Leonardo Terzo (ed.)Lunatic Giants.Edgy Characters in Western Literature: Bartleby, Wakefield, Samsa

ContentsCristina Marelli, Who’s Speaking: Inside and Outside the Characters

Caterina Viola, Dramatis Personae: the Company They Keep

Barbara Berri, The Prison House of Home

Silvia Monti, The Uncanny Power of Language in “Wakefield” and “Bartleby”

Flavio Ceravolo, Mirroring Societies in Literature: Alienation, Exclusion, Segregation.

Leonardo Terzo, A Reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Leonardo Terzo, Puritan Introspection and Critical Voyeurism in Hawthorne’s “Wakefield”

Melville’s Bartleby, Hawthorne’s Wakefield, and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa live with different attitudes and different endings to their uncanny experiences. Each of course starts his non-quest inside his peculiar cultural chronotope, but all of them remain prisoners to some personal shortcoming that they cannot pinpoint and cannot rectify.

Bartleby is the most absolute in his silence. He carries with and within him the secret of his cosmic refusal, because the nonsense of the world overshadowed by Wall Street is best unuttered. Wakefield is the absurd evidence that modern man is driven by intimate desires that he is unable to understand; his going back home after twenty years is as slapdash an occurrence as his absence. On the contrary Gregor Samsa seems to be mortally wounded by the dazzling and gloomy self-revelation of his condition. He resists his own insignificance by trying to ignore it, but his regressive Darwinian metamorphosis is irreversible and beyond recovery.

The three of them, though chained to their respective dooms, project the scandal of their existences on to the people around them. These in turn exhibit a plentiful phenomenology of the accepted midget monstrosities which constitute the sane world. It is due to their confrontation with the display of this peevish and sordid reality that Bartleby, Wakefield and Gregor Samsa look like giants, albeit lunatic giants.

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Lunatic Giants

Leonardo Terzoed.

ARCIPELAGO EDIZIONI

8

Lunatic Giants

Leonardo Terzo (ed.)

Cover illustration: Camden Town Giant, 2011, by Leonardo Terzo.

Edgy Characters in Western Literature:Bartleby, Wakefield, Samsa

Essays by Barbara Berri, Flavio Ceravolo, Cristina Marelli,

Silvia Monti, Leonardo Terzo, Caterina Viola

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Cod. 454 copertina terzo lunatic giants.pdf 18/04/2011 13.51.20

5diretta da Leonardo Terzo

Collana di sintomatologiadelle apocalissi culturali

8

Nella stessa collana

1. L. Terzo, Pornografia ed episteme. Per una sintomatologia delle apocalis-si culturali.

2. B. Berri, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Dal subliminale al trascendentale.3. S. Monti, Le vicissitudini della corporeità. Anima e anatomia nella nar-

rativa inglese e americana dell’Ottocento.4. L. Terzo, Sublimità contemporanee.5. B. Berri (a cura di), Saggi italiani su Elizabeth Bowen. (Saggi di E.

Cotta Ramusino, S. Granata, S. Monti, L. Terzo, C. Marelli, B. Berri,L. Guerra, J. Meddemmen).

6. Cristina Marelli, The Survival of Literature. Remake Practices fromShakespeare to the Graphic Novel. William Shakespeare, MichaelHoffman, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Art Spiegelman, MarjaneSatrapi.

7. L. Terzo (a cura di), Assurdo, paradosso, follia. Samuel Beckett, OscarWilde, William Shakespeare. (Saggi di B. Berri, S. Monti, L. Terzo, E.Zuccato).

Edgy Characters in Western Literature:

Lunatic Giants

Leonardo Terzo

Barbara Berri, Flavio Ceravolo, Cristina Marelli,

Essays by

Silvia Monti, Leonardo Terzo, Caterina Viola

Bartleby, Wakefield, Samsa

ed.

Edizione a cura diArcipelago EdizioniVia Carlo D’Adda 21

20143 Milanoinfo@arcipelagoedizioni.comwww.arcipelagoedizioni.com

Prima edizione aprile 2011

ISBN 978-88-7695-454-2

Tutti i diritti riservati

Ristampe:7 6 5 4 3 2 1 02017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011

è vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata, com-presa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico, non autorizzata.

