We retreated that evening to a joyless Ibis hotel where the dining room had closed due to a flood and, after a cheese sandwich from a petrol station, turned in early.
Matters began to look up the next day, however, when we went to Middlesbrough to visit a windscreen repair company which was in the process of laying off twenty-five middle managers. The bosses had asked Symons to conduct a seminar entitled ‘Self-Confidence’, during which he would lead the redundant workers through a number of exercises designed to help them to imagine an adequate future for themselves. In the morning session, he projected some slides onto a screen: I can do anything if I put my mind to it. I can be strong and move mountains. I can set myself goals and achieve them. Nothing I have done so far is an indication of the powers that are within me. These were supplemented by a booklet Symons handed out, containing extracts from the biographies of famous self-made men and women. On the fly-leaf was a quote from Leon Battista Alberti: A man can do all things if he will.
None of this was easy to watch, and several times I found myself looking awkwardly out of the window at the cafeteria below. I was particularly troubled to hear one participant repeating, under Symons’s direction: I am the author of my own story. In the bathroom to which I repaired for mental relief, I tried to analyse my discomfort, and yet, in so doing, began to be suspicious of my own stance. I realised that Symons’s talk unsettled me because it reflected a disturbing but ultimately unavoidable truth about achievement in the modern world. In older, more hierarchical societies, an individual’s fate had largely been decided by the accidents of birth; the difference between success and failure had not hung on a proficiency with the declaration I can move mountains.
However, in the meritocratic, socially mobile modern world, one’s status might now well be determined by one’s confidence, imagination and ability to convince others of one’s due – a possibility of advancement which shone a less flattering light on philosophies of stoicism and resignation. It seemed that one might squander one’s life chances because of a high-handed disdain for books with titles such as The Will to Succeed, believing that one was above their shrill slogans of encouragement. One might be doomed not by a lack of talent, but by a species of pessimistic pride.
After lunch, Symons took his managers back into the lecture room and offered them a chance to share their hopes for the future, the idea being that a public revelation of this kind would stand as a promise to themselves which would be the harder to break when their confidence wavered. An employee in her early forties, who had been with the company for twenty years, spoke of her ambition to open a tea shop in the village where she had grown up. So strong was her enthusiasm, and so detailed were her plans (the walls were to be hung with pictures of the young Shirley Temple), that it was almost impossible not to feel stirred. I can move mountains, she concluded by saying, and returned to her seat, to the applause of all the participants.
I felt my eyes fill. I was reminded that whatever over-cerebral understanding we may sometimes apply to our functioning, we nevertheless retain some humblingly simple needs, among them a prodigious and steady hunger for support and love. It was to the archaic part of our personalities that Symons’s motivational exercises appealed, the side which requires neither eloquence nor complex logic and which will forgive ungainly sentences so long as they are imbued with the necessary, redemptive doses of hope.
Towards the end of the day, Symons engaged his audience in a discussion about what he called the voices of despair, internalised attitudes emphasising the chances of failure. Many of the participants traced such voices back to an unhelpful parent or a disapproving teacher, someone who, decades before, had subjected them to criticism or neglect. One after another, grown men and women rose to their feet to recount how, when they were barely the height of a door handle, they had suffered some grievous injury to their self-image: a maths teacher had berated them for their poor algebra skills, or a father had said that it was their sister who was good at art and that they should stick to sport instead.
The evidence suggested that the forming of an individual in its early years was as sensitive and important a task as the correct casting of a skyscraper’s foundations and that the slightest impurity introduced at a primary stage could possess a tyrannical power to unbalance a human animal until its dying days. To continue to deny the significance of barely perceptible childhood abuses was to manifest the same robust and foolhardy common sense which had once led our ancestors to scoff at the notion that there might be deadly colonies of microorganisms thriving in drops of saliva no larger than pinheads.
Seen from this perspective, the weight accorded to ideas of nurture and to the development of self-esteem in theories of modern education no longer seemed like a sign that our societies had gone mad or soft. On the contrary, this emphasis was as finely attuned to the demands of contemporary working life as instruction in stoicism and physical bravery had been to the exigencies of ancient times. It owed its existence less to kindness than to practical necessity. Like the rearing methods of every age, it was intended to ensure that the young would be granted the optimal chances of survival in a hostile environment.
6.
A few weeks after we returned from the north, I travelled with Symons to an office in central London, where he had been commissioned by an American bank to put some job applicants through a morning’s worth of tests. Symons had hoped that this process could be combined with a more informative round of face-to-face interviews, but the bank turned out not to want to expend the requisite time and resources. The tests would be scored overnight and a decision taken on hiring the following day.
