Introduction: Weber, Bureaucracy and Creativity

Abstract

Robert Burns, commissioned as an exciseman in Dumfries First Itinerary in 1789, eventually made his way up to the first division. The Excise’s register for promotion is generous about Burns, with entries such as ‘Never tryed, a poet’ giving way to ‘Turns out well’, and then to ‘The poet does pretty well’. This amiable attitude was not reciprocated by Burns, who considered the job ‘an incessant drudgery, and… nearly a complete bar to every species of literary pursuit’.¹ Over a century later Ezra Pound attempted to ‘liberate’ T S. Eliot from a clerical job at Lloyds Bank by starting up a fund (Pound called it Bel Esprit), into which 30 subscribers would pay ten pounds a year for five years to let Eliot concentrate on writing. Pound vowed that Eliot was ‘merely the first. It is the restart of civilisation.’² Similar disgust over office work appears everywhere in literature, behind, for instance, the pallid persistence shown by Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the vacuity at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Circumlocution Office, the state infrastructure underlying W. H. Auden’s ‘Unknown Citizen’ (as he says elsewhere, ‘executives/Would never want to tamper’ in the valley of poetry’s making), the nerveless horror of the institutions of Franz Kafka and George Orwell, and the absurd merry-go-round of official language in Václav Havel’s The Memorandum.³