Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller Summary and Reviews
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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.
Book Review: An exuberant novel!
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Tropic of Cancer the first time when I was twenty years old. I began it in the morning and didn't put it down until the early hours of the following morning. It was the first time I had read a book in one sitting. What an experience it was for me. Up to that time most books I had read might have been good but they took work to get through. This book was different. I realized after reading it that literature could be fun, just sheer fun to read. Miller wrote with such exuberance, such a passion for life. It made me want to suck the juices out of life, to really live fully. Miller was extremely critical of the shallowness and money-grubbing nature of American life. He also criticized the hypocricy and unhealthiness of America's puritanical views on sex. The sexual passages in the book were courageous and liberating at the time the book was originally published in 1934. This part of the book may offend some readers - mainly women - yet Miller wrote honestly and humorously about things many men think about but are too afraid to reveal. I have read the book two or three times since and each time I find it invigorating. When I get caught up in the rat-race I am reminded by Miller to live with gusto and passion and humor. A great book!Book Review: An exuberant novel!
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Tropic of Cancer the first time when I was twenty years old. I began it in the morning and didn't put it down until the early hours of the following morning. It was the first time I had read a book in one sitting. What an experience it was for me. Up to that time most books I had read might have been good but they took work to get through. This book was different. I realized after reading it that literature could be fun, just sheer fun to read. Miller wrote with such exuberance, such a passion for life. It made me want to suck the juices out of life, to really live fully. Miller was extremely critical of the shallowness and money-grubbing nature of American life. He also criticized the hypocricy and unhealthiness of America's puritanical views on sex. The sexual passages in the book were courageous and liberating at the time the book was originally published in 1934. This part of the book may offend some readers - mainly women - yet Miller wrote honestly and humorously about things many men think about but are too afraid to reveal. I have read the book two or three times since and each time I find it invigorating. When I get caught up in the rat-race I am reminded by Miller to live with gusto and passion and humor. A great book!Book Review: An infamous masterpiece!
Summary: 5 Stars
40 years before Henry Miller had "Tropic of Cancer" published, Knut Hamsun wrote "Hunger" and "Mysteries", where the stream of consciousness was first on display in novels - with the outsider on the edge of life and death, where the blood is whispering and bone-pipes praying. Henry Miller, an open-minded American intellectual went to Paris in the pursuit of - - life - - wanting to feel alive, and to tell the whole world about it. He ended up in the gutter of that very alive city, occasionally coming up to breathe in what was upper class or only bourgeois. At the same time he found comfort in the books of authors like Dostoevsky, Strindberg and Hamsun, whom he compared to Mozart, and about "Mysteries" he later said: "No book stands closer to me. It prevented me from killing myself." (He read it a dozen times.) Parallels can be drawn between classics like "Mysteries" - "Ulysses" - "Tropic of Cancer" - even to "Catcher in the Rye". Displays of genuine feelings, dry wit, rage and disillusionment and then sudden lyrical beauty. "Tropic of Cancer" portrays dirt and lowlife, primitive lust and diseases, the diseases of the individual and of mankind, but at the same time Miller never totally loses a sense of beauty. This is a book packed with incredible descriptions of his life in the 1930s Paris, and even when delirium turns into surrealistic joyrides he is still nothing less than brilliant. This is quite a different Paris from that of Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's. They might also have had their struggles, but their experiences were still different from that of Henry Miller's lice, bedbugs, cockroaches and tapeworms. And still Henry Miller could find comfort in the struggling idols before him. One place in the book he describes how he went to see where and how Strindberg lived during his time in the same city, just to show himself that it was possible to sink even deeper... The prose in parts of the book is astonishing, and despite all who have loathed the book, most of all because of the direct and coarse language with descriptions that can make a wharfie blush, it has been praised by the likes of T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and George Orwell. Orwell wrote a brilliant essay on "Tropic of Cancer" called "Inside the Whale", a very thorough critical review of the book, given by the author who himself wrote "Down and Out in Paris and London"."Tropic of Cancer" is indeed a very good book that any prudish heart, with a sense for good literature, should allow him/herself to be impressed by. It stands alone in its own place in literature, where nobody (including Henry Miller) has been since.
Book Review: An omen to our post-sturctural time.
Summary: 5 Stars
Henry Miller is the first Schizo of the 20th Century; if anyone's read Deleuze and Guatarri's "Anti-Oedipus", then Miller's First Major book is the right footnote that is actually cited in Anti-Oedipus. I read Miller before any post-structual theory, and I immediately noticed how he has affected many intellectual post-structural minds of our times (Deleuze and Guatarri specifically). His decentered approach to writing, and stream of consciousness prose makes his book a delight to pick up and read at random. It does not matter where you start or end. It is all one big mess for Miller. The mess of his life defines the basics of human need: to eat and to create (who cares where you sleep?) Miller is able to break down the romantic notion of the artist who suffers in order to create work. He explores the development of the creative mind, showing how it is only through the choice of process (which some may decide to call suffering ) that any work can be developed. Excellent reading, for anyone who is willing to face him/herself in the mirror.