Summary of D.H. Lawrence's "Why the Novel Matters"

 

D.H. Lawrence is a famous novelist, poet and an essayist.  He introduced modernism in English literature.  His novels, though created much vibration then, are current in their thoughts and manners.  Why the Novel Matters is a critical essay, wherein Lawrence tries to establish the superiority of novel and the novelist over other professions. 

To prove his point D.H. Lawrence talks about life and the way we understand human beings.  He introduces a term called man alive for everyone of us being busy and alive.  He calls the fingers that are busy writing as man alive.  The fingers are equally man alive as our brain.  Fingers and brain are equal and there is no superiority between them.  Things that are not alive are considered as dead. 

According to Lawrence, a novelist is better than a parson, the philosopher or the scientist.  The parson speaks about souls in heaven and the afterlife. But for the novelist heaven is in his palms and at the tip of his nose.  The novelist is not concerned about life after death. He is wholly concerned about life at present and with the man alive.  For philosophers nothing but thoughts is important. These thoughts Lawrence says are nothing but ‘tremulations on the ether’. They are not alive. They are like radio news and messages.

According to Lawrence nothing is more important than life. Living things are more valuable than dead objects. A living dog is better than a dead lion but a living lion is better than a living dog. Lawrence says that scientists and philosophers find it difficult to accept the value of the living.

For the scientist a living man is of no use.  For a scientist a man is a heart, a liver, a kidney, a gland or a tissue. But for the novelist the only thing that matters is a whole living man. Lawrence refuses to believe that he is a body or a soul or a brain or a nervous system. He considers himself to be a complete whole made up of all these parts, a whole that is greater and more significant than the individual parts. And for this reason he is a novelist and he considers himself superior to the saint, the scientist or the philosopher.   

Lawrence calls the novel a book of life.  The novel has the capacity to influence a man more effectively than any other book.  The ideals of Plato and the Ten Commandments affect only a part of a man alive. But a novel is capable of shaking the whole of a man alive. This is because a novel deals in nothing else but man alive. In this regard Lawrence calls the Bible a ‘great confused novel’.  For Lawrence, the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare are all great novels because they communicate to the reader. Their wholeness affects the whole of man alive. They do not stimulate growth in a particular direction but shake the whole man alive into new life.

According to Lawrence the strength and appeal of a novel lies in the dynamic nature of its characters which reflects the importance of constant change in the life of a man alive. Nothing is constant and there are no absolutes. There is only a constant flow and change.  A man today is different from what he was yesterday and tomorrow he will be different from what he is today. A man loves a woman because of the constant change in her. It is the change that startles and keeps a man and woman in love with each other. Loving an unchanging person is like loving an inanimate object like a pepper pot.

Lawrence says that one can learn about the importance of change from a novel. In a novel the characters do nothing but live. But if they begin to act according to a fixed pattern – always remaining good or bad – the novel loses its life force. Similarly a man in his life must live and not try to follow a pattern or else he becomes a dead man in life. 

Finally Lawrence says that a novel helps a man to see when a man is alive and when he is dead in life. The novel helps to develop an instinct for life. This is because the novel does not advocate a right path or a wrong path. The concept of right and wrong vary according to circumstances.  The end result of the novel is the whole man alive.  Thus Lawrence asserts that the novel is a book that can touch the life of a whole man alive and that is why the novel matters.