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Sociology and Literature: The Voice of Fact and the Writing

of Fiction
A. McHoul
Journal of Sociology 1988 24: 208
DOI: 10.1177/144078338802400202

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208

Sociology and Literature: The Voice of Fact

and the Writing of Fiction

A. McHoul
School of Human Communications
Murdoch University

ABSTRACT

It is argued that relations between the discourses of sociology and

literature need to be rethought outside the appropriative, yet in-
appropriate, terms of ’the sociology of ...’. The work of Foucault,
and particularly his location of the joint emergence of literature and
the human sciences at a single ’moment’, are enlisted towards this
end. While the human sciences are seen to rely, broadly, on a number
of fictional postulates and categories, literature can also be seen as a
source of serious and advanced social theory. To illustrate this
second point, the article concludes with a preliminary analysis of the
baptism passage from Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan.

THE ENDS OF SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATURE

It is probably correct to say that the sub-discipline called ’sociology of liter-

ature’ barely exists today. This may be an overstatement; or else no more
than a confession of ignorance. At any rate, there would appear to have
been a shift towards what could be called studies of ’cultural practice’ in
general, subsuming literature into a general array of topics such as art, film,
music and so forth (for example, Bourdieu 1984). In any case, the field has
certainly thinned out since the burgeoning days of sociological interest in
literature during the 1970s. At this time, Goldmann’s works were being
widely read in English (for example Goldmann, 1975, 1977); Althusser
(1970) and Macherey (1978) were making ’reading’ a serious sociological
endeavour; Burns and Burns (1973) and Laurenson and Swingewood
(1972) had high-selling textbooks out; and Eagleton (1976a, 1976b) was
able to synthesise these strands, along with a concern for ’criticism’, into a
m6lange of aesthetic sensitivity and political credibility.
Despite the different approaches and even despite the fact that a number
of sophisticated versions of Marxist aesthetics were at work among them,
what above all marked this high moment of the meeting between sociology
and literature was a distinctly positivistic outlook. By this I mean that
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 209

sociology held itself (rather than literature) to be central to the business. It

took for granted as more-or-less certain a number of current explanations of
’real’ social and economic conditions, so that literary works only needed to
be inspected for their degree of match or mis-match with ’social reality’.
Only rarely did literature get a look in as a possible source of social under-
standing and insight -

let alone theory. And even more rarely did the

sociological texts in question, the source of this ’social reality’, come to be
thought of as literature. It is perhaps because such a cut-and-dried distinc-
tion is untenable in the mid-eighties in an age when, we are told not only
-

that ’there is nothing outside the text’ (Derrida, 1976), but also that uni-
versity studies must be ’relevant’ (i.e., technicist) that sociology of
-

literature is such a minority pastime.

So it may still be fair to say that there currently exists a gap in the history
of relations between sociology and literature and in this paper I would
-

like to delimit this gap and put forward a very tentative suggestion for its
bridging. Yet no new way of working could be properly called ’sociology of
literature’; for this would retain an unequal relation between the two com-
ponents, sociology and literature. In ’sociology of literature’, sociology takes
literature as its object. ’Sociology’ describes a mode of knowledge, and ’liter-
ature’ the relatively inert material of which knowledge is had. Literature,
according to this formulation, is not given credence as a mode of knowledge
in its own right. And significantly, the term ’literature of sociology’ is not a
proper antithesis for, in this case too, it is to sociology that possession or
ownership is ascribed.
The pair of terms sociology and literature could be represented in the
following way:
S/1,
where the slash of difference disguises the fact that the first term has the
upper hand. As with a pair like:
m/f,
we can see that the opposites are not equal. In ’sociology of literature’,
literature’s meaning emerges from the fact that it is other than sociology;
that it is only sociological material. The reverse does not hold. Ditto with
m/f. A more adequate representation emerges if we take the slash to stand,
as it does in arithmetic, for division (―) represented as a vertical relation
with the first term being shown ’over’ the second.
The point of the present paper is to ask if it is possible to think a new, and
less differential or divisive, set of relations between the terms literature and
sociology -

one which implies greater epistemic equality between the

fields by taking the category of literature as a domain of knowledge in its
own right, including its being a form of knowledge of society.
The traditional separation to be overcome emerges from a time-
honoured positivist distinction between ’fact’ and ’fiction’, with the former
term being used to describe the knowledge produced in scientific discourses
and the latter to describe that produced in imaginative or imaginary dis-
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210

courses : art, literature, play and so on. When fact describes fiction in the -

case of, for example, literary history the product is to be believed, to be

-

inscribed in official records. On the contrary, when the reverse occurs, all
that is created is more fiction, on a par with the rest: more ’data’, more raw
material for colonisation by the instrumentality of human science. The
process, we think, must only have one valid directionality.
To resist this mode of thought and to begin to see another, we could
think of the two fields, along with others, as consisting of technologies of
representation with no necessary, natural or logical privilege accruing to one
such technology over another. Then we could turn to the fields in which
those diverse technologies arise. For example, ’literature’ appears to de-
scribe modes of representation which fall on the side of pleasure fantasy -