Symons’s subjects devoted the bulk of their session to filling out the Morrisby Personality Profile, the most respected and widely used of all aptitude questionnaires. Never far from doubting the wisdom of my own career choice, I joined the candidates in the hope of learning more about my working psyche. I searched for exceptions within lists of words and tried to solve visual puzzles and analogies such as ‘Heavy is to light as a) wide b) day c) jump is to d) brick e) narrow f) house’.
Which wheel turns the fastest when the tractor moves?
Which of these identical ships has the heaviest load?
Two days later, my test results came back from Symons’s office in an exclusively bound folder designed to assert the importance of their conclusions. Held up against the subtletly of the psychological exchanges I had observed between Symons and Carol (who had since handed in her resignation from her law firm and applied for a managerial post with a housing charity), the report felt like it had been written by a computer. ‘The candidate displays average abilities which would render him well-suited to a range of middle-ranking administrative and commercial posts’, the document began, before it singled out a particular talent for marketing and a weakness with numbers. ‘His future may lie in one of the following fields: medical diagnostics, oil and gas exploration or the leisure industry’.
I recognised my desire to submit to the report’s conclusions in the hope of quelling my doubts about my future. At the same time, the report failed to inspire any real degree of confidence and indeed, the more I dwelt on it, the more it seemed to signal some of the limits of career counselling as a whole. I thought again about the smells of cabbage and swede in Symons’s office. It struck me as strange and regrettable that in our society something as prospectively life-altering as the determination of a person’s vocation had for the most part been abandoned to marginalised therapists practising their trade from garden extensions. What should have been one of the most admired professions on earth was struggling to attain the status open to a travel agent.
But perhaps this neglect was only an appropriate reflection of how little therapists can in the end make sense of human nature. An understandable hunger for answers from potential clients tempts many of them to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhil
e literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, no less immune to the methods of factory farming than a truffle.
The true range of obstacles in the way of unlocking our potential was more accurately acknowledged by the German sociologist Max Weber when, in his essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918), he described Goethe as an example of the sort of creative and healthy personality ‘who appears only once in a thousand years’.
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations. It will remain no more than a hope carried over from childhood, or a dream entertained as we drive along the motorway and feel our plans hovering above a wide horizon. Extraordinary resilience, intelligence and good fortune are needed to redraw the map of our reality, while on either side of the summits of greatness are arrayed the endless foothills populated by the tortured celibates of achievement.
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
I left Symons’s company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.
7.
In the end, twelve literary agents read Symons’s manuscript. All replied politely and with encouragement. The Real Me: Career as an Act of Selfhood remains without a publisher.
1.
In August 2007, on a humid tropical afternoon, an Air France jet touched down in French Guiana, carrying in its Business-class cabin twelve senior executives from a Japanese television company, who had flown from Tokyo to South America to follow the launch of their satellite.
The executives had bought the machine to help them start a new kind of television station, which they hoped would seize the imagination of the Japanese public and overturn the dominance of the state broadcaster NHK, legendary for its narrow focus on lengthy films about the cherry blossom season and the hunting habits of the Tibetan tiger. They had in mind a station that would show anime films about the exploits of warrior robots and romantic dramas about precociously seductive school-girls. They wanted game-shows that would mete out sadistic punishment to their losers and soap operas that would blow open the lid on the extramarital longings of the wives of salarymen living along Tokyo’s commuter lines.
But Japanese topography has traditionally created insurmountable challenges for anyone seeking entry into the broadcasting market, for the country is dispersed across four main islands, most of which are heavily forested and prone to storms and volcanic eruptions, conditions requiring investment in prohibitively expensive maintenance facilities – which helps to explain why, for most of the post-war period, Japanese television has remained unchallenged in the hands of the staid, cherry-blossom-loving, government-owned behemoth.
However, the pioneering executives imagined a way around the logistical hurdles. They discovered that if they fired a satellite into space and, in particular, induced it to settle into an orbit at 110 degrees east, thirty-six thousand kilometres above the ground, they would then be able to beam down a signal to anyone with a modestly priced dish anywhere across their archipelago. A show such as Sensei No Kaban, about the illicit love affair between a twenty-year-old woman and her seventy-five-year-old calligraphy teacher, could be transmitted into the upper atmosphere and bounced back to reach both the icy mountains of Hokkaido and the palm- and skyscraper-fringed coastline of Okinawa.
