Lunatic Giants

Edgy Characters in Western Literature: Bartleby, Wakefield, Samsa Leonardo Terzo

ed.

Essays by Barbara Berri, Flavio Ceravolo, Cristina Marelli, Silvia Monti, Leonardo Terzo, Caterina Viola

A RCIPELAGO EDIZIONI

Collana di sintomatologia delle apocalissi culturali

diretta da Leonardo Terzo

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Nella stessa collana 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. L. Terzo, Pornografia ed episteme. Per una sintomatologia delle apocalissi culturali. B. Berri, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Dal subliminale al trascendentale. S. Monti, Le vicissitudini della corporeit. Anima e anatomia nella narrativa inglese e americana dellOttocento. L. Terzo, Sublimit contemporanee. 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). Cristina Marelli, The Survival of Literature. Remake Practices from Shakespeare to the Graphic Novel. William Shakespeare, Michael Hoffman, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi. L. Terzo (a cura di), Assurdo, paradosso, follia. Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare. (Saggi di B. Berri, S. Monti, L. Terzo, E. Zuccato).

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Lunatic Giants
Edgy Characters in Western Literature: Bartleby, Wakefield, Samsa

Leonardo Terzo
ed.

Essays by

Barbara Berri, Flavio Ceravolo, Cristina Marelli, Silvia Monti, Leonardo Terzo, Caterina Viola

Edizione a cura di Arcipelago Edizioni Via Carlo DAdda 21 20143 Milano info@arcipelagoedizioni.com www.arcipelagoedizioni.com Prima edizione aprile 2011 ISBN 978-88-7695-454-2 Tutti i diritti riservati Ristampe: 7 6 2017 2016 5 2015 4 2014 3 2013 2 2012 1 2011 0

vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuata, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico, non autorizzata.

CONTENTS

Leonardo Terzo Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cristina Marelli Whos 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, Social Exclusion, Segregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonardo Terzo A Reading of Bartleby, the Scrivener . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leonardo Terzo Puritan Introspection and Critical Voyeurism in Hawthornes Wakefield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Leonardo Terzo

INTRODUCTION

Melvilles Bartleby, Hawthornes Wakefield, and Kafkas Gregor Samsa live with different attitudes and different endings to their uncanny experiences. Each of course starts his nonquest 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. 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 techniques operating in the presentation, the framing and the elaboration of the uncanny. Silvia Monti investigates the figurative language in Bartleby and Wakefield, and the rhetorical devices used to create and sustain the authors distinctive imagery. The basic assumption here is that the pathological deviance affecting the title characters is also evidenced in a deviance from standard verbal practices. Cristina Marelli detects and emphasizes the use of the narrators points of view, the distance and the stance they take to perceive and figure out the striking behaviours and appearances 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 three stories, as if in a theatre company, in order to verify the existence of an implied layout, typical of such a peculiar fiction subgenre as the lunatic novella. Thus a system of role functions seems to loom, giving the stories a sense of dramatis personae comprehensiveness. Barbara Berri takes notice of the places where the plots unfold and the significance the chronotopic circumstances contribute to the meaning of the characters and their actions. Comparing the plots in this perspective we see Bartleby, coming out of nowhere, finding and then losing a home, Wakefield escaping the prison-house of his home and being brought back into it, while Gregor Samsa, imprisoned in his monstrous body, sees his home and family gradually lose their function and their sentimental attachment to him. Flavio Ceravolos sociological outlook, mirroring societies in literature, metes out the central characters of the three stories to the notions of alienation, exclusion and segregation. This kind of categorization in a sense reassimilates into a group or a type or a class what was certainly meant as exceptional, unique and inexplicable, exposing once more the somewhat overconfi-

