new purpose she finds is in the productivity of the body, in having and supporting her child. Rather than a future projection of the individual self, this move asks us (and Candace) to consider the future projection of the human race. In these lens-flare endings, the story ends with afternoon and evening — sunset, rather than sunrise. Is it that we are too far into history to imagine a new dawn, not only for ourselves but for the world at large? How much more must be endured, in the darkness of night before a (global) new day? Or do these authors mean to suggest, pessimistically, that we are running out of daylight, of resources, of possibility, in the unstoppable machine of capitalist modernity?

The avoidant instinct at the heart of these novels perhaps draws from that sense of belatedness: things are too late to be fixed, bad patterns have been laid, and here we are, youthful dreams abandoned with nothing to show for it. That would explain the linkage in these contemporary novels between boredom and larger units of time: empty, despairing weeks and months rather than rich moments of miserable immediacy. Ultimately, time is the problem for these bored characters, who must find a way to endure its passing as they look toward death. Many characters choose alcohol, pills, and sleep (as in Grind, Perfect Tense, Whatever, The New Me, and My Year of Rest), but some choose an absorption in work, instead (Severance, The Pale King, and Then We Came to the End).

Turning work's trauma of boredom into its own solution is the more interesting choice, because it shows the other side of boredom: not tedium but transcendence. For instance, Severance's Candace is an impossibly devoted worker: she stays at the office through a pandemic, eventually living there, and hesitates to leave even after her contract ends. Her incredible focus allows her to maintain an obsessive attention to detail, and she loves this feeling. It is an ersatz transcendence, though, because ultimately she has not been working for herself: she has been using work to avoid thinking about her broader crisis of purpose (and her lingering heartbreak). More hopefully, Ferris's novel shows characters struggling with wasted time, but then finding moments of community and purposeful absorption as they work together up against a deadline (and Ferris's reliance on Emerson as a touchstone for authentic self-relation reveals his ultimate hopefulness). Both offer work, despite its emptiness and dullness, as the site of a limited transcendence.

Compared to those two, Wallace's The Pale King comes closest to offering a real transcendence through boredom, perhaps because his characters have the most at stake; the balm of absorption in boring work protects against past trauma. Boredom lets them "function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air."((Wallace, The Pale King, 440.)) By self-negating through chosen attention rather than through a drugged oblivion, Wallace's characters make the most of their damaged selves, while finding civic purpose too. After all, they examine tax returns for fraud, which means their work is not pointless toil but important, nation-maintaining labor, and ultimately, ethical labor. Wallace even suggests that these characters enjoy their jobs, finding, on the other side of boredom, "constant bliss in every atom."((Wallace, The Pale King, 548.)) It is not Sisyphus we must imagine happy, but the office worker.

Wallace's institutional vision is rather utopian, evidence that his typical impulse to excess continues here. He asks characters to breathe without air, but he doesn't consider what happens to them when they do: maybe they die inside, in this effort to transcend their injuries through sheer endurance. Their work doesn't actually heal them; and if our only claim in support of boring work is that it helps you ignore your anguish, then I'm not sure that's much to say for it. Wallace seems to know as much; elsewhere he calls the endurance of tedium "heroism" rather than bliss, suggesting that he knows this model is optimistic or even impossible.((Wallace, The Pale King, 231.))

Still, I'm not sure what other solution there is to boring work in today's economy: Ferris has a character happily go "back to the land" by opening a landscaping business, but Bracewell explicitly mocks that option, and in Houellebecq's forest "the goal of life is missed."((Houellebecq, Whatever, 155.)) We can choose from: sleeping it off with sci-fi drugs (Moshfegh); destroying civilization (Ma); being metaphysically a temp and thus having no choice (Leichter); watching everyone get fired as you quietly grind towards death (Bateman); magically becoming a new person (Butler); mythologizing the past over a beer (Ferris); or lingering in memory (Bracewell). The last two come closest, but is this really it? Can no one imagine an interior world of boredom that becomes, through slow self-development, a world of rich meaningful life?

Perhaps not, or not right now. These novels are pervaded by trauma, vulnerability, despair, and helplessness: the trauma not just of boring work, but, more broadly, of being a laboring subject in a postindustrial, capitalist information economy. Believing that the profession you wanted, the life you expected, the life you watched your parents lead, could be yours — and finding you were wrong. Why, in these novels of frustration, is boring work just this painful? Exemplified by the aptly named Millie, this is a very millennial experience, finding our passions devalued and our energies instrumentalized, feeling, as Wallace writes, "tiny and at the mercy of large forces."((Wallace, The Pale King, 143.)) But if we listen, maybe boredom can tell us something; or boredom can let us tell ourselves what we need. Maybe Wallace and Moshfegh were right: maybe in the radical passivity of boredom, or of sleep, something from the depths will swim up, will crystallize — and it will lead us somewhere new. I hope so.

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Yonina Hoffman (@yonina), soon to be Assistant Professor at the US Merchant Marine Academy, has published on first-person narration, narrative ethics, environment, religion, and the body in 20th/21stC literature. Yonina's first book is about David Foster Wallace and narrative voice, and Yonina's next book will examine narrative ethics and systemic complexity in global mega-novels. 

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