CONTENTS

Leonardo TerzoIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Cristina Marelli Who’s Speaking: Inside and Outside the Characters . . . . . 13

Caterina Viola Dramatis Personae: the Company They Keep . . . . . . . . . . 45

Barbara Berri The Prison House of Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Silvia MontiThe Uncanny Power of Language in “Wakefield” and “Bartleby” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Flavio Ceravolo Mirroring Societies in Literature:Alienation, Social Exclusion, Segregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Leonardo Terzo A Reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Leonardo TerzoPuritan Introspection and Critical Voyeurism in Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Leonardo Terzo

INTRODUCTION

Melville’s Bartleby, Hawthorne’s Wakefield, and Kafka’sGregor Samsa live with different attitudes and different endingsto their uncanny experiences. Each of course starts his non-quest inside his peculiar cultural chronotope, but all of themremain prisoners to some personal shortcoming that they can-not pinpoint and cannot rectify. Bartleby is the most absolute in his silence. He carries with

and within him the secret of his cosmic refusal, because thenonsense of the world overshadowed by Wall Street is bestunuttered. Wakefield is the absurd evidence that modern manis driven by intimate desires that he is unable to understand;his going back home after twenty years is as slapdash an occur-rence as his absence. On the contrary Gregor Samsa seems tobe mortally wounded by the dazzling and gloomy self-revelationof his condition. He resists his own insignificance by trying toignore it, but his regressive Darwinian metamorphosis is irre-versible and beyond recovery. The three of them, though chained to their respective dooms,

project the scandal of their existences on to the people aroundthem. These in turn exhibit a plentiful phenomenology of theaccepted midget monstrosities which constitute the sane world.It is due to their confrontation with the display of this peevishand sordid reality that Bartleby, Wakefield and Gregor Samsalook like giants, albeit lunatic giants.The essays selected in this book share the critical belief that

the enigmatic otherness showcased in the three stories can be

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better approached through the investigation of the literary tech-niques operating in the presentation, the framing and the elab-oration of “the uncanny”. Silvia Monti investigates the figurative language in

“Bartleby” and “Wakefield”, and the rhetorical devices used tocreate and sustain the authors’ distinctive imagery. The basicassumption here is that the pathological deviance affecting thetitle characters is also evidenced in a deviance from standardverbal practices.Cristina Marelli detects and emphasizes the use of the nar-

rators’ points of view, the distance and the stance they take toperceive and figure out the striking behaviours and appear-ances they happen to meet.Caterina Viola overviews the roles played by the respective

sets of characters, the parts allotted to each of them in the threestories, as if in a theatre company, in order to verify the exis-tence of an implied layout, typical of such a peculiar fictionsubgenre as the “lunatic novella”. Thus a system of role func-tions seems to loom, giving the stories a sense of dramatis per-sonae comprehensiveness.Barbara Berri takes notice of the places where the plots

unfold and the significance the chronotopic circumstances con-tribute to the meaning of the characters and their actions.Comparing the plots in this perspective we see Bartleby, com-ing out of nowhere, finding and then losing a home, Wakefieldescaping the prison-house of his home and being brought backinto it, while Gregor Samsa, imprisoned in his monstrous body,sees his home and family gradually lose their function and theirsentimental attachment to him.Flavio Ceravolo’s sociological outlook, “mirroring societies

in literature”, metes out the central characters of the three sto-ries to the notions of alienation, exclusion and segregation. Thiskind of categorization in a sense reassimilates into a group or atype or a class what was certainly meant as exceptional, uniqueand inexplicable, exposing once more the somewhat overconfi-

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dent way the human sciences have taken up and carry on manyan assignment previously performed by realistic literature. As the finely discriminating analyses by Marelli and Viola

demonstrate, the characters’ uncanny situations and attitudesare construed by the ingenious use of narrative techniques. Insimpler words I would add that in the three stories the literarypoint of view is always subjective even when the narrator is anomniscient one speaking in the third person. In “Bartleby” it isthe lawyer’s point of view, in “Wakefield” it is the narrator’s,only in “Metamorphosis” it is Gregor’s himself. The differenceis quite significant.The lawyer tries to understand Bartleby, but can only

