A presentation that tells a bit of the history of the concept of valence and the various ways it has been defined. The question is: can it be usefully applied in literary studies? Given the vagueness of the concept and the very different results that a number of valence lexicons give for Dutch narrative texts, the provisional answer is skeptical. Doesn't pretend to draw any definitive conclusions. ATTENTION: The data reported here about the correlations between the various Sentiment Analysis tools for Dutch are in error. Check out this follow-up paper: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3834/paper67.pdf.