Sociologie, sociographie, Perec, et Passeron
Jean-Claude Passeron has explored the relations between literature and sociology in a subtle and intriguing way. He says, for instance, "On a souvent vu faire de bonne littérature avec de la mauvaise sociologie, parfois même de la bonne, jamais de la bonne sociologie avec de la littérature, bonne ou mauvais." (Passeron, 1990, p. 249) He speaks, as well, of ". . . la nostalgie qui fait soupirer plus d'un sociologue au regret du romancier qu'il eût peut-être été si le dépérissement du roman en sa forme classique, qui a, depuis le début du XXe siècle, amenuisé les vocations en même temps que les débouchés, ne l'avait conduit à la reconversion sociologique." (248)
Having wittily suggested that literature and sociology have quite different approaches to the description of social reality, he goes on to explore the distinctions embedded in the suffixes with which we distinguish various forms of scientific activity: -graphie, -logie, and -nomie. These seem to form a sort of scale. He defines "-graphie" (in fact, ethnographie) this way:
Working with these interesting and useful distinctions takes on greater meaning when we apply them to a particular case. Georges Perec, the French writer, experimented with a variety of literary forms, from more or less "conventional" novels, whatever we might take that to mean, to crossword puzzles. He is perhaps most well-known (certainly so outside France) for his massive "experimental" novel, La vie: mode d'emploi , a vast, panoramic set of interlaced stories which you are encouraged, if not required, to read in any of a variety of possible orders and which therefore might now be seen as an early, non-computer version of hypertext.
Perec spoke of some of his writing as "sociological" in nature Perec, 1985, p. 10), immediately specifying that as a matter of "how to look at everyday life," and those who have written about him have sometimes taken that seriously. Several of his works can profitably be read as a kind of social description, a "telling about society (Becker, 1986) which in some ways fruitfully illustrates the uses and difficulties of the Passeronian distinctions. I will speak about three of those works: Les choses (Perec, 1965), the early novel which made him famous; Je me souviens Perec, 1978), a book, shall we say, of reminiscence; and a late experiment in pure description, Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien (Perec, 1975). Perec, to jump to my conclusion, shows us the uses and limits of more or less pure "-graphie" and, perhaps, the difficulty of making such distinctions as Passeron makes in the context of specific works.
Les choses
Les choses describes a young couple, Jérôme and Sylvie, twenty-four and twenty-two years old respectively, who work part-time as psychosociologists (which we eventually understand to mean market researchers), who live beyond their scanty means in a hip Parisian neighborhood, who yearn for something more and better though they aren't sure what that would be, whose friends are just like them. There is a story of sorts. Things eventually happen to them, nothing very good. But the novel's interest is not in its plot or in a profound exploration of individual character. Its chief interest lies, instead, in its description of the way of life and the social character of just such young people, its statement of something that was true not only of Jérôme and Sylvie but of a whole generation of people like them (and what it means to be "like them" is, of course, an important, interesting, and difficult question).
To say that Les choses is a generalized account of a way of life would be misleading, for the book is nothing if not detailed. It is generalized in the way that an old-fashioned work of ethnology is. It describes, in minute detail, the protagonists' clothing, the furnishings of their home, their work, what they saw when they went window shopping with their friends, what they ate at home and out, what they did in their leisure time, and (importantly) their aspirations and desires and dreams. (The book in fact analyzes the social situation of these young people in a theoretically and historically interesting way. I will not go into that analysis here--many others have written about it extensively--but rather devote myself to the way Perec gives us this analysis, the literary devices he uses, devices which offer an interesting comparison to what social scientists do.)
