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2006-09-16 - 2:52 a.m. Call it the envy of the local writer, but I have never picked up any of those books often categorised under those terms 'self-help', or 'self-management'. I'm only too aware that these are the very same books that perch at the top of bestseller lists in this country, a disturbing trend that reveals how much people want their literature to be utilitarian, even prescriptive, to present scenarios 'applicable to my own life.' I found a copy of such a book at the X office, and borrowed it out of curiosity. Entitled 'Who Moved My Cheese?' it is written by someone called Dr Spencer Johnson. The use of the honorific is revealing, of course; it stamps the book with credibility. As if this wasn't already demonstrative of the book's anxiety to establish its credentials, there is a foreword by an enthusiastic seconder, a Kenneth Blanchard, Ph.D. People don't want to read authors anymore, they want to read authority. Trying my best to clear myself of all hubris, I opened the book to the first few pages. No chance. They had mutilated Scottish poet Robert Burns' poem 'To a Mouse', which originally went: The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men into The best laid schemes There's the issue of intelligibility, but I would have preferred the publishers to reproduce the original version of Burns' poem with a translation footnote attached. And not mess with the line-breaking. One shouldn't tamper with poetry that way, especially if it is highly likely that more copies of the book are being sold than a collection of Burns' verses. A procession of glowing testimonials from the head honchos of Eastman Kodak and Merrill Lynch, among others, are emblazoned on the next few pages. Major hard-sell. Perhaps one day someone can write a marketing book to explain the phenomenal sales of this particular book. There are three 'chapters' in the book. The first, 'Gathering', is an account of a group of friends catching up on their lives post-graduation. The second, 'The Story of who Moved My Cheese?' is the story itself. The third, 'A discussion', is about the group of friends unpacking the metaphors used in the story and discovering resonances with their own respective situations. 'A discussion' also contains resounding testimonials by these 'fictional' characters along the lines of 'I should have read the story earlier!', in what seems to me to be another eager attempt at self-promotion. The way the story had been set up, with all its preceding overzealous effluvia, created an aura of anticipation. The search for the sacred text is a recurring theme in much of literature, the hunt for enlightenment and remedy in the form of panacea, talisman, the sorcerer’s stone, the rune. Imagine my bone-crushing disappointment when I discovered that the story of the cheese hardly provided any new insight. I'm not insisting that all works have a certain duty to cause sublime epistemic shifts, but given the charmless and banal style of writing, I was expecting redemption via some major payoff. The story can be summarised thus: two 'littlepeople' and two mice live in a maze. Their function in life is to look for cheese. The mice, being animals, keep moving around the maze in an 'instinctive' manner. One day the four of them find a cache of cheese. The two 'littlepeople' start establishing a settlement near this source, but the mice keep roaming around, trying to find new sources. When this particular supply runs out, the 'littlepeople' (who had grown complacent) are outraged, one of them starts to scream “Who moved my cheese?”. The mice, in the meantime, have found another supply. One of the 'littlepeople' decides not to brood over their loss and begins his search for this new supply. He eventually finds it and rejoins his friends, the two mice. The. End. Interspersed with the story are recurrent declarative captions on one side of the pages which do not even aspire towards fortune-cookie pseudo-profundity. They include: 'If You Do Not Change, You Can Become Extinct', 'It Is Safer to Search in the Maze Than Be in a Cheeseless Situation' and 'Having Cheese Makes You Happy'. I would have found most of the maxims insulting, and any idiot can tell that the main thrust of the story can be captured with one line: adapt to change, or lose out. Why is the obvious being elaborated, in such a gratuitous and byzantine manner? I scrutinised the book a second time. A passage struck me: "He knew he had learned something useful about moving on from his mice buddies, Sniff and Scurry. They kept life simple. They didn't overanalyse or overcomplicate things. When the situation changed and the Cheese had been moved, they changed and moved with the Cheese. He would remember that." There's something insidious about the passage, almost suggesting an anti-intellectual bent—‘they kept life simple'. One should not try to seek any reasons for the changes in one's life, these were 'natural' occurrences beyond one's control. One was not entitled to whatever position one had attained, the only guaranteed claim anybody has is to an uncertain future. Going through the list of testimonials on the first page again, I realised all of them were provided by those in leadership positions, at the top of the capitalist hierarchy. Sure, there was no point in enlisting the review of the unrecognisable 'everyman'. But as much as the list impressed, it also revealed the book's utility: I can very clearly imagine copies being bought in bulk to be given to employees who have been given the axe. Let's face it: in such instances, someone did move the cheese. Some top-level staff had made decisions related to privatisation, downsizing, outsourcing, retrenchment. The book suggests that it is not as important to hold accountable the people responsible for these machinations as to simply 'move on'. There's no need to seek recourse through your unions, plan strikes along with co-workers who had been spared, demand for negotiations; such futile gestures would only eat away at your ability to find New Cheese. So here we have our bestseller: an ideological tract, inseminating fatalism and a sense of powerlessness in the worker, obscuring the real workings of capitalism, its claim of emancipation founded on false consciousness. Disguised as an optimistic parable involving anthropomorphic mice and some glib aphorisms. Cheese as the new opiate of the masses. Incidentally, the quote by Robert Burns actually ends with these lines: The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men For the author of 'Who Moved My Cheese', emotional encumbrances should be banished if you were a mouse in the rat-race. One should move on, be like the survivalist mice, who know neither grief, nor pain, nor joy. But Burns' humble poem knows better, and that is why no self-help book can ever claim its position as literature.
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