Annotated Bibliography

Why the Novel Matters
by D.H. Lawrence
WE have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body
with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the
wine, and at last throw the bottle away, the body, of course, being the bottle.
It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these
words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really
any huge difference between my hand and my brain? Or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers
with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe in touch, and learns a vast number of
things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along,
jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too
long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my
soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand
is absolutely alive, me alive.
Whereas, of course, as far as I am concerned, my pen isn’t alive at all. My pen isn’t me alive. Me
alive ends at my finger-tips.
Whatever is me alive is me. Every tiny bit of my hands is alive, every little freckle and hair and
fold of skin. And whatever is me alive is me. Only my finger-nails, those ten little weapons
between me and an inanimate universe, they cross the mysterious Rubicon between me alive
and things like my pen, which are not alive, in my own sense.
So, seeing my hand is all alive, and me alive, wherein is it just a bottle, or a jug, or a tin can, or a
vessel of clay, or any of the rest of that nonsense? True, if I cut it it will bleed, like a can of
cherries. But then the skin that is cut, and the veins that bleed, and the bones that should never
be seen, they are all just as alive as the blood that flows. So the tin can business, or vessel of clay,
is just bunk.
And that’s what you learn, when you’re a novelist. And that’s what you are very liable not to
know, if you’re a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a stupid person. If you’re a parson,
you talk about souls in heaven. If you’re a novelist, you know that paradise is in the palm of your
hand, and on the end of your nose, because both are alive; and alive, and man alive, which is
more than you can say, for certain, of paradise. Paradise is after life, and I for one am not keen
on anything that is after life. If you are a philosopher, you talk about infinity, and the pure spirit
which knows all things. But if you pick up a novel, you realize immediately that infinity is just a
handle to this self-same jug of a body of mine; while as for knowing, 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. Oh, yes, my body, me alive, knows, and knows intensely. And as for the sum of all
knowledge, it can’t be anything more than an accumulation of all the things I know in the body,
and you, dear reader, know in the body.
These damned philosophers, they talk as if they suddenly went off in steam, and were then much
more important than they are when they’re in their shirts. It is nonsense. Every man,
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philosopher included, ends in his own finger-tips. That’s the end of his man alive. As for the
words and thoughts and sighs and aspirations that fly from him, they are so many tremulations
in the ether, and not alive at all. But if the tremulations reach another man alive, he may receive
them into his life, and his life may take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown
rock on to a green leaf. All very well and good. It still doesn’t alter the fact that the so-called
spirit, the message or teaching of the philosopher or the saint, isn’t alive at all, but just a
tremulation upon the ether, like a radio message. All this spirit stuff is just tremulations upon
the ether. If you, as man alive, quiver from the tremulation of the ether into new life, that is
because you are man alive, and you take sustenance and stimulation into your alive man in a
myriad ways. But to say that the message, or the spirit which is communicated to you, is more
important than your living body, is nonsense. You might as well say that the potato at dinner
was more important.
Nothing is important but life. And for myself, I can absolutely see life nowhere but in the living.
Life with a capital L is only man alive. Even a cabbage in the rain is cabbage alive. All things that
are alive are amazing. And all things that are dead are subsidiary to the living. Better a live dog
than a dead lion. But better a live lion than a live dog. C’est la vie!
It seems impossible to get a saint, or a philosopher, or a scientist, to stick to this simple truth.
They are all, in a sense, renegades. The saint wishes to offer himself up as spiritual food for the
multitude. Even Francis of Assisi turns himself into a sort of angelcake, of which anyone may
take a slice. But an angel-cake is rather less than man alive. And poor St Francis might well
apologize to his body, when he is dying: ‘Oh, pardon me, my body, the wrong I did you through
the years!’ * It was no wafer, for others to eat. *
The philosopher, on the other hand, because he can think, decides that nothing but thoughts
matter. It is as if a rabbit, because he can make little pills, should decide that nothing but little
pills matter. As for the scientist, he has absolutely no use for me so long as I am man alive. To
the scientist, I am dead. He puts under the microscope a bit of dead me, and calls it me. He takes
me to pieces, and says first one piece, and then another piece, is me. My heart, my liver, my
stomach have all been scientifically me, according to the scientist; and nowadays I am either a
brain, or nerves, or glands, or something more up-to-date in the tissue line.
Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain,
or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is
greater than the part. And therefore, I, who am man alive, am greater than my soul, or spirit, or
body, or mind, or consciousness, or anything else that is merely a part of me. I am a man, and
alive. I am man alive, and as long as I can, I intend to go on being man alive.
For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the
scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive,
but never get the whole hog.
The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the
ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than
poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do.
