Secret Life

By: Jeff VanderMeer

Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press

ISBN: 1930846274

Yvain or The Knight with the Lion

By: Chrétien de Troyes

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

ISBN: 0820307580

Bartleby the Scrivener

By: Herman Melville

Publisher: Kessinger Publishing Company

ISBN: 1419109006

Walden

By: Henry David Thoreau

Publisher: Barnes and Noble Books

ISBN: 0760750947

City of Saints and Madmen

By: Jeff VanderMeer

Publisher: Prime Books

ISBN: 0966896882

Snow Crash

By: Neal Stephenson

Publisher: Bantam Books

ISBN: 0553380958

There is something about the office setting that strikes a chord in people. Perhaps it is the bewildering labyrinth of cubicles. Perhaps it is the artificial fluorescent lighting. Perhaps it’s the faceless anonymity of unseen people at work on invisible tasks working towards inscrutable aims that reminds more of the cube-shaped Borg starship from Star Trek than something living, breathing individuals might construct for themselves. Whatever the cause, the office has long been a source for a peculiar blend of absurdity, pain, and ennui.

In an examination of absurdity, pain, and ennui, Jeff VanderMeer's Secret Life works in a literary tradition that shares space with comedic works like Dilbert and Office Space along with serious writers like Henry David Thoreau (when he utters "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"--could anything be more true of the office), Yvain or the Knight of the Lion (from the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troye where we find a sweatshop of noble sewing women (this may be a bit of a stretch but it was, without doubt, the office of the time)), and Herman Melville's unforgettable Bartleby the Scrivener (and his unenviable job as postal officer in the Dead Letter Officer and copyist for the narrator--if any other character in all American literature would climb a vine to escape the office it would be Bartleby). The aspect that these works have always shared is a deep sense of the unnatural that goes with the stultifying labor of the office place. What stultification means to the human who is wasting away in these unnatural places has given rise to all kinds of political movements but VanderMeer has here concentrated on a more important aspect  and that is the stretch towards freedom. Not freedom in a sense of violent revolution but more a sense of groping, grasping evolution as a kind of natural process of rejection of the unnatural.

Three aspects particularly intrigue about this short story. The first is the growing feud and disassociation between those employees on the second floor and the third floor plus the overall relationship with the janitors. Any office place is a setting for factions. A company is not so much a company of people as a nation of states all battling each other for scarce resources, prestige, and population. Distrust breeds contempt as easily as familiarity (thank you Pubilius Syrus) in these places. The strict development and attention to hierarchy--with height always equating to rank--is as notorious in big business as big cigars. This aspect is beautifully captured in the third floor growing to despise those on the second floor despite the fact that they were once part of the same group. The contempt grows and ends in the pristine line where "They began to fear those on the second floor for reasons they didn't understand." Later it becomes clear: the second floor people have become a different species altogether replete with an insect-like language. An archetype has formed as old as dwarves working in mines and extending through Morlocks dwelling beneath the Eloi--but this in The Office! It is as if centuries of evolution have passed within this building where the natural course of events would lead to the separate evolutions of the second and third floors, which is a perfectly reasonable assumption should one grant office workers immortality and centuries of single-minded work. "Is this what we are to become as a race?" the book asks you as you stare in to the colorless drab of a cubicle wall. And beneath it all are the janitors charged at once with the maintenance of the domain--in effect, the gods of the place that invisibly make things happen and work--yet ranking the lowest of the low and growing jealous in their grasp of petty power and rigid caste. The irony of Big Business is that, with time, large corporations seem to cross some kind of event horizon and descend in to this maelstrom of politics, protocols, and procedures forgetting entirely what the business goals ever were in the first place. VanderMeer gives us the final result.

The second aspect, and perhaps the most memorable, is the device of the vine. From its ignominious birth it becomes a direct challenge to the unnaturalness of the office. It is also recalls to mind the omnipresent mushrooms in Ambergris from The City of Saints and Madmen (also by Jeff VanderMeer). The vine, like the mushrooms, has the same trait of growing and thriving beyond the view of the populace--always advancing in secret and stemming from the lush and relentless vegetation of the earth--while exuding a quiet sense of threat and fear totally at odds with its apparent vulnerability. To the denizens of the building, it is at first welcomed (by all except the janitors) who regard it like the distant call of nature and life ("like the last echoes borne from a great cry" --Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King--VanderMeer deftly implies this emotion in his office workers as if sunshine and fresh air were things long forgotten by this race of people doomed to existence in the unnatural office). The vine very literally provides a breath of fresh air. And to two people--a sort of Adam and Eve of the office--it is escape. A young janitor seizes the vine, crawls in to its universe, and immediately reverts to a kind of primitive jungle life communing with it for all the world like the most gross stereotype of an American Indian shaman. He collects his Eve--the woman who first brought the vine in to the office--and together they vanish from the story altogether presumably to found a new world. The vine itself continues to grow until it at last tears the building to the ground: a triumph of nature over the constructed world of the office. The destruction of the office is almost a necessary catharsis for the audience and borders on the mandatory. Who did not celebrate when Initech burned to the ground in Office Space? Why did the movie Fight Club depart from the book in destroying the giant credit card office buildings? It is with a grim humor and instinctive delight that we take pleasure in the destruction of these icons of unnaturalness and here in Secret Life it is nature itself that brings it to ruin.

The third marvelous invention of this book is the mimic. We find two of these openly named in Secret Life: the first caught by the secretary from the management meeting on the fifth floor and the second an imposter on the third floor. The most interesting thing about these mimics is that they're not very good at mimicing. They have strange eyes, no shoes with splayed out feet, hands that are moist and covered in suckers, they do not appear to speak the language of the office place, and they walk on walls and ceilings. They're hardly doppelgangers in the sense of being perfect copies. Yet, despite their strangeness, they are readily accepted on the third floor and presumably the rest of the office precisely because no one is paid to get involved. The mimic becomes the natural result of bureaucracy taken to its natural conclusion where everyone concentrates on their job, nothing more, and please do not ask questions because the higher-ups have it under control. This is indeed the case when the mimic arrives for work on the third floor. People wonder but no one asks. People observe strangeness but no one takes action. Until matters are finally brought to a head by ever more flagrant examples of inhumanity, the third floor office workers pretend as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening. Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash satirizes procedures in the beginning of that novel that all of business can be covered in three-ring binders. VanderMeer presents an office blighted with an occurrence outside of the demesne of their three-ring binders and so it is ignored. Meanwhile, it would appear that mimics have altogether taken over the executive leadership and fifth floor management--as the fifth floor secretary is at great pains not to notice. Again, we are reminded of countless centuries of evolution taking its natural course where we find the stultified humans now willingly ignorant of the aims and directions of their clearly inhuman managers. The mimic is the final answer to those who refuse to "rock the boat."

Secret Life is in many ways a groundbreaking entry in to the literature of the office. VanderMeer's biological mechanisms are strange in the literary sense that Harold Bloom uses in that it instantly affects the reader as well as the authors who write after it. Both in the methods of Nature attacking the unnatural and the accelerated course of evolution we find the office laid low from the monolithic imaginings of Big Business and Captains of Industry to a sort of blot or tumor on the face of the world to be removed with some scarring--a struggle in which people almost take an ancillary and incidental role. This role is fitting since the common feeling of those who dwell in the cube farm is exactly that: ancillary and incidental. Quiet desperation.

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