describe Bartleby’s refusals, and the core of the narration is hisand the other employees’ reactions in the office. In “Wakefield”the character is at first only a piece of news, maybe he doesn’teven really exist and the narrator, trying to explain Wakefield’spossible personality and motivations, builds him up through hisown moral imagination. So the narrator expounds his own atti-tudes to Wakefield’s act of marital delinquency, disclosing inthis way the Wakefield he subconsciously hides in himself.In both “Bartleby” and “Wakefield” the narrator describes

the title character’s personality deducing it from his mysteriousbehaviour. In “Metamorphosis” instead the protagonist has tounderstand his own transformation and all the characters’ reac-tions. Among these characters he is both himself and the“other”, and the point of view gradually moves from that of thehuman Gregor to the insect. So Gregor infers all other charac-ters’ attitudes and feelings and interprets them according to hisown perspective both as a man (mainly as a salesman) andgradually as the insect he has become. At first his mind isdivided from his body, and progressively joins and adheres toit. Yet his transformation as an “event” in itself remains unex-plained to the end. Though his family at first tries to keep him,albeit hidden away, his otherness proves untreatable, hebecomes more and more distant and irrelevant to his family

Introduction

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attachment and lets himself die. His physical death is preced-ed by the emotional one. While in “Bartleby” and in “Wakefield” the “other” is a

mysterious but complete personality or is supposed to be sosince the beginning, Gregor’s otherness is a body, a mere phys-ical entity. The metamorphosis is somatic, not psychic. So it ismore tangible, but also more inexplicable, even after everyonehas accepted it. The people around Bartleby and Wakefield,more or less sympathetically, try to make sense of them, whileon the contrary Gregor is at the same time himself and the hor-rific other in him. He faces the impossible task of rationallyrealizing the events and paradoxically becoming aware of hisown body, in a kind of new birth and new education.The three stories narrate the encounter and the confronta-

tion with the “other”. But who confronts who? The encounter isalways with a very strange part of oneself: that is why thestrangeness is made noticeable through the technique of thepoint of view. The gap between the parts of the divided self in“Metamorphosis” prompts a material quest between Gregor’sbody and Gregor’s personality. In “Bartleby” the quest has amore obscure and pathetic quality, while in “Wakefield” it is anethically hysteric one. In “Bartleby” and in “Wakefield” theself is divided and located into different characters: the lawyerand Bartleby, the narrator and Wakefield; in “Metamorphosis”the self is divided into body and feelings inside the same char-acter, where a sensitive and sentimental mind scrutinizes theweird body. We can see that a metamorphosis is what happens in any

plot: in myth it is material, in a sense even more realistic,because Jove literally becomes a swan or rain and Daphne real-ly becomes a laurel plant, while in modern literature the read-er interprets it as the allegory of a psychological, interiorizedtransformation. It is either minimal or non existent: comingback home at night, after a day narrated for more than sevenhundred pages, what has Leopold Bloom become? His only

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change is chronological: he is only a day older than at thebeginning of Ulysses. On the contrary, in Kafka’s“Metamorphosis” the transformation is again real, because, asNorthrop Frye has said, in the cycle of the literary genres satir-ic irony will be connected to myth once again.

Introduction

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Flavio Antonio Ceravolo

MIRRORING SOCIETIES IN LITERATURE: ALIENATION, SOCIAL EXCLUSION,

SEGREGATION

The aim of my paper is on one hand to analyze the possibil-ity of a methodological use of literature in an epiphenomenalway to explain the complexity of some conceptualizations ofsocial sciences theories and on the other hand to give some sug-gestions for sociological investigation. I will discuss the possi-ble use of the three short stories analyzed herein to explainsociological concepts and to develop sociological theoriesbased on them. In particular, with the help of Hawthorne,Melville and Kafka, I would like to discuss some key conceptsof sociological debate: alienation, exclusion, uncertainty andinteraction. The starting point of my argumentation is the epis-temological relation between the societies represented in thestories and the societies which were contemporary to the sto-ries.

Mirroring Societies or Painting Societies?

