Bodies in crisis in the French literature of the office: Lydie Salvayre’s La Vie commune and Delphine de Vigan’s Les Heures souterraines

Abstract

When philosophy has dovetailed with the literature of the office in the past, the discussion has usually focused on the crisis of work embodied in Melville’s Bartleby figure, whose mantra ‘I would prefer not to…’ has epitomized the worker who refuses capitalist demands by having no demands of his own. Working beyond this position by focusing on the roman d’entreprise of the past twenty-five years, particularly on two recent narratives of French office life, La Vie commune (1991) by Lydie Salvayre, and Les Heures souterraines (2012) by Delphine de Vigan, I wish to show how these novels articulate a bodily overflow that gestures towards a refusal of the labour culture that they describe. Emerging in the texts through diverse forms such as illness, madness, depression or breakdown, these responses display what I argue is a reclamation of personal affect, and a redemptive refusal of certain cognitive labour infrastructures. What I will argue, further, is that the kinds of personalized corporeal refusals described in these texts also bring to light a crisis of solidarity in the French workplace. Ultimately, I argue that the contemporary roman d’entreprise is engendering new forms of ‘Bartlebyism,’ offering literary escape routes beyond over-identification with labour apparatuses.