As you read the book, you notice that Perec's choice of tenses--the imperfect and the conditional--is unusual for a narrative (unusual enough in English, perhaps even more so in French). As is well-known, French offers a choice of three tenses for the description of past actions. The "simple past" is used in writing fiction or history, but not in conversation. It describes specific actions undertaken at a particular time by specified people or things: "Marie opened the door. Jean did the dishes. The dog howled. It rained." Its equivalent in all other contexts, especially more formal spoken French, is the compound tense sometimes called the "perfect," also known in French as the passé composé. It is a compound tense, made up of an auxiliary verb (either "to be" or "to have") and a past participle. The third version of the past is the imperfect, which describes actions that took place over some period of time, or are repeated, customary or habitual.
French fiction usually tells stories in the definite past or the passé composé, reserving the imperfect for things that, as I said, take place over a period of time or are repeated, and for special grammatical situations, as when one action takes place while another longer action continues ("The dog barked at a noise outside while Jean read his book," the dog's barking being put in the definite past and Jean's reading in the imperfect).
Perec tells much of the story of Les choses in the imperfect tense. He also often uses the conditional tense, usually understood to refer to things that could or would occur, given certain other conditions. One common use is as a classy way of describing habitual or repeated, or at least common, actions: "Jean would go to the corner newstand every morning to get a paper. Marie would wear her heavy black coat in colder weather. The cat would stretch out in the sun on a warm afternoon."
This little reminder of some basics of French grammar is necessary for an understanding of what Perec did sociologically in Les choses. Using the imperfect and the conditional to describe the past turns most actions and events into things that were "usually" done, things that happened not just once but often, that were repeated often, that came to be a matter of course--things, that is, that made up a routine and, in some sense, fundamental part of the way of life of the characters in the book. They didn't just go windowshopping on a particular night during which a specifc conversation took place which in turn led to a specific consequence. No. They often went windowshopping in the evening and that repeated activity had the consequence of reinforcing their longing for things they couldn't afford. And that longing, which was not momentary but long-lasting, led them to spend money they didn't have and had no prospect of getting. And that had predictable consequences too.
So a story is told, finally. But it is enveloped in, buried in, a cloud of things that happened routinely, repeatedly, that were the way of life of Jérôme and Sylvie. And of the lives of their friends. Because all of these descriptions insist that these two (who are the focus of the book) aren't the only ones who dream these dreams, have these apartments, buy these tchotchkes, do these jobs. They are part of a social stratum for whom this is the way life is--young people who have, they think, prospects of something better. As Perec says, "" . . . in our day and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor. They dream of wealth and might get rich; it is here that their troubles begin." (p. 57)
Because there are no specific events--no "Jean did this and Marie did that and then this happened"--the story feels amorphous, an atmosphere more than a narrative, an aura that surrounds you rather than a journey you make. In this it strongly resembles an ethnographic description of a culture or way of life, of shared understandings and routine activities undertaken in accord with them. It is just what an ethnography would give us. And Perec's ethnography is complete, covering material culture, kinship and other social relations, work and technology, beliefs and values, typical careers and lives, and all the other things ethnographers are enjoined to include in a "complete" description of a culture. What happens to Jérôme and Sylvie eventually seems less the story of two people about whom we have learned a lot and for whom we have come to care, than a sociologist's description of a typical career. Something similar to the "career" of the breakup of a couple we get from Diane Vaughan (Vaughan, 1986) or of the "career" of a musician I provided as part of the overall description of an occupational culture (Becker, 1963). It's ethnography as generalized fiction.
(To complete the record of Perec's use of tenses, the "Epilogue," which tells us what eventually became of Jérome and Sylvie, does describe specific events--the details of their voyage home from their experiment in teaching in Tunisia and of their getting the jobs by means of which they accept their fate as real bourgeois and acquire all the things they only dreamed of earlier--and narrates them entirely in the future tense. That gives them a small sense of unreality.)
Les Choses makes use of another literary/ethnographic device: the detailed listing of objects and people, especially objects. A list without explicit, formal analysis of its contents is a potent representational device, used much more by artists than by social scientists. I will consider it in connection with two further works of Perec's that can also be thought of as a sort of representation of social life, in which it is more prominent. (See Sontag, 1982.)
