Work
In my “Work” seminar today, we discussed Andrew Ross’s Fast Boat to China and Isabel Hilton’s report “Made in China” from the Granta special issue “The Factory.” Here’s a brief excerpt from the latter:
There are some sights in China I shall always remember: the young women from a battery factory, poisoned by cadmium, who pushed forward their thin haired, yellow faced little children for me to look at (they had passed on the contamination, unwittingly, to the next generation); the men who gasped for breath as they contemplated an early death from silicosis; the workers hideously mutilated by a factory fire for which they received no compensation. For the last two decades men and women like them have provided the labour that has given us cheap goods (on the shelves of Wal-Mart and elsewhere) and put fortunes into the pockets of local officials and factory owners.
Also, Lacy Galen brought this to our notice, an article by Joshua Ferris in the Guardian, about literature and work:
The workday proves dull not only to the Computer Programmer, but to the novelist. When there’s war to attend to, and heartbreak, and class struggle and familial strife and rage against the dying light, why would one preoccupy oneself, when endeavouring to write fiction, with the nine-to-five?
Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn’t mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life. In The Great Gatsby, after surviving “that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War”, Nick Carraway heads east to learn the bond business. His decision comes swiftly, within the novel’s first few pages; next we know, he’s living in West Egg gainfully employed.
