Literature in the Public Service

Sublime Bureaucracy

C. Sullivan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349449705, 9781137287410
• eBook ISBN: 9781137287427
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How can one make state administrative systems interesting, embody an abstract public ethos and give heroism to homogeneity? The discipline of literature and bureaucracy dismisses Weber's 'neurocrat'. Milton, Trollope and Hare are case studies on implementing the 'what if' visions literature explored during a period of great change in public service

1

Introduction: Weber, Bureaucracy and Creativity

Robert Burns, commissioned as an exciseman in Dumfries First Itinerary in 1789, eventually made his way up to the first division. The Excise’s register for promotion is generous about Burns, with entries such as ‘Never tryed, a poet’ giving way to ‘Turns out well’, and then to ‘The poet does pretty well’. This amiable attitude was not reciprocated by Burns, who considered the job ‘an incessant drudgery, and … nearly a complete bar to every species of literary pursuit’.¹ Over a century later Ezra Pound attempted to ‘liberate’ T. S. Eliot from a clerical job at Lloyds Bank by starting up a fund (Pound called it Bel Esprit), into which 30 subscribers would pay ten pounds a year for five years to let Eliot concentrate on writing. Pound vowed that Eliot was ‘merely the first. It is the restart of civilisation.’² Similar disgust over office work appears everywhere in literature, behind, for instance, the pallid persistence shown by Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the vacuity at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Circumlocution Office, the state infrastructure underlying W. H. Auden’s ‘Unknown Citizen’ (as he says elsewhere, ‘executives/Would never want to tamper’ in the valley of poetry’s making), the nerveless horror of the institutions of Franz Kafka and George Orwell, and the absurd merrygo-round of official language in Václav Havel’s The Memorandum.³

Against the assumption that all offices are at best gothic, and mostly deeply dull, I want to argue that working in a public sector bureaucracy is a creative and discursive process. Employees must imagine a public, its rights and duties. This figure takes shape in a dialogue between the members of the public, away from the naked simplicity of ‘me-first’ that is inspired by the profit motive. The public service institution draws in imaginative people, with a vocation to work in it and to write about it.

I will trace three central aesthetic questions in literature on bureaucracy, which, I contend, are different to those thrown up by private-interest literature. First, authors have to work out how to engage a reader with the abstract collective noun of the public, rather than with an individualist hero. This affects issues of characterisation and the drive for a plot. Second, authors need to find out how to handle repeated moves between abstraction and detailed realism, that is, between the view of a system as a whole and the view of a particular case being dealt with by a bureaucrat. Third, authors writing about bureaucracy need to know how to go beyond using the two genres mostly associated with the topic, those products of prescriptive zeal: satire, based on disappointment and anger, and utopian fiction, based on hope.

This introduction has two strands: initially it discusses why bureaucracy is dismissed as dull, in popular and literary commentary. Though bureaucrats appear relatively often in literature, they do not get the same attention as do other professionals (particularly lawyers and churchmen), let alone entrepreneurs. Yet ‘creative bureaucracy’ is not just a euphemism for bending the rules. This introduction sketches elements that might encourage originality in an administration’s employees, in particular the way that bureaucracy goes beyond the point of view of the individual, its vision of what a virtual organisation looks like, and its dependence on the careful and flexible composition, circulation and reception of documents. It then turns to how, on their side, creativity theorists have come to see bureaucracy as central to the artistic process. They have put aside the cliché of a Romantic model of solitary inspiration for one where creation comes about by managing both mind and environment. Second, the introduction details the technical reasons why, in Max Weber’s theoretical model, central elements of all bureaucracies develop in a similar way, by profiting from the absence of friction produced by systematic regularity, the development of administrative expertise, the care over documents and procedural hierarchies. Historians of bureaucracy show this to be the case in practice, though there are, as Weber pointed out, variations in how the ideal type plays out in different circumstances. I have chosen to trench-cut down into three separate decades of commentary and literary representation (the 1650s, the 1850s and the present), as one way to test Weber’s assertion. Parallels with the methodology developed by the law and literature movement are useful, here.

Historians and sociologists have been consistently – albeit gloomily – enthralled by Weber’s model of how traditional rule is superseded by rational–legal authority expressed through bureaucracy, and only temporarily varied by charismatic leadership. However for literary critics it is a positive boast that writers (like academics) cannot ‘do admin’. Even studies that admit the importance of the administrator sound defensive. Thus, considering the influence that legal reports had on Anthony Trollope’s style, Coral Lansbury remarks that ‘every critical sensibility is offended when the source of literary creativity is found in the humdrum and commonplace’.⁴ ‘Administrators thrive on routine’, says John Brewer airily, as he points out their usefulness. ‘They abhor the stock-in-trade of the dramatist and the historian – change, disruption, violent action – aspiring to a ubiquity of sameness.’⁵ Yet the assumption that the office worker is dull is fairly recent. Robert Newsom, tracing how many of Trollope’s peers worked in administrative jobs, concludes that only now does the widely disparate status of intellectual work and administration make such a career path ‘quite unimaginable’.⁶

