Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. Sociological studies expose their areas of inquiry as under a huge searchlight.
There is an absence of shading, but this only makes the image presented by systematic research seem more complete; compared with it, the social novel or literary essay offers merely a smudge of emotionally charged individual instances. The literary man himself often reacts to a social study with dismayed admiration. So many excellent details—how can a writer as a single person keep up with the revelations of teams of specialists? Perhaps, sociology means the end of the novel, at least, of a certain kind of novel.
Perhaps the writer ought to follow on the heels of the sociologist and attempt to make his contribution in terms of manner of presentation. Soon he observes that though the study has lighted up a few unnoticed corners there is much in it that he knew all along.
And not only he—indeed, he finds, the study mainly consists of commonplaces. A novel written on this level of discovery would be dismissed as a bore. What takes people in about the scientists is the grand display they make of the machinery by which their petty findings are dredged up—explanations in technical language of how the data was collected and how much of it, how different factors were weighted, what safeguards were built against distorted interpretation, etc.
The matter contained in these charts could be quickly summarized, but the sociologist keeps redistributing his meager information into different percentages and statistical tables.