Je me souviens
Je me souviensis quite different from Les choses. Not a novel or story at all, it consists simply of 480 numbered paragraphs, very short, sometimes just one line. Each one names something Perec remembers from his childhood, between 1946 and 1961, when he was between 10 and 25 years old. He says he used a simple principle of selection: "to try to recover a memory that is almost forgotten, inessential, banal, common, if not to everyone, at least to a great many." (p. 119) He says further:
These "I remembers" are not exactly memories, above all not personal memories, but rather small bits of daily life, of things which, in this or that year, everyone of the same age had seen, had experienced, had shared, and which had then disappeared, been forgotten; they were not worth being memorized, they did not merit being made part of History, nor to figure in the Memoirs of men of state, of mountain climbers or of stars. (back cover of book)Here are a few samples:
(4) I remember Lester Young at the Club Saint-Germain; he wore a blue silk suit with a red silk lining.That's it. 480 such entries, ending with an unfinished (480), which simply says "I remember" and is followed by the cryptic note, "to follow . . ." (and, later still, another note that says "At the request of the author, the publisher has left, following this work, some blank pages on which the reader can note the "I remembers" which the reading of these will have, it is hoped, provoked"). The book also contains a complete index of names, places, and titles of movies, books, and musical pieces mentioned in the text. Again, its interest seems to lie in its evocation of a way of life.(10) I remember that a friend of my cousin Henri used to stay in his bathrobe all day when he was studying for his exams.
(131) I remember the Kon-Tiki expedition.
(143) I remember that I believed that the first bottles of Coca-Cola--the ones the American soldiers could have drunk during the war--contained benzedrine (I was very proud that I knew that that was the scientific name of "maxiton").
No narrative in the novelistic sense here. The arrangement of the 480 reminiscences Je me souviens may not be random (though there is no guarantee that it isn't) and there might be a progression from one to the next that would generate some kind of narrative tension. The only character is the young Perec, whose life is being recalled by an older Perec. But there is nothing personal in it, nothing "emotional," unless we count his pride in knowing the scientific name of "maxiton." Nothing in the book conveys a sense of drama or suspense or wonder as to how it will all turn out. Nothing "happens," things are just there.
There's no beginning and no end and no story and no narrative and, certainly, no analysis. A lot of synthesis is left to the reader to do. As you read, you sense that you are being challenged to find a pattern. Perec will not tell you what it is, and it's not clear that there are any clues in the arrangement of the items.
Instead, the book's intention seems straightforwardly historical and ethnographic. David Bellos, Perec's autobiographer, describes it as "a modestly autobiographical lesson in modern history." (Bellos, 1993, p. 673) Its distinctiveness shows up more clearly if we compare it to the work Perec modeled it on; he says, in a preliminary note, that " that "The title, the form, and, to a certain degree, the spirit of these texts are inspired by Joe Brainard's." Some of the distinctive character of Perec's book becomes clear when we look at Brainard's (Brainard, 1975 [1995]).
He says that Brainard inspired him "to a certain degree" and that's right. The title is certainly the same, and the format--short paragraphs of reminiscence--is similar. But the differences are substantial. Brainard's paragraphs connect to one another. One reminiscence of a schoolteacher is likely to be followed by several others. The "I remembers" are often real stories, small anecdotes with a beginning, middle, and end.
And the qualification with respect to "the spirit" of the work is a necessary one. Brainard's book is real autobiographical reminiscence, full of stories of what happened to this young gay artist in his childhood, his early sexual experiences, the new life he found in New York, a social, sexual and artistic world he could never have imagined in his home town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Brainard appears in the book as a major character. His sensibility dominates its pages. His memories are not isolated traces of things anyone could and would have seen. On the contrary, they are the story of what he personally saw and felt (even though many others might have had similar experiences), what he noticed that others would have missed, his own experiences of sexual experimentation with boys and girls, his own sexual fantasies and embarassments. And not only what he did, but the things he wanted to do but didn't have the nerve for. The short paragraphs don't just describe what happened, what was there, they also describe his reaction to what happened and was there. He not only remembers having an erection at the swimming pool, but how embarassed he was when it wouldn't go away. He tells of men he found attractive, of his masturbatory fantasies. The book is effusive, extravagant, overflowing.
