“Let us learn from the novel. In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead. A character in a novel has got to live, or it is nothing. We, likewise, in life have got to live, or we are nothing.” ~ D.H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters”
The English author, poet, playwright, essayist, critic, and painter David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born on this day in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. While Lawrence was immensely interested in human touch behavior and physical intimacy in relationships, which he explored in his well-known novels Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), he was also a passionate advocate against moral absolutes, believing that “all things flow and change” and that “the whole is greater than the part.”
Unlike philosophy, science, and religion, which only address “different bits” of us, the novel reaches us “whole hog.” It is for this reason, according to Lawrence, the novelist is superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and even the poet. “To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you. It can help you not to be dead man in life.”
Lawrence in 1906
An interesting take, and I have enjoyed reading a few of the more popular of Lawrence’s novels, but…
I agree that a novel can incorporate many different passions, and novels also follow the mores and attitudes of the times. However, books of religion often contain all of the passions he mentions. A single novel, from a single period of time, is like a picture. It shows what happens at a specific moment in history at a specific place. It does not encompass the “whole man.”
It seems that Lawrence was overreaching a bit because he respected the genre. I wonder if he was saying that the novels written during a specific period are the whole or if he meant each novel is a whole. I may come closer to believeing the former statement (regarding a group of works) than the latter.
I love your perspective on this, Gaines, and I agree that Lawrence was obviously quite passionate about the novel’s potency. He refers to the novel as “the one bright book of life [...], a tremulation [that] can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do.”
I have been rocked to my core by some novels, but the timing of the reading, as you suggest about the writing, is always in play. A novel may reach us “whole hog” given our current circumstances and have no effect whatsoever at another life stage. But the same can be said for religion, philosophy, and poetry, in my experience. Still, it’s a grand statement from a brilliant novelist…
Michelle