Literary world continued to face a clash of opinion for long as to whether the popular genre, the novel, should be regarded as representing artistic literary heritage. As literary scholarship often traced a line separating poetic discourse from the novelistic discourse, readers as well as scholars were in a state of dilemma whether to recognize the novel as artistic genre. However, with authors like DH Lawrence and critics like Mikhail Bakhtin, the confusion no longer needs to hound us. This article is an attempt to see why and how the novelistic discourse is fit enough to be considered artistic discourse and the novel an artistic genre of literature. As a methodology to look into the issue, scholarly perspectives forwarded by Mikhail Bakhtin and DH Lawrence have been taken into consideration. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘heteroglossia’ and Lawrence’s ‘wholeness of life’ have been adopted as the basic theoretical tool while the textual references are mainly based on their essays entitled “Discourse in the Novel” and “Why the Novel Matters,” respectively. The article concludes that Bakhtin''s appreciation of novelistic discourse as something that enabled the representation of heteroglossia…, and Lawrence''s description of the novel as the “book of life” are both equally potent scholarly defenses establishing the novel as artistic genre.
VERSITY JOURNAL, VOL XXVII, NO 1-2, DEC 2010 47 The most ancient forms of representing language were organized by laughter— these were originally nothing more than the ridiculing of another’s language and another’s direct discourse Polyglossia and inter-animation of languages associated with it elevated these forms to a new artistic and ideological level, which made possible the genre of the novel” (Bakhtin 2005) LAWRENCE’S DEFENSE In his well-known essay “Why the Novel Matters,” which was first published posthumously in 1936 (Enright and Chickera 1989), DH Lawrence (1885-1930), one of the most celebrated novelists of the twentieth century, argues that the worth of the novel as a literary genre lies in its quality of representing the wholeness of life, or life in its totality rather than in fragments He regards the novel as the “book of life.” He says, books are not life but only “tremulations on the either.” “But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other booktremulation can do” (Lawrence 1989) Lawrence’s concept of life, or the state of being alive, can be compared to Bakhtin’s concept of active responses or active understanding through the process of interactive, polyglot dialogism Only, the former is more concerned with action rather than language or verbal utterances Nevertheless, he is fully aware that the language is the medium to demonstrate the action that is very important in life And the novel is just the best medium To be alive is to live actively, with full sense of existence Passivity is just like death, lifeless He says: To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you It can help you not to be dead man in life So much of a man walks about dead and a carcass in the street and house, today: so much of women is merely dead Like a pianoforte with half the notes mute” (Lawrence 1989) The value of heteroglossia is equally recognized by Lawrence In life, everything deserves a full play, and according to him, “only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play,” with a realization that “life itself, not inert safety, is the reason for living.” “For out of the full play of all things emerges the only thing that is anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man alive and live woman” (Lawrence 1989) CONCLUSION Thus, traditional stylistics and contemporary literary scholarship does not recognize novel as artistic genre, Bakhtin and Lawrence have testified that novelistic discourse has also its own artistic quality, with scope to deal with social reality better and in a much wider way While Bakhtin sees in the language of the novel (and other prose arts) an “ideologically saturated system of interaction,” capable of forming a “worldview ensuring maximum mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life,” Lawrence argues that the worth of the novel as a literary genre lies in its quality of representing the wholeness of life, or life in its totality rather than in fragments Bakhtin's appreciation of novelistic discourse as something that enabled the "representation of heteroglossia with all its social and 48 THE NOVEL AS ART: PERSPECTIVES FROM … historical voices…," and Lawrence's description of the novel as the “book of life” are both equally potent scholarly defenses establishing the novel as a form of art WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail 2005 Discourse in the Novel Pages 393-420 in B Pandey (editor) Intellectual History Reader a Critical Introduction 2005 From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse Pages 123-154 in Lodge (editor) Modern Criticism and Theory Enright, D J and De Chikera (editors) 1989 English Critical Texts Oxford University Press, New Delhi Lawrence, D.H 1989 Why the Novel Matters Pages 286-292 in Enright and Chikera (editors), English Critical Texts Lodge, David and Nigel Wood 2005 Modern Criticism and Theory (2nd ed.), Pearson Education, Delhi Pandey, Beerendra (editor) 2005 Intellectual History Reader a Critical Introduction MK Publishers, Kathmandu ...48 THE NOVEL AS ART: PERSPECTIVES FROM … historical voices…," and Lawrence' s description of the novel as the “book of life” are both equally potent scholarly defenses establishing the novel as. .. WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail 2005 Discourse in the Novel Pages 393-420 in B Pandey (editor) Intellectual History Reader a Critical Introduction 2005 From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse... Criticism and Theory Enright, D J and De Chikera (editors) 1989 English Critical Texts Oxford University Press, New Delhi Lawrence, D.H 1989 Why the Novel Matters Pages 286-292 in Enright and Chikera