and desire for example; while the human sciences (including sociology)
collect together particular technologies of reason truth and knowledge
-

for example. Thereby, in any comparison between the two, literature

always becomes associated with untruth. Reason demands this. It is a simple
syllogism; the very one which led Plato to ban the poets from his ideal
republic on the grounds that they ’lied’, that they appealed not to reason but
to the baser elements of our nature. Hence, the categories of reason are
generally deemed to be able to encompass the categories of pleasure with a
high degree of success, but not vice versa. To suggest the opposite is then,
ipso facto, to risk irrationality.
Yet there is no good reason, outside an arbitrary historical and compara-
tive arrangement, to associate the fictive, for example, with the irrational or
the untruthful. For all that, many, including many novelists, have made just
such an association:
Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of
ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close
selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies
.... I am not interested in telling lies in my own novels. A useful distinction
between literature and other writing for me is that the former teaches one
something true about life: and how can you convey truth in a vehicle of fic-
tion ? The two terms, truth and fiction, are opposites, and it must logically be
impossible (Johnson, 1973, 14).

FICTIONS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

An initial way of deconstructing this division is to see how the technologies

of reason -

for example in the human sciences have constructed stories,

-

narratives and so on, each with problematic relations to some non-discur-

sive object. Telling cases in point are the various social fictions, including
legal fictions and here I owe my descriptions to the work of John Frow
-

(1987). For example, at law there is the fiction that a person under a certain
age is not a human subject. At one time, and in some places still, persons of
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 211

certain races were/are not subjects at law. Similarly women. Despite any
.
changes to this story, there remains the legal fiction of the ’reasonable man’;
the yardstick to which appeals can be made when terms such as ’in reason-
able time’ or ’due care and attention’ are inscribed in law and are in doubt.
The reasonable man is just that: a man, an ’ordinary’ man, and one ex-
tremely like the hero of much nineteenth century realist fiction. A char-
acter arises -

a character of particular gender, marked by a particular

reading of the ‘social average’, on which, at times, human lives depend. The
fictional space which this character occupies is we are supposed to
-

believe -
so far removed from the space of irrationality that it is the very
basis of legal reason. It is, to switch to philosophy, practically synonymous
with the bourgeois Cartesian ego. Yet, at the same time, it is plainly gen-
dered and set at the perfectly neutral, and rarely occupied, centre of a fictive
social scale ranging from sub-ordinary to extra-ordinary. In other human
sciences, outside law and philosophy, we can find related fictions.
In economics, the reasonable man becomes the rational, calculating
man in the market place the self-seeker, the one who maximises self-
-

interest as a ’natural’ propensity. In accord with this story, economics and

its affiliates can set themselves, for example, the analytic task of explaining
altruism -

but not egotism as economic behaviour.

-

In linguistics, the central fictional character is the competent

speaker/hearer -

a character who has average competence in oral lang-

uage skills but whose reading/writing abilities, for example, do not enter
into the picture. Note that here, as in other cases, the scientific discourse
operates to exclude certain persons or social types. To have ’an accent’, to
speak a ’sub-dialect’ and so forth are sufficient to mark one as other than this
ideal linguistic character.
One can go on to mention the ’ideal reader’ of traditional literary studies
who, in John Frow’s words, is ’classless, sexless, colourless and odourless’;
the ’simple primitive’ or else the ’complex native’ of anthropology (de-
pending on one’s sub-disciplinary allegiances) both of which nevertheless
mark off an empirically discoverable ’other’ who embodies difference itself;
the ’normal person’ of psychopathology (and also anti-psychiatry) against
which the various forms of deviance and defect can be judged and dis-
cerned ; and all of the fictive personages conjured by the obvious subject-
producing and -controlling disciplines such as phrenology, eugenics, eth-
ology, biology, psychology, criminology and so forth.
So this is one point of contact between literature and the human sciences
-

the point of an overwhelming, if not quite ’necessary’, fictionality. And

at this point, on a further comparison, these fictional characters of human
science appear cruder, more comic-book-like and wooden than those to be
found in quite a deal of literary fiction. Another point of contact is the joint
emergence of the categories of literature and human science at the same
historical conjuncture, outlined by Foucault in The Order of Things
(1970).
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212

THE CATEGORIES ’LITERATURE’ AND ’HUMAN SCIENCE’

