PINCHED BY JACK LONDON

Jack London is one of the most famous writers in American culture. He

was not only a writer, he was a journalist and theatre writer.

He tried many things in his life and these stories partially take on all the
experiences that he had → he spent many years travelling in the United
States (he spent many years being a vagrant).

Martin Eden was probably his most famous novel, but also many others like Star Rover,which is
very interesting because this book takes place in prison and it is the story of a man who is
condemned to die and he finds a way to get out of prison at least mentally. That book obviously
is also based on his experience in jail.

Jack London embodies very much the myth of the self made men (not the self made men which
we have already seen in Thoreau’s philosophy of American individualism, but the self made
artist) → he doesn't have a training as a writer, he turns his life into art in some way; so in this
sense he’s a self made artist. He was very much concerned by social disadvantage in the United
States and so he also took part in contemporary debates about society and politics and he
claimed publicly to be a socialist, to be interested in the well being of the lower classes. He was
very popular: he wrote books for children; in some sense, for a long time, he was considered a
“pop writer” who is a writer who wrote stories that didn’t have much literary values (because he
was very popular, everybody read them but they didn’t have such a strong literary elements).

SOME OF HIS WORKS:

● Martin Eden is an autobiographical novel that developed in 1909, it’s the rise and fall of a
young working class man.
● The Road was published in 1907 which is the autobiographical narrative of his life as a
tramp in the 1890s. So this is another one of the most popular american myths → the
myth of travelling → in the second part of the 19th century travelling was related to
going West, conquering new territories (The Gold Rush). London sets up the literary
context for telling the lives of people who travel without having a destination, people
 who are just travelling maybe because they don’t get money or they’re curious to see
new countries. This is where the definition of vagrancy comes in. There is a
sociological background for this story which is how the concept of vagrant develops in
the United States and how it has been legally regulated. Vagrancy became like one of the
first types of crime,one of the first types of offences in legal terms.

Why would vagrant be considered as an offence? Because vagrancy has to do with people who
don’t have means of support, people who don’t have a house, people who are not working,
people who the american society considers potentially dangerous, potentially turning into
criminals (because they don’t have money,a house or a job). In legal terms is quite a difficult
concept because vagrancy is not simply prohibiting certain actions but there are also moral
problems.

So vagrancy regulations are very vague, they are opened to interpretation but certainly all the
attempts are not considering vagrancy a crime. Vagrant people were poor and american
constitution does not define poverty as a crime. Poverty is not a crime however we will see that
American Society tends to see poverty as some kind of crime that might very well have to do
with the individualistic background of America (the idea that you have to make it by yourself, you
cannot expect the government or other people to help you. So you gotta be dynamic,active and
gotta fight in order to find your position in society). Vagrant people are not trying to make
money, are not trying to claim the social ladder,they are trying to get any better position then the
one they are in; so they are by definition poor people and poor people that don’t have a goal are
quite easily going to fall into criminality.

Prison, jail, penitentiary, these are all different concepts in the United States. They refer to the
same semantic domains but they mean different things. For instance jail is usually applied to
small prisons like the one we see in western movies. Penitentiary takes the name from the Latin
penitencia that takes his name from a religious background, it’s a place where we are going to
repent of the wrong we did to society. Penitentiary is usually characterised by two main
features:

● the model of constant separation (prisoners are in single cells and separated from each
other day and night, they cannot talk to each other). This model is based on the model of
 monastery → in fact a lot of monasteries were turned into jail, not only in the United
States.
● The second model was a mixed separation and non separation → prisoners would have
single cells, they wouldn’t be able to talk to each other but during the day they would be
employed, they would work and the money they made would be taken completely by the
government or by the present administration.

LANGUAGE: Jack London uses a lot of slang (informal language) and this way of speaking and
writing made him extremely popular because his stories were just telling the story of poor
people through the world of poor people.

CONFLICT BETWEEN BARTLEBY AND THE LAWYER

The lawyer (father) is violent in giving orders and wanting everybody in the office to do what he
wants → Bartleby is exactly in the same way violent in not reacting, in not saying anything, in
not showing any opinion about things. This is the way we should look at the story.

The story basically tells the explosive continuation of the litigation between the father and the
son to the pov that the lawyer doesn’t know what to do because Bartleby becomes more and
more still.

The lawyer, on sunday morning, after coming out of church, decides to go to his office to check
something and he finds his door oper, so he starts thinking somebody broke into the office or he
forgot to lock it the night before → he finds Bartleby living in his office, Bartleby has become
completely indifferent to anything (even if the lawyer told him he would call the police). He gets
angry again and then he gives up because he feels guilty → he know there’s something wrong
with Bartleby → what is wrong with Bartleby is what is wrong with Melville himself → they feel
abandoned in their expectations (about being recognized by his father, in the case of Melville).