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 physical body than it is the mind or spirit, and he supports his thesis by disassembling the old cliche that the body is merely a vessel for the soul.
Then he goes on saying that like "a bottle or a jug, or a tin can, or a vessel of clay" our body bleeds when it is cut. But the difference that sets it apart is the life in the skin, vein, bone or blood this is inside. But in case of other inanimate objects the entities inside are as dead as the outer. "And that's what you learn, when you're a novelist" quips Lawrence to define the people in this field. So the superficial "logic" of this passage is conspicuously off: to refute the notion that the body is merely a vessel for the soul, he "proves" that skin and bone are just as "alive" as blood is.
