Guido Mazzoni - Theory of the Novel

Nothing is important but life. 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. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sara, 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 Mosess head.

This is the most important passage in Why the Novel Matters, an essay written by D. H. Lawrence in 1925 and published posthumously in 1936. Most likely, over the coming decades, novelists of the twenty-first century will continue to repeat the same ideas.

What makes Lawrences essay interesting is precisely its crudeness: by simplifying the thought process and removing any nuances, it unabashedly presents an opinion that many writers and readers have shared over the past two centuries, thereby making it easily recognizable. The superficial intentions of Why the Novel Matters are easy to decipher: Lawrence wants to make himself important, to endow his works with an absolute value and challenge anyone with the same ambitions who might threaten his supremacy. And yet, if we reflect on the assumptions that make a piece like this possible, we understand that what lies hidden behind the mediocrity of his claims is an entire epochal landscape. Today we take his words for granted: we might agree or disagree with him, but what we read strikes us as plausible. When we compare Lawrences ideas to other ways of viewing how the various human sciences relate to each other, though, some of his judgments no longer seem obvious. Asserting that the novel is the only book of life, placing it ahead of religion, philosophy, and science, is hardly a gesture to be taken for granted. In order for a statement like this to be even conceivable, the European cultural horizon had to have already gone through two of the most profound metamorphoses in its history. The first, more limited one transformed literature; the second, which was more extensive, transformed the relations between literature and other forms of knowledge, and, ultimately, those between literature and truth.

Between the mid-sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a genre long considered an unpretentious form of entertainmentthe novelbecame the primary art practiced in the West, the art that portrays the extensive totality of life, describe the birth of the novel, its rocky rise, and its modern evolution.