The historical experience of language undergoes a shift at the end of the

eighteenth century. Language itself becomes an object. It is treated as hav-
ing a life of its own. The emergence of the category of literature and of the
human science disciplines is, in a certain sense, joint and complementary
compensation for this new, all-pervasive domain of language in its recon-
figured state. Since it is crucial to our argument, let us examine this double
moment.
In literature, language is ’embodied’ for the first time. Literature marks
the desire for a ’pure play’ of language, free from the constraints imposed
within other linguistic domains - such as law or physics -
where it is, for
the most part, made to map on to some object or other (the body, reason,
nature, the polis and so forth). Literature is language striving for no re-
lation. All prior historical examples (such as poetry) come to be re-read
under this category from here on. Poetry, to continue the example (though
drama and certain ’fictions’ would serve also), is severed from its marked
social functions and treated as the pure exercise of linguistic desire or
pleasure. Romantic poetry, emerging at the same time, is more than just
another generic shift, then. It is the very model of the poetic applied in
retrospect. From this point on, literature more generally becomes synony-
mous with texts that are pleasurable. Its supposed severance from other
discursive fields apparently marks a separation from fact. Fiction becomes
the trademark, the arbitrary shopsign, of literature -
or of the ’ideology of
the literary’ to use Foucault’s more precise term.~ Fiction is ’cut off’. Cut
off from objectification. Or at least, if it is an objectification, it is merely its
own objectification (marked out therefore for the potentially endless

doubling of literature upon itself that we will examine below). And this is
precisely why there is a peculiarity to finding marks of fiction in, to repeat
the examples, law or other domains outside the literary, in disciplines and
discourses which are supposedly not cut off from objectification.
It was on the other side of the divide, cut by the late eighteenth century
reconfiguration of language, that the human sciences positioned them-
selves, as a different form of compensation from literature’s ’embodiment’
of language. The human sciences begin at the moment when life and
labour are able to be theorised/objectivated: to be constructed in language
but in a way which hides that very discursive construction itself by an appeal
to life and labour as ’objects’ of investigation or analysis along with, or as
part of,’nature’ and its multifarious contents. Biology and economics are, as
Foucault (1970) shows, the archetypal human sciences for this reason.
Language, as a newly independent domain, pours into them their very
theoretical impetus but is obliterated as an object in the same moment.
’Positivism’ might be exactly the term to describe this blindness to the
forces and relations of discursive production. The moment of the human
sciences is the moment of the arrival of the voice of fact, as opposed to the
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 213

However, the constitution of this voice has never been satisfactorily sus-
tained ; for it has been almost completely attempted ’without language’, that
is, without acknowledgment of the discursive construction of the human
sciences and, consequently if less significantly, without an interest in the
topic of discursive construction per se. ’Without language’ could be further
glossed as: in opposition and complementarity to, but always dependent for
that very reason on the existence of, the literary. Because the distinction
could never be maintained there have always been very valuable instances
of ’leakage’ between the human sciences and literature. And this has been
especially the case where scientists have tried to break out of positivism, to
alter, critique or emancipate rather than collect, explain or describe life and
labour. At such moments of discursive praxis, the supposedly ’non-
linguistic’ nature of those topics (life and labour) always comes into crisis.
Life and labour then become manifestly embroiled in language and its
action.
Central cases in point would be the concept of ’ideology’ in Marx (1939),
Freud’s (1976) location of repressed unconscious desires, or Habermas’s
(1970) ’systematically distorted communication’, to name but a few at-
tempts to represent real but fictive
-

forces operating in daily life.’

-

Concepts such as ’ideology’ are attempts to grasp the never completely

realised, and still inadequately theorised, interrelation of literature (play of
language, images) with the human sciences (knowledge of life and labour).
Hence we have to see the oblique stroke between the terms:
s/1
as a less-than-watertight barrier. The oblique allows indeed requires -

some form of transmission or ’leakage’. No pure sociology is available,

uncontaminated by literature, even though, and perhaps especially be-
cause, it might make appeal to the more settled cases of biology and
economics. No literature, either, comes uncontaminated by the human
sciences and still less by their object, politics. The will to pure fictional
discursive play is always limited by its own historical location and the con-
ditions of possibility of ’freedom’ which persist there; freedom being, as
Nietzsche (1971) realised, a gift of the ruler to the ruled. Writing, to put it
imperfectly, is always an instance of labour and life practice. It too has its
(albeit inscriptional) relations with both capital and the body, as various
sociologies of literature have been keen to point out.
The ideal opposition:
s/1
is unrealisable but could be marked metaphorically as Plato vs. Homer: ’the
complete, the genuine antagonism’ as Nietzsche so hopefully put it in
Beyond Good and Evil (1973, III, 25): rationality vs. pleasure with the -

human sciences taking the latter to be the proper object of the former but
where literature would ideally reverse this (if pleasure, that is, had any such
power). When, however, the human sciences move into modes which are
critical (in the senses of both Kantian reconstruction and Marxist/Freudian
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214

oppositionality), pleasure becomes desire, transgression, resistance even

(Connerton 1976).3
Insofar as literature forgets discourse (considered as systematicity and as
means of objectification), it values play. Insofar as the human sciences for-
get discourse (as the problem of representation, the impossibility of pure
objectification), they value work.
Foucault writes of the moment of literature, the moment when language
emerges as ’infinite’:
Perhaps that which we should rigorously define as ’literature’ came into
existence at precisely the moment, at the end of the eighteenth century, when
a language appeared that appropriates and consumes all other languages in its

lightning flash, giving birth to an obscure but dominant figure where death,
the mirror and the double, and the wavelike succession of words to infinity
enact their roles ( 1976b, 66).