And so evolved the idea for Japan’s first satellite television station, a business whose very name was intended – as the channel’s mission statement put it – to inspire in its viewers ‘an expression of constant wonder and amazement’: WOWOW TV. But there would be a host of further tribulations in translating the business plan into a reality, including struggles with government officials and regulators, painful equity deals with the Nippon Corporation and Fuji Incorporated, and fraught negotiations to secure broadcast rights to the popular Korean TV drama My Name Is Kim Sam Soon. Finally, there was a protracted search for an actual satellite, which, after pitches from rival companies and a process not much more dignified than a haggle in a souk, led to the purchase, from the Lockheed Martin Corporation, of a $100 million A2100A model, a device now awaiting its first meeting with its new owners in a hangar in a jungle clearing a few kilometres away from the airport.
2.
The Japanese television executives filed off the plane, past a photograph of the French President and into a VIP zone where they were greeted, with all the respect and warmth due to anyone who has lately handed over a launch fee close to $75 million, by bowing senior members of the French commercial space agency Ariane Espace. After clearing customs and formerly entering French Guiana, the executives were each handed a large wooden box containing a silver replica of their satellite and led out to a minibus bound for their hotel.
It was evident that they had arrived in a peculiar corner of the world. The difficulties with French Guiana begin with trying to place it on a map. Seldom has a country been as easily and as regularly confused with somewhere else: Ghana on the western coast of Africa, Guyana east of Venezuela, Guinea next to Senegal, the former Portuguese colony of Guiné next to Guinea and now referred to as Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea below Cameroon or the island of New Guinea divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Even the pronunciation is prone to engender trouble, the English referring to the country as French Guiana (Guy-arna) while the French favour a more compacted Guyane (Gü-yann).
More significantly, the territory bears the surreal burden of being at once located on the malarial northern coast of South America, between Surinam to the west and Brazil to the south, whilst also belonging to the French state, having been absorbed into one of the country’s twenty-six départements by its former colonial master in 1946. As a result, it is now a member of the European Union, its highest legal authority is the Court of Justice in Strasbourg, its agricultural and fishery policies are defined in Brussels and its currency, valid even in the Indian settlement of Pilakoupoupiaina on the Oyapock River, is the euro, from the European Central Bank of Frankfurt-am-Main.
A layer of French bureaucracy and bourgeois ambition has been unevenly applied across this tropical kaleidoscope. In tin-roofed villages, terrains de boules abut voodoo temples. The country’s only two roads, Routes Nationales 1 and 2, are fitted out with standard French signs, whose font, Frutiger 57 Condensed, is more accustomed to pointing the way to Nantes or Clermont-Ferrand but here twists itself around Amerindian place-names such as Iracoubo and Awala-Yalimapo. Restaurants (Café de la Gare, Bar Chez Pierrot) serve escalopes of wild jungle boar and Amazonian river fish with the scaly appearance of prehistoric coelacanths, cut into fillets and domesticated under a meunière sauce.
Deprivation and despair are everywhere apparent. The country has no economy to speak of. There is neither tourism, for the sea is plagued by sharks
and brown from river sediment, nor, thanks to the poor quality of the soil, any agriculture. The roads down to Brazil are largely impassible and the territory’s sole reliable outlet to the world is the daily flight to Paris (a trip to nearby Venezuela or Peru requiring a connection in Orly).
3.
Proud of their achievements and generous of spirit, the WOWOW television executives had given permission for a small group of us to follow them on their journey.
A Hong Kong television station sent one of its most prominent young reporters accompanied – due to budgetary pressures – by only a one-person crew, who bore the contents of a studio on his back, leaving the elegant presenter (something of a household name in her city), to wander around in silver high-heeled shoes, her face frozen in a distressed expression, perhaps not unlike that worn by Amiral Estrées, the earliest French colonist of French Guiana, at the moment when he realised that the country was not to be the El Dorado which Sir Walter Ralegh had led him to expect from his conspicuously mistitled book, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, first published in London in 1595.
Ten rocket engineers from NASA had flown down from Florida as part of an exchange programme. Burdened by a sense of their own spatial superiority, they felt a pervasive need not to humiliate their hosts by any allusions to their agency’s achievements or the scale of its resources and so bore the unfailingly courteous and humble manner reminiscent of royalty on a tour of a slum district. They engaged in elaborate praise of their counterparts’ most routine achievements, like their ability to build a petrol station or to install air conditioning – though the patronisation seemed to whistle blithely past the French, who were in their hearts no less firmly, if a little less shyly, convinced of their own greatness.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work Page 7