There is a lot about art but almost nothing about politics. There is a lot about sex but not much about places. When you finish it you know a lot about Brainard and the world of artists and writers he moved in, and something about the world of Christian Sunday School Tulsa he grew up in. But not a lot about the general political and popular culture of the country or his part of it during the period he's writing about. (And you don't have much sense of the period. None of the names are, say, those of generals or politicians, though there are plenty of movie stars).
Perec's book, though there are some similarities (both he and Brainard, in one of the few overlap, remember the Kon-Tiki expedition), is very different. It tells no stories of sexual awakening or embarassing moments. With few exceptions, it deals only with public places and people and events (and the exceptions, like the item about the man who stayed in his bathrobe all day when he studied for exams, though they are not public, are not very personal). Perec's reactions to things don't enter into it. The book does not list the new, exciting things a migrant to the Big City saw. Instead it lists the ordinary everyday things anyone saw who lived in Paris after World War II, or at least what any male of a certain age and class would have seen, noticed, and perhaps remembered in later years as part of the background of his ordinary life.
It lists what people who participated in the daily, public life of the city would have seen: the buses and the Metro, the places where you bought food, the movie houses and other places of entertainment, the sports figures a young man would have been interested in. If the someone involved was a little adventurous and on the lookout for cool things to do, as Perec was, he would also remember Lester Young and and Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet and other American jazz players (including lesser known ones--I was surprised to see the name of Earl Bostic, an alto saxaphonist who was never a major figure, though good enough). If he was interested in literature, he would remember the names of such writers of the day as Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet and where they were born. If he was that much of an intellectual, he would also remember political figures and causes: Caryl Chessman (the by-now obscure focus of an anti-capital punishment campaign in California), and Lee Harvey Oswald, among the Americans listed in the index. But none of these would have been memories peculiar to Perec. On the contrary, they would have been what everyone like him remembered or, perhaps better said, could have been reminded of.
And, even if these things and places and people were exciting, as they surely must have been to a young, intellectual, somewhat politically engaged French Jew who had escaped being sent to the camps as so many like him had been; even if American jazz and rock and roll and black artistic activity came as a promise of another kind of life; even if May 68 and Biafra and the other great political events occasionally mentioned remind the reader that there are exciting things going on--even with all that, the style is dry, unexcited, listing things and people and events but not commenting or reacting, just remembering. And remembering things that are surely trivial right along with those that aren't: Lester Young's blue silk suit and its red lining, the birthplace of the actress Claudia Cardinale, that Dr. Benjamin Spock once ran for President of the United States. I mean, so what?
Well, so what indeed? It adds up. The whole is more than the parts. Lester Young plus Claudia Cardinale's birthplace plus the names of Disney's Seven Dwarfs (yes, like everyone else he remembers some, though not all, of those) plus Fifties fashions (it was chic for a while to wear shoelaces instead of a tie) plus the French transcription of the Russian word for crayon--all that adds up to a very palpable sense of what people had in their heads, people like Perec, lots of people, and of what they saw and read and heard about and talked about.
There is, oddly enough in so short a book, a very complete index, which unassumingly encourages you not to read the book linearly but to skip around and read it in any old order, this being one of the many anticipations in Perec's work of what later came to be called "hypertext." (I should mention that many of the entries mean nothing at all to me, since I don't know who the people are. "I remember Dario Moreno" may or may not mean a lot to a French person of Perec's generation, maybe to many other French people, maybe to some American readers, but it doesn't mean a thing to me. It does, however, add to the sheer bulk of the memory bank invoked by the book.)
