Why the Novel Matters – Class 12 English Chapter 17 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Author

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was born in a coal-mining town, the son of an uneducated miner and an ambitious mother who was a teacher. With his German wife he lived in Italy, Germany, Australia, Tahiti and Mexico. His writing reflects "a revolt against puritanism, mediocrity and the dehumanisation of an industrial society". Why the Novel Matters is a polemical essay that defends the novel as the only form that captures the whole living human being.

Summary

Against the body-as-bottle idea. "We have curious ideas of ourselves." We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit, soul or mind in it: Mens sana in corpore sano. The body is treated as a bottle that the years drink from before throwing it away. Lawrence calls this "a funny sort of superstition".

His hand as he writes "is alive, it flickers with a life of its own". It "slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored". It is "just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul". "Me alive ends at my fingertips." Only the finger-nails, "those ten little weapons", cross "the mysterious Rubicon" between the living self and dead things like his pen. The "tin can business, or vessel of clay, is just bunk".

What the novelist knows. The parson talks of souls in heaven, but the novelist knows "paradise is in the palm of your hand, and on the end of your nose". The philosopher talks of infinity, but "if I find my finger in the fire, I know that fire burns with a knowledge so emphatic and vital, it leaves Nirvana merely a conjecture."

Tremulations on the ether. Words, thoughts and teachings are "tremulations in the ether", like radio messages. They are not alive in themselves. If they reach a living person, that person may "take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf". But to say the message matters more than the living body is nonsense: "You might as well say that the potato at dinner was more important."

Life above all. "Nothing is important but life." "Even a cabbage in the rain is cabbage alive." "Better a live dog than a dead lion. But better a live lion than a live dog. C'est la vie!"

The renegades. Saints, philosophers and scientists are all "renegades".

Lawrence denies being any part, whether soul, body, mind, brain or glands. "The whole is greater than the part... I am man alive."

Why the novelist is superior. Saints, scientists, philosophers and poets master "different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog". "The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life... But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble." The Bible ("but all the Bible"), Homer and Shakespeare are "the supreme old novels", because they set "the whole tree trembling". Plato, the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments each stir only one bit of him.

No absolutes. He rejects "any dazzling revelation" or "supreme Word". "The grass withereth, but comes up all the greener"; the Word "becomes staler and staler". "There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change." Man is "a very curious assembly of incongruous parts": "My yea! of today is oddly different from my yea! of yesterday." If the one he loves stayed unchanged, "I might as well love the pepper-pot."

Integrity, not fixity. He keeps "a certain integrity", but if he says "I am this, I am that" and sticks to it, he turns into "a stupid fixed thing like a lamp-post". You cannot cut your living body to a pattern. In a novel, characters who are good or bad "according to pattern... cease to live, and the novel falls dead".

Learning from the novel. Men cut life to patterns: God, cash, wine, votes. "It's no good inventing Thou Shalt Nots!" The novel shows us "wherein you are man alive, and wherein you are dead man in life". So many people walk about dead, "like a pianoforte with half the notes mute". Right and wrong is "an instinct of the whole consciousness... bodily, mental, spiritual at once". Only in the novel are "all things given full play". The result is "the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man alive, and live woman".

Themes & Arguments

Style

The essay is passionate, argumentative and colloquial ("bunk", "damned philosophers", "the whole hog"). Catch-phrases recur as "pegs": man alive, tremulations on the ether, the whole hog, the one bright book of life. Rhetorical devices include:

Word Power

Board Exam Focus

Language work from the exercises:

Common Mistakes