Want a pay rise? Take this French writer's hilarious advice
Georges Perec was attracted by formal challenges to writing: his most famous achievement was his novel La Disparition, written without using the letter 'e' once. (This is particularly hard in French, but the late Gilbert Adair managed to translate it into English, under the title A Void.) There was serious intent behind this; it was an echo of the Nazis' efforts to remove every single Jew from Europe. (In the case of Perec's mother, as well as about six million others, they succeeded.)
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is much more light-hearted, but is still the result of an act of literary restriction: an attempt to mimic, in prose, the recursive nature of a flow chart. First published in 1968, this delightfully unclassifiable text, now reissued by Verso, is short and exhausting, and features no capital letters, punctuation (apart from dashes), inverted commas or any other of the normal accoutrements of the printed page. In short, it looks like this:
it is never very wise to approach a line manager at a time when his gastric functions are likely to overshadow the professional and managerial capacities associated with his hierarchical rank it is far better to go see him in the morning but what the hell he himself told you to come see him at 2.30 pm you have to take life as it comes so now it is 2.30 pm and you go to see mr x
… and so on. I could have stopped anywhere. You can either put up with this kind of thing or you can't, but once you slip into its rhythms, it becomes both beguiling and hilarious (although you wouldn't really want it any longer.) For me it recalls Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, or some of the madder expressions of Beckett's prose works (and Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot); or indeed, Don Marquis's Archy and Mehitabel, a similarly unpunctuated and lower-case text.
There's something about this style which is particularly suited to the downtrodden, and in my experience there are few more miserable and downtrodden people than office workers. It first appeared in the journal Enseignement programmé, which was devoted to exploring computer programming (in those days, still in its youth); as it happened, Perec's day job was as a lowly information storage and retrieval technician, grade IIIB, which meant, as Bellos notes in his introduction, 'his prospects of getting a raise were quite as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.'
And yet there's a kind of insane but helpless cunning behind his efforts: which day would be best to ask? (None of them, of course.) Look at the cafeteria menu, Perec says. Is fish being served? Then be careful, for your line manager may have swallowed a fish bone and be 'in a really awful mood'. Bellos uses the word 'circumperambulate' to describe the futile odyssey you must make around the building to find out where 'he' is; he seems at times as elusive as Godot himself. When he does call you into his office 'abandon all rancour and refrain from observing [that] … he could have bloody well given you an appointment three weeks ago'. You know the protagonist will exhaust all the possibilities of the flow chart and still not get his raise; it would, of course, destroy the comedy if he did.
Even in the 1960s, people were becoming uneasy about the prospect of losing their jobs to computers; Perec's own job was one of the more fragile canaries in that particular coalmine. So this book, although describing a world from over half a century ago, still rings true: not only do we have the eternal dehumanised tedium of the office, which has been evoked ever since offices were invented (think of Dickens's worn-out clerks, or Melville's rebellious Bartleby), but the long shadow of the algorithm.
'It would have been nice,' says Bellos wistfully at one point, 'to translate this text without apostrophes either, which are not needed in French, but that might have tried readers' patience a little too much.' He acknowledges that the text is 'quite unreadable in the ordinary way', and you could say that now that I have given you the gist, I have spared you the task of reading the book yourself. But there is something delightful about its intent, a sympathetic humanity which is deliberately at odds with the relentless, machine-like persistence of the prose. It's a text that repays attention, and is timeless.
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