Exhaustiveness corrects skewed perspectives

The book offers a magnificent plus through its character, which tends towards exhaustiveness. If some authors have not been taken into account in the work, it is mainly because it was impossible to gather biographical information about them, and that they were thus not very representative of Belgian francophone literature of the period between the wars. At the other end of the spectrum, certain writers, famous and prolific, widely skewed the statistics, notably those concerning the production of books. Simenon, for example, and the over two hundred works published or republished during this period, required particular attention: wreaking havoc all by himself amongst the statistics of interwar publication, he has been isolated in order to examine them without his massive presence.

As for the rest, Björn-Olav Dozo has drawn up a corpus of over 400 authors. ‘This large corpus for example allowed me to bring to light certain dynamics which had yet to be observed,’ says the delighted researcher. ‘For example, there is a very clear aesthetic shift at the end of the First World War, which goes hand in hand with a shift in the social profile of the authors studied. It moves from that of a jurist to that of a petit bourgeois functionary or teacher. That had already been observed. But what I thought beforehand was that these petit bourgeois had proliferated, that their numbers had risen. And it was legitimate to do so. For example, in observing a sub-corpus such as the evolution of the members of the Royal Academy of Belgian French Language and Literature (ARLLFB), one can easily see that the jurists little by little made way for this new profile and that there were more and more teachers in it. On the basis of this sample one might thus conclude that writers from a more humble social class literally emerged during this historical shift. The exhaustive approach has demonstrated that it was nothing of the sort. In the second epoch the petite bourgeoisie became dominant due to the fall of the jurists, certainly, but the number of writers from this social class did not really rise. They were well and truly there during the first period. It is rather the collapse of the numbers of jurists which rendered their voices more audible.’

Statistics and the quantitative as tools to polish reality

The quantitative study remains the poor relation of the sociology of literature. Commonly used by sociologists, it is more off putting for the Romanists, who claim that there is a sizeable lack of pertinence due to the intrinsic limits of the quantitative in tackling human subjects, ‘recalcitrant to a too absolute categorisation. But it seems to me,’ qualifies the researcher, ‘that making the effort to categorise and above all to understand how we categorise, to ask questions about these classifications after all enables one to give meaning to a reality which is otherwise not very intelligible. In other words, the quantitative approach never gives a definitive answer, but it allows certain things to be systemised, such as, in the case of my research, the social relationships between the writers. To do so, and without distorting reality, it was necessary to find a form of the smallest common denominator in the quality of these relationships. I chose co-presence in one site. This co-presence can effectively cover a spectrum of types of relationships, very varied qualities of relationship, and I in no way claim to have said the last word for each one of them. The idea is instead to imagine that we can observe this ensemble of data and ask ourselves what we can say without entering into the qualitative straight away.’ This approach, preceding a possible future qualitative study, allows a different perspective to that which is habitually accepted in philosophy and letters, a more objectivising look, with out for all that entering into a scientism, and exacerbated positivism. 

If the quantitative remains the principal axis of the work’s theoretical construction, the researcher constantly envisages it with deeps reservations and nuances, spoiling his own work, this deforming reflection which is the eye of the researcher, and thus offers a genuine epistemological reflection on his research. He is aware of the limitations which are involved in a serial study of a human subject, of the simplification and the approximation necessary to the categorisation and establishment of standard profiles. There is thus absolutely no question of considering the quantitative as a sacrosanct and definitive means of unveiling an absolute truth, but nor should its usefulness be underestimated. In other words it is necessary to keep in mind that it is a tool. In using it as it should be, one can bring to light certain practices, certain logics, certain behaviours between which it is possible to set up an analogy and which draws on a certain systematic general dynamic.

‘I thus use statistics to cast light on certain shadow areas. A little like a telescope, a radar or a microscope. They allow one to detect the existence of dynamics which are otherwise imperceptible, to raise up and sketch a first observation of a reality invisible up until now, which a qualitative study can subsequently extend and deepen. But both the quantitative and the qualitative remain tools and are not ends in themselves. The end goal remains the understanding and the analysis of its subject.’