It could no doubt be pointed out that this ’moment’ is, itself, something of a
fictional construct. The eighteenth century may indeed mark an increas
ingly clear distinction between literature (fiction, imagination, play) and
the discourses of instrumentality, rationality and truth. Yet this separation
is never completely realised in practice. Moreover, there would be few who
would wish to associate the emergence of the modern disciplines of soci-
ology, psychology, economics and so forth so strictly with the eighteenth
century. If anything, the ’moment’ of the human sciences is a good deal
later, attached as it is to fundamental changes in natural scientific thinking.
Nevertheless, there is an important historical passage from which literature
is increasingly self differentiated as a relatively autonomous sphere, com-
prising self-legitimating artefacts. As Rita Felski (personal communication)
has pointed out: it is only because literature becomes separate from the social
that, for example, the whole notion of a ’liii£raiure engagie’ becomes pos-
sible in the early twentieth century as a way of re-assigning literature a
function closer to social theory. The ’instrumental’ and the ’aesthetic’, if
anything, have a more problematic historical relation than Foucault sug-
gests with his idea of a single cataclysmic moment of separation.
For all this, Foucault has located a mythic point at which writing
becomes life-practice par excellence: writing in order not to die, in order that
one’s life is mirrored to infinity. If, in the forms of writing which pre-date
the category of literature as such (for example in the epic) one also wrote
not to die, this writing was a glorification in its own right, a tribal totem,
unauthored, a celebration of collective awareness. With literature, nothing
is left to glorify. Literature, in the modern age, is then always already meta-
language. Think of Borges’ eternal doubling that pushes to the limits of
sense and therefore to death and infinity in a different sense. Literature, as
Foucault notes, is language poised against death. Scheherazade, modern
literature’s ancient metonym, fends off death by telling stories, and the
stories include the story of Scheherazade who fends off death by telling ...
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 215

But the game would be forfeit were she actually to continue. There is
always a saving excess. Literature includes, then, a kind of salvation, a lan-
guage above language which saves us from a movement (or slip) into the
final moment of infinity. Literature requires both a language turned in on
itself like a mirror and also that minuscule excess (the eye, the point of view)
which escapes eternal self-reflection, as in the case of the letter in Diderot’s
The Nun which tells of its own loss (Foucault, 1977b, 57-8). Literature is
the domain of pleasure, then, because it defers death, by ’ceaselessly open-
ing a space where it is always the analogue of itself ’ (1977b, 67).
By contrast, the inscription of the human sciences is to be found not on
the faces of death and pleasure but on those of life and labour. They are on
the side of the rational, the economic, the unimagined. But for all this, their
common moment of origination with, and their imperfect separability from
their complement category, literature, remain. And they leave residues of
the literary within the sociological: thus making the project of an unprob-
lematic (or positivist) ’sociology of literature’ impossible and, at the same
time, making some engagement with literature the inevitable consequence
of any sociology, whether ’of literature’ or not.
For sociology is always an inscription. Yet its status as research and its
status as writing are completely separable for most practitioners. One
simply ’writes up’ one’s prior research, without acknowledging that the
writing, at the extreme, is identical with the research and, in any case, an
inevitable component of it. The ideal separation which sustains sociological
research’s self-image can never quite be brought off:
from the moment a piece of research concerns the text ... the research itself
becomes text, production: to it, any ’result’ is literally im-pertinent. ’Research’
is then the name which prudently, under the constraint of certain social
conditions, we give to the activity of writing whatever [research searches
...

for, it must not forget its nature as language and it is this which renders
-

finally inevitable an encounter with writing. In writing, the enunciation

deludes the enounced by the effect of the language which produces it ...

(Barthes, 1977b, 198).

So the status of writing in sociology is by no means as straightforward as is
often thought within the discipline. If, to simplify, the genre of autobiog-
raphy gains its access to truth via the category of experience and by appeals
to empirical witness of a minimal kind, in short, by the invocation of ant, a
first person; and if the genre of the research report is held to relate truth by
means of the exact opposite, namely by an effacement of the ’I’ who speaks
and its replacement by reference to an impersonal, neutral observer whose
observational warrant is no longer the subjective ear or eye but the stan-
dardised equipment of the laboratory or the field sensor; then sociological
writing has still not settled its placement on this rough grid. Traditional
positivist appeals to scientific writing are certainly a thing of the past, but so
are those of Berger and Berger (1979) or Bertaux (1981) which once held

