If Honoré de Balzac's Treatise on Elegant Living addressed one crucial
pillar of modernity--the "mode" itself, fashion--his Physiology of the
Employee examines another equally potent cornerstone to the modern era:
bureaucracy, and all of the cogs and wheels of which it is composed.
Long before Franz Kafka described the nightmarish metaphysics of office
bureaucracy, Balzac had undertaken his own exploration of the
dust-laden, stifling environment of the paper-pusher in all of his roles
and guises. "Bureaucracy," as he defined it: "a gigantic power set in
motion by dwarfs." In this guidebook, published for mass consumption in
1841, Balzac's classic theme of melodramatic ambition plays itself out
within the confined, unbreathable space of the proto-cubicle, filtered
through the restricted scale of the pocket handbook. The template for
such later novels such as The Bureaucrats, and one of the first
significant texts to grapple with the growing role of the bureaucrat,
this physiology reads like a birding field guide in its presentation of
the various classifications of the office employee, from the Intern to
the Clerk (all ten species, from Dapper to Bootlicker to Drudger) to
Office Manager, Department Head, Office Boy and Pensioner. The job
titles may change over the years, and paper-pushing has perhaps evolved
into email-forwarding, but the taxonomy remains the same. In our
twenty-first-century crisis of employment, jobs continue to be
themselves a form of currency, and the question continues to loom: when
will it be quitting time?