I have somewhat overdrawn the differences between Perec's and Brainard's books. These are substantial but there is some overlap. Brainard includes many of the kinds of items Perec includes--movie stars, for example--but not all of them; politics is a notable absence. It's a little as though Perec had thrown away about 80% of what Brainard includes, pared the content down to just what was public and widely shared, and left out everything personal and emotional.
It's a big difference. Brainard is campy and gossipy. His book describes a culture by describing a specific life and a particular body of personal experience. From that. you can figure out something about the occupational and artistic culture and social organization in which that life and experience could occur. Perec's book, spare and lean, describes something more amorphous, but no less real, the cultural background of everyday life against which the more specific understandings that make up culture operate. It's not part of French or American or jazz culture that Lester Young should wear a blue silk suit with a red silk lining, but it is a fact of all those ways of life that he did, and that people noted that, and knew it as "what was happening." It's not a crucial part of American or French culture that Disney's seven dwarves had the names they did, but they did have them and most people knew them. And all that is part of the body of reference and detail that plays some part in what we call cultural life, though I don't think we have a good idea of what that part is.
Here's what Perec said about that:
Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien
A third work,Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien, belongs to a larger unfinished body of such description Perec intended to make of a dozen sites in Paris, visiting each one once a year, always in a different month, so that at the end of twelve years he would have a complete description of each place during every month of the year. The descriptions are, like the entries in Je me souviens, quite ordinary: descriptions of the objects that can be seen from the vantage points he successively occupies on the Place St. Sulpice, lists of the letters and numbers that appear on various signs and trucks, descriptions of the people he sees from his seat in the cafe, of the buses that go by, of the pigeon flock which periodically takes off from its perch on the gutter of the mairie. Here is a sample:
There are five cabs at the taxi stand.
An 87 [bus] goes by. A 63 goes by.
The bells of St. Sulpice begin to ring (for the hour, no doubt).
Three children being taken to school. Another apple-green deux-chevaux.
The pigeons fly around the place again.
A 96 goes by, stops at the bus stop (St. Sulpice stop); Geneviève Serreau gets off and goes down the rue des Canettes; I call to her, rapping on the cafe window and she comes over to say hello to me.
A 70 goes by. [And so on.]
This work reminds me very much of James Agee's similarly detailed, although more focused, descriptions of material objects and events in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee, 1941 [1988]). It also reminds me of John Cage's work, 4'33", the one in which a pianist, in full concert attire, comes on stage, sits at the piano, puts a stopwatch on the music rack and starts it, waits that length of time, gets up and leaves. The point there is to make listeners aware of the sounds that occur when no official "music" is being played.
Perec describes the commplace, the quotidian . . . . In fact, as I try to generalize what he's done in this little book, I find myself increasingly tongue-tied, as though there was no other way to describe it than just to repeat and list what he has already described, and that isn't helpful.
As you read Perec's descriptions, you increasingly succumb to the feeling (at least I do, and I think others do as well) that this is important, though you can't say how. If we don't have ideas and theories about it, we ought to. A very large layer of such stuff--buses going by, people putting up umbrellas, pigeons flying, letters on the sides of trucks--surrounds us all the time. We become aware of it when something is "out of order," when the pigeon shits on our head, when someone puts up an umbrella and it isn't raining, when a bus appears going the wrong way down a one way street. Sociological common sense tells us that just such events tell us what we take for granted and rely on as the conditions under which we carry on our ordinary lives. When those conditions don't obtain we know that "something is wrong," which is as fundamental a social and emotional belief as I can think of.
A further interest of this book is the running account of Perec's difficulties in keeping up the description. Because it is not an evenhanded systematic account of anything. Buses appear often in these pages, but only now and then, not comprehensively. Sometimes there are long lists of which bus just passed and whether it was full or not. But then he gets tired of that and turns away from the street, or just stops mentioning buses for a while. He gets interested in the pigeons and what sets off their sudden collective departures from the mairiegutters. But that doesn't hold his attention for long either. In fact, the book is, in a way, a lesson in the impossibility of the kind of aimless description Perec aimed at, and so it's a lesson in how and why investigators have to focus their attention on something.
