Why the Novel Matters

DH Lawrence wrote this fantastic essay on why the novel matters, so here are my favorite passages in it. I highly suggest you all look it up and read it, it's worth it.

"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."

"But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble."

"I don't want to grow into 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."

"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 to

morrow 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."

"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 fized 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 cut 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."