Possibly we now oppose the notions of creativity and bureaucracy as a result of investigations into the former’s use of play. Sigmund Freud’s essay on ‘Creative Writers and Day-dreaming’ described the unreality of play as a safe state where tangible objects can be linked to wishes, and hence manipulated successfully. Writers allow readers access to their phantasy objects, in which ‘language, in its unrivalled wisdom’, fulfils all desires.⁷ D. W. Winnicott located Freud’s insight in the unintegrated, formless and unmotivated play of the child. Here, reflected back by the phenomena she creates, the child learns to meditate on problems without anxiety by moving imaginatively from the disappointing state of reality to an ideal fantasy.⁸ Margaret Boden noted that the young are best able to play with conceptual spaces in which to change the generative rules informing their reasoning.⁹ Abraham Maslow, finding creativity a form of self-actualisation that exists widely (i.e., across the ordinary affairs of life), thought creative people can see

the fresh, the raw, the concrete, the idiographic, as well as the generic, the abstract, the rubricized, the categorized and the classified. Consequently, they live far more in the real world of nature than in the verbalised world of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes.

People who, ‘when the total objective situation calls for it, [are] comfortably disorderly, sloppy, anarchic, chaotic, vague, doubtful, uncertain, indefinite, approximate, inexact, or inaccurate’ perhaps sound unsuitable as bureaucrats.¹⁰

Or maybe the problem about thinking about creativity and bureaucracy together lies in the poor reputation of public art? Governments, understandably, have sought to annex writing talent, with posts such as the Laureateship and plans for pensions for writers. In a less narrowly political sense, the association of art with ‘public’ work was a cherished Enlightenment project, intended to involve viewers in a community of taste, teaching them public moral values, embodied in pieces that were not produced under the servile artisanship of commercial art. But artists repeatedly find difficulties in working with a subject set in advance, in defining which public is to be addressed, and in deciding whether to celebrate or challenge communal responses.¹¹

Or perhaps, Arlene Young suggests, our revulsion is to do with the class of men we assume actually fill the offices?¹² The 1970s saw influential accounts of the lower middle class, accused of a fascist mindset – a class that was conformist (given its stake in the established order), controlled by status anxiety, full of ‘villa Toryism’, individualist rather than collective – who would stoop to study such a boring topic? Members of the lower middle classes were held to show a ‘sheer lack of heroism’ (according to Geoffrey Crossick), since they were ‘languid by habit’, being concerned to uphold the established order (according to Arno Mayer).¹³ The 1990s, however, saw a new approach to the issue of class. John Carey argued that modernists, afraid of the effects of the increase in population, of widening education, and of democracy, had come up with the caricature of a half-educated working man, a Leonard Bast, who was incapable of selective and intelligent reading, and unable therefore to access difficult (and hence élite) texts. While Carey’s argument was not designed to capture the whole raison d’être of modernist art, it was designed to (and did) nail academic snobbery about the lower middle classes.¹⁴ Carey’s arguments have been corroborated by richly humane studies by Jonathan Rose, Arlene Young and Jonathan Wild, which show there was a vigorous intellectual culture in some offices from 1880 onwards, following the implementation of the 1870 Education Act over the following decade.¹⁵ The reading of even the run-of-the-mill clerk has been reconsidered, in recent studies of the cultural geography of the ‘middle brow’, once passed over as an ‘aesthetics for every man’ (or, more strictly, every middle-class woman).¹⁶

Something, however, remains to be done. Even these commentators see creativity as an element appearing in the interstices of official life, not at its heart. In particular, they are not concerned with the distinction between commercial and public administration, where, I will contend, public service ethics produce a different sort of cultural hero.

Desk work has become the subject of powerful fantasies in the media, appearing everywhere, from fraud investigations like The Firm and Wall Street, to political dramas like The West Wing, to chick flicks like The Devil Wears Prada and Legally Blonde, to reality-TV series like the BBC’s The Apprentice or parodies like Ricky Gervais’s The Office. In these, the office is a place where empires of glittering wealth are built, immense pressures faced down and technical expertise flashed about, to force swooning colleagues to yield tribute. Most of us, however, experience office work as draining us of independence, eroticism and even cleanliness. Against the subtle and lasting stink of an end-of-day shirt, notions of creativity (let alone sex) do not get a look-in. The dismal working conditions of an office today are enough to cause any artiste to start back hurriedly: the pitiless physical environment of dry paper, dusty ledges, second-hand air, computer-screen static, spiky plants, stained carpet, fluorescent light … the carapace of timetables and rules, written and unwritten, by which all activity must be structured … the minute specialisation of function, giving no sight of the whole … the endless trickle of emails, telephone, meetings and corridor chats, each of which meshes with another, and that with another, and that with another still.¹⁷ While Weber’s thesis about the rise of the entrepreneur – all fire, individuality, thrust and so on – is very much in key with what we think literature should deal with, his thesis about the rise of the bureaucrat is very much not.