Is Perec a sociologist?
No, Perec is not a sociologist, though you could make that case. He seems to have known something about the sociology business, the American market research version of which invaded France in the Fifties and Sixties. One of the funnier things in Les choses is the description of the the little tricks of the sociological interview as it was then and usually still is practiced, e.g., the pause that lets the interviewee know that the interviewer isn't yet satisfied, wants to know more.
But leave that aside. Perec wasn't a professional sociologist, but he must certainly have meant to describe French society or some layer of it at a particular historical moment. (As I noted earlier, he says in an essay on his own work that about a quarter of it is "sociological," and identifies Les choses and Tentative de description de quelques lieux parisiens,, of which Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien is a fragment as belonging to that group.) And he did that in the two ways I've decribed. To generalize those two ways, we might say that they are different versions of the same strategy: to characterize a culture and way of life, both the relevant beliefs and their coordinate activities, by the accumulation of formally unanalyzed detail. In Les choses he does it by telling a story as though it were a collection of things that routinely happened; in Je me souviens and Tentative he does it by simply accumulating details of the public facet of collective life, rigorously excluding everything that is private, personal and emotional, leaving only the surface. But what a surface!
The sociology in these works does not come from telling a story whose narrative conveys a social analysis. None of these three works tells a story in a conventionally novelistic way, in which there is a sense of necessary progression, of a narrative unfolding, or some kind of deep analysis of individual character or feeling, on the one hand or, on the other, of social structure and the imperatives of its unfolding.
We ("we" here referring to sociologists first, but also to all the critics and cultural analysts who also do this) often speak of literary works as having value as descriptions of social life, as describing in novelistic detail particular people and events which can be taken as metaphorically embodying some kind of truth about not just those people but people like them and some sort of general truth about events like those. So War and Peace can be seen to tell us, through the specifics of the story and the characters, something about war as a social phenomenon. And Bleak House, and the story of the lawsuit called Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce it relates, can be supposed, not least because Dickens insisted that it did, to embody a "truth" about the British legal system of the day, its incompetence and venality and injustice. More subtly, the very structure of the narrative can embody the organizations and tensions of the society it describes and in which it was made; the Brazilian critic Antonio Candido excels in readings which make these features of a novel explicit (Candido, 1995).
Neither of these is quite what I mean about these works of Perec's. With Perec, you don't participate in the emotional life of the characters or identify with them. Nor do you get a serious analytic rendering of major social institutions, which is such a mainstay of realistic fiction. This is not what Passeron describes as "-logie." Perec is not a model for sociological thinking and writing in those more or less conventional ways.
I want to treat these three works, instead, as three different ways of using literary devices to talk about matters of interest to social scientists, as three methods social scientists might use themselves in their own tellings about society. Les choses is the nearest to conventional social analysis. You leave the book with a strong sense of what life was like for a whole stratum of society, for people of a certain kind, of a certain class, of a certain age and marital condition. and all that. We can compare it to more or less standard social science ways of telling about these aspects of social life. The other two books simply report on something social scientists don't do very well, the description of mundane experience, the "ce qui se passe quand il ne se passe rien" Perec refers to in the introduction to the description of Place St. Sulpice. All three books, each in a different way, rely on detailed "raw description" as a fundamental device by which "reality" is given to the reader. They are, in Passeron's terms, "-graphie."
I don't mean, by treating these works as proto-ethnography, to say that they aren't primarily, after all, literary works, with all the other virtues such works possess. But I want for the moment to bracket that and think about them as the sociology Perec himself said they were. (An author's notions about his own work may not be, as people say these days, "privileged," but that doesn't mean they should be ignored.)