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216

sway at a more recent moment of sociological subjectivity. To this extent,

one could relate current debates about structure and agency (cf. Giddens,
1982), or the relation of sociological theory with social practice, to soci-
ology’s own dilemma about its status as writing and to the sociologist’s or
social actor’s status as agent or author. Certainly the authorship debate in
contemporary literary theory (Williamson, 1985) is highly pertinent to
those sociological problems, and Foucault’s (1977a) category of author-
function might well prove a significant way of treating relations between
agency and structure.4 The author/agent may be dead, as Barthes (1977a)
argues -

if one considers this mythical construct to be a free subject con-

structing its own history yet this does not remove all authorial functions
-

such as the attribution of agency itself. Hence ’author function’, or an

analogue of it, could be exploited more generally in sociology to generate
accounts of how social actors are both enabled and constrained by power
structures. Replacing ’author-function’ with, say, ’agent-function’ (and
’text’ with, say, ’social action’) in a passage such as the following could,
then, provide us with a theory of the problem as cogent as any yet available
in mainstream sociology:
Foucault’s main proposition is that the author is not an origin but a function
of discourse. The point of introducing the term ’author-function’ is this: it is
not a property of texts that we find in them an authorial meaning and origin;
on the contrary, textual authorship arises and is recognised only under certain
discursive and historical conditions. The author is thus constructed through a
number of discursive and social functions or procedures (Williamson, 1985,
15).

RUDIMENTS OF AN ANALYSIS: THE SOCIAL THEORY OF A

LITERARY TEXT

Continuing with the problematic of agency and structure and as a final

example of a possible new alignment between sociology and literature, I
would like to continue some work I have been pursuing elsewhere. In
another paper (McHoul, 1987), I argued that fictional conversations could
be treated like any other conversations for sociological purposes. For ex-
ample, they could be construed as ’transcripts’ for conversation analysis, as
ethnographic material, as interview data, and so forth. That is, their fic-
tionality ought to be anything but a bar to their serious treatment at the
hands of sociology. In retrospect, this plea can be seen to carry with it the
very colonising tendencies which I criticised earlier in this paper. It would
leave us with a distinctively different sociology of literature, but a sociology
of literature nevertheless. Perhaps, then, we need to re-think the position of
literary texts vis-a-vis sociology. The possibility which comes most readily
to mind is that a literary passage could be taken as social theory rather than
as sociological ’data’.
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at UNIVERSITE LAVAL on June 25, 2014 and the human
 217

sciences are indeed as close as Foucault suggests, then it would not be sur-

prising if, inparticular, examples of ’meta-fiction’ (fictions reflecting in

literature on literature) could be read side-by-side with reflexive sociologi-
cal theories (e.g., those of Habermas, 1972, or Blum and McHugh, 1984, to
name only two instances). But before we start, it is important to realise that
the idea of treating literature as social theory means running a great risk.
Before I give my example, then, I want to outline that risk.
At the present moment in the development of this idea, the relations
between literature and sociology it proposes only have the status of the
’possible’. And so an example of them will necessarily run the risk of mak-
ing them look like traditional sociology of literature; for the old has on its
side the fact that it is ’actual’ rather than merely ’possible’. To get a fuller
idea of the problem, let us clarify the differences between my proposal and
traditional sociology of literature as succinctly as possible, at the further risk
of over-simplification.
Sociology of literature, as we saw at the beginning of this paper, proceeds
from basic assumptions about an object called ’society’; that is, from ’social
theory’. This theory informs the sociologist as to how specific social con-
ditions ought to be construed. Once, as it were, the social conditions are in
place, such further considerations as ’the place of literature’ in those con-
ditions can be broached. Methodologically, therefore, sociology of litera-
ture, involves a three-term, one-way progression:
SOCIAL THEORY - SOCIAL CONDITIONS - LITERATURE
In this scheme of things, the category of literature always has the effective
status of being an epiphenomenon of something more ’real’, something
preceding it along the explanatory chain. Hence we can refer to the exist-
ence here of a philosophy of realism. Furthermore, this epiphenomenal

category of literature is often construed in terms of ’literary texts in general’

and only occasionally (for example in the work of Goldmann) refers to
specific works and, even more rarely, the textual specifics of such works. In
short, sociology of literature can be summarised as follows. (1) It encom-
passes a social philosophy of realism -

whatever its ’aesthetic’; (2) it takes its

object, literature, as anything but the initial starting point of its inquiries;
(3) it rarely acknowledges the specificity of that object. In sociology of
literature, one must always take a long journey frorn social theory to
literature.
By contrast the s/I relations instanciated below, however preliminary and
whatever their shortcomings, work against this on every front. They start
with literature, and much less with a concept of ’literature in general’ than
with one of textual specificity, where that specificity cuts across the dis-
tinction between types of text, for example that between ’social scientific’
and ’literary’ texts. Importantly this methodological strategy is already
underway in our co-discipline of anthropology (Clifford and Marcus, 1986)
where it has been pointed out that all social science is, often in spite of itself,
constructed in standard literary tropes, poetic conceits, narrative structures
and rhetorical formations.
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218