The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say, it is
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about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel,
David, Bath-Sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is
it but man alive, from start to finish? Man alive, not mere bits. Even the Lord is another man
alive, in a burning bush, throwing the tablets of stone * at Moses’s head.
I do hope you begin to get my idea, why the novel is supremely important, as a tremulation on
the ether. Plato makes the perfect ideal being tremble in me. But that’s only a bit of me.
Perfection is only a bit, in the strange make-up of man alive. The Sermon on the Mount makes
the selfless spirit of me quiver. But that, too, is only a bit of me. The Ten Commandments set the
old Adam * shivering in me, warning me that I am a thief and a murderer, unless I watch it. But
even the old Adam is only a bit of me.
I very much like all these bits of me to be set trembling with life and the wisdom of life. But I do
ask that the whole of me shall tremble in its wholeness, some time or other. And this, of course,
must happen in me, living.
But as far as it can happen from a communication, it can only happen when a whole novel
communicates itself to me. The Bible–but all the Bible–and Homer, and Shakespeare: these are
the supreme old novels. These are all things to all men. Which means that in their wholeness
they affect the whole man alive, which is the man himself, beyond any part of him. They set the
whole tree trembling with a new access of life, they do not just stimulate growth in one direction.
I don’t want to grow in any one direction any more. And, if I can help it, I don’t want to stimulate
anybody else into some particular direction. A particular direction ends in a cul-de-sac. We’re in
a cul-de-sac at present.
I don’t believe in any dazzling revelation, or in any supreme Word. ‘The grass withereth, the
flower fadeth, but the Word of the Lord shall stand for ever.’* That’s the kind of stuff we’ve
drugged ourselves with. As a matter of fact, the grass withereth, but comes up all the greener for
that reason, after the rains. The flower fadeth, and therefore the bud opens. But the Word of the
Lord, being man-uttered and a mere vibration on the ether, becomes staler and staler, more and
more boring, till at last we turn a deaf ear and it ceases to exist, far more finally than any
withered grass. It is grass that renews its youth like the eagle, * not any Word.
We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and for ever, let us have done with
the ugly imperialism of any absolute.
There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even
change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts,
slipping past one another.
Me, man alive, I am a very curious assembly of incongruous parts. My yea! of today is oddly
different from my yea! of yesterday. My tears of tomorrow will have nothing to do with my tears
of a year ago. If the one I love remains unchanged and unchanging, I shall cease to love her. It is
only because she changes and startles me into change and defies my inertia, and is herself
staggered in her inertia by my changing, that I can continue to love her. If she stayed put, I
might as well love the pepper-pot.
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In all this change, I maintain a certain integrity. But woe betide me if I try to put my finger on it.
If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!–then, if I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a
lamp-post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me. I can never
know it. It is useless to talk about my ego. That only means that I have made up an idea of
myself, and that I am trying to cut myself out to pattern. Which is no good. You can cut your
cloth to fit your coat, but you can’t clip bits off your living body, to trim it down to your idea.
True, you can put yourself into ideal corsets. But even in ideal corsets, fashions change.
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.
What we mean by living is, of course, just as indescribable as what we mean by being. Men get
ideas into their heads, of what they mean by Life, and they proceed to cut life out to pattern.
Sometimes they go into the desert to seek God, sometimes they go into the desert to seek cash,
sometimes it is wine, woman, and song, * and again it is water, political reform, and votes. You
never know what it will be next: from killing your neighbour with hideous bombs and gas that
tears the lungs, to supporting a Foundlings Home and preaching infinite Love, and being
correspondent in a divorce.
In all this wild welter, we need some sort of guide. It’s no good inventing Thou Shalt Nots!
What then? Turn truly, honorably to the novel, and see wherein you are man alive, and wherein
you are dead man in life. You may love a woman as man alive, and you may be making love to a
woman as sheer dead man in life. You may eat your dinner as man alive, or as a mere
masticating corpse. As man alive you may have a shot at your enemy. But as a ghastly
simulacrum of life you may be firing bombs into men who are neither your enemies nor your
friends, but just things you are dead to. Which is criminal, when the things happen to be alive.
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. So much of a
man walks about dead and a carcass in the street and house, today: so much of women is merely
dead. Like a pianoforte with half the notes mute.
But in the novel you can see, plainly, when the man goes dead, the woman goes inert. You can
develop an instinct for life, if you will, instead of a theory of right and wrong, good and bad.
In life, there is right and wrong, good and bad, all the time. But what is right in one case is
wrong in another. And in the novel you see one man becoming a corpse, because of his so-called
goodness, another going dead because of his so-called wickedness. Right and wrong is an
instinct: but an instinct of the whole consciousness in a man, bodily, mental, spiritual at once.
And only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when
we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living. For out of the full play of all
things emerges the only thing that is anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a
woman, man alive, and live woman.
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