It's not quite clear where this stuff--"that's happening when nothing is happening "--fits into a social scientist's grid of the subject matter of a social scientific discipline. But Perec's strategy thus overlaps more than a little with what at least some kinds of social scientists set out to achieve: the description of what a group of people interacting and communicating under particular historical circumstances have produced as a body of shared knowledge, understanding, and practice--what is usually called culture. And, further, it goes some way toward producing a description of what is sometimes referred to as the "lived experience" of people, though that expression is so vague as to be almost vacuous. But, if it means anything at all, it must refer at least to this kind of "what everyone knew and felt" in a particular historical and social juncture. The part Perec calls our attention to is the part that seems "unimportant," not worth remarking on, not (certainly) worth making theories about.
When I evoke these memories of the postwar period, they refer, for me, to an epoch belonging to the realm of myth: which explains that a memory can be "objectively" false: thus, in "I remember" n° 101, I remember correctly the famous "Musketeers" of tennis, but only two of the four names I mention (Borotra and Cochet) actually belonged to that group, Brugnon and Lacoste being replaced by Petra and Destremeau, who became champions later. (p. 119)But he gives the reader plenty of reason to think that it probably was just like that or pretty much like that. To begin with, the note I just quoted confesses to an error of fact that makes no difference at all to the accuracy of Je me souviensas an account of a culture. What is important, as a cultural fact, is that the names of tennis stars would be part of what a somewhat knowledgeable person wanted to know, part of what is sometimes called "cultural literacy." Whether Perec got the names right is no more important than if he had gotten the names of Disney's Seven Dwarves right. But the confession gives the reader to understand that accuracy on such matters is something Perec cared about (though not, of course, enough to change the names to the correct ones!) and thus to establish his reliability as a cultural witness.
Most of the things mentioned in the items in the book, however, are matters of public record, so well-known that most readers will not be learning anything they didn't know about. Rather, they are reminded of what they already knew and of how, taken together, it constitutes some kind of cultural and social whole. This whole, however, is not easily characterized. It doesn't seem to have the kind of cohesion, at least not obviously, that social scientists like to ascribe to a culture, a similarity or interlocking or affinity of the parts to one another that might enable an observer to characterize the culture in one of those apt summary phrases social scientists so love, as we might say that a society is "industrializing" or is characterized by the "Puritan ethic" or is, as Ruth Benedict used to say, "Dionysian" or "Appolonian."
Les chosesis a somewhat different case. When it came out (I am indebted to Jacques Leenhardt's "Postface" to the French edition for the account of the French critical reaction (Perec, 1965, pp. 147-78) in 1965 and won the prestigious Prix Renaudot, it provoked a lengthy critical discussion as to whether it could be properly called a novel or was, in fact, only sociology. Critics noted that there was no real characterization, no emotion, no espousing of values, none of the things that were routinely expected in novels in post-war France (and, of course, not just there). What was there instead was a description of a society coming to be dominated by material consumption, a society in which, exactly, things were coming to shape people's lives in a way and to a degree not known before. That is, these details did add up in a way that allowed that sort of summary description. And some of the heated critical discussion of the book had to do with whether that description was true or not, the argument attesting to how seriously the novel was taken as a description of France then.
As in the other two works, there are plenty of details. But now it is not the accuracy of the details that is in question, it is their representativeness. Jérôme and Sylvie live in a way whose details French readers could recognize--they knew those rugs and lamps, and all the other stuff, material and immaterial, that the two surrounded themselves with. But is that all there is? Weren't there other things to be included? Couldn't we say something that would relieve the harshness of what readers and critics took to be the implied verdict on that way of life? This is a problem of representation that occurs in all sorts of projects, from the photographic essay that seems to be "onesided" to the sociological report whose subjects complain that there were other, nicer things that could have been added that would have given a different overall picture.
All these considerations, finally, leave us to wonder whether the two kinds of social description Passeron distinguishes as "-graphie" and "-logie" might not better be seen as two aspects of every description, as a tension between the desire to show and the desire to explain which holds every kind of social analysis in place.
References
Agee, James, and Walker Evans. 1941 (1988). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Becker, Howard S. 1985. Outsiders: Etudes de sociologie de la déviance. Paris: A.-M. Métailié.
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