Why the Novel Matters

When the essay Why the Novel Matters is approached as rhetorical systems rather than statements of doctrine, it is, I think, significant as critical conceptions of the novel as those of a writer defining his genre in his own terms dialogically, rhetorically, and artistically, as a novelist would. It is these rhetorical maneuvers, not the stated philosophy, that collectively constitute Lawrence's coherent critical vision of the novel as a genre. In the essay Why the Novel Matters, Lawrence explores in his own way the Romantic concept of the relativity of parts and wholes to construct a doctrinal statement celebrating the novel over other fields of thought. Unlike philosophy, science, and religion, which only address part of us, he says, the novel reaches us whole hog. Incorporated into this argument is a diatribe against moral absolutes. 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, the writer asserts. Here Lawrence's hatred of absolutes is made supplemental to a larger theory on the relativity of parts and wholes. In the essay, he contends that man alive is as much or more the Lawrence's critical style in Why the Novel Matters is, to use J. L. Austin's terms, selfconsciously performative (those that are not subject to classifications of "true" or "false" because they act out entirely personal propositions) rather than constative (statements of fact that can be demonstrated as true or false). Like S. T. Coleridge in his critical definitions of poetry, Lawrence rhetorically represents the novel in large, binary, metaphorical terms that implicitly lend dignity to its genre. At the same time, like Thomas Carlyle, he adapts those terms to an often angry, evangelical, platform rhetoric to assert, in a less than dignified way, the overwhelming superiority of the novel to all other forms of writing. One fine way to shed light on the style adopted by D. H. Lawrence in this essay is to deconstruct the metaphorical hierarchies that he establishes to define the novel and that should be done strictly in terms of the specific context of the specific places in which they appear. Lawrence shares Aristotle's preference for metaphor over simile because it is so immediate. For Lawrence to create a comparison through metaphor is to force consonance through dissonance. When Lawrence says that the "novel is the one bright book of life," he deliberately does nol say that the novel is like life (a simile) or that it is full of life (a description) but that it is the "book of life." Immediately upon making this metaphor, however, he adds a supplementary metaphor that would seem to contradict it, pointing out the irreconcilability of his original metaphorical terms. "Books are not life," he writes. "They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble" This supplement, rather than clari