The set of s/1 relations which could emerge from this would then propose
a dual reading of social theory in/as the text (in addition, as we have seen, to
the reading of social theory as primarily a form of writing and only second-
arily as a means of access to ’social reality’). Therefore social theory is not
given any specific privilege a priori. Its location is taken to be as much ’in’
texts usually categorised as literary as ’in’ the ’standard works’ of social
theory (from Comte to Giddens, for example, if we are to stay within the
strictly sociological tradition of social theory). The simpler algorithm:
TEXT(S) <-> SOCIAL THEORY
could be written to represent this new approach, especially if the operator,
’<->’, is read as encompassing superimposition as well as linearity.
The risk, then, is precisely this: for all of the methodological inversion
and the attempt to counter the routine relations of s/l, the category of ’social
theory’ remains and it is capable of swamping those differences, making the
new instance appear just like another sociology of literature. And this is all
the more so in that our example, in order to make its point within the
sociological community, must work with a currently accepted version of
what is to count as social theory something precisely from the Comte-
-

to-Giddens canon. That being the case, there is always the risk that finding
social theory in/as the text in question will look identical with making the
text in question conform to the canon. It could easily appear as a case of
reading the text through the privileged hermeneutic code of a specific
social theory. I take that risk, then, now, with trepidation, and also with a
certain pleasure. For neither I nor my text-example can make social theory
entirely anew, just like that. In Heideggerian terms, potential (Being) is
necessarily an effect of what already exists (being). Nevertheless, something
will have been achieved if some social theory can be read as some fiction. A
small step will have been taken towards overcoming the logical short-
coming at the .centre of this paper’s concerns: namely, that sociology of
literature for as long as it depends on the philosophy of the real cannot,z by
definition, cope with the fictional.
Consider then, the following extract in which the baptism of Titus
Groan is narrated:
Sourdust felt satisfied as he saw them, and their delay that had rankled was
forgotten. He approached Mrs Slagg carrying his great book with him, and
when he had reached them he opened the volume so that it fell apart in two
equal halves and then, extending it forward towards Nannie Slagg, he ’

said:
’It is written, and the writing is adhered to, that between these pages where
the flax is grey with wisdom, the first-born male-child of the House of Groan
shall be lowered and laid lengthways, his head directed to the christening
bowl, and that the pages that are heavy with words shall be bent in and over
him, so that he is engulfed in the sere Text encircled with the Profound, and
is as one with the inviolable Law.’
Nannie Slagg, an inane expression of importance on her face, lowered
Titus within the obtuse V shape of the half-opened book so that the crown of
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his head just overlapped the spine of the volume at Sourdust’s end and his feet
at Mrs Slagg’s.
Then Lord Sepulchrave folded the two pages over the helpless body and
joined the tube of thick parchment at its centre with a safety-pin.
Resting.upon the spine of the volume, his minute feet protruding from one
end of the paper trunk and the iron spikes of the little crown protruding from
the other, he was, to Sourdust, the very quintessential of traditional propriety

Attempting to lower the heavy volume to the table before the christening
bowl where a space had been left for it, his fingers grew numb and lost their
grip on the leather and the book slid from his hands, Titus slipping through
the pages to the ground and tearing as he did so a corner from the leaf in
which he had lain sheathed, for his little hand had clutched at it as he had
fallen. This was his first recorded act of blasphemy. He had violated the Book
of Baptism. The metal crown fell from his head (Peake, 1985/1946, 116-7
and 119).

Even on first sight, it could be argued that we have, in this passage, a very
rich sociological theory, incorporating a number of traditional sociological
concepts; rites of passage, the production and reproduction of social sub-
jects, and patriarchal and class relations, to name only a few. However, in
the following commentary I will cluster my remarks around a particular
aspect of the passage’s social theory, namely the relations it proposes
between society and text and the potential for human agency within those
relations. This tends to limit whatever ’analysis’ is offered. Moreover, my
description of the text’s social theory is not intended to ’recommend’ that
theory. It is decidedly not ’my position’, for example, though there are
points to which I am sympathetic and I hope these will be obvious.
Although the passage occurs well on into the novel whose title bears his
name, it is effectively Titus Groan’s first appearance of any moment. He
has been mentioned previously, though barely, and most notably via his
mother’s dismissal, a little after his birth:
I would like to see the boy when he is six. Find a wet nurse from the Outer
Dwellings. Make him green dresses from the velvet curtains. Take this gold
ring of mine. Fix a chain to it. Let him wear it around his wry little neck. Call
him Titus. Go away and leave the door six inches open (61).

The passage’s interest, then, lies initially in the fact that it ought to narrate a
momentous occasion the first appearance of the main character. At the
-

same time however, this ’main character’ has become an utterly marginal-
ised figure, not just by his mother’s banishment but by the whole social
ritual of the place called Gormenghast. In its context, the passage already
contains a sociological paradox: an assemblage of the most noble and the
most marginal in one figure, a baby-prince, an off-stage central char-
acter.
Titus is less like a person, at this stage, and more like a figure of speech.
He has, as I have said, been mentioned before, but the baptism is his first
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220

