ABSTRACT
In Italy, nowadays we have a remarkable literary production on topics regarding the end of the industrial world and precarious jobs with a rather nostalgic character, or the demand for a permanent job. We wonder how audible would be, in the current social-political and economic context, an antithetic argument of the refusal of the job, which in fact has existed in Italy since the seventies.
Following a reminder that first the unified and liberal Italy, then the republican and moderate Italy are culturally and institutionally built on the idea that work ennobles mankind (see as a reference the tales of Pinocchio, which have shaped many Italian generations, or article 1 of the Constitution of 1948 to which we continuously refer), our aim is to analyse the criticism of the above mentioned basic values, using a number of literary works.
The key text we would like to start with is Vogliamo tutto written by Nanni Balestrini (1971) in which in harmony with the political and social conflicts of those years, a radical refusal of work is advocated for as antithetic to life; man does not fulfil himself through work, on the contrary he has to get rid of work which makes him obedient and subordinate.
We can see that this radical refusal of the work is acknowledged in the countercultural field (Bifo, 2017, Quarant’anni contro il lavoro ); however, it gradually became weaker. We can find evidence of this in Vitaliano Trevisan’s recent book Works (Trevisan, 2017), in which the protagonist takes an ambiguous position towards work: behind the apparent criticism of the precarious jobs there is a sort of personal and existential refusal, an antithetic between artistic vocation and employment removed of the political ideological and cultural aspect which had distinguished the radical criticism of work.