The title of this paper can mask an important problem: howsimilar are the societies represented in stories to the original

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societies of the period in which the stories are set? To answerthis question we can begin from a basic consideration: authorstypically have a multiplicity of aims and the accuracy of thehistorical representation of a social structure can be but one ofthem. In some literary genres this aim can be either secondaryor of little or no importance. So the first step is to discoverwhether the author had the intention of accurately describingthe society where the action takes place. Secondly, it is impor-tant to define an acceptable level of accuracy. A Mannerist rep-resentation of the social reality of an impressionistic paintinggives rise to certain thoughts or feelings or, more than likely,some mixture of both. This is not a trivial question, because itis related to the epistemological point of view of the researcher.

From the very beginning, the tradition of social studies hasbeen divided into two schools of thinking: Positivism andIdealism. The first one states the necessity for a social scientistto gather empirical material while remaining in a totally exter-nal position with respect to the analyzed phenomenon in orderto maintain a state of objectivity. In doing so, the researcher hasthe possibility to apply specific investigative tools to collectdata on the phenomenon and to establish a system of descrip-tive statements to define the mechanisms regulating theobserved social reality. In this case, the aim is clearly thenomothetic searching for the deep laws of social behaviour.Starting from this point of view, literature could be useful to theresearcher when the author tries to mirror social reality with thehighest possible level of accuracy. To achieve such accuracy,the author (and the researcher) begins from an individual, per-sonal point of view, using his/her eyes and abilities to write aprecise description of the society within which the story takesplace. According to this last consideration, even the highestlevel of accuracy is biased by an unavoidable imprecision, dueto the partiality of author’s point of view.

Starting from this issue and considering the impossibility forany human researcher to be an effective external observer of

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social reality, the second approach to social sciences – Idealism– postulates the necessity for an idiographic method. Diltheywent so far as to state the need for an investigative method thatallowed the researcher to feel the range of emotions felt by thesubject(s) of the study. However, this operation also seems to beimpossible. The more recent debate on the epistemology ofsocial sciences is not so clearly divided into opposite sides.

Everyone in the scientific community of social sciencesidentifies a need for a combination of both descriptive andinterpretative approaches, even if different positions in think-ing paths of study remain. This multiplicity of approachesallows the use of literature to exemplify social phenomena inboth a descriptive way and an expressive way. This second pos-sibility allows a character and his/her world to be adapted tohighlight specific characteristics of contemporary social condi-tions, even if the novel is set in the past, for example in mid-19th century Wall Street or London, or in Austria at the verybeginning of the last century.

In the following pages, I will show how an impressionisticreading of the character’s experience could offer a good deal ofsemantic content to complicated and multidimensional con-cepts of sociological theory.

Different Meanings of Alienation and Social Exclusion

The concept of alienation plays a crucial role in sociologicaltheory. An opposition is called to mind: on one hand, sociolo-gists try to explain the rise and evolution of regulative mecha-nisms governing the dynamics of evolution in social order. Onthe other hand, they study how and why some individuals candecide to reject these mechanisms and, in general, the rules ofsocial life. This second aspect is clearly related to the seman-tic area of the concept of alienation.

FLAVIO ANTONIO CERAVOLO ~ MIRRORING SOCIETIES IN LITERATURE

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A current definition of alienation proposed by Kalekin andFishman states that the semantic area of the term “refers toobjective conditions, to subjective feelings, and to orientationsthat discourage participation” in a group, in an organization, inan entire social life. They also claim that alienation is a termwhich “refers to the distancing of people from experiencing acrystallized totality both in the social world and in the self”. Thisfirst definition of the concept is clearly multidimensional andimplies the need for further specification typical of every com-plex concept.

The relation among individuals at the social level is so gen-eral that it may include many different possibile uses of theconcept related to the term. Alienation from the microsocialcircle where the indidual lives (Seeman), but also alienationfrom the rules of the society where the individual was born(Durkheim), or moreover alienation of a part of the individual’sinner identity because of the selling of his/her physical work ina factory (Marx). In all these contexts, the semantic area of thegeneral concept is defined and specified in a different particu-lar sense. Thus it is clear that to properly manage the exactmeaning in a model of analysis of human behaviour, we have tospecify the different possibile semantic areas in a very strictrelation to a given social context. Let’s start to demonstrate thecomplexity of this operation with alienation in Marxist theory.