recorded use: his first participation in any social event. His first appearance
in the book, then, is literally an appearance in the book, between its pages.
While there is reference to the event as a ’christening’, it is one marked by
the absence of any Christ. In its place, the book. To become a fully social
subject, Titus must be ’as one with the inviolable Law’. He, as figure of
speech, must be written into the book of the law in order, as it were, to
prevent this fragment of language running free. The passage, then, pro-
poses a distinctly grammatological theory of the social subject: the subject is
written into being. And social being is identified with the text of the
law.
What is this law, this official and officialising text? Sourdust pronounces
it each morning in Gormenghast castle in order to set up the daily duties of
Lord Sepulchrave of Groan, Titus’s father. Gormenghast has no judiciary,
however and although Sourdust must make certain interpretations of the
texts of Groan, he is much more clearly the keeper of the physical books: he
is the Librarian. The law to which Titus, and all others, must adhere exists
no longer in any popular memory. It can only be accessed through the
medium of large leather tomes kept buy Sourdust in the Library. No one
knows why they are important, except that they are large and leather-
bound. And Sourdust has no particular reading to make of them, he is
merely the one who can read them off. The social order, that is, utterly
determines the form of the personal order. But the social order is itself
predicated on a series of more specific textual orders, or laws, and these in
turn are less matters of interpretation, creativity, consciousness or subjec-
tivity than they are literal materials. So what each of these textual orders
says, its enonce (to reinvoke Barthes’ terminology from the quotation above)
is barely knowable and virtually irrelevant.
Lord Sepulchrave was returning to his room after performing the biannual
ritual of opening the iron cupboard in the armoury, and, with the traditional
dagger which Sourdust had brought for the occasion, of scratching on the
metal back of the cupboard another half moon, which, added to the long line
of similar half moons, made the seven hundred and thirty-seventh to be
scored into the iron. According to the temperaments of the deceased Earls of
Gormenghast the half moons were executed with precision or carelessness. It
was not certain what significance the ceremony held, for unfortunately the
records were lost, but the formality was no less sacred for being unintelligible
(295).
As their keeper, Sourdust is continually trying to find ways of making the
old texts fit slightly less old facts. And this can reach a point of complete
meaninglessness; assuming, that is, one tries to find meaning in an hom-
ology between the words of the texts and the material realities of Gormen-
ghast. For example, Sepulchrave’s daily ceremonial routes have to be
continually modified as bits of the castle and its grounds once referred to in
the ’sere Text’ drop away physically, are re-built, replaced or forgotten.
Sourdust’s continual and impossible struggle is to match the world with the
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 221

text, where it is the latter which has precedence in every case. To this
extent, it is not the text’s enonce but its enonciation (the fact of its saying
something) to which the social order is tied. And this is a second element in
the passage’s social theory: social meaning arises not from semantic content
but from the ’performative’ aspects of a text or social object, not from what
is said (the ’burden’) but from the technique of its saying.
This is, probably somewhat ironically, shown in the baptism extract by
the requirement of the law (or, of the text) that Titus be placed in it, liter-
ally, physically. And this in order to become a character in the book. The
text’s most essential status is, on some readings, its most trivial one; its
condition as a (physical) book. To blaspheme, as we can read, is not to break
the law in any abstract sense, but to break it physically, to rip the book in
which it is inscribed; or more drastically, to burn the entire Library in
which the texts reside. And this is an act of resistance which the narrative of
Titus Groan explores.
It is this Library which is Lord Sepulchrave’s only society, which brings
his only comfort and pleasure:
row upon priceless row of calf-bound Thought, of philosophy and fiction, of
travel and fantasy; the stern and the ornate, the moods of gold or green, of
sepia, rose, or black; the picaresque, the arabesque, the scientific the -

essays, the poetry and the drama (296).

Books which he loved not only for their burden, but intrinsically, for vary-
ing qualities of paper and print (329).

And it is in this Library that the extraordinary family celebration party is to

be held while Steerpike, the kitchen hand, plots the downfall of the social
order via that of the Lord’s family, and the downfall of the family via the
burning of its Library.
From this partial reading let us then try to rethink the fundamental
points of the baptism passage’s social theory in terms of the problem of
’consciousness’. According to the theory, social rules cannot be understood
as abstract principles which have meaning because of their attachment to
any group or individual’s memory, consciousness or subjectivity or -

indeed simply because of their inscription in some text which attempts to

retain them across history and across the differential readings that time and
epistemic shifts can produce. They are not, then, equivalent to the concept
of ’values’ in SF (structural functionalism). And they are far from equival-
ent to the anthropological principles of either phenomenology or classical
Marxism.
’

Social rules have meaning because they are ensconced in, as fundamen-
tal elements of, social practice. They are not ’outside’, regulating social
practice, even though they are deeply ’historical’ and utterly impersonal,
but are inevitably bound up with in social practice and technique. More-
over, the replication of such a material rule in a particular individual’s
consciousness is only marginally relevant to the action of social rules. Both
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 222

literary and social meanings can appear to arise from consciousness and/or a
given textual location. But both of these are epiphenomenal by comparison
with the inextricability of rule and practice. Consciousness may be impli-
cated in such practice, but it is not necessarily so.

