Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer – Review

Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer – Review

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*Biography HENRY MILLER (1891-1980) was an American writer and painter famous for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of ‘creative writing’ that is designed to be read as literature… It is a mix of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, but mainly it’s a pseudoauthobiography where too much is exaggerated and hyperbolized. His most characteristic bookchildren are “Tropic of Cancer,” “Tropic of Capricorn,” and “Black Spring. *The Destiny Of The Book Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as “notorious for its candid sexuality” and as responsible for the “free speech that we now take for granted in literature. ” It’s an unforgettable novel of self-confession, self-deprecatory remarks. Frankly speaking, it resembled me the strip-tease of American innermost soul. Maybe the most honest book ever written, it had been banned as obscene for 27 years after its publication in 1934 in Paris.

Nevertheless, a court overturned this order, acknowledging Miller’s work as one of the most celebrated victories of the sexual revolution. Nowadays you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller. It was Miller’s “fuck everything” that would inspire subsequent renegades such as Genet, Burroughs, Mailer and Ginsberg. Not bad for a man who had once written: “Why does nobody want what I write? ” *C-Bomb: Women Target Tropic of Cancer details Henry’s Miller’s take on la vie boheme of artists between Paris and New York, mostly, in the 1930s.

It describes how an artist survives and spends time a-chasing and using women. Most of the time Miller drops the c-bomb when referring to women. A woman, according to Miller, is an endless stream of unconsciousness, a Great Nothing, a Void, an abyss. All feminine characters are fat and vicious. They beat their men; they are able to enjoy themselves intimately lying on the road. It’s a spit in the society’s inner entity, I consider. – *Brief Analysis (Setting, Structure)

Set in France during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tropic of Cancer centers on Miller’s life as a struggling writer. Combining autobiography and fiction, some chapters follow a narrative of some kind and refer to Miller’s actual acquiantances; others are written as stream-of-consciousness reflections that are epiphanic. The novel is written in the first person, as are many of Miller’s other novels, and does not have a linear organization, but rather fluctuates frequently between the past(memories)and present. *Summary

I decided not to retell the whole book but highlight the very prolific moments to titillate the readers-to-be. We discover that: * We examine a man whose head permeates not with otherworldly thoughts but thoughts of the dirty sea of the streets which are, in themselves, another world. * We learn that characters aren’t characters – they play actors, and thus seem insignificant. * Miller penetrates the genre calling the novel a “song” and writes: “It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. ” (Tania is a Jewish woman who Miller carried on an affair with). All feminine characters are fat and vicious.

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They beat their men; they are able to enjoy themselves intimately lying on the road. It’s a spit in the society’s inner entity, I consider. * In quick succession we meet some of Miller’s friends and companions in Paris: they play the embodiments of all seven sins and vices. All, including Miller, love sexual shenanigans and besmirch everything they see. * He always lets off his memories. He thinks back to a year ago, when he used to wander the city with a woman named Mona, who was a prototype of Jun, his real love. Some pages are fulfilled with hatred to Paris. Though Miller is a typical American renegade to Paris, he can’t stop blaming every place he lives in. * Also Miller laughs at henpecked husbands represented by one of his buddies who idolizes his wife, Fanny, when Fanny resembles a dumb elephant. * There’s a case how all staff at the publishing house is mocking at Peckover – diseased old man, who isn’t worth a penny for anyone. When he falls down an elevator shaft just recently and is not likely to survive, nobody cares. Next, Henry meets up with an old acquaintance – a wealthy Hindu pearl merchant named Nanantatee whose name alliterates with Nonentity what he truly represents. * There is a dedication into the prostitute culture world, when young Indian visitor, wanting to deal with a whore on her bed, mistakes a bidet for a toilet and defecates in one. * The book is full of scents: shit, sweat, sexual juices, alcohol and other human byproducts. Only the mornings scent finely here because the streets are washed from the vomit masses.

It is a thought-provoking hint making us think over the aromas of our own life. * Then Miller becomes an aficionado of proofreading…and his frustration leads him to pseudonymous writing to make money here and there. Besides texts, he gives his consent to be photographed in the nude for what he is assured will be “a strictly private collection. ” A real rubbish hip instead of a head, isn’t it? * In the end Miller wonders whether he too should return to America. It’s a scene of autoreverse, the broken merry-go-round. Sticky Quotations * “There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature. ” * In describing an artist he wrote:  “An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what an artist needs is loneliness. ”  I like the idea, but candidly, the italicized is feels arrogant and if it’s not meant to be ironic, it isn’t nor is it funny. * “This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word.

No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty. .. what you will”. * “The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time

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but Timelessness. “” * “For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my mind – her. Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christs today. ” *Commenting Upon The Novel To my mind, Miller’s book is a literature with a capital L.

Because the aim of a true story is to be true, to show us the world like a flipping coin – from the two sides, and the grimmer one too. Some excerpts of the “Tropic of Cancer” really seemed to be a drivel but I hope it to be Miller’s hints to help the reader in perception of himself drunk in junk, lustful and therefore frustrated. It can be referred to a kitsch or ready-made techniques by banhammer critics, but my mind is prone to support Henry Miller in all his beginning thank to the permanent marks and the tremendous impressions left.

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