Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
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Book Summary Information
Author: Henry MillerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-01-06
ISBN: 0802131786
Number of pages: 318
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of Tropic of Cancer
Book Review: An Unfortunate Waste of Genuine Talent
Summary: 2 Stars
So I've just finished reading Henry Miller's brilliantly poetic and utterly nihilistic memoir "The Tropic of Cancer," first published in 1934 and banned in both Europe and the US for twenty-seven years afterwards. Like many texts of the post-WW1 Modernist era - from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" to Joseph Wood Krutch's philosophical work "The Modern Temper" - "The Tropic of Cancer" is built upon the premise that the traditional values of Western culture and the arts have crumbled, leaving behind a valley of ashes, like the one in "The Great Gatsby" watched over by the disembodied eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. "Looking into the Seine I see and desolation, street lamps drowning, men and women choking to death, the bridges covered with houses, slaughterhouses of love," says Miller. ". . .The people who live here are dead; they make chairs with which other people sit on in their dreams." So nothing new there; others had made similar observations. But although Miller was an amazing writer, it was how he approached his topic that was so screwed up and, quite frankly, goes above and beyond the pessimism of his predecessors. "The Tropic of Cancer" is all together flowingly lyrical and bleakly disquieting, and not to mention very, very troubling.
Miller later goes on: "Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but now I see that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. . . And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in this inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song [...] Let us have more oceans, more upheavals, more wars, more holocausts. [Say what???] Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, dreams, madness, a world that produces ecstacy and not dried farts." So, yeah, just to give you a sample. Pretty much the whole book is like that.
So I think what Miller is saying here is that wrath and passion are inescapable aspects of the sentient animal. (Arthur Koestler's "Ghost in the Machine" would later explore this from a more scientific, evolutionary standpoint.) In a similar vein, Salman Rushdie, in his 2002 novel "Fury," writes that, "Life is fury. . . Fury - sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal - drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover." I think Rushdie and Miller are somewhat in agreement here: they both imagine the artist or creator as a psychological rogue figure, who must, like Kurtz in the jungle, cast off society's veil of artifice and confront "forgotten and brutal instincts" (Conrad). For all his Whitman-esque dreams of embracing the whole of humanity, life, and death, there is a pulsing darkness at the core of Miller's vision that is largely absent from Whitman's exuberant celebrations of "the body electric." It's definitely very "Heart of Darkness," this image of the modern artist or writer as one who would be, in Conrad's words, "wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness" and whose work would bear "the appalling face of a glimpsed truth - the strange commingling of desire and hate."
However, once you throw off all social limitations in search of some ultimate in pure, raw experience that ends in terrifying truth - some unholy combination of neo-Platonic idealism and social anarchy - you may very well end up with something very, very nasty. Anyone who has read Euripides's play "The Bacchae" will know that, having descended into the maelstrom of pure emotional and physical sensation, of "gratified and monstrous passions" (Conrad), Agavė mistakes her son Pentheus for a mountain lion and, along with the other delirious women of Thebes, tears him limb from limb. And that, I believe, expresses the true problem with Miller's philosophy: it's a Pandora's Box that not only liberates creativity but also destroys the ego, leaving only the id. And this brings me to my main, overall problem with the book: namely, that never once does Miller ever actually address the issue of HOW FAR to take all of this. I mean, the man said it himself: "Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. . . I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day, then rape I would, and with a vengeance. Had one single element of man's nature been altered . . . ? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. . . One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. . . If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal."
Yes, I know, I'm quoting way too much, but Miller really speaks for himself. We're talking about a man who repeatedly refers to women as a word the begins with c and rhymes with "blunt." It's like he's just spouting off this rambling rhetoric of his to justify his constant and misogynist objectification of the female gender: I did this to this c*** and this and this to this c*** because I AM AN ARTIST I NEED TO RETURN TO THE EARTHINESS OF IT ALL! He is, after all, all about throwing off the "restrictions" of humanity, which leads me to wonder what exactly is included in his litany of artificial niceties to be annihilated. Quite frankly, this man did indeed strike me as one very capable of the act of rape. But really none of this would be quite so disturbing if it weren't for Karl Shapiro's giddy rhapsody of an introduction (written in 1960), in which he basically fawns over Miller like he's some kind of prophet for a new age of "authenticity" in literature. But what is SO messed up here is that Miller pretty much got what he said he wanted: World War II and the Holocaust were only a few years away, after all. Talk about eating your own words.
In summation: "The Tropic of Cancer" is certainly well-written and thought-provoking (I'll be the last person to accuse Miller of lacking raw talent), but it is also the single most nihilistic, misogynist thing I have ever read.
Summary of Tropic of Cancer
Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller?s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller?s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.?
No punches are pulled in Henry Miller's most famous work. Still pretty rough going for even our jaded sensibilities, but Tropic of Cancer is an unforgettable novel of self-confession. Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller.
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