CONSEQUENCES: STRUCTURE AND AGENCY

This theoretical position has some important consequences for theoretical
debates over questions of agency, social change and resistance to dominant
social formations. These are worth following through not because they
make ’good’ social theory necessarily, but because they can be read as some
kind of relatively sophisticated social theory at all. For example, as soon as
Titus is admitted (or produced) as a social object, he ’blasphemes’ by mak-
ing a disruption in the very basis of the social order, the materiality of the
book. Paradoxically, then, one must count as a social subject, at least in
some sense, first, in order then to be in a position to transgress social rules.
To be completely outcast, whatever that would mean, would be to be
beyond all possible effect on the social order. Resistance, therefore, would
have to be counted as a mode of social practice within the very order it
would resist. The moments of sociality and of the possibility of resistance
are identical. But what of the intentions of the resister? Titus doesn’t even
know he has blasphemed. If this is an act of resistance, and the Gormen-
ghast trilogy as a whole does indeed equate resistance with a microphysics
of refusal and transgression, it is not necessarily connected to an act of
consciousness and certainly any such ties which it does have do not gua-
rantee success. In this social theory, consciousness is at most an accompani-
ment to oppositional action.
Resistance, in this theory, is a material practice first and foremost and is
implicated with thinking, speaking or writing (that is, with language) only
insofar as these mental, textual and/or discursive practices have material
form, not because of any intrinsic connection between language and resist-
ance -

though this should not be taken to rule out the effectiveness of

subsequent, ’consciously’ oppositional, forms of knowledge. Nevertheless,
in the baptism passage, the unintended consequences are fundamentally
and qualitatively different from the ’intended’ consequences. For the latter
can only be located with hindsight; as Garfinkel (1967) so aptly put it when
he realised that, for social agents, what ’is’ is what ’will have been’; that the
social world is constructed in an eternal future perfect tense. Insofar as ’we’
construct it, we do so with an eye to how it will, or might, turn out to have
been, ’all along’.
In Peake’s theory -

if it is, indeed, either Peake’s or a theory -

no

strategy for change is thereby guaranteed to have its pre-planned effect.

Consciousness, having intentions, for example, may indeed mark one dif-
ference between people and inert material, but there is no further guaran-
tee that this consciousness is connected in any special way to historical
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 223

outcomes. If history is its product, in part or in whole, as many social theor-

ies claim, there is still no way of anyone knowing whether or not this path of
consciousness through history is in any way different from the path of a leaf
in the wind, a child to the font, or an electron in its orbit. The social theory
of the baptism extract suggests that all social intervention, oppositional or
conservative, can only be more practice, as it were ’in the present tense’. It
cannot operate on the present by speaking on behalf of a definite future and
so can only have retrospective significance.
While Peake’s social theory may not be a great one by present standards,
it is important to remember that this work was done in the late 1940s and
early 1950s when most of the few sociologists there were were still collect-
ing data with clipboards, attempting to solve problems on behalf of the state
and crunching their results with pencil and paper. Sociology had not yet
discovered street corner society, let alone political reflection and seemed to
be trying as hard as possible to keep social theory within other disciplines.
Looking at the strategic potential of human agency, and its position in
social and historical change would hardly have counted as sociological
concerns. Yet they are central for Peake.
The Gormenghast trilogy occupies 1280 printed pages and it would not
be too wild to speculate that it has had a much wider circulation than any
1280 pages of sociology one could care to name. In some ways it is hard not
to take seriously. Above all else, then, we may need to discover ways of
coming to grips with the forms of (often very advanced) social theory that
popular texts such as this purvey.

NOTES
1. For me the important part of this phrase (from Foucault, 1977a) is ’the literary’ rather than
’ideology’. Nevertheless, the other term might give some cause for concern. ’Ideology’ is not
a term much used by Foucault and seems barely a technical term at all. If anything, it simply

delimits particular fields of ideas one from another. In this respect, it is quite like some
pre-Marxist uses of the word (Williams, 1983, 153-7) and, in any case, should not be taken
pejoratively. I thank the anonymous ANZJS reviewer for drawing this problem to my atten-
tion as well as for a number of other insightful comments which led to the present version of
the article.
2. This list marks only the most important cases of central social science concepts with strong
links to language and discourse. Again, I would hope that my argument here is not read in
such a way as to belittle these concepts. On the contrary my belief is that any concept which
attempts to mutually include the ’repressed’ connections between the social and the discur-
sive is important and should be seen as such.
3. The term ’resistance’ is a difficult one to document but has one of its most searching for-
mulations in Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977). I use it here to mark that extreme form
of human agency whereby marginalised subjects engage in direct strategic action against
institutionalised power. The term is more clearly elaborated in the final section of the present
article where a novel’s theory of social agency requires consideration of resistance.
4. ’Author-function’, as the quotation from Williamson below shows, is a term which is meant
to retain the idea of authorship (agency) without locating it in a privileged subject of creation
(subjectivity, consciousness).
5. There is some attempt to turn Titus into a complete outcast in the final book of the Gormen-
ghast trilogy, Titus Alone. Titus claims that his lack of identification papers merely mean that
he is not a member of the society, not that he is a criminal. Not surprisingly, the court fails to
see the distinction.
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224

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