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. 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 if something is forced to remain constant it loses its value and power along with the passing of time. There are no absolutes. There is only a constant flow and change and even change is not absolute. 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 defies 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. However Lawrence says that putting a finger on one individual trait makes one as fixed as a lamp post. It seems as if a man has made up an idea about himself and is trying to trim himself down to fit into it. 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. Lawrence however says that it is difficult to define what is living.
Different men have different ideas about what they mean by living in life. Some go to seek God while others seek money, wine, and women, yet others seek votes and political reforms. In this Lawrence says that the novel is a guide which helps to differentiate between a man alive and a man who is dead in life. A man may eat his dinner like a man alive or merely chew his dinner as a dead man in life.
A man alive shoots his enemy but a dead man in life throws bombs at people who are neither his friends nor foes. Finally Lawrence says that the most important thing is to be a whole man alive and the novel provides guidance in this matter. 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. A novel portrays this unpredictable and varying nature of life making the reader realize that life itself is the reason for living. 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. Labels: analysis , D. Lawrence , Literary Criticism , novel , summary. Unknown 20 June at Unknown 1 February at Arkadeep Sharma 12 October at Unknown 31 January at Samalay R. Kashyap 1 February at Unknown 4 February at Unknown 10 December at L An Chhalhhring 11 December at Steff 28 February at Unknown 27 June at Unknown 23 July at Religion depends on the theory of soul and life after death but the novelist is only thinking about the present moment and life in it.
The philosopher talks about spirit and infinite knowledge contained in it but for a novelist it the living that contains all the understandable knowledge. Everything else is conjecture and speculation. Any idea is meaningless until it is received and understood by a live person. It does not have a life of its own. Hence, the man alive is much more important than the lifeless ideas and concepts. The scientist does not value living beings and wants to analyze it lying dead and motionless under a microscope.
To a scientist, a human being is a sum total of its different parts or organs like heart, liver, etc. However, a novelist courts the living and believes that all the parts make a greater whole i. Now, Lawrence describes the importance of a novel.
According to him, a novel is a window to life. But any novel or book is as valuable as thoughts until it is read by a human being. He says that the novel is more important than any other book because it is more impactful and influential. Then we stop caring. Refugees become mere numbers, anyone who is different becomes a category, an abstraction.
It is not a coincidence that all populist movements are essentially against plurality, against diversity. In creating dualistic frameworks and polarising society, they know they can spread numbness faster.
The novel matters because it punches little holes in the wall of indifference that surrounds us. Novels have to swim against the tide. And this was never more clear than it is today. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with the growth of new technologies, there was so much hope and optimism. At the turn of the millennium, many people — including leading analysts, academics and journalists — believed that the triumph of liberalism was inevitable.
There was a shared understanding that, sooner or later, all societies would become more modern, democratic and globally integrated. We would all turn into one big global village. There were expectations that religion would become irrelevant, that the nation-state would lose its power to supranational entities. And the paradox is while all of these happened to a certain degree, the opposite also happened. Only two decades have passed since that time of optimism and we have entered the age of pessimism.
If the world is changing, so must the literary world. Writers from wobbly and wounded democracies — such as Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt or Venezuela — never had the luxury of being apolitical. But something interesting is happening today: more and more Western authors are feeling the same kind of urgency that non-Western authors have been feeling for so long.
Writers need time — to process, to digest, to imagine, to write. I am not suggesting that every writer has to become politicised and I am not talking about being a partisan or even being interested in party politics.
I am using politics in its broadest sense possible: as a feminist, I know that the personal is also political and wherever there is power and inequality there is politics. Novelists need to speak up about the dangers of losing our core values: pluralism, freedom of speech, minority rights, separation of powers, democracy.
Benjamin believed storytelling had to turn information into wisdom. Today a bigger challenge awaits writers: how to turn misinformation into wisdom.
I come from a land where words often feel heavy. Every Turkish writer, poet, journalist or intellectual knows that because of a poem, a novel, an interview, or even a tweet, we can be stigmatised in pro-government media, lynched on social media by trolls and possibly put on trial, detained or exiled. We carry this knowledge at the back of our minds when we sit at our desk to write our stories. As a result, there is widespread self-censorship among writers.
How do you even begin to speak about the kind of censorship that comes from within and not necessarily always from outside? This is what the loss of democracy and freedom of speech does eventually. It creates a climate of intimidation. As Arthur Koestler said, authoritarianism corrupts not only the politicians and the political elite, but also deeply damages the civil society. It damages the institutions that are essential for a democracy to survive.
And it also damages collective memory. Turkey is a country of collective amnesia, and therefore, memory is a responsibility for us writers. In a world beset with populist demagoguery and misinformation, memory is a responsibility for writers everywhere. We cannot forget what has happened in the past when tribalism, nationalism, isolationism, fanaticism and jingoism managed to get the better of humanity. The novel matters because stories continue to connect us across borders, and help us to see beyond the artificial categories of race, gender, class.
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