According to Marx, alienation is a process in which workerslose control of their own lives because of the consequences ofthe production mechanisms. Capitalists pay workers just toexecute simple tasks and do not involve either their creativityor their intellectual capabilities. Furthermore, this simplifica-tion of the tasks required inevitably fails to reckon with individ-ual capabilities and thus it sacrifices autonomy and self realiza-tion. The outcome of this process is a sort of depression of theinner identity of the human being, which is degraded to theidentity of a worker unable to participate in the common evolu-tion of society and, at the same time, enslaved by the goals of

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the bourgeoisie purchasing his/her work. Recent evolutions ofthe Marxist theory, according to Lockwood, disconnect thealienation process from manual work and apply the same cate-gory to explain the loss of identity implied in all non-participa-tive work. It is not so simple to describe with accuracy andpatency any possible consequence of the alienation process inthe everyday life of an individual. A reading of Melville’s shortstory could help us.

The author, through the narrating voice of quite a moderntype of capitalist, describes the degradation of a man who pro-gressively loses every human social ability. While readingMarxist books, we probably are not able to figure every impor-tant aspect of the long course leading to an effective state ofalienation. Bartleby is described at the very beginning of thestory as not-so-good a worker, substantially untalented andwithout initiative or autonomy. He is so untalented that he isplaced in another room, away from the other workers.

The description provided by the story-teller is fully devot-ed to giving the reader a lot of details about Bartleby’s inabil-ity for social cooperation, but on the other hand we have topoint out that the teller himself pays the poor Bartleby, and theother copyists, to perform inexpressive tasks: they have to copyand then compare legal acts and documents. The duty ofpreparing these papers seems to be a sort of torture for thelawyer himself, all the more so copying and comparing them.The other employees work in the same room and they developa sort of group culture and usually cooperate, perhaps, as itoften happens, even against the lawyer because of the workingconditions he imposes on them (in this case, the teller obvious-ly cannot relate to it).

Bartleby starts his course to human degradation in a condi-tion of greater exposition to the consequences of an alienatingjob. He is alone, hidden by a screen, exiled in a physicallylonely space that can be thought of as a socially secluded place,a sort of prison where he spends all his time copying and copy-

FLAVIO ANTONIO CERAVOLO ~ MIRRORING SOCIETIES IN LITERATURE

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ing. Step by step the condition of alienation from reality andsocial life becomes the normal circumstance of his life and con-sequently he loses any attitude to sociality and any ability toface the changes and uncertainties of the future.

This inability progressively brings about his ruin. He losesbasic communication abilities, he loses basic social relations,he even loses his home. Because of his inability to react to hisenviroment and its normal changes, he lives relying upon hisfew certainties which are all confined into the physical space ofthe office. He lives there all the steps of the way to total alien-ation until the moment of his explicit expulsion from the socialsystem when the authorities put him in jail, because of thegrievances of the other inhabitants of the building.

From a sociological point of view, this hyperbolic course isnot really interesting for the particular description of the maincharacter, but for the highlighting of the graduality of a cumu-lative alienation process based on an industrial organization ofwork or suchlike. On the other hand, the story helps us to pointout the deep relation between two different social phenomena:alienation and social exclusion. Bartleby’s workmates show astronger resistance to the same alienation process because oftheir ability to cooperate, thus keeping alive the human dimen-sion even in this unappealing environment. Finally, their gen-eral recognition of a collective consciousness is the only way toreact to the oppressive condition imposed by this type of work-ing structure and economic organization.

Bartleby is the prototype of the alienated man and, at thesame time, he is a perfect example of social exclusion. The pro-gressive alienation process makes Bartleby’s inner social circleempty. He is facing life alone. In this case, exclusion is a con-sequence of the progressive loss of humanity caused by alien-ation, but on the other hand we can recognize a very typicalcase of self-exclusion. The pressure of society makes it impos-sible for the subject to remain within the normal circle of themicro-society in which he is involved and so he begins to enter,

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unconsciously and unwillingly, a sort of progressive self-segre-gation to escape from the complexity and risks of relationships.