Introduction

dent way the human sciences have taken up and carry on many an assignment previously performed by realistic literature. As the finely discriminating analyses by Marelli and Viola demonstrate, the characters uncanny situations and attitudes are construed by the ingenious use of narrative techniques. In simpler words I would add that in the three stories the literary point of view is always subjective even when the narrator is an omniscient one speaking in the third person. In Bartleby it is the lawyers point of view, in Wakefield it is the narrators, only in Metamorphosis it is Gregors himself. The difference is quite significant. The lawyer tries to understand Bartleby, but can only describe Bartlebys refusals, and the core of the narration is his and the other employees reactions in the office. In Wakefield the character is at first only a piece of news, maybe he doesnt even really exist and the narrator, trying to explain Wakefields possible personality and motivations, builds him up through his own moral imagination. So the narrator expounds his own attitudes to Wakefields act of marital delinquency, disclosing in this way the Wakefield he subconsciously hides in himself. In both Bartleby and Wakefield the narrator describes the title characters personality deducing it from his mysterious behaviour. In Metamorphosis instead the protagonist has to understand his own transformation and all the characters reactions. Among these characters he is both himself and the other, and the point of view gradually moves from that of the human Gregor to the insect. So Gregor infers all other characters attitudes and feelings and interprets them according to his own perspective both as a man (mainly as a salesman) and gradually as the insect he has become. At first his mind is divided from his body, and progressively joins and adheres to it. Yet his transformation as an event in itself remains unexplained to the end. Though his family at first tries to keep him, albeit hidden away, his otherness proves untreatable, he becomes more and more distant and irrelevant to his family

Lunatic Giants

attachment and lets himself die. His physical death is preceded by the emotional one. While in Bartleby and in Wakefield the other is a mysterious but complete personality or is supposed to be so since the beginning, Gregors otherness is a body, a mere physical entity. The metamorphosis is somatic, not psychic. So it is more tangible, but also more inexplicable, even after everyone has accepted it. The people around Bartleby and Wakefield, more or less sympathetically, try to make sense of them, while on the contrary Gregor is at the same time himself and the horrific other in him. He faces the impossible task of rationally realizing the events and paradoxically becoming aware of his own body, in a kind of new birth and new education. The three stories narrate the encounter and the confrontation with the other. But who confronts who? The encounter is always with a very strange part of oneself: that is why the strangeness is made noticeable through the technique of the point of view. The gap between the parts of the divided self in Metamorphosis prompts a material quest between Gregors body and Gregors personality. In Bartleby the quest has a more obscure and pathetic quality, while in Wakefield it is an ethically hysteric one. In Bartleby and in Wakefield the self is divided and located into different characters: the lawyer and Bartleby, the narrator and Wakefield; in Metamorphosis the self is divided into body and feelings inside the same character, where a sensitive and sentimental mind scrutinizes the weird 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 really becomes a laurel plant, while in modern literature the reader interprets it as the allegory of a psychological, interiorized transformation. It is either minimal or non existent: coming back home at night, after a day narrated for more than seven hundred pages, what has Leopold Bloom become? His only

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change is chronological: he is only a day older than at the beginning of Ulysses. On the contrary, in Kafkas Metamorphosis the transformation is again real, because, as Northrop Frye has said, in the cycle of the literary genres satiric irony will be connected to myth once again.

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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 possibility of a methodological use of literature in an epiphenomenal way to explain the complexity of some conceptualizations of social sciences theories and on the other hand to give some suggestions for sociological investigation. I will discuss the possible use of the three short stories analyzed herein to explain sociological concepts and to develop sociological theories based on them. In particular, with the help of Hawthorne, Melville and Kafka, I would like to discuss some key concepts of sociological debate: alienation, exclusion, uncertainty and interaction. The starting point of my argumentation is the epistemological relation between the societies represented in the stories and the societies which were contemporary to the stories. Mirroring Societies or Painting Societies? The title of this paper can mask an important problem: how similar are the societies represented in stories to the original

