Comment

Sociology and literature

WHAT is literature? All writing that lasts, and is relevant over large spans of time without seeming out-dated, constitutes a body of literature. Sociologists have produced great literature. It is impossible to read Marx’s German Ideology, for instance, without coming to terms with the sheer brilliance and clarity of his style. Even with the crumbling of communist states here and there, Marx’s writing is read the world over, both for its understanding of capital as well as the way in which the narratives of history and peoples are articulated.

There may be fewer takers for the view that Emile Durkheim or Max Weber provide the same quality of colour and vibrancy. Yet, as a body of literature that survives time, the resilience of sociologists as litterateurs cannot be denied. To write about marriage and children, property and death is the subject of sociological recording. To write well about the everydayness of existence is another talent entirely. But to be a sociologist one must be a writer. To teach, one must write. One must read great works of sociology and be in a position to want to write – to change the world one must wish to write, and one must wish that everyone else can read and write as well.

Feminist theory is a distinctive type of sociology which produces its own literature. Many of the criticisms that come from those who call themselves objective, or biased in some other time-honoured way, are significantly around the questions of the sociology of emotion and affect. Is sociology equipped to study affect? Anyone who reads Max Weber would immediately respond to the questions of rationality, values and ethics (and the varieties of combinations of these) to say that indeed this is possible. The Protestant ethic arises out of the regulation of desires, as does modern bureaucracy. Yet the empirical sociologist’s questions arise from the maverick nature of social life and activities. Providing an order to reality is only our second methodological task; the first is to observe, to record and compare.

Feminism uses the method of bringing that which was silenced to the fore. It contributes substantially to the ways in which a kind of recording takes place that allows balance to be restored. If sociology is the science of combining wisdom and community, then objectivity demands that we see women’s voices as crucial to the endeavour of describing what reality is. Sociology, though abstract, is concerned with realism. While we are indebted to the founding fathers of sociology, the search for the voices of women continue in loyalty to the objective pursuits of our art. This is no shifting canvas, there is a certain structuralist paradigm that comes alive: that is the search for meaning. In that sense, recording the voices of women is not significantly or merely a women’s task; men are as much part of the venture, and the solidarity and support of men in the task of reconstructing the fabric of sociological narrative is integral.

Women’s names, women’s work, women’s contribution, and the deficit in the structure which contributes to their oppression must be highlighted. It is in this contest that one is grateful to the gender studies programmes in many universities where the shared tasks of analyses have been made evident to men and women faculty as well as students. If there are dangers that men will again speak on behalf of women, it is a risk that we must take, and some of us as women scholars feel that we can safeguard these risks by recording in newspapers, journals or women’s meetings the dangers of assimilation.

The writing of fiction, I find, is one of the most interesting metalanguages that sociology can use. That it is a legitimate form of writing sociology has never been doubted by universities wherever sociologists have appeared as writers of fiction. I first began to write fiction because of boredom and the fear of death. These are sociological principles which are catalysts to human behaviour – active and creative. Fifteen years later I find that writing fiction helps me to come to terms with facts that I can no longer footnote diligently as an academic writer. The sociology of fear, boredom, corruption, and Pandora’s gift to the world – curiosity and hope – these are difficult to handle through the statistical method. To write prose, poem, essay or play that delineates the human condition is easier to do.

Yet, unlike writing sociology, this kind of writing demands an empty mind. Its creativity arises out of fallowness. This particular condition is available only to the wealthy, the protected or the renunciant. I fall into any of these categories only marginally. Like seasonal labourers who go out to harvest a crop, the season of work for me as a writer comes into being only when I am on a paid holiday from teaching, scripts, doctoral submissions of students. Such times of idle and fruitful pleasure are rare for me. So I enjoy my busman’s holiday when I go on fieldwork, or recuperate from nervous exhaustion, or go on a seminar tour. The chances are that after a break like that I will write forty pages. I am fairly committed to writing, so somehow that one short story or that chapter out of a novella does get written.

A lot of the work that I have done focuses on record keeping as a form of social criticism. I believe that the task of the sociologist is as radical critic, one which in description compels verification as its accompaniment. Those who wish to read what is clearly stated, can act upon its assumptions. With fiction the task is much more subtle, and a lot is said between the lines. This sets up a great deal of controversy because people read texts of fiction very differently from each other, each according to his need, and often each according to his whim. No fiction writer believes that his or her work can be standardized through critical readings. We all form part of concentric rings, each one with a job to do, and our responsibility to our differing audiences is hard to gauge.

As a sociologist I have been interested in working with the Weberian idea that we are actors, that we are agents, that we can transform the world. This creates a methodological space for the analyses of biography. Much of the work I have done presumes against the generally held sociological idea that any one person can change structures. I feel hesitant to say this because I am myself not sure how it works. It draws from the idea of the exemplary hero. I believe that the catalytic agent is able to draw from various sources within himself or herself to actually take on situations where pathologies have become ‘normal’. This presumes then that loneliness is an acceptable human and social condition.

It also presumes that such individuals are well able to understand the relationship between themselves and society, that while being detached they are also interventionist.

All my reading has forced me to believe that there is no one point of view and that we are enriched by these ambiguities and differences.

Susan Visvanathan