In Bartlebly’s case, the problem could be recognized as aspecific dimension of fear, closely related to the sociologicalorganization of the concept of uncertainty. In recent debateabout globalization, several sociologists (in particular Baumanand Sennett) have theorized the key role of uncertainty in deter-mining the decline of social cohesion. The idea is that the lackof a consolidated horizon causes to individuals a sort of inabil-ity to practise effective citizenship within society. Bauman haswritten a lot about the social disintegration of traditional, insti-tutional and stable relationships (family, long term friendship,love) in favour of more liquid relationships, unstable by defini-tion. Thus, uncertainty becomes a spirit category because sys-temic uncertainty affects the whole globalized society. Thisvicious circle depresses the ability of individuals to placethemselves in specific social contexts, thus finding the correctsolution to the crucial problem of everyone: to what degreecould I be different from others and nevertheless be acceptedby my society and to what degree am I capable of acceptingbeing similar to others?

Uncertain interaction and interaction of uncertainty

In the current sociological debate, the uncertain future andthe lack of stability are considered crucial concepts to explainthe progressive erosion of social cohesion. In particular, thework of a great philosopher and sociologist such as RichardSennett has pointed out the essential role of a predictablefuture to perform any strategy in everyday life. Uncertainty pre-cludes the possibility of a continuative and accurate concernfor one’s job. If I know that my job is not stable and that I willprobably change my duties within the same organization, orthat I will at least change jobs between several organizations in

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the future, my level of commitment will be noticeably differentif compared with a situation of a stable occupation in a stableorganization. In this last case, I would empower myself to do mybest in the perspective of a positive evolution.

The consequences of uncertainty in the private sphere arelikewise pervasive. Let’s consider this simple example: how wouldI like to seriously engage in a sentimental relationship when myjob could require mobility? Would I like to invest in creating afamily if I had no stable prospects for my future? Thus, uncer-tainty becomes a sort of regulatory mechanism for everyday life:it dramatically changes the social rules and systematically dis-courages the concluding of deep social relationships. Bartlebyis not equipped to face the rate of the changing aspects in hislife and he finally gives up and abandons the game.

On the other hand, the impression of perfect normality canbe considered as a sort of lack of opportunities of self-realiza-tion. Repetition in everyday life becomes a sort of depressiveprison, much like the repetition of tasks within an assemblyline. In this case, the exploiter cannot be identified as a specif-ic person (the capitalist) or as a specific group of persons (thecapitalist class), but as the system of social rules itself.Alienation is not caused by the dissociation between the humanbeing and his/her mind, but by the progressive loss of interestin any possible future because of the relative predictability ofits insensible greyness. The absence of a durable perspective ofevolution becomes the main cause of the will to escape fromthis same condition. The subject decides to become alienatedfrom this life, but at the same time he/she remains tied to it.Wakefield’s story could be useful to investigate this condition.This is a clear provocation: someone who decides to becomealienated from his everyday life and relationships, following acompulsive need; at the same time, he is not able to definitive-ly break the chains of his slavery and thus he finds a place toobserve the consequences of his decision on the other personsbelonging to his original social context.

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To a prima facie analysis, this is the opposite condition tothat suffered by Bartleby but, from a more accurate point ofview, both of them are involved in the same problem: the pro-gressive loss of their humanity and the increasing waste of theirlives. “Normality” can alienate a man or a woman from theirinner nature, just as the work exploitation mechanism does:everyday “normality” enforced by social rules itself becomesexploitation. Wakefield is a prisoner of everyday life, whileBartleby is a prisoner of his work place. In “Wakefield” the pro-tagonist tries to understand the inner sense of his past reality.He goes on spending his life in the same place, merely a fewmeters away, observing, studying, but finally never decidinganything about the future. For Wakefield and Bartleby, thefuture is an enemy because it implies the need to make deci-sions regarding what to do afterwards. This is a condition ofinability which is quite common when evident points of refer-ence seem to be lost and consequently there is a predominantimpossibility to choose strategic actions.

Wakefield tries to delay the moment of making the decisionto change or to return to his old life. This is not a strategy, thisis a delay to reduce the cognitive dissonance between what hereally is and what he probably would like to be. Dramatically,the problem is that this hiatus becomes almost overwhelmingbecause of time passing by. When he accidentally decides toreturn to his previous life, he finds the same situation of hisdeparture, nothing is different, nothing has evolved, but he haswasted a lot of time in waiting. The current debate in sociologyand in social psychology assigns to the time variable a veryimportant place in explication models of social individualchoices. The structure of the stage path and the time elapsingbetween one stage and the following are good indicators toexplain a great part of social behaviour. One of the conse-quences of uncertainty is the difficulty or the impossibility tofollow an adequate path of stages in a reasonable length of time.In particular, the traditional sequence of stages (finishing one’s

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studies, finding a job, reaching autonomy or contracting mar-riage, having children) becomes more and more disregarded.This fact produces a great variance and a progressive weaken-ing of social cohesion.

