90 ANTHROPOLOGY AND HUMANISM QUARTERLY 14(3) LITERARY AND SOCIOLOGICAL VIEWS OF UNEMPLOYMENT: ENGLAND AND AUSTRIA IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s Jan Abbink Anthropological-Sociological Center University of Amsterdam Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185 1012 DK Amsterdam The Netherlands SUMMARY Through a comparison of a realistic novel with a so- cial science study of industrial capitalism during the Great Depression, this article assesses the relative merits of a literary versus sociological treatment of unemployment. Both treatments successfully con- vey the dejection, the resignation, and the terrible feeling of redundancy that characterize workers who are out of work. In that the two accounts evince a remarkable complementarity, we might suggest that the knowledge we gain from the literary work is in- formative while that which we gain from the social science investigation is authoritative. The relationship between literature and conventional social science as avenues to the understanding of social reality continues to be an issue within an- thropology. Questions arise whether literary works, such as novels and stories, can provide us with better insights; whether some literary procedures should be used (or avoided) to improve anthro- pological writing; or whether anthropology as a scientific discourse requires a restructuring (Geertz 1988). "Experimental anthropology" (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Scholte 1987) and the increased in- terest within anthropology in literary forms of ex- pression reflect renewed interest in comparing liter- ary and social scientific accounts of social life. In this contribution, I shall not directly address the is- sue of whether anthropology should develop a more literary, less conventionally "realist" mode of repre- sentation (Marcus & Cushman 1982, 12). Instead, I want to compare the status of literary and social sci- entific insights into society and to look for common elements in literary and scientific representations of reality in order to uncover their shared, underlying humanistic approach. My material for analysis is an English novel and an Austrian monograph on the problems of unemployment, both of which ap- peared in 1933. At the outset, we might note that while social scientists should be duly inspired by the great liter- ary writers of the modern era, they should not and cannot hope to reach a comparable kind of force- ful representation of human interpersonal and social problems. These two media of textual communi- cation with an audience operate on different levels and aspire to different status, and consequently one is quickly reminded that a boundary between the two genres of "literature" and "social science" must be maintained. Neither Stendhal nor de Balzac wrote their ad- mirable novels mainly to give us a realistic pic- ture of early nineteenth-century France in a proto- sociological sense. Good literary authors, it may be assumed, hardly have the intention of present- ing readers with a mimetic sketch of a society or of a certain era for its own sake and thereby put the dramatic demands of the story in second place. As Oscar Wilde wrote in his magnificent essay, The Decay of Lying (1889), which was a protest against unimaginative "realist" literature of his time, good authors create life, not copy it. The aim of Art is to give us imaginative, convincing "lies"; the aim of social science is the opposite. There is certainly truth in Wilde's ironically stated message. It might be concluded that the artistic level of literature is perhaps inversely related to its "realist" claims (Tan- nenbaum 1981). On the other hand, my intention here is to bring out the striking complementarity of early literary and sociological depictions of a disturbing problem in twentieth-century industrial society: unemploy- ment and its social consequences. The comparison will show that although the two approaches employ different stylistic and textual means (one narrative, the other analytic-expository), both evoke a simi- lar, sensitive picture of the personal crisis and de- spair experienced by people cast out by the socioe- conomic dynamics of industrial society. One may ask how this similarity might be ex- plained. Comparing the two books provides an op- portunity to venture some answers, all the more be- cause they appeared in the same year, in the midst of the Great Depression, when mass unemployment became a phenomenon of such disastrous results. THE TWO STUDIES The first book, the novel, is Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole, which was (and is) a popular, widely read work. Its attraction lies in its dramatic, realist message. It was a novel of social protest (see Klaus 1978). The literary form of a dramatic,