The subject-matter of our conversation-in-letters, reproduced below, is the notoriously (and according to some people ‘essentially’) contested issue: the relation between literature (and arts in general) and sociology (or, more generally, a branch of the humanities that claim a scientific status).

Both literature, together with the rest of the arts, and sociology are part and parcel of culture; the above-quoted Theodor W. Adorno’s statements and assessments of the nature and role of culture – as ‘going beyond the system of self-preservation’ by ‘tearing the veil’ that culture’s prospective beneficiaries may self-deceive into looking upon as benevolent – apply to both in equal measure. All the same, it is our view that literature and sociology are linked to each other more intimately and cooperate with each other more closely than is common among the various types of cultural products, and certainly much more than their administratively motivated and imposed separation would suggest.

We attempt to argue and to demonstrate that literature and sociology share the field they explore, their subject-matter and topics – as well as (at least to a substantive degree) their vocation and social impact. As one of us said, in trying to spell out the nature of their kinship and cooperation, literature and sociology are ‘complementary, supplementary to each other and reciprocally enriching. They are by no means in competition […] – let alone at loggerheads or cross-purposes. Knowingly or not, deliberately or matter-of-factly, they pursue the same purpose; one could say “they belong to the same business”.’¹ This is why, if you are a sociologist trying to crack the mystery of the human condition and so to tear the veil woven of pre-judgements and insinuated or selfconcocted misconceptions, ‘if you are after the “real life” rather than “truth” overloaded with the doubtful and presumptuous “knowledge” of homunculi born and bred in test-tubes, then you can hardly choose better than to take a hint from the likes of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Georges Perec, Milan Kundera or Michel Houllebecq’. Literature and sociology feed each other. They also cooperate in drawing each other’s cognitive horizons and help to correct each other’s occasional blunders.

What we had in mind, however, when conducting our exchange was neither to compose another reconstruction of the long chronicle of changing scholarly views on the multi-faceted relationship between arts and human/ social sciences, nor to take a snapshot of its present stage. Conducted and recorded from the perspective of mainly sociological interests and concerns, our conversations are not an exercise in the theory of literature – let alone a reconstruction of its long and rich history. We’ve tried instead to present that relation in action: to trace, note and document the shared aspirations, mutual inspirations and interchange of these two kinds of inquiry into the human condition – human ways of being-in-the-world complete with their joys and sorrows, deployed as well as neglected or wasted human potentials, prospects and hopes, expectations and frustrations. Both literature and sociology do all that (at least attempt to do it and most surely are called to go on attempting) – while deploying distinct, albeit mutually complementary, strategies, tools and methods.

Classifying and filing literature among the arts, while sociology struggles earnestly – though with mixed success – for being classified and filed among the sciences, cannot but leave a deep imprint on common views of their mutual relationship – as well as on the priorities of their practitioners. For that reason, drawing boundaries has been attracting more attention on both sides of the assumed division than building bridges and facilitating cross-border traffic (bringing to both sides as the result, in our view, incomparably more harm than profit), while the job of checking obligatory identity cards commanded on the whole incomparably more attention and dedication than issuing (few and far between) travel documents – as if to confirm Frederick Barth’s observation that, rather than borders being drawn because of the presence of differences, differences are avidly sought and invented because borders have been drawn.² Each of the two juxtaposed classes of cultural products sets stern demands for all applicants for inclusion; rigorous, stringent and onerous prescriptions and proscriptions are codified in order to guard the unique identity and territorial sovereignty of each entity. On the scale of conformity to the rules, the crossbars tend to be set discouragingly high to keep away insufficiently disciplined applicants who threaten to wash away the class privilege together with borderline stockades.

Differences in ‘methods’ of proceeding, just like the points at which literatures and social-scientific research feel allowed to announce arrival at their respective destinations, are indeed multiple and variegated.³ Two of the differences, however, are, as far as we are concerned, central to the distinction between the two ways of investigating the human condition – while, simultaneously, to their complementarity. This duality was splendidly caught by Georgy Lukács already in his 1914 study: ‘Art always says “And yet!” to life. The creation of forms is the most profound confirmation of the existence of a dissonance […] [T]he novel, in contrast to other genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in process of becoming’.⁴ Let’s add that a great part of – perhaps most – sociological study belongs to the family of those ‘other genres’: it aims towards completeness, conclusiveness and closure. Committed to this task, it is willing to skip, relegate to the margin, or efface from the picture as irrelevant idiosyncratic anomaly, everything uniquely personal – subjective – as quirky, offbeat and aberrant. It strives to unravel the uniform and general while eliminating the peculiar and distinct as quaint and anomalous. As Lukács insists, however, it could not be otherwise than ‘that the outward form of the novel’ is ‘essentially biographical’. He warns right away that ‘the fluctuation between a conceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never attain completeness is immanently utopian’.