On the other hand, the social pressure to maintain tradition-al equilibriums often induces conditions of cognitive disso-nance which could even reach pathologic excesses causingsocial auto exclusion. These phenomena sometimes show them-selves in the form of real, concrete escapism, as in Wakefield’scase, or on other occasions, more frequently, they are at the rootof a number of social and particularly psychological patholo-gies. The time-wasting waiting condition of Wakefield veryoften is an interior condition of individual mind forcing schizo-phrenic behaviour or else a condition of disease belonging tothe very large family of maniacal-depressive syndromes.

Summarizing: individual mind and social danger

Sometimes, social pressure is a real danger for any individ-ual mind. These cases could be recognized considering thelevel of individual tension produced by social pressure and theloss of independence in making decisions regarding personalfuture. The last short story analyzed in this volume,“Metamorphosis” by Kafka, gives us suggestions to evoke thealliance between social sciences and literature.

Who is Gregor Samsa? We can probably define him as a verygood boy: a conscientious worker, very committed to his fami-ly’s needs. He lives to serve others and, in the end, he dies toserve others. Is it possible to identify the limit of an acceptableapplication to common goals and needs, implying the sacrificeof individual goals and needs? Most likely the problem of socialorder and of its reproduction is quite close to this question.Gregor Samsa tries not to lose sight of this limit but one day herealizes that he has become a monster, unable to defend his

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position in society, because of his annihilating behaviour ineveryday life.

He is a victim of direct and indirect violence by his father,mother and sister (within the family) and by the chief clerk ofthe factory in which he works. He has become a victim of anni-hilation since he has realized he is different and since the oth-ers have realized his condition of diversity. At that moment, hehas become a victim of social exclusion because of his appear-ance which is probably the metaphoric version of this inner sit-uation. The problem is the defence of his place in micro andmacro societies, which becomes a metaphoric painting of thesearch for equilibrium between the social identity and the psy-chological one. Requests by other members of society could beincoherent with the attitude of personal inner mind. On theother hand, the social level tends to react against every individ-ual statement of free will, incoherent with social rules and theconsequence is the application of social sanctions. This mech-anism is at the base of any given social order and it has beendefined in sociology and psychology as “social control”.

In a given society, everyone can think and behave as anagent of this sort of social control, because everyone is allowedto react against other people’s behaviour when it is not consis-tent with the common rules which are part of everyone’s social-ization process. Probably in Gregor Samsa’s world, Austria atthe very beginning of the last century, the pressure of socialcontrol was more intense than in contemporary western soci-eties. But on the other hand tolerance to differences was not sodeveloped. The same discourse is suitable for many countriesall over the world, even nowadays. The condition of “different”,related to one or many characteristics (for example economiccondition, race, gender and so on), is at the base of the segre-gation mechanism. Let’s think of a modern metropolis.Residential segregation very often reflects the structure ofinequalities within the population related to a sum of factors.The pariah’s condition is often identified with the term “cock-

FLAVIO ANTONIO CERAVOLO ~ MIRRORING SOCIETIES IN LITERATURE

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roach”. Segregation is another consequence of the loss of citi-zenship. In this case, the condition of exclusion is raised byothers, like in Samsa’s case and it often produces an annihila-tion of individual desires, because of the condition of segrega-tion itself.

Finally, Samsa was essential for the survival of his familysince the others have given up to live as free-riders. WhenSamsa stops working, earning and providing for his family andfor the system, all the other people resume their place in thesystem and contribute to the survival of the others. Let’s thinkof the weight of inequalities in modern western societies, oftenunbalanced against specific minorities (migrants for example).Are there other members of modern societies who are capableand ready to carry out their tasks in case minorities stop givingtheir contribution to the common good? By treating them aspeople with no rights of effective citizenship, as different andnot equal, the possible consequence is that they will decide tobecome cockroaches or, even worse, they will feel as if they arecockroaches, and then what will they do? Can the events cur-rently happening in many Mediterranean countries be just thebeginning of a metamorphosis?