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societies of the period in which the stories are set? To answer this question we can begin from a basic consideration: authors typically have a multiplicity of aims and the accuracy of the historical representation of a social structure can be but one of them. In some literary genres this aim can be either secondary or of little or no importance. So the first step is to discover whether the author had the intention of accurately describing the society where the action takes place. Secondly, it is important to define an acceptable level of accuracy. A Mannerist representation of the social reality of an impressionistic painting gives rise to certain thoughts or feelings or, more than likely, some mixture of both. This is not a trivial question, because it is related to the epistemological point of view of the researcher. From the very beginning, the tradition of social studies has been divided into two schools of thinking: Positivism and Idealism. The first one states the necessity for a social scientist to gather empirical material while remaining in a totally external position with respect to the analyzed phenomenon in order to maintain a state of objectivity. In doing so, the researcher has the possibility to apply specific investigative tools to collect data on the phenomenon and to establish a system of descriptive statements to define the mechanisms regulating the observed social reality. In this case, the aim is clearly the nomothetic searching for the deep laws of social behaviour. Starting from this point of view, literature could be useful to the researcher when the author tries to mirror social reality with the highest possible level of accuracy. To achieve such accuracy, the author (and the researcher) begins from an individual, personal point of view, using his/her eyes and abilities to write a precise description of the society within which the story takes place. According to this last consideration, even the highest level of accuracy is biased by an unavoidable imprecision, due to the partiality of authors point of view. Starting from this issue and considering the impossibility for any 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. Dilthey went so far as to state the need for an investigative method that allowed the researcher to feel the range of emotions felt by the subject(s) of the study. However, this operation also seems to be impossible. The more recent debate on the epistemology of social sciences is not so clearly divided into opposite sides. Everyone in the scientific community of social sciences identifies a need for a combination of both descriptive and interpretative approaches, even if different positions in thinking paths of study remain. This multiplicity of approaches allows the use of literature to exemplify social phenomena in both a descriptive way and an expressive way. This second possibility allows a character and his/her world to be adapted to highlight specific characteristics of contemporary social conditions, even if the novel is set in the past, for example in mid19 th century Wall Street or London, or in Austria at the very beginning of the last century. In the following pages, I will show how an impressionistic reading of the characters experience could offer a good deal of semantic content to complicated and multidimensional concepts of sociological theory. Different Meanings of Alienation and Social Exclusion The concept of alienation plays a crucial role in sociological theory. An opposition is called to mind: on one hand, sociologists try to explain the rise and evolution of regulative mechanisms governing the dynamics of evolution in social order. On the other hand, they study how and why some individuals can decide to reject these mechanisms and, in general, the rules of social life. This second aspect is clearly related to the semantic area of the concept of alienation.

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A current definition of alienation proposed by Kalekin and Fishman states that the semantic area of the term refers to objective conditions, to subjective feelings, and to orientations that discourage participation in a group, in an organization, in an entire social life. They also claim that alienation is a term which refers to the distancing of people from experiencing a crystallized totality both in the social world and in the self. This first definition of the concept is clearly multidimensional and implies the need for further specification typical of every complex concept. The relation among individuals at the social level is so general that it may include many different possibile uses of the concept related to the term. Alienation from the microsocial circle where the indidual lives (Seeman), but also alienation from the rules of the society where the individual was born (Durkheim), or moreover alienation of a part of the individuals inner identity because of the selling of his/her physical work in a factory (Marx). In all these contexts, the semantic area of the general concept is defined and specified in a different particular sense. Thus it is clear that to properly manage the exact meaning in a model of analysis of human behaviour, we have to specify the different possibile semantic areas in a very strict relation to a given social context. Lets start to demonstrate the complexity of this operation with alienation in Marxist theory. According to Marx, alienation is a process in which workers lose control of their own lives because of the consequences of the production mechanisms. Capitalists pay workers just to execute simple tasks and do not involve either their creativity or their intellectual capabilities. Furthermore, this simplification of the tasks required inevitably fails to reckon with individual capabilities and thus it sacrifices autonomy and self realization. The outcome of this process is a sort of depression of the inner identity of the human being, which is degraded to the identity of a worker unable to participate in the common evolution of society and, at the same time, enslaved by the goals of

