Reviewed by: Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization by Benjamin Lewis Robinson Alexandra Irimia Robinson, Benjamin Lewis. Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization Berlin: DeGruyter, 2019 With the notable exception of Jonathan Wild's 2006 study The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939, the literary figure of the bureaucrat has seen little critical attention and received theoretical scrutiny limited to several individual case-studies only. Unjustly so, I argue, considering the abundance and variety of its exponents, particularly in the literature of the past two centuries, written both within and beyond the Western world. Even Wild's exploration, creditable perhaps as the birth certificate of this character typology, remains confined to the boundaries of English literature and inscribed in a strictly delimited time frame. In this context, Benjamin Robinson's 2019 Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization provides a much-needed discussion of the underexplored type of fictional clerks, laying the ground for a literary history of fanatical bureaucrats that accounts for national and cultural variance. His comparative approach is interested in the literary modes of addressing what he calls "the problem of fanatical rationality" (3), with an emphasis on the peculiarity of the subjects emerging from the ultimately humanitarian project of bureaucratization, often perceived as either inhuman or dehumanizing in itself. Without avoiding Melville's Bartleby, arguably the usual suspect when it comes to the disciplined kind of apathy usually associated with the passions of bureaucratization, Robinson strays off the beaten tracks and prefers to investigate more subtle examples of institutional subjectivities and their affective flows. As the author convincingly demonstrates, these are often not explicitly, but rather obliquely symptomatic of various biopolitical discourses that have permeated literary narratives concerned with officialdom and administration. Consequently (and, perhaps, counterintuitively), Robinson does not populate the intricate corridors of his book with the most idiosyncratic Kafkian figures; both Josef K. from The Trial and K. from The Castle are loud absences in this respect. Instead, as far as Kafka is concerned (and he cannot not be), Robinson reads into characters that are less obvious candidates for the title [End Page 389] of bureaucratic fanatics: the officer in The Penal Colony and Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. Other prominent figures on the walls of this gallery of characters come from the Conradian universe, namely from the feverish imperial delirium in The Heart of Darkness and from the cold and disaffected urbanscapes in The Secret Agent. Rest assured: Robinson's inventory is more reverent to clarity and chronology than my description of it. He follows the red thread of bureaucratic fanaticism in its historical evolution, filiations and interferences, wherever these can be pertinently or plausibly established. It is also not without importance that the author gives his book a circular coherence, bringing the argument to a round close: it opens with Michael Kohlhaas, the protagonist of Heinrich von Kleist's eponymous novel, and ends with Kohlhaas's South-African, twentieth-century double imagined by John Maxwell Coetzee in his The Life and Times of Michael K. According to the author, the common denominator validating the comparison of such apparently dissimilar characters is that "despairing of, or over, bureaucracy, these bureaucratic fanatics draw attention to the limits, the internal contradictions, the points of breakdown, excess and dislocation, in short to those moments at which bureaucratization runs into perplexities it can neither dissolve nor circumvent" (6). Depending on the ways in which they choose to critique the fanaticalbureaucratic tendencies of modernity (to which modern literature itself could not have remained insensitive), a typology distinguishing between a first degree and a second degree of fanaticism becomes transparent. While the former, Robinson argues, is characterized by an exceptionally active commitment and unabated loyalty to the imposition of bureaucratic principles onto the natural irregularities of the world, the latter triggers apparently passive behaviours of peculiar resistance that "cannot be subsumed by bureaucratic measures" (4). The book maintains a graceful and delicate balance between theory and criticism, satisfying both "fanatics" of literature and readers interested in a broader outlook on bureaucracy as a hypersign of modernity. It solidly anchors the seven case studies not only in the...
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Sep 7, 2024
Haowen Zhang + 7
Open Access