In conclusion, literature helps the social scientist in severalways. First of all stories, novels and every other narrative formuse a different language to describe the same phenomena stud-ied by the social scientist. But moreover literature gives themother possibilities to explain in detail, in a more accessible way,complicated and technical theories using stories to underlineaspects of their theoretical constructions or to point out partic-ular elements of them. Finally, literature gives the researcheranother field of comparison to study society and its complexity.There are a lot of reasons to share fields.

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Bibliography

ADDARIO, N., CAVALLI., A., (a cura di), Economia, politica e soci-età, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1990.

BAUMAN, Z., Modernità liquida, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2003.DURKHEIM, E. Le regole del metodo sociologico. Sociologia e

filosofia, Torino, Einaudi, 2008.ELSTER JON, An Introduction to Karl Marx, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 1986.KALEKIN-FISHMAN, D., “Tracing the growth of alienation:

Enculturation socialization, and schooling in a democracy”,in Geyer, F., ed., Alienation, Ethnicity, and Post-modernism,London, Greenwood Press, 1996.

KALEKIN-FISHMAN, D., “Studying alienation: toward a bettersociety?”, in Kybernetes, vol. 35, no. 3/4, 2006,pp. 522–530.

ROSSI, P., MORI, M., TRINCHERO, M., (a cura di), Il problemadella spiegazione sociologica, Torino, Loescher, 1975.

SEEMAN, M., “Alienation Motifs in Contemporary Theorizing:The Hidden Continuity of the Classic Themes”, in SocialPsychology Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, September 1983.

SENNETT, R., L’uomo flessibile. Le conseguenze del nuovo capital-ismo sulla vita personale, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2002.

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Leonardo Terzo (ed.)Lunatic Giants.Edgy Characters in Western Literature: Bartleby, Wakefield, Samsa

ContentsCristina Marelli, Who’s Speaking: Inside and Outside the Characters

Caterina Viola, Dramatis Personae: the Company They Keep

Barbara Berri, The Prison House of Home

Silvia Monti, The Uncanny Power of Language in “Wakefield” and “Bartleby”

Flavio Ceravolo, Mirroring Societies in Literature: Alienation, Exclusion, Segregation.

Leonardo Terzo, A Reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Leonardo Terzo, Puritan Introspection and Critical Voyeurism in Hawthorne’s “Wakefield”

Melville’s Bartleby, Hawthorne’s Wakefield, and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa live with different attitudes and different endings to their uncanny experiences. Each of course starts his non-quest inside his peculiar cultural chronotope, but all of them remain prisoners to some personal shortcoming that they cannot pinpoint and cannot rectify.

Bartleby is the most absolute in his silence. He carries with and within him the secret of his cosmic refusal, because the nonsense of the world overshadowed by Wall Street is best unuttered. Wakefield is the absurd evidence that modern man is driven by intimate desires that he is unable to understand; his going back home after twenty years is as slapdash an occurrence as his absence. On the contrary Gregor Samsa seems to be mortally wounded by the dazzling and gloomy self-revelation of his condition. He resists his own insignificance by trying to ignore it, but his regressive Darwinian metamorphosis is irreversible and beyond recovery.

The three of them, though chained to their respective dooms, project the scandal of their existences on to the people around them. These in turn exhibit a plentiful phenomenology of the accepted midget monstrosities which constitute the sane world. It is due to their confrontation with the display of this peevish and sordid reality that Bartleby, Wakefield and Gregor Samsa look like giants, albeit lunatic giants.

€ 12,00

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Lunatic Giants

Leonardo Terzoed.

ARCIPELAGO EDIZIONI

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Lunatic Giants

Leonardo Terzo (ed.)

Cover illustration: Camden Town Giant, 2011, by Leonardo Terzo.

Edgy Characters in Western Literature:Bartleby, Wakefield, Samsa

Essays by Barbara Berri, Flavio Ceravolo, Cristina Marelli,

Silvia Monti, Leonardo Terzo, Caterina Viola

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