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the bourgeoisie purchasing his/her work. Recent evolutions of the Marxist theory, according to Lockwood, disconnect the alienation process from manual work and apply the same category to explain the loss of identity implied in all non-participative work. It is not so simple to describe with accuracy and patency any possible consequence of the alienation process in the everyday life of an individual. A reading of Melvilles short story could help us. The author, through the narrating voice of quite a modern type of capitalist, describes the degradation of a man who progressively loses every human social ability. While reading Marxist books, we probably are not able to figure every important aspect of the long course leading to an effective state of alienation. Bartleby is described at the very beginning of the story as not-so-good a worker, substantially untalented and without initiative or autonomy. He is so untalented that he is placed in another room, away from the other workers. The description provided by the story-teller is fully devoted to giving the reader a lot of details about Bartlebys inability for social cooperation, but on the other hand we have to point out that the teller himself pays the poor Bartleby, and the other copyists, to perform inexpressive tasks: they have to copy and then compare legal acts and documents. The duty of preparing these papers seems to be a sort of torture for the lawyer himself, all the more so copying and comparing them. The other employees work in the same room and they develop a sort of group culture and usually cooperate, perhaps, as it often happens, even against the lawyer because of the working conditions he imposes on them (in this case, the teller obviously cannot relate to it). Bartleby starts his course to human degradation in a condition of greater exposition to the consequences of an alienating job. He is alone, hidden by a screen, exiled in a physically lonely space that can be thought of as a socially secluded place, a sort of prison where he spends all his time copying and copy-

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ing. Step by step the condition of alienation from reality and social life becomes the normal circumstance of his life and consequently he loses any attitude to sociality and any ability to face the changes and uncertainties of the future. This inability progressively brings about his ruin. He loses basic communication abilities, he loses basic social relations, he even loses his home. Because of his inability to react to his enviroment and its normal changes, he lives relying upon his few certainties which are all confined into the physical space of the office. He lives there all the steps of the way to total alienation until the moment of his explicit expulsion from the social system when the authorities put him in jail, because of the grievances of the other inhabitants of the building. From a sociological point of view, this hyperbolic course is not really interesting for the particular description of the main character, but for the highlighting of the graduality of a cumulative alienation process based on an industrial organization of work or suchlike. On the other hand, the story helps us to point out the deep relation between two different social phenomena: alienation and social exclusion. Bartlebys workmates show a stronger resistance to the same alienation process because of their ability to cooperate, thus keeping alive the human dimension even in this unappealing environment. Finally, their general recognition of a collective consciousness is the only way to react to the oppressive condition imposed by this type of working structure and economic organization. Bartleby is the prototype of the alienated man and, at the same time, he is a perfect example of social exclusion. The progressive alienation process makes Bartlebys inner social circle empty. He is facing life alone. In this case, exclusion is a consequence of the progressive loss of humanity caused by alienation, but on the other hand we can recognize a very typical case of self-exclusion. The pressure of society makes it impossible for the subject to remain within the normal circle of the micro-society in which he is involved and so he begins to enter,

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unconsciously and unwillingly, a sort of progressive self-segregation to escape from the complexity and risks of relationships. In Bartleblys case, the problem could be recognized as a specific dimension of fear, closely related to the sociological organization of the concept of uncertainty. In recent debate about globalization, several sociologists (in particular Bauman and Sennett) have theorized the key role of uncertainty in determining the decline of social cohesion. The idea is that the lack of a consolidated horizon causes to individuals a sort of inability to practise effective citizenship within society. Bauman has written a lot about the social disintegration of traditional, institutional and stable relationships (family, long term friendship, love) in favour of more liquid relationships, unstable by definition. Thus, uncertainty becomes a spirit category because systemic uncertainty affects the whole globalized society. This vicious circle depresses the ability of individuals to place themselves in specific social contexts, thus finding the correct solution to the crucial problem of everyone: to what degree could I be different from others and nevertheless be accepted by my society and to what degree am I capable of accepting being similar to others? Uncertain interaction and interaction of uncertainty In the current sociological debate, the uncertain future and the lack of stability are considered crucial concepts to explain the progressive erosion of social cohesion. In particular, the work of a great philosopher and sociologist such as Richard Sennett has pointed out the essential role of a predictable future to perform any strategy in everyday life. Uncertainty precludes the possibility of a continuative and accurate concern for ones job. If I know that my job is not stable and that I will probably change my duties within the same organization, or that I will at least change jobs between several organizations in

