“All I want to do is get that check and get drunk”: Work, catastrophe and subversion in Charles Bukowski’s Factotum
Carl Rhodes, University of Technology Sydney
For Paul Ricoeur (1992) fiction is an “an immense laboratory for thought experiments” (p. 159) that, like life itself, is “an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience” (p. 162). Seen this way fiction is a way that we find new ways to explore, understand and evaluate lived experience. It is in this spirit that this paper offers a reading of Charles Bukowski’s 1975 novel Factotum – a book that is indubitably about the experience of working in organizations. But not just any work. Bukowski “targets the deadening oppressiveness of the workplace [and] the questionable aspects of traditional masculinity” (Charlson, 2005: 9). Factotum’s main character, Hank Chinaski (Bukowski’s alter-ego), isn’t a factotum in that he has a job with many tasks – he is a person who has many jobs. He drifts between them, as he criss-crosses 1940s America, always anticipating getting sacked, always looking for the next drink. Factotum is an experiment in extreme organizational resistance – an experiment well beyond the capacity of most people. This is not resistance located within power relations so as to be constrained by that power from all sides. It is a radical resistance that shatters power relations in the extremities of its own actions.
Chinaski knows what is expected of him, after all “bosses are never hard to fathom” (Bukowski, 1975: 111). “It wasn’t enough to do your job” he says, “you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it” (p. 17). But he lacks this passion vengefully. He is horrified, horrified by “what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep and keep himself clothed” (p. 67). He battles with this horror every day. He despises himself when his resistance elevates itself to the level of cynicism; upon accepting one job he says: “I had to demean myself to get that one – I told them that I liked to think of my job as a second home” (p. 102). But he never stays around long, and always starts a new job “feeling that I’d soon quit or be fired”; an attitude that gave him “a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power” (p. 130). After all: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” (p. 127). Chinaski’s resistance is excessive as it is rendered through Bukowski’s dark and absurdly humorous prose. He rejects the whole system, except the part that allows him to continue to eat and drink. This is a resistance that involves the “politically radical notion of refusing capitalist work relations” (Whiston, 2000: 29). It is also a resistance for the few who can face its consequences, not for the many who cherish eating the fruits of the organizational tree.
Following Dobozy (2001) the paper will consider Factotum as “a model of subversive operativity within postindustrial capital” (p. 44). This model is one in which time and the future are deeply implicated. There is no messianism here. There is not even a tomorrow. The only organizational constraint is the requirement to work so as to eat (and drink). Factotum is no bildungsroman. The narrative is episodic and its connections arbitrary. It offers no moral lessons. It provides no exemplar to be followed. Instead its ‘dirty realism’ (Dobozy, 2001) chronicles one possibility of living outside of the law, under the law. This is resistance at its most extreme catastrophic possibilities. It lacks both mamby-pamby contrariness and utopian dreams, settling instead on the dirt of one person’s reality. In reviewing these themes, the paper points to some of the limitations of resistance theory in organization studies – limitations which, while valorizing resistance actually pay homage to power.
References
Bukowski, C. (1975) Factotum, Black Sparrow Books.
Charlson, D. (2005) Charles Bukowski: Autobiographer, Gender Critic, Iconoclast, Victoria: Trafford.
Dobozy, T. (2001) In the country of contradiction the hypocrite is king: defining
dirty realism in Charles Bukowski's Factotum, Modern Fiction Studies, 47(1): 43-68.
Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another, trans K. Blamey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Whiston, P. (2000) The Working Class Beats: A Marxist Analysis of Beat Writing and Culture From the Fifties to the Seventies, Sheffield Online Papers in Social Research (SHOP).