Workplace Trauma and Fragmented Memory in Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project: A Trauma-Theoretical Reading of Surreal

Abstract

Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project is a stunning and surreal interrogation of corporate bureaucracy, memory and the void and the emotional fallout of late capitalist labor systems. This article uses trauma theory to consider the ways in which the novel depicts the workplace as a haunted site of repetition, archival lacunae, and uncanny dislocations that reflect traumatic dynamics of erasure and fragmentation. The narrator’s observation of a father’s eventual departure at a corporate “bring-your-daughter-to-work” day becomes an instance of intergenerational breach and bureaucratic violence. Borrowing from Cathy Caruth’s idea of trauma as belated experience and hauntology, this article argues that Pester renders everyday office practices into spaces of ghostly agitations that disrupt the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. By locating the novel within the context of trauma studies and postmodern dystopian satire, the paper demonstrates how The Expansion Project subverts corporate modernity and recovers trauma as an individual and collective product of twenty-first century labor.