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the future, my level of commitment will be noticeably different if compared with a situation of a stable occupation in a stable organization. In this last case, I would empower myself to do my best in the perspective of a positive evolution. The consequences of uncertainty in the private sphere are likewise pervasive. Lets consider this simple example: how would I like to seriously engage in a sentimental relationship when my job could require mobility? Would I like to invest in creating a family if I had no stable prospects for my future? Thus, uncertainty becomes a sort of regulatory mechanism for everyday life: it dramatically changes the social rules and systematically discourages the concluding of deep social relationships. Bartleby is not equipped to face the rate of the changing aspects in his life and he finally gives up and abandons the game. On the other hand, the impression of perfect normality can be considered as a sort of lack of opportunities of self-realization. Repetition in everyday life becomes a sort of depressive prison, much like the repetition of tasks within an assembly line. In this case, the exploiter cannot be identified as a specific person (the capitalist) or as a specific group of persons (the capitalist class), but as the system of social rules itself. Alienation is not caused by the dissociation between the human being and his/her mind, but by the progressive loss of interest in any possible future because of the relative predictability of its insensible greyness. The absence of a durable perspective of evolution becomes the main cause of the will to escape from this same condition. The subject decides to become alienated from this life, but at the same time he/she remains tied to it. Wakefields story could be useful to investigate this condition. This is a clear provocation: someone who decides to become alienated from his everyday life and relationships, following a compulsive need; at the same time, he is not able to definitively break the chains of his slavery and thus he finds a place to observe the consequences of his decision on the other persons belonging to his original social context.

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To a prima facie analysis, this is the opposite condition to that suffered by Bartleby but, from a more accurate point of view, both of them are involved in the same problem: the progressive loss of their humanity and the increasing waste of their lives. Normality can alienate a man or a woman from their inner nature, just as the work exploitation mechanism does: everyday normality enforced by social rules itself becomes exploitation. Wakefield is a prisoner of everyday life, while Bartleby is a prisoner of his work place. In Wakefield the protagonist tries to understand the inner sense of his past reality. He goes on spending his life in the same place, merely a few meters away, observing, studying, but finally never deciding anything about the future. For Wakefield and Bartleby, the future is an enemy because it implies the need to make decisions regarding what to do afterwards. This is a condition of inability which is quite common when evident points of reference seem to be lost and consequently there is a predominant impossibility to choose strategic actions. Wakefield tries to delay the moment of making the decision to change or to return to his old life. This is not a strategy, this is a delay to reduce the cognitive dissonance between what he really is and what he probably would like to be. Dramatically, the problem is that this hiatus becomes almost overwhelming because of time passing by. When he accidentally decides to return to his previous life, he finds the same situation of his departure, nothing is different, nothing has evolved, but he has wasted a lot of time in waiting. The current debate in sociology and in social psychology assigns to the time variable a very important place in explication models of social individual choices. The structure of the stage path and the time elapsing between one stage and the following are good indicators to explain a great part of social behaviour. One of the consequences of uncertainty is the difficulty or the impossibility to follow an adequate path of stages in a reasonable length of time. In particular, the traditional sequence of stages (finishing ones

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studies, finding a job, reaching autonomy or contracting marriage, having children) becomes more and more disregarded. This fact produces a great variance and a progressive weakening of social cohesion. On the other hand, the social pressure to maintain traditional equilibriums often induces conditions of cognitive dissonance which could even reach pathologic excesses causing social auto exclusion. These phenomena sometimes show themselves in the form of real, concrete escapism, as in Wakefields case, or on other occasions, more frequently, they are at the root of a number of social and particularly psychological pathologies. The time-wasting waiting condition of Wakefield very often is an interior condition of individual mind forcing schizophrenic behaviour or else a condition of disease belonging to the very large family of maniacal-depressive syndromes. Summarizing: individual mind and social danger Sometimes, social pressure is a real danger for any individual mind. These cases could be recognized considering the level of individual tension produced by social pressure and the loss of independence in making decisions regarding personal future. The last short story analyzed in this volume, Metamorphosis by Kafka, gives us suggestions to evoke the alliance between social sciences and literature. Who is Gregor Samsa? We can probably define him as a very good boy: a conscientious worker, very committed to his familys needs. He lives to serve others and, in the end, he dies to serve others. Is it possible to identify the limit of an acceptable application to common goals and needs, implying the sacrifice of individual goals and needs? Most likely the problem of social order and of its reproduction is quite close to this question. Gregor Samsa tries not to lose sight of this limit but one day he realizes that he has become a monster, unable to defend his

