‘Free Men’: The Image Contested

This scene is banal, but then I think it is meant to be. The brief respite experienced by the worker — his name is Eugene Picard — is a commonplace. The respite, the moment of reverie, the flight from the realm of unfreedom: these are all staples of the literature addressed to working life. This is not to say that the novelist quoted, Tristan Remy, lacks imagination, for the repetition of the tropes is part of the point. Remy’s novel, dealing with a strike wave in 1936, tries to hold close to the rhythms of the shop floor. And on the shop floor locution, gesture and execution are all subject to repetition.