"Society, Morality and the Novel" (1957), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), pp. 699-700.
Context: 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. 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. 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. 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. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational.
“We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art.”
Introducing our Argument
Cannibals and Christians (1966)
Context: We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd … Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste…? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?
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Norman Mailer 165
American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film m… 1923–2007Related quotes
As quoted in: Fred Kleiner (2008) Intl Stdt Edition-Gardner's Art Thru/Ages: Globl Hist. Vol.2, p. 949
1918 - 1935, Realistic Manifesto, 1920
"Who Wants the English Composer?" (1912); cited from Ursula Vaughan Williams RVW (1964) pp. 101-2.
Art since 1940, strategies of being, Jonathan Fineberg, copyright Prentice Hall, Inc. 1995. ISBN 0 13 045469 9
To the Japanese Parliament on January 21, 1936. Quoted in "The Virginia quarterly review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion" - Page 164 - by University of Virginia - 1936.
Quoted in: Alan D. Bryce (2007) Art Smart: Art Smart: The Intelligent Guide to Investing in the Canadian Art Market. p. 55
Quotes, 1971 - 2000
Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 12.
"The Profession of Poetry," Partisan Review (September/October 1950) [p. 166]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)