So, when pushed to it by sheer biographical fact, we literary critics tend either to explain away any office work that authors do as being irrelevant to the fiction, or concentrate on what the author administers (ranging from a colony down to stamp duty), rather than on his working practices. When it is absolutely necessary to consider the latter, our readings tend to be (variously following Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault) suspicious. It is assumed that bureaucracy’s uses will always lapse into abuses. Expertise in administration will always produce obfuscation and delay, not clarity and speed. Precision over functions in a system will always ossify into forms. Though all should be equal before the rules, office hierarchy will always favour the boss’s toady or gofer. Methodical and comprehensive reviews of circumstances will always decay into office politics, and so on.

Yet, in government and commercial circles alike, recent technical changes have desegregated work and home activities, making such institutional problems seem less inevitable. The decentralised electronic office has brought more fluid textual and social practices. Critical legal and accounting studies have emerged from the 1980s onwards, depicting the office as a place of competing discourses. Indeed, some business commentators now argue that we are in the era of the post-bureaucratic organisation, with its worker participation, cross-functional task forces, dense networks of communications, negotiated solutions and, most tellingly, managerial roles explicitly concerned with organisational change.¹⁸ Managers now are convinced that non-financial capital, especially the creativity and personal engagement of their employees, is key to success. Artistic entrepreneurs are providing training in imagining how other people think, in refining writing styles, in improvisation and in investigating how the metaphors we use in work affect how we work.¹⁹ Business studies regularly takes techniques and ideas from the creative sector. Gurus refer to Teresa Amabile’s contention that, in an affluent society, employees are driven more by intrinsic motivation than fear of management. Firms must give transformational leadership (where workers are inspired), rather than transactional leadership (‘do this or you’re out’), if they want to recruit and retain excellent staff.²⁰ The advice is mirrored in scores of railway-store self-help books for the executive, which urge her to innovate and to breathe new life into her employees.²¹ Wendy Williams and Lana Yang warn that any ‘organization which penalizes rather than rewards those who offer unorthodox approaches to problem-solving may find … few innovators … among its ranks’. It will end up stable but stagnant, full of people who get their status and motivation from the structure of the organisation and not the work done, and so have an investment in maintaining the status quo.²² Conversely, in studies of the creative industries there is increasing emphasis on how ‘creative thinking takes place neither inside the box nor outside the box, but at the edge of the box’, depending on constraints and rules as much as on spontaneous or random thinking.²³

Well, if business and art can dub-step, perhaps it is time for literary critics also to ask whether there is a mutually beneficial relationship between literature and bureaucracy. Having become familiar with the literary techniques and concerns of his time, does this affect how the writer does his day job? Do fictions stop the bureaucrat from becoming a neurocrat? And – audaciously reversing this – does experience in office produce characteristic and original modes of writing? In particular, does the peculiar ethical environment of the public service bureaucracy encourage an obliquity to market values that is, in itself, inspirational?

This book is a discussion piece to map out ways of answering these questions. It looks at public offices at three moments of change, namely the trial period of the Republic, the Victorian flowering of state systems resulting from the Northcote–Trevelyan reforms and our own time’s experiment in New Public Management. At these three points state provision changes, as it is initiated, then extended, then partially withdrawn. Consequently, there is much contemporary commentary about the aims of the service, as the size of operations waxes and wanes. In the 1650s central state institutions employed more than a thousand men; this grew fortyfold by the 1850s, as government moved away from endorsing laissez faire, and then grew again to the high point of the mid-1970s, with nearly three-quarters of a million civil servants. Numbers have since fallen a third, and the downward trend continues as the state moves from direct provision to negotiating between public, commercial and domestic or volunteer provision of services. I could have taken up a number of other tipping points, of course, such as the decade of imperial expansion and consolidation following the East India Company Act of 1773, or the Labour government’s term of office after the Second World War, during which the Beveridge report was implemented. However, depth took precedence over continuity, trenches over a furrow. Thus I have chosen, as case studies, three men who wrote extensively about government administration, and who held high-ranking posts in government-funded institutions for extensive periods of time: John Milton was secretary for foreign tongues in the Commonwealth, Anthony Trollope entered the Post Office as clerk and left as Surveyor and, more tangentially, David Hare has managed, directed and written extensively for national theatre companies funded by the state. All three have a personal and a conceptual engagement with the public service.

The developing area of law and literature provides a useful model. This started some 30 years ago studying references to, and representations of, one in the other (‘law in literature’, especially plai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Weber, Bureaucracy and Creativity
• 2. The 1650s: Milton and the Beginning of Civil Service
• 3. The 1850s: Trollope and the Height of Civil Service Ambitions
• 4. The Present: Hare and Shrinking Government Provision
• 5. Coda: Bureaucratic Creativity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index