And so we confront on the one hand the organically heteronomic and endemically dissonant social setting of individual life, and on the other the earnest if doomed effort of the individual to conjure up a cohesive totality out of fragmented life, and a steadfast trajectory out of a series of biographic twists and swivels weather-cockstyle. The first induces the fallacy of imputing logic and rationality to an illogical and irrational condition; the other incites the error of spying a self-propelled and selfguided exploit in a tangle of disparate and inconsistent pulls and pushes. One danger is endemic to sociological undertakings; the other to novel-writing. Neither sociology, nor literature, can conquer their respective menaces on their own. They can, however, circumvent or vanquish both, if – and only if – they join forces. And it is precisely their difference that gives them the chance of victory under the sign of complementarity. To quote Milan Kundera’s – as concise as it is cogent – way of putting it: ‘the founder of the modern era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes […] If it is true that philosophy and science have forgotten about man’s being, it emerges all the more plainly that with Cervantes a great European art took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of this forgotten being.’⁵ And to quote also his wholehearted endorsement of Hermann Broch’s assertion that ‘the sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only a novel can discover’. We would add: without that discovery, sociology would risk becoming a one-legged walker.

We believe that the relationship in question bears all the marks of a ‘sibling rivalry’: a mixture of cooperation and competition, only to be expected among beings who are bound to engage in the pursuit of similar objectives while being judged, evaluated and recognized or denied recognition on the ground of distinct, though comparable, types of results. Novels and sociological studies arise from the same curiosity and have similar cognitive purposes; sharing parenthood and bearing indisputable, palpable family resemblance, they watch each other’s advances with a blend of admiration and comradely jealousy. Novel-writers and the writers of sociological texts in the last account explore the same ground: the vast human experience of being-in-the-world that (to quote José Saramago) ‘bear[s] witness to the passage through this world of men and women who for good or bad reasons have not only lived but also left a mark, a presence, an influence, which, having survived to this day, will continue to affect generations to come’.⁶ Novel-writers and the writers of sociological texts dwell in the shared household: in what the Germans call die Lebenswelt, the ‘lived world’, the world perceived and recycled by its residents (its ‘auctors’ – that is, simultaneously its actors and authors) into the wisdom of ‘common sense’, re-moulded into the art of life reflected in their life practices. Knowingly or not, purposefully or just matter-of-factly, they are both engaged in a sort of ‘secondary (or derivative) hermeneutics’: a continuous reinterpretation of entities that are outcomes of preceding interpretations – realities formed by interpretative exertions of the hoi polloi and stored in their doxa (common sense: ideas one thinks with, but little – if at all – about).

On numerous past occasions, novel-writers (like other visionary artists) were first to note and scrutinize the incipient changes of track or new trends in the challenges that their contemporaries faced and struggled to tackle; novelists managed to spot and catch new departures at a stage in which, for most sociologists, they would remain unnoticed, or dismissed and unattended on account of their marginality and apparently irrevocable assignment to minority status. We are currently witnessing another such occasion. Once more in the history of modern times, novel-writers join filmmakers and visual artists in the avant-garde of public reflection, debate and awareness. They are pioneering insight into the novel condition of men and women in our ever more deregulated, atomized, privatized society of consumers: people smarting under the tyranny of the moment, doomed to lead a hurried life and to join in the cult of novelty. They explore and portray transient joys and lasting depressions, fears, indignation, dissent and half- or whole-hearted inchoate attempts at resistance – ending in partial victories or ostensible (though hopefully temporary) defeats. Awakened, inspired and boosted by them, sociology tries hard to recycle their insights into authoritative statements grounded in systematic sine ira et studio (‘with neither hate nor zeal’) research. The career study of that process serves us as a key to unpacking the pattern of the relation and mutual interdependence between two, artistic and scientific, cultures – as well as to estimating the degree to which each of the two business associates owes its progress to the incentive, enlightenment, spur and animus received from the other.

To conclude the message which we conversationalists attempt to convey: novel-writers and the writers of sociological texts may explore this world from different perspectives, seeking and producing different types of ‘data’ – and yet their products bear unmistakable marks of shared origin. They feed each other, and depend on each other in their agenda, discoveries and the contents of their messages; they reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of the human condition only when staying in each other’s company, remaining attentive to each other’s findings, and engaged in a continuous dialogue. Only together can they rise up to the challenging task of untangling and laying bare the complex entwining of biography and history, as well as of individual and society: that totality we are daily shaping while being shaped by it.

Z. B. and R. M.