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G. S. Balakrishnan

A POST-graduate student of business management sought my help for his dissertation on business fiction. Incidentally, he was curious to know, why like the abbreviation SF for Science Fiction, B F for Business Fiction was not popular.

To his chagrin, I expressed my prejudice against classifying fiction as picaresque, sentimental, satirical or business. A work of fiction stood or fell as a work of fiction. Even Sir Walter Scott abhorred the adjective "historical" applied to his works. He was content with calling them "imaginative narratives."

I tried to recollect from my reading fictional works featuring business and industry. Their number was amazingly large. Though all the novels had business as their nucleus, they had allowed many cultural issues to invade and mar the theme like social adaptability, personal integrity and even legal points related to trade.

Thus, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live telling the deceitful machinations of Augustus Memotte, a French financier in the railway business, degenerates into a tract on the commercial profligacy of the age.

Though the satirical picture of a society on the brink of bankruptcy has been drawn admirably well, the book lacks qualities of permanence.

Business fiction has failed to produce characters who are highly individualised. Either they are worthy and reasonable men like Chaucer's Merchant or con men like Autolycus, the charming pedlar of The Winter's Tale.

Babbit, the competent materialistic businessman is only a type representing thousands like him in New York, Boston and San Francisco dictating over art, education and politics. R. K. Narayan's Margayya has a certainly an edge over him though he too cannot claim to be highly distinct. Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman is no doubt an individual clearly marked out.

In America — where the genre has made much headway — in business novels industrialised cities supplying the world with machine tools and motors cars usurp the place of the protagonist.

A powerful and compelling novel is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle about the meat packing industry. Like Uncle Tom's Cabin, the novel's impact was tremendous. It lowered the consumption of meat in the US and led to the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act.

The novel tells us the sad story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian peasant who migrates with his family to the US with high hopes. He gets lost in the jungle of Chicago where business life is a cesspool of intrigues.

Rudkus and family suffer untold misery at the hands of exploiting bosses and a heartless system whose only aim is to enrich those who wield power. Indeed a business novel of epic dimensions.

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