![]() Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in.Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), pp. ![]() "Society, Morality and the Novel" (1957), in The Collected Essays, ed.Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. We cannot live, as someone has said, in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. Man knows that even in this day of marvelous technology and the tenuous subjugation of the atom, that nature can crush him, and that at the boundaries of human order the arts and the instruments of technology are hardly more than magic objects which serve to aid us in our ceaseless quest for certainty. Man knows, despite the certainties which it is the psychological function of his social institutions to give him, that he did not create the universe, and that the universe is not at all concerned with human values. Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the facade of social organisations, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos.Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty."The Art of Fiction: An Interview" ( The Paris Review, Spring 1955), in The Collected Essays, ed.Writing is, after all, a form of communication. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer.The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance. All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority."Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed.Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality-that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few-and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale."Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed.For if the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison and destroy. Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word." Richard Wright's Blues" (1945), in The Collected Essays, ed.Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart. ![]() As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
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