"Art is the triumph over chaos"
About this Quote
Art, for Cheever, isn’t decoration; it’s a hard-won stay against the mess. “Triumph” is doing a lot of work here: it implies struggle, discipline, and an adversary that never fully disappears. Chaos isn’t just world-historical catastrophe. In Cheever’s universe it’s the intimate disorder of appetite, loneliness, booze, secrecy, suburban performance, the way a bright lawn can hide a dark interior. To make art is to take that swarm of feeling and incident and force it into shape without pretending it was ever tidy to begin with.
The line flatters neither the artist nor the audience. It doesn’t promise transcendence, only victory in a single battle of an endless war. Cheever’s fiction is full of people trying to organize their lives with rituals and respectability; the irony is that those strategies often fail. Art, though, can succeed precisely because it admits chaos as its raw material. It doesn’t deny the fracture; it composes with it. The subtext is almost moral: form is an ethical choice, a refusal to let experience remain formless and therefore unusable.
Context matters: Cheever wrote in midcentury America, when prosperity and conformity sold the fantasy of order. His work keeps showing the leakiness of that fantasy. This sentence reads like a private credo from someone who knew how quickly a life can slip its frame. Art becomes the one place where the self’s scattered pieces can be arranged into meaning, even if the meaning is provisional, even if the cost is paying close attention to what everyone else would rather smooth over.
The line flatters neither the artist nor the audience. It doesn’t promise transcendence, only victory in a single battle of an endless war. Cheever’s fiction is full of people trying to organize their lives with rituals and respectability; the irony is that those strategies often fail. Art, though, can succeed precisely because it admits chaos as its raw material. It doesn’t deny the fracture; it composes with it. The subtext is almost moral: form is an ethical choice, a refusal to let experience remain formless and therefore unusable.
Context matters: Cheever wrote in midcentury America, when prosperity and conformity sold the fantasy of order. His work keeps showing the leakiness of that fantasy. This sentence reads like a private credo from someone who knew how quickly a life can slip its frame. Art becomes the one place where the self’s scattered pieces can be arranged into meaning, even if the meaning is provisional, even if the cost is paying close attention to what everyone else would rather smooth over.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