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position in society, because of his annihilating behaviour in everyday life. He is a victim of direct and indirect violence by his father, mother and sister (within the family) and by the chief clerk of the factory in which he works. He has become a victim of annihilation since he has realized he is different and since the others have realized his condition of diversity. At that moment, he has become a victim of social exclusion because of his appearance which is probably the metaphoric version of this inner situation. The problem is the defence of his place in micro and macro societies, which becomes a metaphoric painting of the search for equilibrium between the social identity and the psychological one. Requests by other members of society could be incoherent with the attitude of personal inner mind. On the other hand, the social level tends to react against every individual statement of free will, incoherent with social rules and the consequence is the application of social sanctions. This mechanism is at the base of any given social order and it has been defined in sociology and psychology as social control. In a given society, everyone can think and behave as an agent of this sort of social control, because everyone is allowed to react against other peoples behaviour when it is not consistent with the common rules which are part of everyones socialization process. Probably in Gregor Samsas world, Austria at the very beginning of the last century, the pressure of social control was more intense than in contemporary western societies. But on the other hand tolerance to differences was not so developed. The same discourse is suitable for many countries all over the world, even nowadays. The condition of different, related to one or many characteristics (for example economic condition, race, gender and so on), is at the base of the segregation mechanism. Lets think of a modern metropolis. Residential segregation very often reflects the structure of inequalities within the population related to a sum of factors. The pariahs condition is often identified with the term cock-

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roach. Segregation is another consequence of the loss of citizenship. In this case, the condition of exclusion is raised by others, like in Samsas case and it often produces an annihilation of individual desires, because of the condition of segregation itself. Finally, Samsa was essential for the survival of his family since the others have given up to live as free-riders. When Samsa stops working, earning and providing for his family and for the system, all the other people resume their place in the system and contribute to the survival of the others. Lets think of the weight of inequalities in modern western societies, often unbalanced against specific minorities (migrants for example). Are there other members of modern societies who are capable and ready to carry out their tasks in case minorities stop giving their contribution to the common good? By treating them as people with no rights of effective citizenship, as different and not equal, the possible consequence is that they will decide to become cockroaches or, even worse, they will feel as if they are cockroaches, and then what will they do? Can the events currently happening in many Mediterranean countries be just the beginning of a metamorphosis? In conclusion, literature helps the social scientist in several ways. First of all stories, novels and every other narrative form use a different language to describe the same phenomena studied by the social scientist. But moreover literature gives them other possibilities to explain in detail, in a more accessible way, complicated and technical theories using stories to underline aspects of their theoretical constructions or to point out particular elements of them. Finally, literature gives the researcher another 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 societ, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1990. BAUMAN, Z., Modernit 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 better society?, in Kybernetes, vol. 35, no. 3/4, 2006, pp. 522530. ROSSI, P., MORI, M., TRINCHERO, M., (a cura di), Il problema della spiegazione sociologica, Torino, Loescher, 1975. SEEMAN, M., Alienation Motifs in Contemporary Theorizing: The Hidden Continuity of the Classic Themes, in Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, September 1983. SENNETT, R., Luomo flessibile. Le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla vita personale, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2002.

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Leonardo Terzo (ed.) Lunatic Giants. Edgy Characters in Western Literature: Bartleby, Wakefield, Samsa
Contents
Cristina Marelli, Whos 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 Hawthornes Wakefield

Melvilles Bartleby, Hawthornes Wakefield, and Kafkas 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.

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

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